After making Age of Audio, a feature documentary about the history of podcasting, filmmaker Shaun Michael Colón sat down with Dallas for a revealing conversation about the state and future of this industry. Together, Dallas & Shaun unpack the shift toward celebrity chit chat shows, what gets lost in video, the real economics of making Twenty Thousand Hertz, and why highly crafted audio storytelling still matters.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Wesley Slover – Just Facts 06
Wesley Slover – Help from a Stranger
Wesley Slover – Inner System
Wesley Slover – Just Facts 01
Learn about this year’s Listener Stories competition and submit your story at 20k.org/2026.
Premiered on 24 May 2026 #BarrysEconomics #GarysEconomics #Inequality
Elon Musk. Tesla. Spacex. Cybertrucks. Solar Power… not your normal supervillain origin story.
But the neuroscience explains everything.
Do you remember when we all kind of liked Elon Musk?
Electric cars. Space travel. Solar panels. He felt like the closest thing we had to a real-life Tony Stark.
And now he’s… this.
Nobody’s asking the right question. Not “what did he do?” but “what happened to him?” Because there’s a scientific answer. And the unsettling part isn’t what it says about Elon Musk. It’s what it says about everyone with that much power.
Fifty years of peer-reviewed research on power, wealth and the brain from Columbia, Berkeley and McMaster University, shows that power isn’t a metaphor for corruption. It’s a corruption toxin. It does measurable damage to specific neural pathways.
This is the psychology of billionaires. This is the neuroscience of wealth and power. And this is why Elon Musk was always going to become this.
Galinsky et al. (2006) :Power and Perspectives Not Taken, Psychological Science
Sukhvinder Obhi: Power and neural mirrorin, McMaster University
Paul Piff: Wealth, empathy and the dose-response relationship, UC Berkeley
Roger Fisher: Preventing Nuclear War, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1981
I’m Barry Ferns – a comedian whose personal journey through failure, homelessness, and rebuilding led me to explore the socio and behavioural economics of inequality.
This channel digs into how systems of power shape our identity, behaviour, and beliefs, and how we can shift the stories we tell ourselves and each other about poverty, inequality, and who’s to blame.
June 2, 2026 Art Craft Illustration Nature Kate Mothes
All images courtesy of the artist
Marisa Aragón Ware grew up wandering through the Rocky Mountain forests of Colorado, where she reveled in nature’s diversity. There, she learned about woodland wildflowers, fungi, birds, and more with the help of her dad, who is a scientist. Over time, her fascination with organic forms made its way into an evolving art practice.
Based in Boulder, Ware continues to spend time in the woods, taking inspiration from flora and fauna alike. Through a meticulous process of cutting and scoring paper, she creates delicate curves to imitate the volume of leaves or bones and defines feathers, insect wings, and petals with precise veins and edges.
Paper became Ware’s medium of choice because she finds beauty and awe in a material we use so often in daily life that we hardly give it a second thought. “Paper is deeply familiar—everyone has handled it, written grocery lists on it, folded it, torn it, discarded it,” she tells Colossal. “Because it’s such an everyday material, there’s something especially powerful about transforming it into something unexpected.”
Biodiversity and ecosystem interdependence are themes running throughout Ware’s work, and she’s especially interested in the theory of biophilia. The hypothesis posits that humans inherently seek connections with nature on multiple levels. “Our need for nature extends far beyond physical survival; it also nourishes imagination, spirituality, and our sense of meaning,” Ware says. “Through my sculptures, I hope to create moments of wonder that help viewers reconnect with that ancient relationship and perhaps feel more compelled to protect it.” […]
7 Sept 2023
Go to https://brilliant.org/drbecky to get a 30-day free trial and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription! This summer, I published two research papers with my collaborators about the growth of supermassive black holes. One of those research papers was about what processes cause SMBHs to spin at their maximum rates, and the subsequent effect on their galaxy’s. So in this video we’re going to dive into that research paper and I’ll explain what we found…
00:00 – Introduction
01:17 – What do we mean by black hole “spin”?
04:19 – How fast can black holes spin?
06:47 – How you actually measure black hole spin
09:52 – Why the spin of a SMBH affects the whole galaxy
15:34 – My new research: galaxy merger-free growth of SMBHs leads to the highest spins in simulations
18:55 – Can we test these results with observations?
20:41 – Brilliant
21:47 – Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
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📚 My new book, “A Brief History of Black Holes”, out NOW in hardback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky
18 May 2026 #Physics #Time #Cosmology
This is a deep dive into the most unanswered question in modern physics. The most familiar thing in our lives — time — has refused to be defined for two and a half thousand years of human thought. From Aristotle’s earliest writings to the most precise atomic clocks in the world today, every era has redefined what time means, and every redefinition has opened a stranger question beneath it.
We begin with the ancient certainty of absolute time, the river Newton described in 1687, flowing equally everywhere. Then we walk through Einstein’s discovery in 1905 that time is not absolute, that two observers moving differently can disagree about what is happening right now, that time bends with gravity and slows with motion. We see the JILA laboratory measuring this effect across a single millimeter of strontium atoms in 2022 — the smallest scale ever recorded. We meet the block universe, where past and future exist as real as the present moment. We walk through the arrow of time, why we remember the past but never the future, and Roger Penrose’s argument that the direction of time was set thirteen point eight billion years ago at the Big Bang itself. We arrive at the Wheeler-DeWitt equation of 1967, where time disappears entirely from the equation describing the universe. We meet Julian Barbour and Carlo Rovelli, two physicists who argue that time may not be fundamental at all. We examine the Page-Wootters mechanism from 1983, predicting that time emerges from quantum entanglement. And we end with the 2014 experiment in Turin, where physicists watched this happen — time itself emerging in the laboratory, from a system that has no time of its own.
Each picture is beautiful. Each is partial. None is complete.
And underneath all of them sits the question modern physics has not finished asking. Is time something the universe contains? Or something the universe does?
Sources and references:
Aristotle, Physics IV. Augustine, Confessions XI. Newton, Principia Mathematica (1687). Einstein, Special Relativity (1905). Hafele-Keating experiment (1971). Bothwell, Kennedy, Aeppli et al., Nature 602 (JILA / NIST, 2022). Boltzmann’s H-theorem (1872). Penrose, The Road to Reality (2004). DeWitt, Phys. Rev. 160 (1967). Page and Wootters, Phys. Rev. D 27, 2885 (1983). Barbour, The End of Time (1999). Rovelli, The Order of Time (2018). Moreva, Brida, Gramegna, Giovannetti, Maccone, Genovese, Phys. Rev. A 89, 052122 (2014).
#Physics #Time #Cosmology #QuantumPhysics #Philosophy
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