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PODCAST

The DemystifySci Podcast

Support Us! https://www.patreon.com/DemystifySci DemystifySci is Dr. Michael Shilo DeLay and Dr. Anastasia Bendebury. Together they untangle complex theories of nature, making analysis accessible through conversations with exceptional thinkers. Each week they interview a new theorist about the ideas that are going to rewrite our understanding of the world. Power them via Patreon: @demystifysci

society & culture

All Episodes

02:55:21

The Secretive Dynasties Who Hijacked the Food Supply...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/02/06

Austin Frerick is an economist, Yale Fellow, former Congressional Research Assistant, and author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry. He investigates how the U.S. food system became both outrageously expensive and dangerously toxic—not just for consumers, but for the farmers who grow our food. Instead of blaming deregulation alone, Frerick exposes the real culprits: the Big Ag monopolies that have spent billions to rig the system, buy politicians, and crush

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02:47:14

Language v. Thought in Animals, AI, and Humans - Dr....

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/02/02

Dr. Gašper Beguš is a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics who studies the interface between human, machine, and animal language. We head into the conversation with a question - is there something fundamentally different about the way that humans learn and the way that machines like LLMs learn? Vector embeddings of the relatedness of language and the map that we carry in our heads of abstract concepts don’t seem that different at the end of the day. This leads us into a discussion of the ways in

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01:33:50

Are Receipts Androgynizing America? - SOLO!!! Drs....

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/01/30

DSPod SOLO returns for a conversation about a recent edition of “you can just do things,” where Github CEO Nat Friedman and company tested the levels of endocrine disrupting chemicals in 700 common food items. And friends, it does not look good! We dig through the data to pull out some trends that can help us avoid getting slowly poisoned by our food, try to figure out if akshually no it’s fine that there’s plastics everywhere, and debate if there’s a better way of naming these chemicals that

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02:55:13

A World that Values IQ Above All - Dr. Richard Haier,...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/01/30

Dr. Richard Haier is an emeritus professor of Pediatric Neurology at UC Irvine, who spent his career studying the neuroscience of intelligence. Over the course of his career, Haier has come to believe in the existence of a “g-factor,” a measurable quantity of broad spectrum intelligence that is universally predictive of success in all cultures. He also believes that intelligence is a fixed characteristic, and that it’s possible to predict someone’s intelligence by watching how their brain works when

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02:26:51

Predatory Value Extraction Turns the World - Dr. Bill...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/01/23

Professor William Lazonick, emeritus Professor of Economics and founding director of the Academic Industry Research Network, is one of the world’s foremost experts on Shareholder Value Ideology and its impact on society. In our first conversation, we uncovered the fundamentals of shareholder value ideology and the harmful effects of stock buybacks on the working class and economic inequality. This discussion goes deeper into how financial institutions capitalized on the deregulation of the financial

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02:45:42

Gobekli Tepe Doesn't Make Any Sense - Andrew Collins,...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/01/19

Andrew Collins is a historian and journalist who has devoted over four decades of his life to the study of ancient civilizations, much of it among the enigmatic T-shaped pillars that dot the stone hills of the Turkish highlands. He believes that Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe are more than ceremonial sites of hunter-gatherers—he takes these monuments to be the remnants of a foundational proto-culture that authored the earliest versions of the myths and narratives found in the Bible, Torah, and

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02:12:58

Is "Age of the Universe" the Wrong Question? Dr....

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/01/18

Martin Lopez Corredoira is a physicist, philosopher, author, and playwright who has written extensively on the issues with standard cosmological theories, the role of science in society, and a number of short biographies of key figures in the history of science. He is both a theoretical and observational cosmologist, and we sit down with him for a conversation about what it would take for a theory like the Big Bang to finally come undone. In the course of our talk, we narrow down the list of

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01:20:38

Telepathy Tapes + Cosmologic Ouiji Boarding - SOLO!...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/01/12

Shilo and Anastasia sit down for a discussion of the Telepathy Tapes, motivated belief, and the difference between grift and ignorance. For those who don’t know, the Telepathy Tapes is a hugely popular podcast about the telepathic abilities of non-verbal autistic children, where a reporter interviews a bunch of families where the parents claim to have telepathic connections with their children. The kids are reported to have a 100% success rate of reading their caretaker’s mind, are supposedly able

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02:44:43

A Theory of Live Players - Geoff Anders, Leverage...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/01/09

Geoff Anders is the director of Leverage Research, a think tank devoted to understanding the nature of progress and the arc of scientific insights. Anders wants to understand what sort of cultural context creates the ability to make valuable insights into the mechanisms of nature. After mapping some of the interplay between science, society, and religion, we turn to the questions of how to spark a golden age at a time where institutions feel increasingly frail, just how effective we want our science

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02:16:33

Why Nobody Talks Class Anymore - Dr. William F....

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2025/01/06

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 and replaced it with divisive identity politics, the role of shadowy thinktank money in the

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02:42:11

How Shareholder Value Ideology Destroyed the Middle...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/12/26

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 economic system can survive without "the firm," the kind of old school corporate organization that

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02:28:18

Goethian Science, Transhuman Traps, & Steinerian...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/12/19

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 locks up at the stage of the Experimentum Crucis. Instead of mapping the dizzying variety of experiences,

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02:47:52

The 'Big Science' Bottleneck - John Horgan, Science...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/12/12

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 lens of art, literature, and the stories we collectively shoulder, we seeks a way to stitch together the

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02:37:28

Magnetism Subtly Orchestrates Biology - Dr. Clarice...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/12/09

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 machinery. The discussion is a madcap chase after how these quantum phenomena might drive not only the

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02:49:28

Goethian Science Reveals a Hidden World - Austin...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/12/07

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" has been invaluable for the development of the modern world, but Abigt argues that its ability to keep

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02:45:25

Quantum Computers are Reality Simulators - Dr. Steve...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/12/04

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 can only be answered with a quantum computer, how next generation encryption services will come with a

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02:17:32

Water: Action at a Distance, Light Speed Computation,...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/11/25

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, acting as a transient computationally competent actuator. Michael reveals how much of this story has

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02:29:52

Machine Intelligence and the End of History - Jeffrey...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/11/22

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 demonstrating that AI agents let loose on the world are capable of wreaking far more havoc than we expect

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02:43:31

Can We Avoid Collapse? - Ben Landau Taylor, Bismarck...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/11/18

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 expansion, where the tools of growth defined the success of the empire - a direct contradiction to

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01:30:02

Cosmic Lifeforms, Abiogenesis, Machine Consciousness...

The DemystifySci Podcast ·

2024/11/16

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, a science fiction work that supposes stars themselves have an interior life and that when they move

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385 results

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