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Giants Shoulder

Evan McGloughlin

A Biology & Consciousness podcast chronicling the bio-singularity. 3x times per week I speak with leading scientists at the bleeding edge of Neuroscience, Consciousness and Biology.

No idea is too strange, tackled with genuine curiosity and technical rigour. Come follow the journey as I have my brain melted and ontology warped on a regular basis.

Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is founder of Giants Shoulder.

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S2 · E138
July 17 · 1 hr 14 min
#138 - Meet The Greatest Ayahuasca Psychedelic Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial: https://onelink.to/giants Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Dráulio Barros de Araújo is a physicist who spent twenty years pointing MRI scanners at the ayahuasca experience, and ran the world's first controlled trial proving a single dose of a psychedelic could lift treatment-resistant depression in a week. He thinks DMT entity encounters are not hallucinations, and he wants to know if they could be real.Expect to learn why calling ayahuasca visions "hallucinations" is scientifically wrong, why you can't overdose or build tolerance to ayahuasca the way you can with alcohol or cocaine, why vomiting is considered part of the medicine rather than a side effect, how a physicist measured the entropy of a mystical experience and watched it rise, why your eyes physically won't stay open during a vision, the hippocampal memory glitch that may explain why DMT entities feel real, and why psychedelic science may be measuring altered states with the wrong tools entirely. Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:50 Who Is the Physicist Studying Ayahuasca Visions 0:05:05 The 1930s Origin of Brazil's Ayahuasca Churches 0:10:13 Why You Can't Buy Ayahuasca Like a Coca-Cola 0:11:22 What a Typical Ayahuasca Trip Actually Feels Like 0:16:53 Why LSD Visions Happen With Eyes Open, Ayahuasca Doesn't 0:17:22 Your Brain on Ayahuasca Looks Like a Dream, Not a Hallucination 0:21:08 Why Ayahuasca Visions Never Feel Like "Just a Dream" 0:22:23 There's No Such Thing as an Ayahuasca Overdose 0:24:18 Why Vomiting and Diarrhea Are Part of the Medicine 0:28:34 The Hippocampus Theory of Why DMT Entities Feel Real 0:33:22 Would Irish People See Snakes on Ayahuasca Too? 0:35:40 We're Measuring Trips With the Wrong Scientific Tools 0:40:44 Speech Analysis: A New Way to Study the Trip 0:44:31 The Flawed Questionnaire Behind Every Psychedelic Study 0:50:23 Why Dráulio Refuses to Ask a Single Direct Question 0:55:19 The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Explained by a Physicist 1:02:01 Why Psychedelics Dissolve Your Career Ambitions 1:04:02 The Most Important Psychedelic Question Science Avoids: Death 1:06:09 What the West Should Learn From Indigenous Ayahuasca Traditions... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5o Robin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-GkE4YtLRk David Nutt — Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEgbv6IHYaY Guest Links UFRN Brain Institute — Faculty Profile: https://neuro.ufrn.br/institute/members/investigators/draulio Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NoO4Rt0AAAAJ Centro Avançado de Medicina Psicodélica (CAMP): https://www.camp-sci.com/ptLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/draulio-araujo-06ab47125
S2 · E137
July 13 · 1 hr 31 min
#137 - Dennis McKenna: "I've Spent 50 Years Investigating The Entities That Exist Within Ayahuasca"
Get Manta Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL and Code GIANTSMANTA10 Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Dennis McKenna is an ethnopharmacologist who spent fifty years decoding the chemistry of psychedelic plants, producing the first hard pharmacological proof of why ayahuasca actually works. He's also the younger brother of Terence McKenna, and in 1971 the two of them ran an experiment on their own minds in the Colombian Amazon that ended in a two-week psychotic break neither has ever fully explained.Expect to learn why the McKenna brothers thought DMT was a portal to another dimension rather than a drug trip, what happened during Dennis's two-week dissociation from reality in the Amazon, how ayahuasca's DMT and MAO-inhibitor plants actually work together in the body, why Dennis still calls the entire 1971 expedition "an act of science fiction, not science," how his PhD research became the first pharmacological proof of why ayahuasca works, why he thinks his own brother unintentionally seeded the "machine elf" into everyone else's DMT trips, why a career pharmacologist has never personally seen one himself, and why DMT entity encounters may be linked to real mental health outcomes, and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:03:07 How Dennis Got Into Psychedelics 0:06:07 Terence The Philosopher vs Dennis The Scientist 0:11:11 The 1971 Expedition To The Colombian Amazon 0:16:05 Why DMT Was "The Holy Grail" 0:17:50 The Ayahuasca Chemistry Nobody Understood Yet 0:18:45 Hunting For The Legendary Oo-Koo-Hé 0:22:00 Stumbling Into A Mushroom Paradise 0:27:05 When The Mushrooms Started "Talking" 0:28:38 The DNA Resonance Experiment 0:36:01 The Two-Week Psychotic Break 0:40:46 Psychotic Break, Shamanic Initiation, Or Alien Encounter? 0:47:08 From Psychotic Break Back To The Lab 0:53:16 Proving How Ayahuasca Actually Works 0:58:47 The Book That Seeded Mushrooms Into Society 1:05:39 Sasha Shulgin And The Chemistry Of Psychedelics 1:11:02 "I've Never Seen A Machine Elf Myself" 1:17:56 Pushing The DMT Experience To Five Hours 1:20:02 What Makes DMT Different From Psilocybin 1:26:18 DMT Entities And Mental Health Outcomes...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.comGS Episodes MentionedAndrew Gallimore — No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5oGuest Links Heffter Research Institute Bio: https://www.heffter.org/dennis-j-mckenna-phd/ McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy: https://mckenna.academy/mka-team/dennis-mckenna/ X: https://x.com/DennisMcKenna4Book — The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: http://brotherhoodofthescreamingabyss.com/ ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dennis-Mckenna
S2 · E136
July 10 · 1 hr 30 min
#136 - Denis Noble: Neo-Darwinism, Michael Levin & Why The Last 70 Years of Genetics Is Wrong
Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder Get Manta Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL and Code GIANTSMANTA10 Denis Noble is the physiologist who built the first computer model of the heart in 1960 — and has spent the sixty years since using it to dismantle the gene-centric view of life that dominates modern biology. He took Richard Dawkins's Selfish Gene and rewrote its most famous passage word for word in reverse — and every single experiment still fits.Expect to learn why the central dogma of molecular biology is provably wrong, how your immune system rewrites its own DNA to fight off new viruses, why the peppered moth story in every biology textbook turns out to be false, what happened when Denis told Richard Dawkins "Lamarck is back" to his face, why a cell corrects roughly 800,000 DNA replication errors before it's allowed to divide, how epigenetic inheritance can persist indefinitely if the environment stays changed, whether plants might have a form of experience, and where exactly agency ends and pure chemistry begins. Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:27 Meet The Man Who Modeled The Heart By Hand 0:04:43 Why The Central Dogma Of Biology Is Wrong 0:06:39 The 1866 Split Between Darwin And Wallace 0:09:02 The Infinite Monkey Theorem, Tested For Real 0:17:30 The Peppered Moth Myth Textbooks Still Teach 0:20:19 The Nobel Laureate Textbooks Forgot To Cite 0:22:53 Telling Richard Dawkins "Lamarck Is Back" 0:27:43 Was Lamarck's Giraffe Neck Story Actually Right? 0:29:40 How Your Body Talks To Your DNA 0:38:17 A New Species Evolved In Two Generations 0:44:18 So What's Actually Controversial Here? 0:48:09 Cellular Agency: When Cells Act Like Organisms 0:53:04 Steelmanning The Case Against Cellular Agency 0:55:05 The 17th-Century Prediction That Proved Purpose Works 1:04:20 Your Cells Correct 800,000 DNA Errors Per Division 1:13:14 Life Lives On The Edge Of Order And Chaos 1:15:27 Do Plants Have Experience? 1:27:31 How Does Consciousness Fit Into Systems Biology?...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned Michael Levin — Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM Philip Ball — Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SseGx0R0fY Guest Links Oxford Faculty Page: https://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/team/denis-noblePersonal Website: https://www.denisnoble.com Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=J6kLmsIAAAAJ&hl=en Understanding Living Systems (Book): https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Living-Systems-Life/dp/1009277367 The Third Way of Evolution: https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/people/view/denis-noble
S1 · E135
July 6 · 1 hr 20 min
#135 - Consciousness Expert Explains The 5 Levels Of The Psilocybin Experience
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Get Manta Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL and Code GIANTSMANTA10 Matthew Johnson is a psychedelic addiction scientist who spent over two decades at Johns Hopkins before becoming the senior researcher at Sheppard Pratt's Center of Excellence for Psilocybin Research. He's personally guided over 100 people through high-dose psilocybin sessions and says the "mystical experience" that shows up in the data predicts recovery even after you strip out how strong the drug felt.Expect to learn how the psilocybin experience changes as the dose climbs from one gram to a full "heroic dose," why a mystical-type experience predicts addiction recovery even after controlling for how intense the drug felt, what separates a mystical experience from personal insight and emotional catharsis as predictors of healing, why DMT users around the world keep reporting the same handful of entity archetypes, the peer-reviewed Rupert Sheldrake experiment testing whether people can sense who's about to call them before the phone rings, why he thinks rigorous telepathy research keeps getting ignored rather than debunked, why a hard-nosed behavioral pharmacologist ends up leaning toward an idealist view of reality, and much more… Timestamps: 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:28 Who Matt Johnson Actually Is 0:04:34 How He First Got Into Psychedelics 0:09:07 Did He Sense Addiction Benefits Early On 0:15:03 The First Mystical Experience Trial At Hopkins 0:16:42 What Counts As A High Dose Session 0:22:17 How The Trip Changes From 1 To 5 Grams 0:30:41 Why Mystical Experiences Predict Better Outcomes 0:33:34 Insight And Catharsis As Separate Predictors 0:39:49 DMT Entities And Machine Elves Explained 0:44:02 Why 20% Of DMT Users See The Same Beings 0:52:58 The Peer-Reviewed Telepathy Experiment That Shocked Him 0:59:32 Why No One Has Funded A Real Telepathy Study 1:11:04 Attention Schema Theory And The Illusion Of Self 1:16:00 Could A Single Cell Have Experience 1:17:54 Why He Leans Toward Idealism Over Materialism ... Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned Michael Graziano — Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When Consciousness First Emerged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnasmLpY5_8 Guest Links Sheppard Pratt Profile: https://www.sheppardpratt.org/news-views/story/sheppard-pratt-announces-dr-matthew-w-johnson-as-senior-researcher-for-the-center-of-excellence-for-psilocybin-research-and-treatment/X: https://x.com/drug_researcherGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fWhYUvwAAAAJ&hl=enResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew-Johnson-57JHU Faculty Bio: https://hub.jhu.edu/experts/profiles/matthew-johnson/
S2 · E135
July 2 · 1 hr 38 min
#134 - Neuroscientist: "Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness" — NDEs, Telepathy and Terminal Lucidity
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Marjorie Woollacott is a neuroscientist who spent three decades as a hard materialist and co-wrote the textbook used to train physiotherapists worldwide. After a meditation experience her own field said was impossible, she hid it from her colleagues for over 25 years before concluding the brain does not produce consciousness — it filters it. Expect to learn why a career materialist neuroscientist hid her own paranormal experience for 25 years, the prospective hospital studies that corroborate what patients report while clinically dead, how a comatose man with zero brain activity accurately described a nurse hiding his dentures, what terminal lucidity is and why dying Alzheimer's patients regain full clarity minutes before death, the ongoing lab research into non-speaking autistic children who appear to communicate telepathically, why Christof Koch said the data would turn his world upside down, how Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism compares to Woollacott's own theory of consciousness, and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:46 Where Her Story Really Begins 0:05:05 The Materialist Neuroscientist She Used To Be 0:06:15 The Meditation Retreat That Broke Her Skepticism 0:14:24 What Actually Caused Her Awakening 0:22:59 How Rigorous Is Near-Death Experience Research, Really 0:24:19 The Prospective Studies Skeptics Ignore 0:25:06 The Coma Patient Who Knew Where His Dentures Were 0:35:48 Bernardo Kastrup's Analytic Idealism Explained 0:43:19 Is Terminal Lucidity Just Wishful Interpretation? 0:46:09 The Three-Year-Old's Last Request Before Dying 0:53:07 Can Consciousness Move Physical Objects? 0:58:20 Why Jung And A Nobel Physicist Believed In Idealism 1:02:59 The Telepathy Tapes, Explained 1:19:40 The Autism Vulnerability Problem With This Research 1:21:21 The 5% Above Chance Telepathy Effect 1:35:13 Designing an Experiment Skeptics Can't Dismiss... ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned Christof Koch — The Psychedelic Trip that Convinced Christof Koch Consciousness is Fundamental: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlV-b2bvaE Guest Links Website: https://marjoriewoollacott.com/ University of Oregon Faculty Page: https://ion.uoregon.edu/about/person-page/459 Book – Infinite Awareness: https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Awareness-Awakening-Scientific-Mind/dp/144225033X Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences Bio: https://www.aapsglobal.com/marjorie-woollacott/ ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marjorie-Woollacott
S2 · E133
June 29 · 1 hr 13 min
#133 - Meet The Most Important Man Alive In The History of MDMA
Check out Scispace (JNGIANT20: 20% off the monthly plan or JNGIANT40: 40% off the annual plan): https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulder Get Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Rick Doblin is the founder of MAPS and the man who spent 50 years dragging the world's most demonized drug into the doctor's office. He taxed legal ecstasy dealers to fund the first MDMA toxicity studies, sued the DEA with the profits, and got a Harvard PhD in public policy to beat the system from inside — then ran the only completed Phase 3 trials in history showing that two-thirds of severe PTSD patients no longer had the diagnosis after MDMA-assisted therapy. Expect to learn how he taxed ecstasy dealers to sue the DEA, why MDMA was a couples-therapy drug before it was a party drug, the real reason Nixon criminalized psychedelics in 1970, why 88% of severe PTSD patients responded to MDMA therapy while half dropped out of standard VA treatment, why you can't get addicted to MDMA the way you can to cocaine, why you'll do more jail time for MDMA than for the same weight of cocaine, his plan for "net zero trauma by 2070," and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:03:03 Winning the Generational Lottery After the Holocaust 0:05:27 Dropping Out of College to Study LSD 0:08:15 The Forgotten Golden Era of Psychedelic Research 0:09:33 When the CIA Weaponized LSD for Mind Control 0:13:10 Half a Pound of Mescaline and Ten Years to Recover 0:15:09 The Day a Stranger Said "There's This Drug Called Adam" 0:15:56 MDMA Was a Therapy Drug Before It Was Ecstasy 0:18:39 Sasha Shulgin, the Man Who Invented 200 Psychedelics 0:24:12 How Dealers Tweaked Molecules to Stay Legal 0:27:21 Why Nixon Really Criminalized the Hippies 0:30:04 Going to War With the DEA — and Winning 0:33:56 Founding MAPS and $200 Million Later 0:39:09 Taxing the Ecstasy Dealers to Fund the Lawsuit 0:41:33 The First MDMA Safety Study, Run on a Beach 0:42:43 The 1992 Moment That Reopened Psychedelic Science 0:44:31 The First PTSD Study, Shut Down for Politics 0:48:08 Cannabis Is Palliative, Psychedelics Are Curative 0:50:08 The Veteran Suicide Epidemic Nobody Will Fund 0:53:33 Why MAPS Bet Everything on MDMA 0:58:35 The Effect Sizes That Should Have Changed Everything 1:01:01 Why Half of Veterans Quit Standard PTSD Therapy 1:02:13 Why the Data Alone Was Never Going to Win 1:04:54 The Absurd Reason the FDA Cited: "Euphoria" 1:06:34 Why You Can't Get Hooked on MDMA 1:07:26 More Jail for MDMA Than for Cocaine 1:08:36 Net Zero Trauma by 2070 1:10:47 MDMA for Couples, and Bringing It to the World... ... Email for sponsorship enquiries:evan@thegiantsshoulder.com Guest Links Rick Doblin — MAPS: https://maps.org/people/rick-doblin/ Rick Doblin on X: https://x.com/RickDoblin MAPS: https://maps.org
S2 · E132
June 25 · 1 hr 46 min
#132 - Meet the Psychedelic Scientist Proving The Fields Largest Theory is WRONG!
Check out Scispace (Use Code JNGIANT20: 20% OFF MONTHLY): https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulder Get Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Manoj Doss is a cognitive neuroscientist and one of the only people studying what psychedelics actually do to memory — trained inside the field's most prestigious lab at Johns Hopkins, he's now its most rigorous internal sceptic. His claim is heretical: the profound sense of revelation you get on a trip may be a memory glitch — a familiarity signal firing without the detail that would normally justify it, so the trip feels like downloading the truth while your brain quietly degrades what it's actually recording. Expect to learn why the profound insights you get on psychedelics might be a memory glitch, why the entire default mode network story "needs to go to hell", what a 250-subject mega-analysis revealed that small studies missed, why salvia melts you into the couch while DMT builds whole worlds, whether DMT entities and mantises are real contact or just a brain built to see faces, why blocking a single receptor proves psychedelics aren't "keys to reality", the flaw Doss says sinks the entropic brain and REBUS, how you'd ever tell a true revelation from a beautiful lie, and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:24 The One Thing Psychedelic Science Ignores: Memory 0:05:38 Why Your Worst Beliefs Feel Like Hard Facts 0:07:38 The "Sense of Knowing" That Fools Everyone 0:09:00 How Psychedelics Rewire What You Remember 0:16:11 Why Yoga Feels Better on Psilocybin 0:20:27 "The Default Mode Network Story Needs to Go to Hell" 0:27:26 How Neuroscience Invents Stories From Noise 0:35:42 Why Psychedelic Studies Are Too Small to Trust 0:40:31 Salvia: Becoming a Sentient Piece of Corn 0:44:13 The Kappa-Opioid Door Into Another Reality 0:48:00 Why Salvia Is Heaven and Ibogaine Is Hell 0:53:03 Does the Brain Have Two Reality Generators? 0:59:24 Has 20 Years of Psychedelics Taught Us Anything?1:05:18 Are DMT Entities Real? The Mantis Problem 1:13:28 Why You See Machine Elves (But His Mum Wouldn't) 1:24:29 Tearing REBUS and the Entropic Brain Apart 1:36:21 "Do Stuff in the Scanner, Stuff Happens in the Brain" 1:44:25 The Debate Robin Was Warned Not to Do... ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned Karl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmY Robin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-GkE4YtLRk Michael Levin — Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM Christof Koch — The Psychedelic Trip that Convinced Christof Koch Consciousness is Fundamental: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlV-b2bvaE David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5o Guest Links Manoj Doss — Dell Medical School: https://dellmed.utexas.edu/directory/manoj-dossX (Twitter): https://x.com/manojdossGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KFo44R0AAAAJORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2939-2522
S2 · E131
June 23 · 1 hr 5 min
#131 Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List Part 3
Check out Scispace (JNGIANT20: 20% off the monthly plan or JNGIANT40: 40% off the annual plan): https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulder Professor David Nutt is a neuropsychopharmacologist, former UK chief drug adviser, and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, Drink?, Cannabis, and Psychedelics. After two rounds that sparked an overwhelming response, round three goes fringe — ibogaine, salvia, mescaline, peyote, GHB, xylazine, the nitazines, and the Amanita muscaria "Santa Claus" mushroom — ranking each on Nutt's evidence-based harm scale. Timestamps: 2:56 Ibogaine 7:21 Salvia 18:02 Mescaline & Peyote 23:59 San Pedro Cactus 28:55 GHB40:59 Kratom & 7-Hydroxy 46:05 Xylazine ("Tranq") 51:34 Nitazines 54:53 Amanita Muscaria ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com Buy Nutt's BooksDrink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health: https://amzn.to/4dZTP9Z Psychedelics: The Revolutionary Drugs That Could Change Your Life―A Guide from the Expert: https://amzn.to/3SJXAX6 Drugs without the hot air: Making sense of legal and illegal drugs: https://amzn.to/4kyu7eS Cannabis (Seeing Through the Smoke): The New Science of Cannabis and Your Health: https://amzn.to/3FOiLo2 Check out the amazing work of Drug Science (Dr David Nutt's Charity)Website - https://www.drugscience.org.uk/Prof Nutt Twitter (X) - @ProfDavidNutt Drug Science SocialsFacebook - @DrugScienceISCDTwitter (x) - @drug_scienceInstagram - @drugscienceinfoLinkedIn - @drugscience-ltdBlueSky - @drugscience.bsky.socialYouTube - @DrugScienceMore Resources on Drug Safety Medical Cannabis: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-cannabis-working-group Medical Psychedelics: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-psychedelics-working-group Harm Reduction: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/enhanced-harm-reduction-working-groupAcademic Research: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/research
S2 · E130
June 18 · 1 hr 50 min
#130 - The Two Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientists Discuss The Insane Future Of Drugs
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Get Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about David Nichols is the chemist who made the molecules behind the entire psychedelic renaissance; Bryan Roth is the pharmacologist who cracked how those drugs actually work inside the brain. Together they reveal how little we still understand about the compounds now entering mainstream medicine — and how the same technology could, in Roth's own words, build a literal zombie apocalypse. Expect to learn why the word "psychedelic" could once kill a research grant, how Nichols hand-made the MDMA, DMT and psilocybin behind the field's most famous trials, what profiling 41 psychedelics against 318 receptors actually revealed, why we still don't know what half of those receptors even do, whether the trip itself is the medicine or a side effect that can be engineered away, why a twitching mouse is the most reliable predictor of a human trip, how Roth's "remote control for neurons" could rewrite memory, pain and aggression, and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 3:22 Two Godfathers of Psychedelics, Together 4:03 The Man Who Made the Molecules by Hand 7:34 How Roth Fell Into Serotonin by Accident 16:46 When "Psychedelic" Was a Forbidden Word 20:18 318 Receptors, 41 Psychedelics: The Big Paper 31:18 Nobody Knows What Half These Receptors Do 35:46 How Nixon's Drug War Killed the Science 46:06 The LSD in the Famous Structure Was Dave's 55:52 1.4 Kilos of MDMA for $4,000 57:29 The Psilocybin That Stunned Johns Hopkins 1:00:19 The Real-Life Walter White 1:01:20 Where Psychedelic Medicine Goes Next 1:07:13 "It's Just GQ": How Psychedelics Actually Work 1:11:35 The Hidden Proteins Behind Mental Illness 1:20:03 Is the Trip Itself the Medicine? 1:34:33 Why a Twitching Mouse Predicts a Trip 1:38:14 Your Personalised Psychedelic, Designed by AI 1:45:51 The Tech to Build a Zombie Apocalypse ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned David Nichols — Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umTgXsW1lQ Bryan Roth — Meet The World's Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEmmmMma8QsGuest Links Bryan Roth — UNC Pharmacology: https://www.med.unc.edu/pharm/directory/bryan-roth-md-phd/Roth Lab & NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program: https://pdspdb.unc.edu/rothlab/ David Nichols — Heffter Research Institute: https://www.heffter.org The 318-receptor psychedelics paper (Neuron, 2025): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(25)00470-2
S2 · E130
June 16 · 1 hr 15 min
#129 - Meet The Worlds Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant’s Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Joseph LeDoux is, by almost any measure, the greatest emotion neuroscientist who has ever lived. His work has been cited more than 185,000 times, he wrote The Emotional Brain — the book that defined the field — and he put the amygdala on the map as the brain’s fear centre. Then he spent a decade arguing that everyone, including himself, got the lesson wrong. Expect to learn how a marketing student accidentally became the most-cited emotion researcher alive, what split-brain experiments reveal about why your brain invents fake explanations for your behaviour, why the amygdala is not a fear centre and what it actually does, how every act of remembering chemically rewrites the memory, why anxiety drugs have been targeting the wrong brain circuit for 50 years, what the Four Realms of Existence means for the concept of self, why emotions are culturally acquired schema rather than universal hardwired states, and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:43 From Marketing Student to Neuroscientist 0:06:18 Moving to New York and Meeting Gazzaniga 0:07:37 How Split-Brain Surgery Works 0:09:58 The Chicken and Shovel Experiment 0:12:13 We Are Confabulating 24/7 0:17:13 Why He Chose to Study Emotion in Rats 0:19:26 His Grant Was Rejected for Studying Emotions 0:22:30 Masquerading as a Learning Researcher 0:25:22 Growing Discomfort With the Amygdala Fear Centre 0:28:23 Rethinking the Emotional Brain 0:30:47 Why Fear Isn’t Universal — Danger Is 0:33:19 Emotions as Acquired Schema 0:35:22 The Four Realms of Existence 0:40:36 Cognition vs Consciousness in Animals 0:41:29 Tulving’s Three Kinds of Consciousness 0:47:57 The Brain Region Only Humans Have 0:53:40 Your Model Is Still on the Slide — And You Disagree 0:55:05 The George Martin Analogy 0:56:37 Why Anxiety Drugs Don’t Actually Work 0:58:21 The Three-Step Fix for Fear 1:01:27 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness 1:05:36 Using AI to Decode Conscious vs Unconscious Speech... ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com Guest Links NYU Faculty Page: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/joseph-e-ledoux.html Personal Website: https://www.joseph-ledoux.com/ Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iAqJssMAAAAJ&hl=en Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/joseph-e-ledoux-phd The Four Realms of Existence (Harvard University Press): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291003
S2 · E128
June 11 · 1 hr 50 min
#128 - Meet the Neuroscientist Proving Scientists Got Conscious Ai WRONG
Get Jenni, Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off): http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder Get the Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulder Paul Cisek is a control neuroscientist at the University of Montreal who records from single neurons in the brains of monkeys as they think, and who has spent decades reconstructing how the brain evolved across hundreds of millions of years. His verdict cuts against everything Silicon Valley believes: the brain was never a computer — it's a control system built to keep a body alive, and the most advanced AI on Earth understands nothing it says. Expect to learn why Richard Dawkins is wrong that Claude could be conscious, why every era wrongly compares the brain to its fanciest technology, how a baseball outfielder reveals what the brain is really doing, why large language models are "Eliza on steroids" and 100% illusion, where meaning actually comes from and why LLMs can never have it, why the real danger isn't ChatGPT but the agentic systems that come next, whether a paramecium could be conscious, what Michael Levin's neuron-growing biobots tell us about minds, and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:33 Why Paul Rescheduled to Watch a Monkey Learn 0:06:13 Probing Electrodes Into a Living Brain 0:13:42 What a Single Neuron Actually Sounds Like 0:20:41 The Brain Is Not a Camera Plugged Into a Computer 0:24:55 How an Outfielder Catches a Ball Without Doing Physics 0:33:24 Why Federer "Lets the Cerebellum Run the Show" 0:38:09 Richard Dawkins Says Claude Might Be Conscious 0:39:11 Every Era Thinks the Brain Is Its Latest Gadget 0:42:36 Why AI Is "Eliza on Steroids" and 100% Illusion 0:45:38 The Mechanical Turk and the Stage Magician 0:48:09 The Mimicry Irony at the Heart of Dawkins' Mistake 0:52:32 The One Thing AlphaFold and ChatGPT Both Lack 0:53:30 Where Meaning Actually Comes From 0:57:55 Language Is Persuasion: The Crying Baby Problem 1:03:14 The Paper With Friston and Clark on What AI Misses 1:04:48 Could You Build a Machine That Wants Things? 1:10:23 Build a Mind, Build a Rival: Do We Even Want To? 1:13:32 Is a Paramecium Conscious? 1:18:11 Why There's No Line Between a Lump of Cells and You 1:23:18 Population Thinking: It's All Continuums 1:30:36 The Mad Scientist Won't Be Sam Altman — It'll Be Michael Levin 1:36:29 Does Synthetic Biology Deserve Its Own Doomsday?1:39:37 Why Real Intelligence Would Be a Competitor We Should Fear 1:43:20 Why the Real World Humbles Every Robot ... Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience?Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com... GS Episodes Mentioned Paul Cisek Round 1: https://youtu.be/C6frE6nj1tY Michael Levin — Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM Anil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o Karl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmY Mark Solms — Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMWaQ1U6dcc... Guest Links Paul Cisek — Faculty page, Université de Montréal: https://neurosciences.umontreal.ca/en/our-team/staff-directory/staff/cisek-paul/Cisek Lab: https://www.ciseklab.umontreal.ca/Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Bbk0DEcAAAAJX / Twitter: https://x.com/PaulCisek...
S2 · E127
June 8 · 1 hr 10 min
#127 Meet the Neuroscientist Who Gave A Brain to Michael Levins Xenobot’s
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Haleh Fotowat is a neuroscientist who builds nervous systems from scratch — the scientist who gave neurons to Michael Levin's xenobots, the living robots made from frog cells. When those neurons self-organised into a working nervous system, they switched on genes for eyes, in a creature that has never had eyes and never existed in nature. Expect to learn how a clump of frog skin cells becomes a moving biological robot, why these cells secretly default to becoming neurons unless their neighbours stop them, what happened when the neurons grew axons and reached out for the body, why every neurobot develops its own movement personality, how a brainless blob forces you to redefine agency and goals, why the neurons switched on genes for eyes despite having none, what a seizure drug revealed about which biobots truly have nervous systems, what might happen if you gave the neurobots DMT, and much more … Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:05 What Is a Neurobot? 0:02:39 Building a Living Robot From Frog Cells 0:08:46 Why These Cells Secretly Want to Be Neurons 0:10:48 What's the Point of This Research? 0:16:26 Brain Cells in a Dish Playing Doom 0:18:16 A Warehouse Full of Human Neurons 0:19:16 What Happened When the Neurons Grew 0:21:36 The Neurons Reached Out for the Body 0:25:51 Why Each Neurobot Has Its Own Personality 0:28:51 Can a Blob of Neurons Have Goals? 0:39:42 Braitenberg's Vehicles: Complexity From Simplicity 0:42:25 Biology Is Cognition All the Way Down 0:49:12 The Eyes That Shouldn't Exist 0:54:18 Xenobots Grew Genes for Hearing 1:01:16 The Role of Bioelectricity 1:04:02 One Question for Michael Levin 1:06:53 What If You Gave the Neurobots DMT? 1:07:27 The Seizure Drug That Surprised Everyone... ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned Michael Levin — Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM Brett Kagan — Meet The Neuroscientist Creating New Forms of Sentient Biological Intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlJc4tu1F8 Philip Ball — Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SseGx0R0fY Josh Bongard — Meet The Scientist Who Created The First Living Robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h908uoH6n4 Guest Links Allen Discovery Center (Tufts) Profile: https://allencenter.tufts.edu/our-team/haleh-fotowat-ph-d/Art Website: http://www.halehfotowat.com Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=W5KTeEMAAAAJLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haleh-fotowat/ ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Haleh-Fotowat-2245482149
S2 · E125
June 4 · 1 hr 39 min
#126 - Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Bioelectricity, Platonic Spaces, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots
Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Michael Levin is a developmental biologist who builds living creatures that have never existed before, and Earl Miller is a neuroscientist who has spent thirty years arguing that your thoughts live in the brain's electric fields, not its wiring. In the same room together for the first time, they agree on something that sounds insane — that bioelectricity is the engine of mind at every scale of life, from a single cell deciding to grow an eye to a human deciding what to eat for lunch. Expect to learn how cells use a bioelectric code you can read and rewrite to grow an eye on a tadpole's tail, why no single cell knows what an eye is but the collective does, how a flatworm regrows a whole new brain and keeps its old memories, why the brain is an orchestra of electric waves and not a telegraph of wires, how three different anaesthetics switch off consciousness through one mechanism reductionism can't explain, why consciousness may just be the story your brain tells about what it already did, whether memories can be transplanted between bodies, what the Platonic space of minds is and why Levin thinks physicalism died with Pythagoras, and much more … Timestamps: 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:46 The Vacuum Tubes That Started It All 0:08:36 How to Read and Rewrite the Bioelectric Code 0:12:36 Why No Single Cell Knows What an Eye Is 0:15:22 Your Brain Is Not a Telegraph System 0:19:30 Why They Called It Magic and Bullshit 0:24:56 Flatworm or Human Brain — Same Code? 0:30:00 Where Is Memory Actually Stored? 0:32:24 The Flatworm That Regrows Its Memories 0:34:34 People Living Without Most of Their Brain 0:40:32 Can Memories Live Outside the Brain? 0:43:26 Will a Rat Pop Down to the 7-Eleven for Smokes? 0:49:14 Consciousness Is Overrated (Says a Neuroscientist) 0:53:17 Hey Liver, Why Do I Feel Like Crap? 0:54:20 Nobody Knows Why Anaesthesia Works 0:57:21 Three Drugs, One Mystery, One Mechanism 0:58:50 Why Anaesthesia Is Dangerous When You're Old 1:02:12 What Is a Neurobot? 1:08:18 The Eyes That Shouldn't Exist 1:13:28 What Is the Platonic Space of Minds? 1:20:44 Devil's Advocate: Have We Just Not Figured It Out? 1:24:03 The Free Lunch: More Out Than You Put In 1:29:36 Why Physicalism Died With Pythagoras 1:32:52 How Bioelectricity Touches the Platonic Space ... GS Episodes Mentioned Anil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o Guest Links Michael Levin — Allen Discovery Center (Tufts): https://allencenter.tufts.edu/our-team/michael-levin/ Michael Levin — Website: https://www.drmichaellevin.org Earl Miller — The Miller Lab (MIT): https://ekmillerlab.mit.edu/ Earl Miller — X: https://x.com/MillerLabMIT
S2 · E125
June 2 · 1 hr 46 min
#125 Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Steven Barker is the world's longest-running DMT researcher and the analytical chemist who helped prove the molecule exists in the mammalian brain. He argues your brain manufactures its own psychedelic at the same concentration as serotonin — and floods your cortex with it under stress and as you die.Expect to learn why Steven believes your brain produces DMT at serotonin-level concentrations, how 29 years of drug-testing racehorses gave him the tools to find it, why he says David Nichols is wrong about endogenous DMT, why stress can make brain DMT spike tenfold, how a hidden receptor inside your neurons may explain how psychedelics rewire the brain, why the DMT trip might be neuroplasticity you can actually feel, what DMT entities really are, and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:40 The Recurring Dream That Started a 50-Year Obsession 0:06:53 Hunting For The Brain's Own Psychedelic In 1972 0:12:54 The Discovery That We ALL Make DMT 0:19:07 Were Psychedelics Ever Meant To Be Medicine? 0:22:17 How The War On Drugs Killed The Research 0:24:02 Funding Psychedelic Science With Racehorse Drug Tests 0:34:56 Why You Can't Patent A Psychedelic 0:36:31 The Psychedelic Trip Is Just An "Overdose" 0:41:58 Why David Nichols Is Wrong About DMT 0:50:16 The "Pineal Is Too Small" Argument Is Ludicrous 0:54:20 DMT Is In Your Brain At Serotonin Levels 1:01:00 Stress Floods Your Brain With DMT 1:02:32 Why Everyone Else Failed To Detect DMT 1:12:05 The Hidden Receptor Inside Your Neurons 1:19:54 Is The DMT Trip Just Neuroplasticity You Can Feel? 1:26:09 What DMT Entities Actually Are 1:32:15 Are We Building A New Psychedelic Religion? 1:42:11 50 Years of DMT and The Nature of Consciousness 1:44:26 Why He's Still A "Proud Reductionist" ...Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned David Nichols — Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umTgXsW1lQ Bryan Roth — Meet The World's Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEmmmMma8Qs Andrew Gallimore — No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA Guest Links ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven-Barker-8 Cottonwood Research Foundation: https://www.cottonwoodresearch.org
S123 · E2
May 28 · 1 hr 45 min
#124 - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Get Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community (100% free): https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about David Luke is the world's first and only Professor of Exceptional Experience — a parapsychologist and psychedelic researcher at the University of Greenwich who has spent two decades running experiments on the phenomena mainstream science refuses to touch. His naturalistic DMT field study found that 90% of participants encountered autonomous entities, 85% believed they were real — and some were blocked from returning by the entities themselves. Expect to learn why 90% of DMT users encounter entities and 85% say they're real, what happens when the entities refuse you entry, how your body responds to images before you've seen them, why someone with zero visual imagery can still meet elves on DMT, how entity encounters shift people's sense of purpose and meaning more than any other psychedelic effect, what the telepathy tapes are and why they show 100% success rates, why physics gets to be weird but consciousness doesn't, what a neo-pagan shamanically-informed lazy mystic actually believes about reality, and much more … 0:00:00 Trailer 0:04:03 Double Career Suicide 0:07:32 The DMT Field Study 0:13:45 Your Body Predicts the Future 0:16:01 Huxley's Reducing Valve Theory 0:20:23 Chris Timmermann's DMT Research 0:23:20 90% Encounter Entities 0:24:48 Punched in the Head by God 0:27:17 The DMT Entity Taxonomy 0:29:03 Experiencing Entities Without Vision 0:48:28 The Aphantasia DMT Trip 0:53:47 Entities Leaking Into Other People's Trips 0:54:23 DMT Blocking 0:56:30 The Entities Said Bugger Off 0:59:57 Endogenous DMT and the Pineal Gland 1:02:55 David Nichols Dismantles the Pineal Theory 1:05:52 Giant Mantis Entities1:11:12 Purpose & Meaning: The #1 Wellbeing Shift 1:12:06 The Telepathy Tapes 1:19:54 The Ganzfeld Experiment 1:24:16 Physics Gets To Be Weird But We Can't 1:26:33 Why DMT Entities Are So Reliable 1:29:33 Pablo Amaringo's Ayahuasca Art 1:36:34 Do You Have a Stable Ontology? 1:38:12 The Lazy Mystic 1:39:34 In the Province of the Mind There Are No Limits... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

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