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The DemystifySci Podcast

The DemystifySci Podcast

DemystifySci 438 Episodes Aug 24, 2026

DemystifySci is hosted by Dr. Michael Shilo DeLay and Dr. Anastasia Bendebury. They interview exceptional thinkers to untangle complex theories of nature and make analysis accessible. Each week features a new theorist discussing ideas that could rewrite our understanding of the world.

Episodes

How Electron Guns Work Without Firing Electrons - LIVE! Drs. Bendebury & DeLay (DemystifySci +443)
How Electron Guns Work Without Firing Electrons - LIVE! Drs. Bendebury & DeLay (DemystifySci +443) Aug 24, 2026 01:37:23 This week we are broadcasting live from Mexico, on an unrelated assignment, and we continue our discussion of the material atom, reading from our upcoming book Paradox Lost. Picking up where we left off last week, we seek an explanation for electron guns like cathode ray tubes that doesn't involve the projectile action of electric particles. Instead we model the electron as circulation of atom
How Humanity Will Rise From the Age of Empire - Part Two, Dr. Luke Kemp, DemystifySci +442
How Humanity Will Rise From the Age of Empire - Part Two, Dr. Luke Kemp, DemystifySci +442 Aug 20, 2026 01:28:59 This is part two from a recent conversation with Luke Kemp from Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. In part one we asked what made humanity suddenly pivot to the nation-state all around the world at the cusp of the bronze age. In part two Kemp argues that colonial expansion stretched a single Goliath across the globe, and we now live in a single integrated system o
How Empire Was Discovered Everywhere at Once - Part One, Dr. Luke Kemp, DemystifySci +441
How Empire Was Discovered Everywhere at Once - Part One, Dr. Luke Kemp, DemystifySci +441 Aug 18, 2026 01:18:08 Today we give you an episode in two parts from a recent conversation with Luke Kemp from Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. We discuss the sudden and simultaneous rise of the nation state all over the globe as humanity emerged from the paleolithic. Prior to the bronze age of empires, humanity used kept the concentration of societal power in check by relying on rid
How Magnets Reach Across Empty Space - LIVE! Drs. A.V. Bendebury & M.S. DeLay (DemystifySci +440)
How Magnets Reach Across Empty Space - LIVE! Drs. A.V. Bendebury & M.S. DeLay (DemystifySci +440) Aug 16, 2026 01:52:21 This week we continue our discussion of the material atom live. Picking up where we left off last week, we go deeper into our book Paradox Lost and uncover the hidden mechanics of magnetism. The conversation follows from the past two week's livestreams where we argued for a new way of looking at the electron and charge: as patterned atomic surface motion. This week, we build out the details of
Testing the Fractal Universe · Part Two, Chris Lehto (DemystifySci +439)
Testing the Fractal Universe · Part Two, Chris Lehto (DemystifySci +439) Aug 13, 2026 01:48:26 This is the second episode from our recent meetup with Chris Lehto where we explore his work on the Fractal Universe, where macrobiological entities become a real possibility in the cosmos by way of adherence to NASA's own checklist definition for life. We explore the fractal organization of biological structures, what it means to be a subunit in a living system, and Lehto argues the case that
Our Fractal Universe · Part One, Chris Lehto (DemystifySci +438)
Our Fractal Universe · Part One, Chris Lehto (DemystifySci +438) Aug 12, 2026 01:19:58 This week we are going to the core of what it means to be alive. If we don't understand where matter turns into the living then how can we be sure we're not missing biological processes all over the universe? Chris Lehto joins us for this first part of a two part series on his work surrounding the Fractal Universe, where we establish the historic basis for our present understanding of what
Charge as a Physical Motion - LIVE! Drs. A.V. Bendebury & M.S. DeLay (DemystifySci +437)
Charge as a Physical Motion - LIVE! Drs. A.V. Bendebury & M.S. DeLay (DemystifySci +437) Aug 11, 2026 01:50:48 Electric charge has always been handed to us as a fact fixed to the electron, a quantity carved into the particle like a name. But charge may be less a thing the atom has than a thing the atom does, a surface motion that our instruments register with ever increasing precision. In this solo livestream drawn from our upcoming book, Paradox Lost, we explain the exact motions we propose at the atomic
Tracing a Line From Göbekli Tepe to the Bronze Age – Jens Notroff (DemystifySci +436)
Tracing a Line From Göbekli Tepe to the Bronze Age – Jens Notroff (DemystifySci +436) Aug 4, 2026 02:13:40 Archaeologist Jens Notroff of the German Archaeological Institute takes us into Göbekli Tepe and the Taş Tepeler world, where hunter-gatherers raised T-shaped pillars and carved the aurochs into stone long before the first Bronze Age king wore a crown. No palaces and no royal graves, only a fingerprint pressed into wet plaster and a child's footprint set in a mudbrick, the small human traces t
Electron Is Something the Atom Does - LIVE! Drs. A.V. Bendebury & M.S. DeLay (DemystifySci +435)
Electron Is Something the Atom Does - LIVE! Drs. A.V. Bendebury & M.S. DeLay (DemystifySci +435) Aug 3, 2026 01:43:39 The electron arrives in every textbook the same way, a point with no size, no interior, no address, a charge that lives nowhere and hazily explains everything, and nobody stops to tell you what got traded away to buy that convenience. We start at the outer surface of the atom and walk backward through J.J. Thomson and the cathode ray tubes, through the long slow formalization that turned a glow in
Last Time the World Ended – SOLO! (DemystifySci +434)
Last Time the World Ended – SOLO! (DemystifySci +434) Jul 28, 2026 01:47:08 Our recent guests, Dr. Eric Cline and Dr. Jesse Millek have wildly different takes on the Bronze Age Collapse, and the picture that comes clear when you lay them side by side is not the one the textbooks handed down. The Sea Peoples did not come off the water and burn the world; the world was already coming apart from the inside, empires overreaching, trade thinning rather than snapping, cities em
How to Actually Change a Mind? – Dr. Angus Fletcher, DemystifySci +433
How to Actually Change a Mind? – Dr. Angus Fletcher, DemystifySci +433 Jul 21, 2026 01:29:23 Professor Angus Fletcher, from Ohio State's Project Narrative, comes back for a second lap around the machinery of belief, where the mind runs on story long before it runs on proof. From Oedipus to Copernicus to Darwin, every paradigm shift in the history of science turns out to be won by elegance, timing, and a culture hungry to hear it, never by data alone. Math describes the world with asto
Sea Peoples Didn't End the Bronze Age – Dr. Jesse M. Millek, DemystifySci +432
Sea Peoples Didn't End the Bronze Age – Dr. Jesse M. Millek, DemystifySci +432 Jul 20, 2026 01:12:14 For a hundred and fifty years we were told the same story, that the Sea Peoples came in off the water around 1200 BC and burned the Late Bronze Age to the ground, city by city, until nothing was left but ash for centuries. Netherlands Institute for the Near East Archaeologist Jesse Millek walks back into that rubble with a lantern and finds most of it was never there, that more than half the destr

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