June 9, 2025: Family Ties

Today is a family affair. We speak with director, writer, producer Llewellyn Smith of Blue Spark Collaborative, who has been making documentary films of all lengths and topics for over four decades. From Eyes on the Prize, to Poisoned Water, to Race: The Power of an Illusion, to his producing role in the PBS series American Experience, the filmmaker is no stranger to the platform that Public Media offers. Now helming an independent company, his latest film “When Machines Prescribe” offers a chilling look at the Medical system and the histories it holds that have devastating repercussions in today. We’ll explore the work he’s done inside and outside of Public Media, the future of the films he makes, and perhaps get a family story or two out of him because it just so happens, he's Kaliis' uncle. And Mr. Universe, Kainaat Studios and Hampshire College’s Salman Hameed, joins Monte to take a closer look at an exo-planet, that is moving in ways that are puzzling for such a system, including that the binary stars of its system seem to be co-parenting it, and what that means for us observing similar systems in the future.