Giants Shoulder

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Donald Hoffman is the cognitive scientist whose own maths told him reality isn't what it seems. Around 1986, after seven years modelling perception, the equations said we render the world on the fly, and he has been recovering ever since. Now Professor Emeritus at UC Irvine, he has founded the Trace Institute to rebuild physics from conscious observers, starting outside spacetime. Its first collaboration, with Andrew Gallimore, asks whether DMT entities are glimpses beyond the headset.

Expect to learn:

- The Trace: the 121-year-old maths behind every observer window

- Zero For Trillions: why no theory of consciousness explains a single experience

- The Nose Test: why seeing your own nose shows how restricted your headset is

- The DMT Experiment: passing information through an entity under controlled conditions

- Mach 40: what UFOs might look like to someone with the headset's source code

SPONSORS

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

Join the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend) - https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA

Michael Graziano - Is This Greatest Consciousness Theory You’ve Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/ZnasmLpY5_8

David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o

Karl Friston - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://youtu.be/R-IZOFs4qmY

GUEST LINKS

Trace Institute Profile: https://traceinstitute.org/people/donald-hoffman/

Trace Institute Website: https://www.traceinstitute.org/

Trace Institute YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TraceInstitute

X: https://x.com/donalddhoffman

UC Irvine: https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/

The Case Against Reality (2019): https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393254693

Trace × Andrew Gallimore (DMT research): https://traceinstitute.org/collaborations/gallimore/

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/dOAo04b6jCQ

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:45 The Biggest Unsolved Problem In Science

0:05:38 Physicists Say Spacetime Is Doomed

0:11:03 Dennett, Graziano And The Illusion Of Consciousness

0:14:35 What Is A Trace? Markov Chains Made Simple

0:22:23 The Discovery That Founded The Trace Institute

0:26:10 Recursive Trace Logic: How Observers Become Agents

0:31:27 The CCTV Metaphor For Reality

0:37:01 Why There's Always A Nose In Your Vision

0:41:08 How Big Is Reality Beyond The Interface?

0:43:10 What "Consciousness Is Fundamental" Actually Means

0:52:43 Consciousness Science Has Explained Zero Experiences

0:58:03 Does Your Consciousness Belong To You?

1:01:57 If Consciousness Is One, Why Isn't Telepathy Common?

1:08:16 "I Have No Neurons"

1:11:13 The Maths That Slapped Him In 1986

1:20:04 Andrew Gallimore And The DMT Entity Experiment

1:26:34 The Swami Who Showed Zero Powers

1:32:08 The DMT Mantis And Why Reports Are So Consistent

1:37:28 Are DMT Entities Real, Or Just Icons?

1:46:35 Nine Conjectures To Rebuild All Of Physics

1:49:29 UFOs At Mach 40

1:50:19 Neuroscience As Headset Engineering

1:57:13 Hacking The Source Code Of Reality

2:04:28 AI Is "Dumber Than Cucumbers"

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Michael Masters is the biological anthropologist who thinks the grey aliens might be us. A professor at Montana Technological University, he studies how the human skull, face and eyes evolved over six million years, and has excavated at a 3.5-million-year-old hominin site in South Africa. His extratempestrial hypothesis argues that the beings described in UFO encounters are our own descendants, travelling back in time to study their evolutionary past. He says it's falsifiable, just not in his lifetime.

Expect to learn:

- The Brazilian Farmer: the 1950s abduction that ended in sex with a near-human woman

- The Earlier Cases: the abduction reports that predate Betty and Barney Hill

- Brain Up, Face Back: why six million years of skull evolution point towards the greys

- The Gamete Problem: why our descendants might come back for our sperm and eggs

- Falsifiable By Time: why he'll be "long dead" before anyone knows if he's right

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA

Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc

GUEST LINKS

Montana Tech Faculty Profile: https://mtech.edu/arts-sciences/faculty/michael-masters/index.html

X: https://x.com/MorphoTime

Website: https://idflyobj.com/

Identified Flying Objects (2019): https://www.leighbureau.com/books/identified-flying-objects

The Extratempestrial Model (2022): https://www.leighbureau.com/books/the-extratempestrial-model

Lomas, Case & Masters (2024), The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis: https://doi.org/10.29202/phil-cosm/33/3

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/FRFT3PeiWwk

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:26 The Skull Scientist Who Studies UFOs

0:03:46 "They Could Be Us From The Future"

0:07:21 The Book On The Shelf That Started It All

0:09:10 Whitley Strieber And Communion

0:10:49 Abductees Who Never Told Their Own Families

0:17:13 The Archetypal Abduction Story

0:19:38 The Nimitz: 80,000ft In Under Two Seconds

0:20:37 The Farmer Who Had Sex With An Alien

0:22:22 "I Just Floated Right Through The Ceiling"

0:24:06 Did Sci-Fi Invent Alien Abductions?

0:29:15 DMT Entities, Machine Elves And UFOs

0:37:32 The 2017 Story That Broke UFOs Open

0:42:08 "The Disc-Shaped Craft Are The Time Machine"

0:44:39 Why The Greys Are Built Like Hominins

0:47:26 Can You Really Fast-Forward Evolution?

0:49:30 Brain Up, Face Back: 6 Million Years Of Skulls

0:56:04 Are We Just Projecting Human Faces?

1:00:13 How Far In The Future Are They From?

1:03:23 Why Would We Evolve To Look Like That?

1:06:51 Falling Sperm Counts And The Gamete Mystery

1:15:01 How Do You Falsify Time-Travelling Aliens?

1:22:27 Teaching A University Class On UFOs

1:30:13 Is The US Government Hiding Something Huge?

1:32:40 Keeping UFOs Quiet Through Grad School

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Janice Holden is a near-death-experience researcher who designed the first hospital experiment to catch consciousness outside the body, edits the Journal of Near-Death Studies and spent 31 years on the University of North Texas faculty. For nearly 40 years she has tested one claim: that patients whose hearts have stopped can see the room from above. Surgeons have corroborated some of those details. No controlled study has caught one yet.

Expect to learn:

- The Leg In The Yellow Bag: an anaesthetised patient described an amputation in the next operating room

- The Post-it Notes: a heart patient saw a detail only his surgeon would know

- The Hidden-Target Experiment: pictures hidden near hospital ceilings, visible only from above

- The Life Review: reliving every moment of your life as the people you affected

- DMT Vs Near-Death: why the brain may interpret reality rather than create it

SPONSORS

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc

Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

Karl Friston - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://youtu.be/R-IZOFs4qmY

Marjorie Woollacott - Neuroscientist: "Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness" — NDEs, Telepathy and Terminal Lucidity: https://youtu.be/mDWtmfmIUHA

GUEST LINKS

Website: https://www.janholden.com

The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0313358648

Journal of Near-Death Studies: https://www.janholden.com/jnds

IANDS: https://iands.org

Articles: https://www.janholden.com/copy-of-articles

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/RAXr5ZavLk4

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:15 From Doctoral Student To 40 Years Of Near-Death Research

0:03:38 How Resuscitation Created The Near-Death Experience

0:09:06 What Actually Happens During A Near-Death Experience

0:11:03 Moving At The Speed Of Thought

0:11:41 The Tunnel And The City Of Light

0:13:18 The Life Review: Feeling What Everyone Else Felt

0:14:55 "It's Not Your Time": Why People Come Back

0:19:27 Why Near-Death Experiences Aren't Just Dreams

0:21:09 The Woman Who Watched Her Own Surgery

0:27:11 The Post-it Notes A Dead Patient Saw

0:32:31 The Doctors Who Corroborated These Cases

0:33:39 The Harvard Neurosurgeon Who Changed His Mind

0:37:38 Why "False Memory" Doesn't Explain It

0:40:08 The Patient Who Floated Into The CPR Training Room

0:45:05 Hiding Pictures On Hospital Ceilings

0:49:35 Seven Studies, No Hits Yet

0:53:32 Is Humanity Ready For Proof?

0:58:08 DMT Vs Near-Death Experiences

1:06:35 Does The Brain Create Reality Or Interpret It?

1:10:27 Consciousness Before Birth And After Death

1:14:47 Why Don't We See This All The Time?

1:17:30 Karma And The Afterlife In Southeast Asia

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Carlos Sonnenschein is Professor of Integrative Physiology and Pathobiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. With Ana Soto, he developed the tissue organisation field theory of cancer: the idea that a tumour begins not in a rogue cell, but in the breakdown of the tissue around it. For fifty years he has argued that cancer research has been looking one level too low. Here he explains why the mutations we find in tumours may be the wreckage, not the cause.

Expect to learn:

- The default state: why every cell's natural tendency is to proliferate

- Growth factors: why he argued they don't exist, and why people laughed

- Mutations without cancer: why he says no gene has been shown to cause a cancer

- Targeted therapy: why he believes the target was never really there

- Cellular agency: how life, proliferation and motility fit together

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

GUEST LINKS

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VmTCfroAAAAJ

IEA Nantes Fellow Profile: https://www.iea-nantes.fr/en/fellows/carlos-sonnenschein

Biological Purpose Project: https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/people/carlos-sonnenschein

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos-Sonnenschein

An Integrative Approach Toward Biology, Organisms, and Cancer (2018): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29119499

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/AypMhvhWwjg

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:26 From Paediatrics to Cancer Research

0:05:23 The Oestrogen Paradox

0:08:43 Proliferation Is the Default State of Every Cell

0:12:27 Inhibitors of Inhibitors

0:14:06 "Growth Factors Don't Exist"

0:15:31 The Somatic Mutation Theory

0:17:41 The Society of Cells and the Tissue Theory of Cancer

0:21:44 Stars and Dogs: Funding a Minority View

0:23:49 Teaching Cancer Through Genetics

0:25:01 How Does Tissue Keep Cells in Check?

0:26:04 Metastasis

0:28:34 Prostate Cancer and Spontaneous Regression

0:30:38 The Cost of Cancer Treatment

0:31:49 Melanoma, UV and the Standard Model

0:32:24 Mutations Without Cancer

0:35:17 No Gene Causes Cancer: BRCA1, p53 and RAS

0:37:00 Why Targeted Therapy Isn't Targeted

0:38:03 When Treatment Causes Cancer

0:40:39 What Does Genome Sequencing Tell You?

0:42:24 Why Does Cancer Run in Families?

0:45:41 Trauma, Healing and Tissue Robustness

0:47:59 A Theory of Organisms

0:50:59 What Is Life?

0:52:18 Economics Is a Branch of Biology

0:53:36 Cellular Agency

0:58:36 Defining Life: Proliferation and Motility

1:01:36 When Did Cells Become Agents?

1:04:49 The Future of Cancer Research

1:09:52 Final Thoughts

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Alexander Beiner is the writer who volunteered as a guinea pig for the world's first extended-state DMT trial. At Imperial College London, he was one of eleven people kept on a continuous DMT drip for thirty minutes. He is a co-Executive Director of Breaking Convention, Europe's largest psychedelic conference, and the author of The Bigger Picture.

Expect to learn

- The Chinchillas: hyperdimensional beings he had never seen in real life, speaking a visible language

- The Reply: he sent a symbol back, they went ballistic, then got bored and left

- The Pharmacology Problem: why tolerance to LSD and psilocybin does nothing to DMT

- The Synchronicity: the stranger across a London road, and what he learned that night

- The Spider Queen: a planet-sized entity that wrapped him in a web

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc

Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o

GUEST LINKS

X: https://x.com/AlexanderBeiner

Kainos (Substack): https://beiner.substack.com/

Personal Site: https://www.alexanderbeiner.com/

Breaking Convention: https://breakingconvention.co.uk/performers/alexander-beiner

The Bigger Picture - Author Page: https://www.penguin.com.au/authors/alexander-beiner

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/aZnvPt9X3Dc

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:01:59 Why Changing Minds Isn't Enough

0:02:54 A Magic Mushroom Homecoming In Holland

0:05:33 Joining Europe's Largest Psychedelic Conference

0:06:44 Why He Signed Up To Be A DMT Guinea Pig

0:08:03 Half Of DMT Users Meet Autonomous Entities

0:10:38 Meeting The Hyperdimensional Chinchillas

0:14:25 He'd Never Seen A Chinchilla In Real Life

0:15:14 "They Were Speaking A Visible Language"

0:17:47 Why Priming Can't Explain The Chinchillas

0:21:33 The Metaphysical Shift After 100 Episodes

0:26:21 DMT Immunity And The Cross-Tolerance Mystery

0:28:07 Why Psychedelics Make Avoiding Pain Harder

0:29:28 The Placebo Dose And The Prank Paranoia

0:32:24 Three Heartbeats To The Deepest Trip

0:35:06 Wired Up: The Hidden Rituals Of The Lab

0:39:29 Would He Ever Come Back?

0:40:22 Psychedelic PTSD And The Fear Of Madness

0:41:31 The Synchronicity He Still Can't Explain

0:46:37 If Everything's Conscious, Where's The Telepathy?

0:49:16 Why The East Talks Openly About Ghosts

0:53:45 The Planet-Sized Spider Queen

0:58:51 "This Is So Similar To What McKenna Described"

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic is a physicist turned cognitive scientist and Professor Emeritus at Chalmers University of Technology, with doctorates in both physics and computer science. Across three careers she built info-computationalism: the idea that nature is information and computation at every level, from particles to minds. Her conclusion puts her at odds with much of her own field. Cognition arrives with life itself, which puts consciousness in a single bacterium and nowhere in today's AI.

Expect to learn:

- Info-computationalism: why nature is information and computation all the way down

- Cell consciousness: why a single cell is already sensing, deciding and minimally aware

- The Levin divide: where she draws the line Michael Levin won't

- Anaesthetised bacteria: why ether switches off organisms with no brain

- Machines that can't feel: why today's AI has intelligence but no goals of its own

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA

William B. Miller Jr. - Meet The Scientist Proving Your Cells Are Conscious and Intelligent: https://youtu.be/xrV5oGyyKSI

Mark Solms - Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms: https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc

GUEST LINKS

Chalmers Profile: https://www.chalmers.se/en/persons/dodig/

X: https://x.com/DodigGordana

Chalmers Research Publications: https://research.chalmers.se/en/person/dodig

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bvc5bBsAAAAJ

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9881-400X

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordana-dodig-crnkovic/

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/D4jBgWV8BoY

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:44 Physicist, Computer Scientist, Cognitive Scientist

0:08:05 What Is Information, Really?

0:13:16 You Can't Observe Without Changing The System

0:16:14 Are Conscious Agents The Most Fundamental Thing?

0:20:06 A Single Cell Is Already Conscious

0:27:16 Where She Parts Ways With Michael Levin

0:28:41 Can We Build A Machine That Creates Itself?

0:33:38 Why A Book Is Just Food To An Insect

0:39:40 You Are Trillions Of Information Agents

0:44:09 Science's Obsession With Measurement

0:46:40 Xenobots And The Cells Nobody Programmed

0:51:02 Agency Or Just Complicated Chemistry?

0:55:58 Why No Experiment Can Settle This

0:57:22 Where Computation Ends And Cognition Begins

1:01:08 Would Levin Say Gene Networks Think?

1:03:37 Why Survival Might Be Essential For Consciousness

1:07:07 You Can Anaesthetise A Bacterium

1:11:08 Can Consciousness Be Written Down As Maths?

1:19:31 How AI Could Help Us Understand Minds

1:22:35 Should We Ever Build Conscious AI?

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

John Vervaeke is an award-winning cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Cognitive Science programme and the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He helped pioneer relevance realisation — the claim that underneath your intelligence, your attention and your consciousness sits a single process, and that every living thing is doing it. He has argued since 1997 that this process cannot be a computation, and his field is only now conceding the point: even predictive processing, its dominant framework, is increasingly admitted to presuppose the thing he named. A cell decides what matters to it. So does a bacterium. Possibly everything that has ever been alive, long before there was a brain to think with.

Expect to learn:

- Relevance realisation: how you ignore almost everything in front of you and still land on what matters

- Cognition all the way down: why a single cell is doing the same thing your mind is, only smaller

- The line at life: why a tornado self-organises but never cares, and what that rules out

- Why computation can't do it: the reason large language models collapse on open-ended problems and always will

- Mind as the between: the case that consciousness isn't inside your head but in the coupling with your world

SPONSORS

Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA

Philip Ball - Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life!: https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E

Philip Ball - Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY

Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE

Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

GUEST LINKS

University of Toronto Faculty Profile: https://www.psych.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/john-vervaeke

Website: https://johnvervaeke.com/

X: https://x.com/vervaeke_john

YouTube (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis): https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (book): https://johnvervaeke.com/books/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/jcMtjjeUV98

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:54 The Meaning Crisis, Explained by a Cognitive Scientist

0:04:16 The Patterns in This Room Outnumber the Particles in the Universe

0:06:45 How Your Mind Ignores Almost Everything

0:09:09 "Dad, It's Relevance Realisation All The Way Down"

0:10:24 Noise Is Just Information Nobody Needs

0:15:33 Comparing a Human Mind to a Single Cell

0:18:01 Michael Levin's Cognitive Light Cone

0:19:49 The Cone of Caring

0:23:20 How Far Down Does Mind Actually Go?

0:24:15 Why a Tornado Isn't Alive

0:25:34 Pressing Michael Levin to Admit He's a Platonist

0:34:01 The Water Bottle Experiment

0:40:34 Where Levin Leaps From Patterns to Minds

0:48:12 The Problem With Symmetry Theories of Consciousness

0:55:03 Why LLMs Fall Apart on Open-Ended Problems

1:00:16 Obviousness Is Not a Physical Property

1:05:11 The Shark That Dies in the Sahara

1:10:49 What Consciousness Is Actually Doing

1:15:12 Are Neural Correlates a Dead End?

1:22:07 "We Should Stop Funding It"

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Richard Watson is a professor of artificial intelligence and theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Southampton and the author of Compositional Evolution. He argues that adaptation does not require natural selection at all, and that biology has spent a century mistaking one for the other. With Michael Levin he published Natural Induction, which shows that any network whose connections give way under stress will begin to learn on its own. Ecosystems. Gene networks. Possibly the chemistry of the early Earth, long before anything was alive to be selected.

Expect to learn:

- Cognition before selection: why learning came first and natural selection came second

- The spring mechanism: how falling masses solve hard puzzles with no brain, no genes and no designer

- Ecosystems that compute: the model where an ecosystem solves a Sudoku without reproducing or inheriting

- The limits of the genome: why no amount of sequencing will explain what a cell is actually doing

- Medicine as persuasion: treating tissues as cognitive systems to negotiate with, not machines to fix

SPONSORS

Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

GUEST LINKS

University of Southampton Profile: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x27lw/professor-richard-watson

Personal Website: https://www.richardawatson.com

Natural Induction (Entropy, 2024, with Michael Levin): https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/9/765

Publications: https://www.richardawatson.com/publications-1

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Watson-10

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/wAGFE2S6qXg

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:43 The Assumptions Every Biologist Knows Are Wrong

0:03:53 "All of Life Is Cognitive"

0:06:58 Survival Is a Consequence, Not the Driver

0:09:32 How Cognition Could Come Before Natural Selection

0:14:03 Adaptation Isn't What Natural Selection Does

0:17:57 What a Sudoku Puzzle Teaches About Life

0:20:41 Masses, Springs and the Physics of Learning

0:23:45 When Springs Start to Remember

0:26:18 Learning as "Second-Order Falling"

0:28:56 No Selection, No Neural Nets, No Design

0:31:03 What "Memory" Actually Means

0:35:59 Gene Networks That Learn

0:38:13 An Ecosystem Solving Sudoku

0:43:22 Natural Selection "Isn't Doing Anything Clever"

0:52:08 No Amount of Sequencing Will Answer This

0:57:23 Will We Ever Model a Cell? "Bottom Up, Never"

1:01:23 Rethinking Medicine: Persuadable Systems

1:08:01 Agency, or Just Complex Biochemistry?

1:20:47 "I Don't Do Consciousness"

1:23:30 Three Things That Changed His Mind

1:25:39 Analytic Idealism and the Dream Argument

1:33:31 Why Doesn't Your Consciousness Blur Into the Chair?

1:35:47 McGilchrist and Why We're Blind to It

1:38:47 It Was Never About Survival

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Richard Brown is a philosopher of mind who built one of the leading cognitive theories of consciousness, co-authored the paper with Joseph LeDoux that moved the feeling of fear out of the amygdala, and has just published the full book-length case for it with Oxford University Press. He also cannot picture a chicken. Brown has aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery whatsoever — and he didn't find out until a graduate seminar, when he realised that everyone around him had been speaking literally all along about seeing things in their heads. This is a man building a theory of inner experience from inside a mind with no pictures in it.

Expect to learn:

- The blank mind's eye: what a philosopher with no mental imagery reveals about where experience actually happens

- Fear without the amygdala: how he and Joseph LeDoux moved the feeling of fear up into the cortex

- Fake phenomenology: the TMS study where vision gets more vivid without getting any more accurate

- Experience you can't reach: whether you can be having a conscious state and be locked out of it

- The state of the field: why the consciousness chapter in most neuroscience textbooks is a coin flip

SPONSORS

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0

Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE

Alfredo Spagna - Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://youtu.be/k8SBHefDnEk

GUEST LINKS

Personal Site: https://onemorebrown.com

Consciousness Live!: https://onemorebrown.com/consciousness-live/

Consciousness as Representing One's Mind (OUP, 2025): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consciousness-as-representing-ones-mind-9780197784006

X: https://x.com/onemorebrown

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/onemorebrown.bsky.social

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/RBP-w5Z9t1g

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:10 Why You Can't Do Science Without Philosophy

0:04:54 "You're Doing Bad Philosophy and You Don't Know It"

0:06:26 The Band That Got Him Working With Joseph LeDoux

0:11:53 Why the Consciousness Chapter Is a Coin Flip

0:17:17 What a Higher-Order Theory Actually Says

0:20:43 The Two Kinds of Awareness

0:21:59 The Blurry Book That Taught Him About Experience

0:26:32 Consciousness as Awareness of Your Own Mind

0:27:08 LeDoux, the Amygdala and Where Fear Really Lives

0:33:06 "There Is No Unconscious Fear"

0:39:17 Two Famous Theories That Are Secretly the Same

0:40:15 Aphantasia as Evidence for Higher-Order Theory

0:42:57 The Speckled Hen That Broke the Seminar

0:44:48 Seven Spots, or Black on Black?

0:45:46 What Meditation Showed a Man With No Mind's Eye

0:49:38 You Might Be Having Experiences You Can't Reach

0:52:21 Ned Block's Overflow and the "Placeholder" Problem

0:55:36 India Solved This Before Descartes

1:02:26 Subjective Inflation, or "Fake Phenomenology"

1:03:38 Zapping the Prefrontal Cortex With TMS

1:06:13 The $3 Million Experiment Testing All of This

1:09:56 Quality Space Theory and Mental "Dabs of Paint"

1:22:08 Why You Can't Swap Your Red for My Green

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Dean Buonomano is a UCLA neuroscientist and one of the first researchers to ask how the brain encodes time. His work overturned a century-old assumption — that somewhere in your head sits a central clock — by showing that timing falls out of the dynamics of neural circuits themselves. He wrote the bestseller Your Brain Is a Time Machine, then took the argument to physics, co-authoring a paper with Carlo Rovelli on whether the past still exists. He is a presentist in a field that mostly isn't.

Expect to learn:

- The clockless brain: why there is no central timer anywhere in your head

- Timing in a dish: how isolated brain tissue can be taught intervals

- Death and religion: how foresight forced our ancestors to invent the afterlife

- The ten-second test: the one simple thing no language model can do

- Pause the computer: the thought experiment that breaks state-based theories of consciousness

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

György Buzsáki - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/95FFRTIiLDY

Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/eNi-_2cOVtc

Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

GUEST LINKS

UCLA Neurobiology Profile: https://neurobio.ucla.edu/people/dean-buonomano-phd

Buonomano Lab: http://www.buonomanolab.com/

X: https://x.com/DeanBuono

Bridging the Neuroscience and Physics of Time (with Carlo Rovelli): https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01976

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/G2LaKtxUng0

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:01 The Brain Has No Central Clock

0:04:17 How Neural Population Clocks Work

0:05:40 Teaching Brain Tissue To Tell Time

0:06:57 Prediction Is Really About When

0:09:10 Even Bacteria Keep Time

0:10:27 Mental Time Travel Built Civilisation

0:11:39 Realising You'll Die Invented Religion

0:14:57 Squirrels Don't Actually Plan Ahead

0:18:19 Waking Up Before Your Alarm

0:23:29 Why Time Is Central To Consciousness

0:24:01 Block Universe vs Only Now

0:29:24 The Runner Who Lost Time

0:33:18 Why Marathons Destroy Time Perception

0:37:18 The Memories With No Timestamp

0:42:02 Your Brain Runs Many Clocks

0:43:31 AI Cannot Wait Ten Seconds

0:45:38 How Transformers Deleted Time

0:49:29 What If You Paused The Computer?

0:53:05 Could We Ever Build Conscious AI?

0:58:17 Arguing About Time With Carlo Rovelli

1:01:40 A Time Traveller Would Prove Me Wrong

1:07:05 You Can't Measure Time With Time

1:12:25 Which Theory Of Consciousness Is Right?

1:21:55 Why We Invented The Soul

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Steven Barker is the chemist who has spent fifty years proving your brain makes its own psychedelic. He built the mass-spectrometry methods sensitive enough to find DMT in living tissue, and showed it sits in the brain at concentrations rivalling serotonin and dopamine. In 1981 the war on drugs cut his funding and the work stopped for fifteen years. He also synthesised his own supply — and took it.

Expect to learn:

- The locked cabinet: what his mentor kept behind two locks, and why Barker raided it

- The missing neurotransmitter: why DMT meets every formal criterion and nobody noticed

- Machine elves: why he calls the term marketing rather than science

- DMT immunity: the lab technician who took a full dose and felt nothing

- Receptors inside the neuron: the 2023 finding that explains the neuroplasticity

SPONSORS

Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA

Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc

Dennis McKenna - Dennis McKenna: "I've Spent 50 Years Investigating The Entities That Exist Within Ayahuasca": https://youtu.be/gTSBhfZhuD8

David Nichols - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/6umTgXsW1lQ

GUEST LINKS

ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Steven-A-Barker-2164230436

N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, an Endogenous Hallucinogen (2018 review): https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00536

A Critical Review of Endogenous DMT in Humans 1955-2010 (with Strassman): https://doi.org/10.1002/dta.422

LC/MS/MS Analysis of Rat Pineal Microdialysate (2013, the paper discussed on tape): https://doi.org/10.1002/bmc.2981

Administration of DMT in Psychedelic Therapeutics (2022 review): https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-022-06065-0

LISTEN ON

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:15 50 Years Chasing One Molecule

0:06:37 Huxley, Osmond and the Birth of "Psychedelic"

0:08:01 The Schizotoxin Hypothesis That Started It All

0:10:54 Finding DMT in Everyone, Not Just Patients

0:11:56 How the War on Drugs Killed the Research

0:16:39 The 40 Years of Research We Lost

0:18:36 "Have You Ever Taken It Yourself?"

0:19:20 Inside the Locked Psychedelic Cabinet

0:20:22 The Overabundance He Didn't Want to Waste

0:22:51 Why He Won't Describe What He Saw

0:23:38 Set, Setting and the Expectancy Problem

0:27:16 Dennis McKenna Has Never Seen a Machine Elf

0:28:31 "Machine Elf" Was a Marketing Term

0:30:40 The Tryptamine Family Tree Explained

0:34:21 Bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT and the Blood-Brain Barrier

0:38:36 DMT as a Working Neurotransmitter

0:41:34 "DMT Is the Missing Neurotransmitter"

0:44:56 You Have Two Brains - and the Gut Makes More

0:46:29 Pushing Back on Gallimore's Alien World

0:54:04 96% Say the Entity Was Conscious

0:57:52 Did the Caveman Experience an Alien?

0:59:07 "These Are Not Real Elves"

1:06:40 Are Some People Immune to DMT?

1:10:51 You Can't Build Tolerance to Your Own Neurotransmitter

1:15:46 The Receptors Hiding Inside Your Neurons

1:24:24 What a Psychedelic Overdose Actually Is

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinAlexander Batthyány is the philosopher and psychologist who turned a deathbed anecdote into a science. He ran the first modern study of paradoxical lucidity, co-authored the field's founding definition with Bruce Greyson, and has now collected around 450 cases of severely demented patients unexpectedly getting their memory, speech and personality back. Victorian doctors documented the phenomenon at length and called it "lightening up before death"; twentieth-century medicine stopped writing it down because there was no way to phrase it in a case study. He is now working with a group at the Mayo Clinic to put cameras in patients' rooms so the episodes stop being missed. In one case a woman came back for two hours, discussed her own diagnosis, died — and imaging taken immediately afterwards showed no change whatsoever.SPONSORSGet One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeGS EPISODES MENTIONEDRick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYscAndrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDAGUEST LINKSX: https://x.com/Alxdr_BatthyanyGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VRL8CPYAAAAJPersonal Site: https://sites.google.com/view/alexanderbatthyany/startViktor Frankl Institute Vienna: https://www.viktorfrankl.org/Threshold (2023): https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250782298/threshold/Psychology Today - Magic Mushrooms and Terminal Lucidity: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/consciousness-and-meaning-at-lifes-end/202607/magic-mushrooms-and-terminal-lucidityBatthyany & Greyson (2021), Spontaneous Remission of Dementia Before Death: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2021/04/terminal-lucidity-PC.pdfSKOOLWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutFOLLOW EVANhttps://x.com/evan_mcglTIMESTAMPS0:00:00 Trailer0:02:29 What Terminal Lucidity Actually Is0:05:33 Why He'd Rather Call It "Paradoxical Lucidity"0:06:01 "Call Your Grandma - She's Back Again"0:09:11 The Victorians Documented It, Then Medicine Stopped0:10:55 "We Saw It, But We Didn't Write It Down"0:12:58 Frankl's Rule: Treat Them As Fully Present0:17:35 What Brain Age Was She Speaking From?0:18:36 "It Was All As If In A Fog"0:21:11 The Wife Who Filmed It So People Would Believe Her0:25:40 The Art Historian Who Gave Back His Books0:30:27 Is It Comforting For Families, Or Crueller?0:32:02 The Three Shocks Every Family Goes Through0:38:05 450 Cases And Counting0:41:29 Does It Have Anything To Do With Death At All?0:45:12 Steven Pinker: "You're Seeing Figures In Clouds"0:47:10 "Everywhere And Nowhere"0:49:47 They Overdosed Her On Psilocybin. She Woke Up.0:51:37 She Got Her Sense Of Humour Back0:55:18 Dresden: The Brain Hadn't Changed At All0:56:37 "Some Of Our Personhood Is Platform Independent"1:02:40 Near-Death Experiences vs Paradoxical Lucidity1:05:52 Rick Strassman, DMT And Neuroprotection1:11:22 "How Can We Get Them Out?"1:20:20 When Vienna Gave Psychiatric Patients Malaria.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Carl Hart is a human drug scientist — the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia University and Chair of its Department of Psychology, who runs one of the very few laboratories on earth licensed to give people real doses of crack cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA. His volunteers live inside a sealed four-room lab for weeks at a time, originally built for NASA to study astronauts, with no contact with the outside world while he measures their sleep, their food intake and how much they speak. He started that work believing drugs were what had gone wrong in neighbourhoods like the one he grew up in. Thirty years of data refused to agree with him.

Expect to learn why there is no such thing as drug addiction in a rat, why "hard drugs" is a category the human body doesn't recognise, why he refuses to use the word "psychedelic", how one extra methyl group is the only difference between methamphetamine and the main ingredient in Adderall, why psychiatry still runs on a theory formalised in 1967 when only six neurotransmitters were known, what heroin actually feels like and why the real danger is constipation rather than overdose, why addiction tracks access rather than pharmacology, and much more…

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o

GUEST LINKS

Columbia Psychiatry Profile: https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/carl-hart-phd

Personal Website: https://drcarlhart.com/

X: https://x.com/drcarlhart

Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Use_for_Grown-Ups

High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Price_(book)

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:16 Why Human Rights Became His Whole Mission

0:03:45 "I Believed the Bullshit About Drugs"

0:07:42 The Brain-Imaging Studies That Prove Nothing

0:10:32 Why "Hard Drugs" Is a Made-Up Category

0:12:42 There Is No Such Thing as Addiction in a Rat

0:14:18 Put Cocaine on Your Gum and See What Happens

0:15:50 Rat Models for Autism, ADHD and Depression

0:18:03 How Many Hoops to Give a Human Crack Cocaine

0:20:38 "Psychedelic" Is a Political Word, Not a Real Thing

0:22:40 Why the One-Receptor Story Is Bullshit

0:23:56 Psychiatry Is Still Running on a 1967 Theory

0:31:17 One Methyl Group: Meth vs Adderall

0:34:41 The Lab NASA Built for Astronauts

0:37:45 The Phenomenology Gap Nobody Studies

0:39:01 "I Was a Virgin to These Drugs, And Not Even Curious"

0:44:14 What Heroin Actually Feels Like

0:47:04 The Real Danger Is Constipation

0:52:47 The Overdose Myth He's Trying to Destroy

0:55:39 Education, Not Harm Reduction

0:58:40 Addiction Isn't About Drugs, It's About Access

1:01:38 Not Whether to Legalise, But How

1:05:30 Dublin's Cocaine Problem, Evan Pushes Back

1:06:46 "That's Quite Arrogant of You"

1:09:05 The Same Argument That Delayed Emancipation

1:12:50 "We Put People on the Moon. This Is Not Complicated."

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Luca Turin is a biophysicist who has spent thirty years arguing that the nose reads a molecule's vibrations rather than its shape, published in Nature at twenty-three, and co-wrote the definitive critical guide to perfume with his wife Tania Sanchez. The vibrational theory of olfaction was declared dead twice before he revived it, and he is still waiting for the one experiment that would settle it. His newest result has nothing to do with smell: fruit flies sealed in separate opaque wells, with no sight, sound or scent between them, coordinate their movement anyway — and the coordination vanishes the moment the plate is made of metal. This is a scientist who went looking for anaesthesia and found something that looks like insect telepathy.

Expect to learn why creating a smell stimulus is nothing like creating a colour, how a startup elicited smell sensations with ultrasound for the first time in history, why the only two chemical groups in the universe that share one vibration are also the only two that smell of rotten eggs, how a receptor could read vibrations with no lenses or prisms anywhere in your nose, why the famous "trillion smells" figure was a mathematical error, why nobody in pharmacology can predict what a drug will do once it binds, how Google Quantum AI's xenon question led to fruit flies, what happened when the plates were swapped for aluminium, why radio frequency would be the perfect brain-wide reward signal, and much more…

SPONSORS

Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Earl K Miller - Meet the MIT Neuroscientist Showing Brain Waves Are the Secret Engine Behind Consciousness: https://youtu.be/7OFb-NG3jIw

Marjorie Woollacott - Neuroscientist: "Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness" — NDEs, Telepathy and Terminal Lucidity: https://youtu.be/mDWtmfmIUHA

GUEST LINKS

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fgXXdQYAAAAJ

Wi-Fly Project: https://wi-fly.eu/

X: https://x.com/LucaTurin

Substack: https://lucaturin.substack.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lucaturin

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:20 Biophysicists Are Dreamers, Biologists Are Doomed

0:07:07 The Startup That Triggered Smells With Ultrasound

0:12:22 The Rotten-Egg Coincidence That Convinced Him

0:18:34 What The Receptor Is Actually Reading

0:19:54 Electron Tunnelling, Explained Simply

0:23:33 The Trillion-Smells Figure Was A Maths Error

0:28:21 What Perfumers Perceive That You Don't

0:32:14 Why Every Drug Receptor Might Be Electrical

0:33:12 The Mystery Nobody Admits: Drug Efficacy

0:39:28 "Cascade" Is A Word That Masks Ignorance

0:44:04 The Receptor As A Transistor

0:48:40 Google Quantum AI And The Xenon Puzzle

0:52:24 Two Years Of Work, A Definite Maybe

0:53:55 30 Flies Freeze Like The Guards At Buckingham Palace

0:55:28 One Fly Per Well, No Way To Communicate

0:56:17 To My Total Astonishment, They Coordinate

0:58:45 Metal Plates Kill The Signal

0:59:36 The Wi-Fly: A Radio Network For Flies

1:11:26 Radical Pairs: How A Fly Could Listen

1:16:34 What Is The Brain's Reward Signal?

1:19:59 Standing Waves And The Binding Problem

1:23:58 Could Humans Ever Do This?

1:27:46 Ramanujan And Latent Abilities

1:36:16 Giving Fruit Flies DMT

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Karen Konkoly is a dream scientist who led the first study to hold a real-time, two-way conversation with a person inside a dream, putting maths problems to sleepers in REM and getting answers back through their eye movements. She is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cambridge Consciousness and Cognition Laboratory, completed her PhD in the Paller Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, and has spent her career building tools to engineer dreams — from targeted lucidity reactivation for narcolepsy nightmares to planting unsolved problems into REM sleep. She has also asked a dream character to swap bodies with her, and woken up inside it. This is the strangest conversation we have had on the channel.

Expect to learn how scientists prove someone is awake inside a dream, why you still cannot fly in your own dream even when you know it is a dream, what happened when Karen swapped bodies with a dream character, whether time really slows down while you sleep, why practising darts in a lucid dream works about as well as practising awake, what galantamine and acetylcholine actually do to REM sleep, the exact protocol for having your first lucid dream, why Karen no longer believes lucidity is the key to consciousness, and much more…

SPONSORS

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

David Spiegel - World's Greatest Hypnosis Scientist Hijacks My Mind Live On Camera!: https://youtu.be/eCtRBZHIsgQ

GUEST LINKS

Personal Website: https://www.karenkonkoly.com/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=teYHEFIAAAAJ&hl=en

Cambridge Consciousness & Cognition Lab: https://www.ccc-lab.org/

Dust Systems (Dream Engineering): https://www.dust.systems/people/karen-konkoly

X: https://x.com/KarenKonkoly

LISTEN ON

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M

Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:03:18 What Lucid Dreaming Actually Is

0:05:37 Wake Back To Bed: The 4am Method

0:06:40 Why You Still Can't Fly In Your Own Dream

0:09:20 How You Prove Someone Is Lucid In A Dream

0:11:53 Are The Sleep Stages Even Real?

0:15:28 When A Dream Dissolves But You Don't Wake Up

0:19:19 The Reality Check You Can Do Tonight

0:21:00 Does Time Run Slower Inside A Dream?

0:24:45 Trying And Failing To Become Her Dog

0:26:10 Swapping Bodies With A Dream Character

0:27:51 Is Lucidity A Glitch In Consciousness?

0:33:37 Hyperphantasia And Maladaptive Daydreaming

0:37:53 Practising Darts While You're Asleep

0:41:52 When Lucid Dreaming Is A Bad Idea

0:46:09 Why A Giraffe Can't Appear While You're Awake

0:49:54 Galantamine, Acetylcholine And Dream Drugs

0:52:17 The Squat Experiment

0:58:38 The Full Protocol, Step By Step

1:04:55 What This Teaches Us About Consciousness

1:09:15 Who Are Your Dream Characters?

1:12:55 "You're Not You"

1:14:41 Hypnosis, David Spiegel And Lucid Dreaming

1:18:20 What She's Working On Next

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇

https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

David Spiegel is the world's leading hypnosis scientist — fifty years at Stanford spent proving that trance is a measurable brain state rather than a stage trick, across thirteen books, four hundred papers and roughly seven thousand patients hypnotised personally. I told him to his face that I thought his entire field was a scam, so he ran the hypnotisability test on me live on camera, my left arm floated off the desk and stopped obeying me for the next forty minutes, and he scored me seven out of ten.

Expect to learn what hypnosis actually is and the three components it breaks down into, how stage hypnotists secretly screen their audiences before the show even starts, what changes in three separate brain networks the moment you go under, why "suggestibility" is the wrong word and cognitive flexibility is the right one, how hypnotised subjects cut their brain's electrical response to pain by 50%, why one in four smokers quit after a single session, the two very different childhoods that both produce highly hypnotisable adults, why eight-year-olds are the most hypnotisable people alive, how Rory McIlroy used self-hypnosis to break a seven-year Masters curse, what it feels like to have your own arm stop belonging to you, and much more…

SPONSORS

Try Reveri, Dr David Spiegel's Self-Hypnosis App (use code SPIEGEL20 for your discount) - https://reverihealth.app.link/e/spiegel

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

GUEST LINKS

Stanford Profile: https://profiles.stanford.edu/david-spiegel

Reveri: https://www.reveri.com/

Reveri on X: https://x.com/reveri_health

Stanford Center on Stress and Health: https://med.stanford.edu/stresshealthcenter.html

Trance and Treatment (his clinical textbook): https://www.appi.org/Products/Hypnosis/Trance-and-Treatment-Second-Edition

SKOOL

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:27 Who Is David Spiegel?

0:03:39 What Hypnosis Actually Is

0:05:37 Why He Calls Stage Shows "Dumb Shows"

0:06:29 How Hypnotists Secretly Screen The Audience

0:09:08 The Student Who Relived Being A Newborn

0:10:46 What Hypnosis Does To Three Brain Networks

0:13:23 It's Not Suggestibility, It's Cognitive Flexibility

0:16:12 Cutting The Brain's Pain Signal By 50%

0:17:05 One In Four Quit Smoking In A Single Session

0:18:33 The Meditator Whose Migraines Vanished

0:22:36 Why Hypnotisability Is Partly Genetic

0:23:54 The Two Childhoods That Make You Hypnotisable

0:27:16 Hypnosis, Flow States And Peak Performance

0:32:54 How Rory McIlroy Broke His Masters Curse

0:38:05 Why You Can Forget Your Own Name

0:44:29 Filtering The Hurt Out Of Pain

0:55:00 The Hypnotisability Test, Live On Camera

1:00:15 "It's Actually Going Up"

1:08:52 Evan Scores 7 Out Of 10

1:18:42 Trying To Erase The Number Four

1:31:04 "Please Don't Do This On My Other Arm"

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing: https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Rick Strassman is the psychiatrist who ran the first new American psychedelic research in a generation — five years of DMT studies at the University of New Mexico, the first rating scale ever built specifically to measure a psychedelic experience, and the book that made DMT famous. DMT: The Spirit Molecule sold a quarter of a million copies and effectively created machine-elf culture. Thirty years on, he is the most sceptical man in the room about what those entities actually are.

Expect to learn why your brain spends energy importing DMT across the blood-brain barrier, why the pineal gland story he made famous fell apart, how brain DMT sits at the same concentration as serotonin and dopamine, why DMT floods the visual cortex of a dying brain, why a molecule that shrinks strokes and protects kidneys should not be psychedelic at all, what the endomatrix is and why it raises the simulation question, why he now thinks psychedelics are super placebos, what a DMT entity actually is and why talking to one is like talking to an AI, how you would actually test whether the entities are real, why only one scientist on Earth is studying endogenous DMT, and much more…

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

Join the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend) - https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2

GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Steven Barker - Meet The World's Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/gTc5QjyZuvY

David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o

Deborah Mash - Meet The Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist Who First Unravelled Its Big Mystery: https://youtu.be/z7eRtXV6ptA

Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA

GUEST LINKS

Official Site: https://www.rickstrassman.com/

Books & Publications: https://www.rickstrassman.com/publications/

Substack: https://rickstrassman.substack.com/

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/RickStrassman

Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of DMT in Mammalian Brain (Dean et al., Scientific Reports 2019): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45812-w

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:04:31 The First Legal DMT Studies in a Generation

0:07:41 The Bomb-Maker Who Became a Psychedelic Scientist

0:14:13 The Iron Curtain Reason We Know DMT Works

0:22:32 Why Your Brain Spends Energy Importing DMT

0:28:26 Your Brain Makes DMT at Serotonin Levels

0:29:26 DMT Floods the Dying Brain's Visual Cortex

0:30:28 Stroke, Kidneys and Heart — DMT as a Survival Molecule

0:32:39 The $64,000 Question Nobody Can Answer

0:36:33 Does DMT Regulate How Real Reality Feels?

0:39:32 Only One Person on Earth Studies This

0:43:52 The Endomatrix and the Simulation Question

0:49:48 "Psychedelics Are Super Placebos"

0:55:12 The Man Who Wrote Down "Bananas Are Really Yellow"

1:03:50 The Barking Patient — Entities as Dream Logic

1:05:42 Talking to Entities Is Like Talking to an AI

1:06:40 The Prime Number Test for Proving Entities Are Real

1:13:36 Half His Volunteers Met Beings — And a Conscious Apartment

1:18:08 "Your Brain On Drugs" vs Another Dimension

1:26:58 The Entities That Curse You

1:29:09 "Have You Started Yet?" — The Man Immune to DMT

1:33:30 Why DMT Is the Only Psychedelic Without Tolerance

1:36:12 Blocking 5-HT1A Tripled the Effect — Buried 30 Years

1:39:06 Aphantasia and Seeing For the First Time

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT’S SHOULDER FAMILY

Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing: https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join

Deborah Mash is a neuropharmacologist who holds the first FDA licence ever granted to give ibogaine to a human being, built one of America's largest brain banks, and discovered noribogaine — the metabolite now entering its first US clinical trial. She has spent over thirty years on a drug that appears to interrupt addiction after a single dose. This April a US president named it specifically. This is the scientist who was right three decades early.

Expect to learn what Trump's executive order actually changes for ibogaine, why Sasha Shulgin put ibogaine in a box of its own, how noribogaine blocks nicotine, alcohol, cocaine and opioid use in animal models, why ibogaine holds the brain's neuroplasticity window open for four weeks when ketamine manages days, why some patients get the full therapeutic benefit with no psychedelic experience at all, why the reported ibogaine deaths are almost impossible to interpret, why more than 80% of her patients said they never wanted to repeat it, and much more...

SPONSORS

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

Join the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend) - https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2GS

EPISODES MENTIONED

David Nutt - Meet the Neuroscientist Fired For Exposing the Truth! Dr David Nutt: https://youtu.be/BLk6a5Vb2O0

David Nutt - Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List: https://youtu.be/G-OZ_UBGvvo

GUEST LINKS

University of Miami Faculty Profile: http://neurology.med.miami.edu/about-us/faculty-list/deborah-c-mash-ph-d

X: https://x.com/drdeborahmash

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4383E7wAAAAJ&hl=en

DemeRx: https://www.demerx.com/team/deborah-c-mash-phd/

2018 Frontiers in Pharmacology paper (St. Kitts cohort): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.00529/full

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

FOLLOW EVAN

https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:00 Why Ibogaine Is Suddenly Everywhere

0:02:22 Trump's Executive Order and What It Actually Does

0:05:55 The Drug That Breaks the Cycle of Addiction

0:08:07 Why One Drug Treats Addiction, Depression and Trauma

0:11:30 Noribogaine: The Metabolite Nobody Talks About

0:14:20 The Real Risks Nobody Reports Properly

0:16:36 How Ibogaine Became a Vast Underground Experiment

0:17:44 Veterans, Brain Trauma and the Testimonials

0:22:55 The Master Molecule: Why Ibogaine Stands Alone

0:23:30 Sasha Shulgin Draws Four Boxes

0:26:48 Is a Psychedelic Just a Hard Reboot?

0:28:11 Four Weeks of Neuroplasticity, Longer Than Anything Else

0:28:44 Fast, Slow and Ultra-Rapid Metabolisers

0:31:39 The First Patient in St. Kitts, Decades Later

0:34:35 Do You Need the Trip to Reach the Destination?

0:35:05 One Molecule, Every Addiction

0:37:39 Miami Vice and the Bodies at the Morgue

0:41:18 The Man Who Slept Through His Own Trip

0:44:11 Why America Will Lead on Ibogaine

0:47:51 Dual Dosing: The Second Stage of the Rocket

0:54:52 Why More Than 80% Never Want to Repeat It

0:57:33 What Would Ibogaine Do to a Healthy Brain?

0:58:18 Why She's Never Taken Ibogaine

0:59:39 Psychedelics, Longevity and Ageing Brains

......Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

Join the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend): https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2

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

Martin Picard is a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University who just won the inaugural $1.5 million Baszucki Prize for a new theory of life. His radical claim: consciousness doesn't just run on energy, it might actually be made of it, generated inside your mitochondria rather than your brain.

Expect to learn why calling mitochondria "the powerhouse of the cell" does them a disservice, how mitochondria might generate consciousness rather than just power the brain that has it, why some of history's most rigorous physicists ended up believing consciousness is more fundamental than matter, how psychedelics might work by reshaping the way energy is patterned through your body, why grey hair can reverse itself within weeks of a stressful period lifting, how a simple blood test might one day predict whether you're about to have a good or bad trip, why "no drug actually heals you" and what does instead, and much more.

Timestamps:

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:00 What Actually Keeps You Alive (Not What You Think)

0:04:40 Why There's No Experience Without Energy Flow

0:07:11 Are You Conscious Because of Matter, or Despite It?

0:10:13 Why History's Greatest Physicists Became Idealists

0:17:17 The Doctor Who Watched Patients Come Back From Death

0:22:09 Don Hoffman and the Day the Beach Disappeared

0:24:12 What Actually Triggers a Near-Death Experience

0:24:51 You Are an Eddy in a River of Consciousness

0:31:59 Bernardo Kastrup's Idealism, Tested Live

0:33:34 Could We Scan Your Energy and Predict Your Mind?

0:39:37 Stop Calling Mitochondria "The Powerhouse"

0:40:03 Your Cells Are Basically Tiny GPUs

0:41:04 How Psychedelics Might Rewrite Your Energy Pattern

0:49:10 The Study Testing Whether Psilocybin Changes Your Mitochondria

0:52:06 "It's Not the Drug That Heals You"0:52:38 A Blood Test That Predicts Your Best (and Worst) Trip

0:57:27 The Psychedelic Paradox: Less Brain, More Experience

0:58:57 Aldous Huxley's "Reducing Valve" Theory of the Brain

1:02:03 "The Brain Is Overrated"

... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned:

Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

Guest Links:

Columbia Faculty Profile: https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/martin-picard-phd

Personal Website: https://www.martinpicard.energy/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/MitoPsychoBio

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IG2t_uMAAAAJ&hl=en

Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab: https://www.picardlab.org

Try Mind Lab Pro, The Universal Nootropic For A Sharper Brain: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3

Join The Outskill Claude Mastery Sprint (2 Days, Free): https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2

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

Min Zhao is the UC Davis professor whose lab discovered the first genes ever found in electrical signalling — proof that every cell in your body runs on a current, not just your brain. He can reverse the polarity of a field and watch a living cell physically turn around and walk the other way.

Expect to learn why every wound in your body generates its own measurable electric current, how a single postdoc's "failed" experiment revealed a force that overrides genetics, how reversing an electric field can make a cell physically turn around mid-migration, how a damaged potato generates the same electrical signal that guides wound healing in humans, why Min stops short of fully agreeing with Michael Levin on whether cells count as agents, and where the fight between bioelectricity and genetics currently stands.

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:20 What Everyone Gets Wrong About Wound Healing

0:07:20 Your Skin Is Secretly Electric (And So Is Everything Alive)

0:11:09 The 200-Year-Old Discovery Hiding in Every Wound

0:15:19 The Postdoc Result That Changed the Whole Lab

0:19:19 How Do Cells Know Where to Grow? (Five Fingers, Not Six)

0:21:19 The Potato Experiment That Reveals How Infections Start

0:25:24 Reverse the Field, Watch a Cell Turn Around

0:38:10 The Bioelectricity Nobody Taught in Biology Class

0:44:17 Is Bioelectricity More Fundamental Than Genes?

0:45:33 "No Electricity, No Life"

0:49:14 When Electric Fields Override Genetics Entirely

1:03:40 Michael Levin's Xenobots, Debated

1:12:22 Do Cells Have Agency? The Fuzziest Question in Biology

1:15:16 To Be Continued... (Members Get the Rest)

... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned

Michael Levin — Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: 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

Denis Noble — Denis Noble: Evolution Has Purpose, Cell Consciousness & Why The Last 70 Years of Genetics Is Wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqw-DaWVK24

Michael Levin & Earl Miller — Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mU5nN5nlLA

Guest Links

UC Davis Faculty Profile: https://health.ucdavis.edu/dermatology/faculty/zhao.html

Zhao Lab (UC Davis Dermatology): https://health.ucdavis.edu/dermatology/research/lab/zhao.html

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=G7-zWBcAAAAJ&hl=en

Neuroengineering at UC Davis: https://neuroengineering.ucdavis.edu/people/min-zhao-md-phd

UC Davis Profiles (Publications): https://profiles.ucdavis.edu/min.zhao

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

Kirsten Cherian is the Stanford neuropsychologist who gave Special Forces veterans with traumatic brain injuries a single dose of ibogaine — a psychedelic root used in African shamanic ritual for millennia — and watched their injury scores collapse from severe to normal in a month. It's a weak agonist for nearly every receptor in the body, yet it somehow delivers a tailor-made result to each person — a form of pharmacology science has never seen before.

Expect to learn why veteran suicide outpaces combat deaths, how one dose collapsed PTSD, depression, and anxiety at once, why users describe their brains being "defragged," a researcher's 12-hour "conversation" with the ibogaine molecule itself, the bizarre phenomenon of "DMT blocking" by hostile entities, why ibogaine has no single receptor target — "matrix pharmacology," how brain age dropped by over a year in a single month, and why the results contradict science's leading theory of consciousness.

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:11 How This Ibogaine Study For Veterans Began

0:04:06 Veteran Suicide Now Outpaces Combat Deaths

0:07:31 The 30-Veteran Study With Staggering Effect Sizes

0:12:22 Ibogaine Isn't A Trip, It's A Waking Dream

0:13:14 Vivid Trip Imagery: Slideshows And "Defragged" Brains

0:15:02 Reconciling Trauma By Talking To The Dead

0:20:01 What A Bad Ibogaine Trip Actually Looks Like

0:24:50 Purging "Black Demons" In A Room Full Of Strangers

0:27:23 The Scientist Who Talked To The Ibogaine Molecule

0:33:36 Why Elite Special Forces Veterans Still Broke

0:34:30 DMT Blocking: When Entities Refuse To Let You In

0:41:22 The Psilocybin Researcher Who Believes In Telepathy

0:43:00 Why Ibogaine Has No Single Target In The Brain

0:46:25 The 1920s Thought Experiment That Proves We're Too Skeptical

0:49:38 Ibogaine As A Full-System Diagnostic, Not A Drug

1:03:36 Measurable Brain Change From An African Tree Fruit

1:05:19 Brain Age Dropped Over A Year After One Dose

1:17:21 The Finding That Contradicts The Leading Theory Of Consciousness

1:20:28 If Ibogaine Research Got A Blank Billion-Dollar Check

1:23:21 Could Ibogaine Help Parkinson's And ALS Patients?

... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned

Dalibor Sames — Meet The Greatest Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9whp_wtCoc

Andrew 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=qLKD1gt1X5o

Matthew Johnson — Consciousness Expert Explains The 5 Levels Of The Psilocybin Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHyy3aW09sk

Robin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

Guest LinksStanford Profile: https://profiles.stanford.edu/kirsten-cherian

Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab: https://bsl.stanford.edu/

MISTIC Study (Nature Medicine, 2024): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38182784/

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kirsten-Cherian

VETS — Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions: https://vetsolutions.org/

Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor!

Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial: https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants

Try Mind Lab Pro, The Universal Nootropic For A Sharper Brain: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3

Andrés Gómez Emilsson is a consciousness mathematician at the Qualia Research Institute, and he's back for round two of ranking altered states of consciousness by sheer intensity. He and Evan spend two hours ranking every substance and practice they can think of — arguing that ibogaine may be the most ethically urgent drug on Earth, that a hardcore meditation retreat can rival 5-MeO-DMT, and that an obscure nootropic produces psychedelic visuals through a mechanism nobody understands.

Expect to learn why ibogaine seems to "scan" your whole nervous system instead of hitting one receptor, how advanced jhana meditation can go toe-to-toe with 5-MeO-DMT in depth, why ordinary DMT produces far more alien entity encounters than its "stronger" cousin, the topology behind why feeling like God and feeling like there's no self are almost the same state, why cannabis's real danger isn't addiction but a specific schizophrenia risk in young men, how combining LSD and ketamine produces "freewheeling hallucinations" you can consciously direct, why mescaline might be the best nootropic for doing actual math yet never caught on, and where MDMA, salvia, and a little-known nootropic called coluracetam land on the scale, and much more…

Timestamps

0:02:53 Ibogaine

0:17:28 5-MeO-DMT

0:36:05 Meditation

0:46:33 DMT

0:58:41 Cannabis

1:05:15 Psilocybin

1:11:41 Ayahuasca

1:18:42 Coluracetam

1:21:09 MDMA

1:29:26 Salvia

1:44:21 Ketamine

1:54:37 Mescaline

1:58:48 LSD......

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

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

GS Episodes Mentioned

David Nutt — Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEgbv6IHYaYMichael

Levin & Earl Miller — Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mU5nN5nlLA

Guest Links

Qualia Research Institute: https://qri.org

Qualia Computing (blog): https://qualiacomputing.com

Substack: https://andrsgmezemilsson.substack.com

X (Twitter): https://x.com/algekalipso

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

Dr. Reshanne Reeder is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool and creator of the Ganzflicker — a flickering screen that makes most people hallucinate complex scenes within a minute, no drugs required. Her research suggests hallucinations themselves are just disordered mental imagery, and that the most vividly imaginative among us may be the closest normal-range group to a psychotic break.

Expect to learn why a simple red-and-black flicker makes most people hallucinate faces and landscapes within a minute, the accidental lab discovery that led to the Ganzflicker experiment, why she believes hallucinations are simply "disordered mental imagery," why psychedelic and clinical hallucinations come from entirely different brain mechanisms, the 1960s art device built to replace the television, why almost nobody hallucinates their own phone, how aphantasia may carry a hidden cost to face recognition, how she's trying to predict psychosis risk years before it ever develops, and much more…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:29 How She Discovered Imagery Isn't One Thing

0:08:43 Can You Decode Images in an Aphantasic's Brain?

0:10:37 The Truth About "Unconscious" Mental Imagery

0:16:01 Imagery vs Imagination: Why They Aren't the Same Word

0:18:55 Imagery, Perception, Hallucination, Dreaming: Where's the Line?

0:20:36 The Hyperphantasics Who Project Images Into the Real World

0:22:23 Her Bold Claim: Hallucinations Are Disordered Imagery

0:23:37 Can Aphantasics Hallucinate on Psychedelics?

0:27:55 The DMT Study Where 90% Said It Felt More Real Than Reality

0:29:39 Why Mental Imagery Breaks the Predictive Brain Theory

0:32:21 The Irish Castle Test: Are Mental Images Just Priors?

0:38:58 She Made People See Faces in Pure Random Noise

0:42:04 The Illusion That Turns Faces Into Monsters

0:45:48 Why Aphantasia Might Come With a Face-Recognition Cost

0:47:35 His Sister Went 31 Years Without Knowing She Had Aphantasia

0:49:59 The Accidental Origin Story of Ganzflicker

0:51:26 The 1700s Origin of the "Whole Field" Hallucination Effect

0:57:41 "I See a Lighthouse": The Moment Ganzflicker Was Born

1:00:28 Why Aphantasics Barely Hallucinate on Ganzflicker

1:05:31 The Sharp Cliff Between Zero and Weak Mental Imagery

1:12:30 Why Nobody Hallucinates Their Phone

1:19:45 The Hypnosis Session That Left His Arm Frozen in the Air

1:22:13 The 1960s "Dream Machine" That Was Supposed to Replace TV

1:35:59 Can This Predict Psychosis Before It Happens?

...

... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned

Adam Zeman — The Blind Mind's Eye: How Aphantasia Is Rewriting Consciousness ! Dr Adam Zeman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgA2up6-Bok

Alfredo Spagna — Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8SBHefDnEk

David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5o

Karl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmY

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

University of Liverpool Faculty Page: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/reshanne-reeder

Personal Website (Ganzflicker Demo): https://www.reshannereeder.com/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/kerblooee.bsky.social

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=DfdUB3UAAAAJ

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/reshanne-reeder-53182123b

Check out Scispace: (JNGIANT35: Get 35% off on the Max plan) https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulder

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 Resnik is the NIH's Senior Advisor for Research Integrity and a philosopher of science who has spent his career defending careful, sober naturalism. He just co-authored a paper with biologist Michael Levin arguing that the shape of your body — and maybe your mind — is pulled from a nonphysical space of mathematical forms.

Expect to learn why cicadas evolved to emerge only in prime-numbered years to dodge predators, why a mule's infertility comes down to simple odd-and-even chromosome math, why mathematics might be a "free lunch" baked into the universe rather than something we invented, why there may be no real difference between an electron and the equation that describes it, why Michael Levin's leap to calling certain mathematical forms "minds" might be the biggest jump in modern biology, why a Xenobot growing eyes and ears it doesn't need raises the question of where biological information actually comes from, why even a few lines of sorting-algorithm code can behave in ways nobody predicted, and why David thinks it might not matter whether Platonism is literally true, as long as it keeps producing good science.

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:52 Is Math Discovered or Invented?

0:15:48 Why Cicadas Emerge in Prime-Numbered Years

0:19:45 Why Mules Can't Reproduce (It's Just Math)

0:21:19 Michael Levin's "Free Lunch": Math That Isn't Physical

0:24:16 Is Materialism Actually Incomplete?

0:29:43 Xenobots: Where Did the Information Come From?

0:35:08 Why Do Xenobots Grow Ears and Eyes They Don't Need?

0:43:40 The Magnet and Iron Filings Experiment

0:45:26 Is There Really a Difference Between an Electron and Math?

0:46:40 Michael Levin's "Grand Canyon Jump" to Platonic Minds

0:48:03 What Is a Cognitive Light Cone?

0:54:26 Cutting a Triangle: What "Ingression" Actually Means

0:59:40 Michael Levin's Biological Compiler Idea

1:01:27 The Two-Headed Worm and the Eye That Shouldn't Exist

1:02:02 A Sorting Algorithm That Does the Unexpected

1:05:17 Laplace's Demon and the Limits of Prediction

1:09:43 Does It Matter If Platonic Space Is Real?

1:16:00 Could AI Access Minds Human Brains Can't?

1:17:36 The Limits of Any Mind in the Universe

... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned

Michael Levin — Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller — Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/eNi-_2cOVtc

Julian Barbour — Meet The Greatest Mathematician You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/LcYdhjcFnzA

Guest Links

David Resnik — NIH Office of Intramural Research: https://oir.nih.gov/about/leadership-staff/david-resnik

Levin & Resnik — "Mind Everywhere" Part One (Biological Theory): https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-025-00523-6

Levin & Resnik — "Mind Everywhere" Part Two (Biological Theory): https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-025-00524-5

David Resnik — ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Resnik-2

David Resnik — NIEHS Bioethics: https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/bioethicist

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

Elliot Murphy is a neurolinguist at UTHealth Houston who records language directly from inside the human brain, placing electrodes deep in the cortex of epilepsy patients and watching meaning get built in real time. His claim is unsettling: every time you speak, your brain performs an operation no other cognitive system — and no AI — can do, and the structure of grammar may be something the brain discovers rather than invents.Expect to learn why the phrase "old men and women" proves language breaks the laws of algebra, how "red boat" and "barco rojo" hide the same secret structure, what it means to record single words forming inside a living brain, why the deepest things you feel are impossible to put into words, how one word like "lunch" can be food, an event, and a time all at once, where Elliot stands on Michael Levin's idea that meaning lives in a Platonic space, why he thinks large language models don't understand a word they produce, what really separates human intelligence from pattern-matching, and much more…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:01:56 From Liverpool Bookworm to Brain Scientist

0:10:25 The Phrase That Breaks the Laws of Logic

0:12:36 Why "Red Boat" and "Barco Rojo" Are Secretly Identical

0:15:14 Where Language Actually Lives in Your Brain

0:20:02 Recording Single Words Inside a Living Brain

0:23:38 The Surgery That Changed How We Study Language

0:36:12 Does Anything Else Work Like Language? Even Music?

0:40:28 The Feelings No Words Can Ever Reach

0:42:19 The Nietzsche Line Elliot Can't Shake

0:44:52 How "Lunch" Is Three Contradictory Things at Once

0:57:47 Does Meaning Have a Mathematical Shape?

1:03:34 Is Grammar Invented — or Discovered in a Platonic Space?

1:13:54 What Even Is Agency?

1:25:00 What Actually Separates You From an AI

1:30:12 Where to Start With Nietzsche and Dostoevsky...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned

Michael Levin — Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller — Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNi-_2cOVtc

Guest Links

Elliot Murphy — Website: https://elliot-murphy.com

Elliot Murphy — Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=4AYNRj0AAAAJ

Elliot Murphy — UTHealth Profile: https://www.uth.edu/people/profile?id=a676259c-6b83-45de-bba3-f9ce464344a6

Try Mind Lab Pro, The Universal Nootropic For A Sharper Brain: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutAdam Butler is a DMT researcher and author who has taken the molecule over 100 times and completed the same Monroe Institute consciousness program the CIA funded during the Cold War. He went from suicidal alcoholic to sober and mission-driven through a molecule his own brain already produces -- and then, one day, found himself completely locked out of the DMT space with zero pharmacological explanation for why.Expect to learn why DMT stops working for some people with no pharmacological explanation for it, how the body produces its own DMT internally, what the Monroe Institute's Hemi-Sync binaural beats protocol has in common with a DMT trip without any substance at all, why a declassified CIA-linked report took remote viewing seriously enough to fund it for decades, what DMT entities actually look like across 100+ trips, the controversial DMT laser experiment that claims to reveal a rigid code-like grid in the visual field, why effect sizes in psychedelic-assisted therapy trials are becoming impossible to ignore, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:17 Who Is Adam Butler? From Rock Bottom to a Mission0:07:18 The Story That Changed Everything0:13:21 Inside His First DMT Session0:24:22 Why DMT Doesn't Build Tolerance0:31:56 Blocked: The Night DMT Just Stopped Working0:38:22 The Telepathy Tapes and the DMT Laser Experiment0:40:38 Huxley's Reducing Valve and the DMT "Cheat Code"0:44:29 What Is a DMT Entity, Really?0:48:21 Jesters, Mantis Beings, and the Entity Portfolio0:54:48 Carhart-Harris's Theory vs Alien World-Building1:02:52 Do DMT Entities Have Their Own Agency?1:09:20 The Mantis "Technicians" and the Body Upgrade1:11:23 Meeting His Future Self on DMT1:17:28 Inside the Monroe Institute1:32:17 The Declassified CIA Gateway Project1:41:10 Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and DMT-Like States1:44:27 The DMT Laser Experiment Explained1:53:21 Debating the "Code of the Simulation" Claim1:58:37 Near-Death Experience and Why It All Matters... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.comGS Episodes Mentioned:Robin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRkAndrew Gallimore — No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDAAndrés Gómez Emilsson — Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWEGuest Links:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/booksbyadambutlerYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ButlersDMTFieldGuidePatreon: https://www.patreon.com/BooksByAdamButlerBook — Butler's DMT Field Guide: https://www.amazon.com/dp/196050505XBook — Butler's Psychedelic Integration Field Guide: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H4GL8H6V...Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor!

Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial: https://onelink.to/giants

Get Manta Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL and Code GIANTSMANTA10Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience?

Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

Dalibor Sames is the chemist who reverse-engineered ibogaine into a version that appears to erase heroin addiction in a single dose, without the cardiac risk that can kill people on the original drug. He also took his own medicine — and says he watched the molecule's exact 3D structure rotate in front of him for 36 hours straight.Expect to learn why ibogaine breaks every rule of classical pharmacology, what "matrix pharmacology" means and why it's heresy to a one-drug-one-target industry, how editing a single atom deletes ibogaine's fatal heart risk, why a common antidepressant turned out to be a secret opioid for thirty years, what it's like to watch a molecule's structure appear during a 36-hour flood dose, why ibogaine seems to erase interest in alcohol overnight, whether the "DMT block" phenomenon researchers describe is real, and much more…

Timestamps0:00:00

Trailer0:02:39

Meet the Chemist Who Fell for a Molecule's Shape

0:04:13 The Dogma That the Adult Brain Can't Heal0:09:00 Why Synapses Might Explain Every Brain Disorder0:10:28 Reverse-Engineering Nature's Own Drugs

0:16:44 The Paper That Changed Everything About Addiction

0:20:01 Why Ibogaine Breaks Every Rule of Pharmacology

0:33:08 The Weakest Drug That Works the Strongest

0:38:21 The Traffic Jam That Explains Matrix Pharmacology

0:44:18 A Human Genome Project — For One Molecule

0:47:48 Deciding to Take Ibogaine Himself

0:50:02 Inside a 36-Hour Flood Dose

0:54:38 The Chapter Called "Treatment"

0:56:26 Ibogaine Shows Him the Future of Design

1:00:01 Seeing Ibogaine's 3D Molecular Structure

1:03:14 High-Fiving a Molecule1:06:47 "This Is a Computational Technology"

1:16:36 The Simulation So Real It Panicked Him

1:24:26 Did He Earn This Experience?

1:30:56 Six Months Later — What Actually Changed

1:36:01 Did This Change His View of Consciousness?......

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned

Andrew 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

LinksColumbia Chemistry faculty page: https://www.chem.columbia.edu/content/dalibor-sames

Sames Lab: https://www.samesgroup.org/professor-dalibor-sames

Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals: https://www.gilgameshpharmaceutical.com/

Oxa-Iboga paper (Nature Communications, 2024): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51856-y

Beond Ibogaine Clinic (where he took ibogaine): https://beondibogaine.com

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

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

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

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/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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/

Want to go deeper on consciousness? Join our community where we run live discussions, inner experience challenges and early ad free access to every episode: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

Philip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University and author of Galileo's Error and Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Stephen Fry called him the most persuasive panpsychist alive.Physics tells us everything about what matter does — but nothing about what it actually is. Goff argues this isn't a gap we'll close — it's a permanent hole. And the best candidate to fill it is consciousness itself.

Expect to learn why physics can only describe what stuff does and not what it is, how Evan's sister discovered at 31 she has zero mental imagery, why Bertrand Russell may have already solved consciousness a hundred years ago, what 5-MeO-DMT revealed to a philosopher about the nature of reality, the difference between weak and strong emergence and why it matters for AI, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Trailer

02:21 What Makes Consciousness Radically Different

05:24 Evan's Descriptive Experience Sampling Experiment

06:42 Discovering Aphantasia at 31

08:27 Change Blindness and the Invisible Gorilla

10:40 Mary's Room: What Red Looks Like

13:21 Why Consciousness Theories Ignore Subjective Experience

16:48 The Resurgence of Panpsychism

18:14 Bertrand Russell: The Darwin of Consciousness20:13 Evan's Psychedelic Journey Toward Biopsychism22:12 Taking 5-MeO-DMT as a Philosopher24:38 Michael Pollan, Plants and Psychedelic Openness28:45 Is Consciousness Computational or Biological?

30:43 The Combination Problem: How Tiny Minds Become One

37:17 Russell's Inversion: Start With Consciousness

40:21 The Hole in Physics: What Stuff Does vs What It IS

41:50 Why Bernardo Kastrup Gets Cross

44:41 Galileo's Error: The Decision That Broke Science

47:20 Aphantasia, Visual Decoding and the Consciousness Gap

49:50 Front Brain vs Back Brain: Where Is Consciousness?

52:40 Eric Schwitzgebel's Snail Problem

55:40 Philosopher-Scientist Teams: A New Model

1:03:01 Strong Emergence and New Causal Dynamics

1:04:47 Will We Fall in Love With Robots?

1:07:22 The Genome Didn't Solve Life

1:10:54 The $10 Billion Consciousness Experiment

...

GS Episodes Mentioned

Anil Seth — Consciousness, Controlled Hallucination, Perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o

Philip Ball — Quantum Mechanics, Brain Organoids, How Life Works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNbG5lnp51E

Kevin Mitchell — Free Will, Neuroplasticity, Strong Emergence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VGWzGqA32E

Matthias Michel — Consciousness Philosophy, Aphantasia, Fish Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtVWgpVPr1s

Russell Hurlburt — Inner Experience, Descriptive Experience Sampling: https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg

Robert Prentner — Conscious Agent Theory, Mathematics of Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKE8eLo8CU

Charles Fernyhough — Inner Speech, Hearing Voices, Memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJFY6dypPc4

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/id1752486249

Want to truly understand your own conscious inner experience? I built a tool and its free - https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

Dr Simon Ruffell is a clinical psychiatrist and the CEO of Onaya Science, the research organisation that studies Amazonian ayahuasca healing alongside Shipibo curanderos in the Peruvian rainforest. His team ran the first-ever study on a psychedelic and human epigenetics — finding that ayahuasca methylates the trauma-memory gene SIGMAR1, mapping precisely onto what the Shipibo have called "cleaning ancestral lines" for thousands of years.

Expect to learn why a Maudsley-trained psychiatrist walked away from the NHS to apprentice as a Shipibo shaman, what happens when a curandero performs an exorcism on you mid-ceremony, how 80% of veterans no longer met PTSD criteria six months after a two-week retreat, why the curandero traditionally drinks the ayahuasca and the patient doesn't, what happened when Simon gave a Shipibo curandero a hit of pure crystal DMT, why DMT entities might be real and where Robin Carhart-Harris and Andrew Gallimore disagree about it, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Trailer

03:20 What is Shipibo Curanderismo?

04:52 From disillusioned NHS psychiatrist to the Peruvian Amazon

10:14 First ayahuasca: shown two versions of myself

15:41 The demon attack and the three suckers

26:13 Bridging Western psychiatry and Amazonian shamanism

36:04 Are DMT entities real? Carhart-Harris vs Gallimore

49:50 Inside the multimodal veteran PTSD study

52:41 DMT vs ayahuasca — what's actually different

57:11 Should you try this? Preparation and "gringo wasca"

1:04:52 The first-ever psychedelic epigenetics study (SIGMAR1)

1:12:17 "Cleaning ancestral lines" — when Indigenous science met Western

1:16:51 80% no longer meet PTSD criteria — the real numbers

1:20:37 The shaman drinks, not the patient — traditional protocol

1:30:41 The spiritual mechanism of action

1:34:54 The dream experiment — plant personalities

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

FOLLOW SIMON:

Website: https://www.drsimonruffell.comInstagram: @sgdruffell

Onaya Science: https://www.onaya.io

Heroic Hearts UK: https://www.heroicheartsuk.org

PAST EPISODES MENTIONED:

Robin Carhart-Harris — Entropic Brain, How Psychedelics Really Work and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

Andrew Gallimore — DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA

Grace Blest-Hopley — Psychedelics Expert: Who is Blocking Psychedelic Research?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcLxMfUzxw

Join the #1 Community Dedicated to Rigorous & Radical Biology: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

Brett Kagan is the Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical Labs, the Australian startup that fuses living human neurons with silicon chips to create a fundamentally new kind of intelligence. His team's DishBrain paper showed that neurons in a dish learned to play Pong in under five minutes — without any reward signal — providing some of the strongest experimental evidence for Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle.

Expect to learn how neurons on a chip actually play Pong and Doom, why unpredictable stimulation drives learning better than reward, what the Free Energy Principle really says and where Brett disagrees with Friston, why 200,000 neurons outperform 800,000 on certain tasks, how Brett's baby daughter staring at fractals led to a new theory of intelligence, why no AI system can walk into your kitchen and make a cup of tea, what biological data centres look like and why they already exist, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Trailer

02:30 Brett Kagan — Neurons Playing Doom

03:04 The stepping stones from Pong to Doom

04:00 What is the CL1 and Cortical Cloud?

05:20 The moonshot goal of Cortical Labs

06:46 Giant buildings of neurons as computation hubs

07:13 The biocomputing data centre already running in Melbourne

07:38 Not building a brain in a dish

09:00 What does a biological computer actually look like?

09:29 Electricity as the shared language between biology and silicon

10:49 How neurons on a chip play Pong

11:10 Topographic mapping inspired by the whisker barrel system

13:10 Why the neurons hit the ball — and what happens when they miss

14:33 The Free Energy Principle explained simply

16:03 The trap door analogy for unpredictable stimulation

18:42 How the structure of neuron cultures shapes performance

19:19 Bees vs elephants: why bigger brains aren’t always better

21:37 Growing hippocampal place cells in a dish

24:12 Teaching neurons Morse code

28:27 The Free Energy Principle — cups, predictions and surprise

32:29 Where Brett disagrees with Friston

37:03 The dog treat problem — how do you reward a neuron?

39:40 Complexity as a hidden driver of intelligence

41:53 His baby daughter’s obsession with fractals

43:57 Defining agency — the three orders of information processing

50:33 Change how you change over time

53:27 Why scientists are incentivised to be vague instead of wrong

59:42 J.D. Bernal’s 1929 vision for brains beyond bodies

1:02:38 Standing on the shoulders of iPSC pioneers

1:03:14 Can neurons play chess? Moravec’s Paradox

1:04:12 No AI can walk into your kitchen and make tea

1:05:16 Augmenting what silicon is bad at

1:06:35 Is general intelligence even possible for silicon?

1:09:40 Why 200,000 neurons beat 800,000

1:11:16 Complexity and structure matter more than scale

1:11:58 Could biological neurons end up in your laptop?

1:13:36 Edge robotics and the future of biological computing

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

Do you really inner speak? Join my Skool community and find out: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

Charles Fernyhough is the world's leading Inner Speech Researcher, Cambridge-trained Psychologist, and author of *The Voices Within*. His three decades of research have uncovered something most people never suspect: the voice in your head isn't a monologue — it's a compressed conversation between internalised versions of everyone you've ever spoken to, and when that compression fails, you hear voices.

Expect to learn why inner speech is a Swiss army knife you use against yourself as often as you use it to plan your day, what "thinking in pure meanings" actually feels like when language gets stripped away, why spontaneous inner speech lights up completely different brain regions than scientists expected, how the dialogic structure of your inner voice explains human creativity, why 1 in 7 fiction readers hear characters as vividly as a real person in the room, what experiential crossing is and why a reader walked into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway, why prayer might just be a specific kind of inner speech, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:30 Inner Speech as a Swiss Army Knife

05:39 Is Inner Speech the Same as Thinking?

06:58 Why We Should Abolish the Word "Thinking"

08:42 Chess Experts Don't Use Language to Think

10:03 Evan's 10-Week DES Experiment with Hurlburt

12:19 Condensed Inner Speech vs Unsymbolized Thinking

17:11 What Brain Scans Actually Show About Inner Speech

20:58 Spontaneous vs Elicited Speech Light Up Different Areas

25:16 Does It Matter How Much Inner Speech You Have?

30:02 When Inner Speech Becomes a Weapon Against Yourself

32:41 Are People Without Inner Speech NPCs?

36:02 It's Not How Much You Speak — It's What You Say

38:44 Why People Refuse to Believe Others Think Differently

42:26 Neurodiversity and the Inner Speech Revolution

44:35 The Dialogical Inner Speech Model Explained

49:55 Multiple Identities Inside Your Inner Dialogue

52:00 Prayer as Inner Speech with a Spiritual Being

54:20 Hearing Voices Without Being Mentally Ill

57:17 1 in 7 Readers Hear Characters Like Real People

58:34 Experiential Crossing — Walking Into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway

59:48 Do Writers Actually Hear Their Characters?

1:01:57 Predictive Processing and Fictional Selves

1:04:20 Why Children Create Imaginary Companions

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

Do you really inner speak? Join my Skool community and find out: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutBen Alderson-Day is a hallucination researcher, Professor of Psychology at Durham, and author of the award-winning book *Presence*. His work reveals that the line between your inner voice, hearing voices, and deliberately creating a mind inside your own head is far thinner than anyone assumed.Expect to learn why not as many people truly inner speak as you might think, how your parents' voices became the voice in your head, why writers hear their characters talk back, what tulpamancers are and how they build autonomous minds, what really separates inner speech from hallucination, what Evan's LSD experience revealed about the voice in his head, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Intro03:20 What everyone should know about their inner speech05:39 Is my inner speech really me?07:30 Why some people have no inner speech at all11:13 How your parents' voices became the voice in your head13:34 The age your brain learns to think in words15:25 What 10 weeks of sampling your own mind reveals18:13 Peep Show and why we think thinking means talking21:04 What Evan's inner experience was actually like23:00 The field was written by people who talk to themselves25:32 Why people refuse to believe other minds work differently28:39 Why you get furious when a character's voice is wrong in a film34:22 Reader Bank — find out what type of reader you are37:53 Can you train yourself to have richer inner speech?40:20 Writers who hear their characters speak42:27 What is a tulpamancer and how did this start?45:36 How to create a sentient being in your own mind50:20 "This sounds like you're channelling psychosis"52:45 "It's just like hearing a voice in the room"55:50 The time Evan didn't recognise his own voice on LSD58:31 Would a hallucination researcher ever try tulpamancy?...Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.comEpisodes mentioned:Russell Hurlburt (Round 1): https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNgRussell Hurlburt (Round 2): https://youtu.be/N9tO1OLdJtoGualtiero Piccinini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkDIPLIuRg

Get A Full Breakdown Of Your Own Conscious Inner Experience (100% Free): https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

Matthias Michel is an MIT philosopher and co-founder of the MIT Consciousness Club who has developed one of the most provocative theories of consciousness in recent years: Perceptual Reality Monitoring. He argues your brain runs a constant reality check on every signal it receives — deciding what's real and what's noise — and that this mechanism IS consciousness.

Expect to learn how your brain tells the difference between perception, memory, imagination and noise, why conscious vision lags 400 milliseconds behind reality, why every fast action you've ever taken was driven entirely unconsciously, why fish probably have no conscious visual experience at all, how aphantasics may have mental imagery they can't consciously access, why conscious mental imagery might actually be a bug in the system, what blindsight patient GY's experience reveals about unconscious vision, and much more

…

Timestamps:

0:00 Matthias Michel — What Is Perceptual Reality Monitoring?

2:58 How does the brain tell reality from imagination?

5:30 Snake fear in Malaysia: when prediction systems misfire

6:22 Blood vessel shadows and the stuff your brain erases

7:50 Motion-induced blindness: your brain deleting real objects

9:50 Is schizophrenia a broken reality monitor?

11:02 Where does reality monitoring happen in the brain?

12:53 Can you be conscious without a frontal cortex?

15:49 Mark Solms and brainstem consciousness

18:15 What does it mean to see without conscious vision?

18:40 "Tell me what it's like to see behind your head" — blindsight patient GY

20:48 Do fish have conscious vision?

22:05 Why conscious vision is 350-400ms too slow for action

24:07 Two visual systems: one conscious, one not

25:30 The hollow face illusion fools your eyes but not your hand

26:21 Binocular rivalry: your eyes know things you don't

29:24 Sensory horizons: why water limits conscious vision

33:17 Could coral reef fish or octopuses be the exception?

37:31 Are fish complete zombies? (60% confidence)

39:18 Should we still protect fish even if they're unconscious?

42:47 Aphantasia through the lens of reality monitoring

46:00 Why conscious imagery might be a "bug"

48:06 Blank access: using imagery without experiencing it

50:17 What is an unconscious visual representation?

55:54 The strongest counterevidence to unconscious imagery

58:50 Pupil dilation and Joel Pearson's results

1:01:18 How do we falsify unconscious imagery?

1:04:30 The PRM explanation for aphantasia: threshold differences

1:07:50 The future of consciousness and aphantasia research

1:10:29 Vividness is multidimensional — lessons from Russell Hurlburt

1:13:35 Brain imaging limitations and the next breakthrough

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned

Mark Solms — https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc

Adam Zeman — https://youtu.be/SgA2up6-Bok

Russell Hurlburt (R1) — https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg

Russell Hurlburt (R2) — https://youtu.be/TfSuvAJB3JU

Merlin Monzel — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21AqnSV1X4

Joel Pearson — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I_7HrWYMQ0

Alfredo Spagna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8SBHefDnEk

Dr. Alfredo Spagna is a Cognitive Neuroscientist at Columbia University who discovered the Fusiform Imagery Node — the brain region that activates every time you imagine anything. But when he scanned people with aphantasia using an ultra-high-field 7T brain scanner, the node was firing perfectly — it just wasn't connected to the frontal lobe, suggesting that consciousness itself might depend not on what your brain computes, but on what it connects.

Expect to learn how imagination hijacks the brain's perceptual system, why aphantasia shattered 40 years of assumptions about mental imagery, what the "visualizer fallacy" is and why it affects everything from therapy to education, how a painter with aphantasia creates art without ever seeing it in his mind, why your brain imagining a lemon makes you salivate even though there's no lemon, what the 7T brain scanner revealed about the architecture of imagination, how aphantasia may support the Global Neuronal Workspace theory of consciousness, why Olympic athletes spend hours visualizing routines they never physically perform, and much more…

Timestamps

00:08 What Happens in the Brain When You Imagine

01:02 Where Imagination and Perception Diverge

03:44 Would Perfect Imagination Be Hallucination?

05:49 Voluntary vs Involuntary Imagination

06:50 Why Do People with Aphantasia Still Dream?

07:33 What Is Aphantasia — The Discovery That Changed Everything

09:30 The Dissociation That Frightened Scientists

11:06 The Visualizer Fallacy

12:01 How Aphantasics Solve Problems Without Images

14:31 Evan's Sister Discovers Aphantasia at 31

16:55 Could Imagery Be Unconscious in Aphantasia?

18:19 The Architect Who Lost His Imagination

21:11 Eric the Painter — Creating Art Without Seeing It

24:51 The Inner Speech Fallacy and Neurodiversity

29:02 "I Can't Visualize My Mom's Face"

29:57 Why Aphantasia Breaks Psychotherapy

33:06 Empathy, Conflict and How Inner Experience Shapes Society

36:42 The Chemistry Exam Problem

39:09 Is Hypervisualization Actually a Disadvantage?

41:21 Imagination as a Double-Edged Sword

43:37 What Is the Fusiform Imagery Node?

46:10 The Cafeteria Conversation That Started It All

50:07 Three Bombshells From One Meta-Analysis

52:23 Domain-General vs Domain-Specific Imagination

54:05 The Brain Still Imagines in Aphantasia — It Just Disconnects

56:36 Is Aphantasia a Disconnection Syndrome?

58:59 Step-By-Step: What Your Brain Does When You Imagine an Apple

1:05:05 Non-Visual Imagination — Taste, Touch, Sound

1:09:38 What Aphantasia Reveals About Consciousness

1:13:26 Does This Support IIT or Global Workspace Theory?

1:15:49 Can Aphantasia Be Trained Away?

1:18:53 The Olympic Skier Who Visualized Gold

1:22:25 $10 Billion to Solve Imagination — Where Would You Spend It?

...

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/

Bryan L. Roth is a drug receptor scientist who solved the crystal structure of LSD inside a serotonin receptor and took $26.9 million from DARPA to build a non-hallucinogenic psychedelic — a compound that hits the same receptor as psilocybin, produces antidepressant effects in mice, and doesn't cause a trip.

Expect to learn how his mother's schizophrenia launched a 40-year career in pharmacology, why Salvia divinorum has zero serotonin activity and works entirely through the kappa opioid receptor, why serotonin and opioid receptors converge in the claustrum, why DARPA funded non-hallucinogenic alternatives for soldiers, how his lab screens a trillion compounds that don't physically exist, why only 100 of 26,000 protein targets have ever been drugged, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Bryan L. Roth — The Man Who Builds Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelics

02:41 Falling Into Receptor Science by Accident

04:58 When Only 5 People on Earth Studied Psychedelic Receptors

06:07 Why "Psychedelic" Was Banned From Research Grants

07:28 The 2016 Papers That Changed Everything

08:26 The Scientist Friend Who Got "Cured" by Psilocybin

10:41 The Vietnam Vet With a Gun in His Mouth — Ibogaine's Power

12:50 What Is Ibogaine and Why Can It Kill You?

18:06 Why the Kappa Opioid System Breaks Reality

19:07 The Hidden History of Psychotomimetic Opioids

22:16 Why Opioid Researchers Deny Kappa Causes Hallucinations

23:18 The Claustrum: Where Serotonin and Opioid Receptors Meet

24:14 Multiple Entry Points Into Reality-Altering Brain Systems

28:35 Why Psychedelic Experiences Feel So Meaningful

29:58 DMT: "More Real Than Reality" — And Nobody Knows Why

31:28 Salvia: Becoming Plaid on a Wall

33:48 Trump's $50M Psychedelic Order Won't Buy One Clinical Trial

35:33 No Other Psychedelic Touches the Kappa Receptor

38:10 The Real Reason He Built a Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelic

41:33 DARPA: More Psychiatric Casualties Than Physical in the Military

44:48 Biased Agonism: Stripping the Trip From the Therapy

47:19 How GPCRs Work and Why Drug Design Is Still Trial and Error

49:50 People Who Will Never Touch a Psychedelic But Do Cocaine Weekly

52:27 "I Don't Discuss That" — Whether He's Taken Psychedelics

52:47 Screening a Trillion Drugs That Don't Exist

55:02 The Real Bottleneck: 26,000 Targets, Only 100 Drugged...

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/

Andrés Gómez Emilsson runs research at the Qualia Research Institute and thinks consciousness has a literal mathematical shape. We walk through the six geometric levels of DMT, why phenomenal space goes hyperbolic at high doses, why bad trips are competing symmetries fighting for territory in your visual field, and why he thinks AI on silicon will never be conscious.

Expect to learn why pleasure is symmetry, what makes DMT phenomenologically alien at the topological level, why your breath being out of phase with your heartbeat might be most of what anxiety is, where the free energy principle stops being a theory of consciousness, and why a swimming pool full of logic gates breaks every computational theory of the mind.

Timestamps

00:00 The 6 Geometric Levels of DMT

02:30 Can Subjective Experience Be Studied Like Physics?

03:58 Mapping Experience as a Hypergraph

09:33 Introducing the Symmetry Theory of Valence

12:19 What Symmetry Actually Is (And Why Physics Cares)

19:21 Why Energetic Blockages Feel Bad — Yoga, Jhanas and Wave Propagation

23:06 Is Pleasure Necessarily Symmetrical?

26:31 The Annealing Metaphor: Healing a Broken Cymbal

29:18 Symmetries in the World vs Symmetries in the Brain

32:54 The Bucket Brigade: Why Coupled Oscillators Have to Be in Phase

36:27 Where the Free Energy Principle Stops Being a Theory of Consciousness

39:33 Marr's Levels: Why Friston Describes But Doesn't Explain

42:12 What's Actually Symmetric in the Brain? (Thalamus and Biorhythms)

47:52 Anxiety as Hyperpressurisation

50:13 Connectome Harmonics and the Brain as a Musical Instrument

52:18 The Six Levels of DMT — Threshold, Symmetry Hotel, Magic Eye

55:06 The Magic Eye Level Explained

57:31 Crystal Worlds and the Waiting Room

59:48 The Breakthrough: When Topology Itself Changes

01:01:43 Why Bad Trips Are Competing Symmetries, Not Missing Ones

01:04:35 Square vs Hexagon Universes Fighting for Territory

01:05:54 The LSD Christianity Example

01:07:32 Andrew Gallimore's Alien Worlds — Pre-Configured Reality?

01:09:04 Beam Splitter Holography and the Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer

01:10:21 Why DMT Feels So Real — Cross-Modal Coherence and the Tactile Field

01:12:48 The Coupling Kernel and Opposite-Phase Oscillators

01:13:53 DMT Archetypes and the Specificity of Encounters

...

🔗 GS Episodes ReferencedAndrew Gallimore (DMT, alien worlds): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Gallimore

Elizabeth Margulis (music neuroscience): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Margulis

Mark Solms (homeostatic theory of valence): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Solms

🔗 Andrés Gómez Emilsson

Qualia Research Institute: https://qri.org

Qualia Computing (blog): https://qualiacomputing.com

Substack: https://andrsgmezemilsson.substack.comEmail for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

Andrew Gallimore is a neurobiologist, pharmacologist and chemist who developed the DMTx protocol — a technology that extends the most intense psychedelic experience known to science from minutes to hours. He is the author of Alien Information Theory, Reality Switch Technologies and Death by Astonishment, and is Director of Noonautics, a nonprofit dedicated to the scientific exploration of consciousness. He currently lives and works in Tokyo.

Expect to learn why your brain builds alien worlds on DMT, what thalamocortical loops and attractor states actually are, why DMT may have once been an ancient neurotransmitter, why 94% of users encounter non-human entities, what Jungian archetypes can and can't explain about DMT, where Andrew disagrees with Robin Carhart-Harris on the reality of entities, what the DMTx extended state protocol is and how it works, why DMT is the only psychedelic that doesn't produce tolerance, what happens when entities deny you access to the DMT world, what darkness retreats and breathwork have to do with endogenous DMT, and much more...

Timestamps:

0:00 Trailer

2:11 What Is the Building Alien Worlds Thesis?

4:06 What Makes DMT Unique Among Psychedelics?

6:57 World Space Landscape and Consensus Reality

8:11 DMT Entities — Prevalence and Types

11:04 Consistency of Entity Interactions

13:31 Is the DMT World Real or a Hallucination?

17:34 Thalamocortical Loops and World-Model Construction

20:34 Attractor States Explained

24:21 Why DMT’s Stability Suggests an Evolutionary Role

27:25 Parallel Lives — The DMT Sleep Cycle Hypothesis

28:36 What Was the Evolutionary Purpose of the DMT World?

33:35 Melatonin, Serotonin and DMT — Pharmacological Cousins

35:57 Is DMT Still Doing Something Important in the Brain?

36:36 Noonautics and Endogenous DMT Research

38:43 Debunking DMT Breathwork Courses and Pineal Myths

40:45 What Does a Stable Pattern of Brain Activity Actually Look Like?

43:53 Order Within Chaos — Chris Timmermann’s DMTx Findings

47:16 Robin Carhart-Harris and the Jungian Archetype Debate

48:37 What Jungian Archetypes Actually Are

53:36 Why Archetypes Can’t Explain Alien Entities

54:32 The Directed World Model — Do Entities Control Access?

56:55 DMT Lockout — When Entities Deny You Entry

58:30 Can You See Entities in Brain Scans?

1:00:06 Future Brain Scanning Technology

1:01:24 The Speed of the Switch as Evidence

1:04:40 Dimensionality and Topology of the DMT World

1:06:39 DMTx — What Is the Extended State Protocol?

1:09:03 Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion Explained

1:11:23 Sending Specialists Into DMT Space

1:13:35 Time Perception on DMT

1:16:16 Surprises from DMTx Experiments

1:18:15 The Future of DMT Consciousness Research

1:19:12 Andrés Gómez Emilsson and the Mathematics of DMT Space

...

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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Dr. Matt Hill is one of the world’s leading cannabis neuroscientists, former president of the International Cannabinoid Research Society, and a researcher with over 21,000 citations studying how the endocannabinoid system regulates the brain and body.Cannabis affects different people in completely opposite ways — calming one person while causing crippling anxiety in another — and Hill explains why the biology makes this inevitable, why both sides of the cannabis debate are getting it wrong, and why legalisation in Canada accidentally destroyed the very research that could have answered our biggest questions.Expect to learn why CB1 is the most widely distributed receptor in the brain yet almost nobody has heard of it, how endocannabinoids work backwards across the synapse unlike any other signalling system, why low-dose THC calms the amygdala but high-dose THC causes paranoia and anxiety, why women get higher than men on the same dose of cannabis due to a liver enzyme difference, why only a third of people genuinely benefit from medical cannabis while a third get nothing, how cannabis triggers schizophrenia in genetically vulnerable people without actually causing the disease, why Canadian legalisation killed cannabis clinical trials through a bureaucratic GMP-versus-GPP standoff, what the real cardiovascular risks of chronic cannabis use are, why cannabis users paradoxically have lower obesity rates, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer02:00 Dr. Matt Hill — Cannabis Neuroscientist02:25 The Endocannabinoid System: Your Body’s Own Cannabis04:23 Every Biological Function It Controls06:30 The Most Distributed Receptor Nobody’s Heard Of07:20 Why Cannabis Science Is So Politically Toxic09:35 Both Sides Are Wrong: The Three Blind Men Problem10:23 The Frustrating Polarity of the Cannabis Debate12:37 Your Personal Experience Doesn’t Generalise16:25 Why Cannabis Feels Like a Different Drug for Different People17:52 Retrograde Signalling: How Cannabis Works Backwards20:08 Low Dose Calms, High Dose Causes Paranoia — Here’s Why22:24 Women Produce More 11-Hydroxy-THC Than Men25:52 Why Receptor Distribution Makes Cannabis Unpredictable27:11 The PET Scan Problem: Why We Can’t Map Your Receptors29:04 Why Cannabis Companies Don’t Fund Real Research31:25 How Legalisation Accidentally Killed Cannabis Science34:46 The GMP vs GPP Bureaucratic Disaster38:09 David Nutt: Drug Policy Driven by Politics Not Science43:01 Why You Can’t Standardise Cannabis Dosing Like Alcohol49:44 The Three Thirds Rule: Benefit, Side Effects, or Nothing53:05 The Best Evidence: Where Cannabis Actually Works53:36 Schizophrenia Risk — It’s a Trigger, Not a Cause55:52 Cardiovascular Risk: The Under-Discussed Real Danger57:02 Does Exercise Cancel Out Cannabis Heart Risk?58:14 The Obesity Paradox: Why Cannabis Users Are Thinner01:01:03 Chronic Pain, MS, Epilepsy and PTSD — The Medical Evidence01:03:18 Final Thoughts and a Plea for Billionaire Stoners...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/

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder

Dr. Elizabeth Margulis is a professor of music cognition at Princeton University and author of Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams.

When strangers listen to the same unfamiliar music, they independently imagine the same vivid stories — down to specific words like "frolic" and "pirates." This may be one of the most surprising findings in modern cognitive science, and it challenges everything we assume about the privacy of our own thoughts.

Expect to learn why strangers imagine the same stories when listening to identical music, how a cross-cultural experiment between the US and rural China revealed completely different imagined worlds to the same sounds, how repeated speech spontaneously transforms into song, the surprising link between psychedelic therapy and modern music therapy, why the Mozart Effect misled state legislatures, what makes certain songs irresistibly groovy, and much more

…

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:45 From Concert Pianist to Cognitive Scientist

06:27 What Does a Brain Look Like Listening to Music?

09:04 How Musical Processing Differs from Speech

10:53 The Irresistible Urge to Dance

16:18 Can Animals Keep a Beat? The Snowball Experiment

23:42 Why Repetition Changes How You Feel About Music

26:31 The Speech-to-Song Illusion

32:05 Is Music Evolutionary? The Case for Social Bonding

36:36 Psychedelics and Music: What's Really Driving the Healing?

42:28 The Mozart Effect Myth

47:42 How to Raise a Musical Prodigy

49:25 Musical Daydreams: Why Strangers Imagine the Same Stories

53:11 The China Experiment: Same Music, Different Stories

1:06:57 Psychedelic Hallucinations and Musical Archetypes

1:16:17 Can Music Teach Us About Consciousness?

...

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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder

Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of physics at NYU and founder of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. In 1989 he published a paper proving that consciousness cannot arise from computation — thirty-five years before the world started panicking about whether ChatGPT can think.

Expect to learn why no computer programme will ever be sufficient for consciousness, why large language models operate nothing like human brains, the critical difference between intelligence and consciousness that the AI industry keeps collapsing, why Penrose's arguments about consciousness are wrong, why quantum mechanics has nothing to do with the mind, why the mind-body problem may be the most intractable problem in all of science, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Consciousness Is Not Computable

02:35 Maudlin's 1989 Paper: Computation and Consciousness

06:01 The Thought Experiment: Beer Cans, Windmills and Conscious Machines

08:11 Why Running a Programme Can't Be Enough for Consciousness

10:36 Counterfactuals: What the Machine Would Have Done

13:56 The Cog and Wheel Machine: Stripping It Down

16:18 The Strange Anaesthesia: Jamming the Gears

19:10 Why Computational Structure Is the Wrong Level

20:08 Is This For or Against Computationalism?

23:01 The 2026 AI Consciousness Debate

25:06 Why the Turing Test Is Trivially Defeatable

27:00 Neural Nets Are Nothing Like Brains

29:12 Why the Brain Is Far More Than Neurons

31:01 HAL 9000 and How Children Actually Learn

33:27 The Car Wash Question That Breaks ChatGPT

35:18 Defining Intelligence and Consciousness

37:53 Twin Earth: Why Definitions Don't Work the Way You Think

43:06 Locked-In Syndrome and the Lobster Problem

47:08 Computation Can't Explain Pain Either

48:01 Intelligence vs Consciousness: Why You Must Separate Them

50:45 Can Anything Be Intelligent Without Being Conscious?

53:09 Is the Turing Machine Argument About Intelligence Too?

54:04 What Does Memory Actually Mean?

57:00 Can Mathematics Capture the Structure of Qualia?01:00:02 Scott Aaronson's Demolition of Integrated Information Theory

01:03:26 Why Formalising Consciousness Is a Fetishisation of Maths

01:09:00 Why There Is No Simple State Space for Vision

01:13:22 Does Quantum Mechanics Explain Consciousness?

01:18:25 The Problem with Penrose and Hameroff's Microtubule Theory

01:21:31 How Do We Actually Make Progress on Consciousness?

01:24:45 Does the Body Matter or Is It All in the Brain?

01:27:00 The Mysterian View: Why the Mind-Body Problem May Be Unsolvable

01:29:47 Could Someone Invent a New Explanatory Framework?

01:31:13 Why Pain Hurts: The Evolutionary Story

01:33:12 What Newton Would Think of General Relativity

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [evan@thegiantsshoulder.com](mailto: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/

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder

Dr. György Buzsáki is one of the world’s most influential neuroscientists and the author of The Brain from Inside Out — a radical rethinking of how the brain generates perception, memory, and consciousness.

We’ve been asking the wrong questions about the mind. Memory isn’t storage. Perception isn’t passive. Time and space aren’t sensed — they’re constructed. And the rhythms of our own bodies may be the hidden scaffolding behind everything we think, feel, and remember.

Expect to learn why the brain doesn’t record the world but predicts it, how neural rhythms act like syntax to structure our thoughts, why time is not an input but a product of the brain’s internal cycles, how space and memory emerge from the same temporal code, why consciousness might just be a performance built from nested oscillations, what happens when brain–body rhythms fall out of sync, how we can think about memory as musical replay not archival storage, how rhythm breakdown may underlie mental disorders, and much more

…

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:22 The Evolution of Neuroscience Techniques

05:13 Understanding Feedforward Inhibition

08:13 The Paradigm Shift in Brain Function

12:07 The Role of Rhythms in Prediction

14:28 Overcoming Technological Barriers in Research

16:45 Mapping the Hippocampus and Microcircuitry

25:30 The Complexity of Brain Connectivity

26:24 The Future of Connectomics

34:36 The Inside Out Brain: A New Framework

42:28 The Brain's Survival Mechanism

45:00 Local and Global Brain Interactions

48:47 Evolution of Brain Complexity

52:56 Inside-Out Thinking in Neuroscience

59:32 The Importance of Body Rhythms

01:17:42 The Interconnectedness of Mind and Body

01:26:43 Understanding Brain Dynamics in Psychiatric Disorders

01:29:04 The Future of Diagnosing Mental Health Conditions

01:32:56 The Role of Technology in Neuroscience

01:35:47 Exploring the Nature of Memory

02:06:25 Consciousness and Its Complexities

...

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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder

Dr Wendy Suzuki is a Neuroscientist and Professor at New York University whose lab was the first to capture neurons firing as new memories are born. Her TED talk has over 65 million views, and she's the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life.

The hippocampus isn't just where memories are stored — it's the structure that builds your internal model of reality, imagines futures you've never lived, and may be the engine that constructs your sense of self.

Expect to learn how place cells and grid cells map your world inside your skull, why people without a hippocampus can't imagine a tropical beach, how memories become models and models become selves, what the default mode network reveals about consciousness, how exercise physically grows new brain cells even into your 90s, why the boundary between memory and imagination is far blurrier than you think, and much more…

Timestamps:

04:31 The Hippocampus: The Brain Structure That Makes You You

07:01 Patient H.M.: The Most Famous Brain Surgery in History

11:28 Place Cells, Grid Cells, and the Nobel Prize for Mapping Reality

17:18 The Patients Who Can't Imagine a Tropical Beach

20:41 Is Memory Just a Type of Imagination?

24:44 Aphantasia: The People With No Mind's Eye

28:55 The People Who Can't Forget Anything

36:39 Reconsolidation: Why Remembering Makes Memories Vulnerable

42:46 Marian Diamond and the Discovery of Brain Plasticity

46:53 Autocatalytic Closure: How Memories Become Ideas

51:44 Time Cells: How Your Brain Tracks "When"

55:42 What the Hippocampus Does While You Sleep

59:34 The All-Nighter Experiment: From A Grades to F Grades

01:03:47 Does the Brain Replay Emotions During Sleep?

01:07:01 The Amygdala, Fear Conditioning, and Joy Conditioning

01:13:13 What Is Consciousness and Does the Hippocampus Create It?

01:14:38 Clive Wearing: New Consciousness Every Seven Seconds

01:19:30 The Dream Experiment and Optimizing Your Brain for Life

...

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

Dr. David E. Nichols is a pharmacologist, medicinal chemist, and widely regarded as the greatest living psychedelic scientist. He personally synthesized the psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT used in the most landmark psychedelic studies ever conducted — and founded the institute that funded most of them. He is 81 years old, has published nearly 300 scientific papers, and there is no one alive who can replace him.

Expect to learn how he made a kilogram of MDMA for $4,000 and changed the course of psychiatry, what his first LSD trip revealed about the function of the universe, why psilocybin may be the most effective depression treatment we have, how his research was stolen and turned into street drugs that killed people, why the DMT pineal gland theory is scientifically impossible, whether consciousness lives in the brain at all, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 The Greatest Living Psychedelic Chemist

05:09 Making MDMA for $4,000 and Changing Psychiatry

08:25 How Do You Explain a Kilo of MDMA to Your University?

10:50 What Was Known About MDMA in the 1980s?

12:06 The LSD Trip That Showed Him the Function of the Universe

14:52 A Psychedelic Healed His Relationship With His Abusive Father

19:26 MDMA, PTSD, and a New Paradigm in Healing

21:17 Psilocybin for Alcohol Addiction: The Stories That Changed Everything

24:30 Why Is Psychedelic Research Still So Painfully Slow?

30:05 Big Alcohol, Big Pharma, and the Economics of Prohibition

33:24 The Paradigm Shift Happening in Real Time

39:35 What Psychedelics Actually Do to Your Perception of Life

42:06 Music and Psychedelics: Why Lyrics Can Ruin a Trip

44:56 Can You Separate Real Insight From Hallucination?

46:19 Is Consciousness in the Brain at All? The Transducer Theory

52:36 His Wife's Paranormal Prediction of Her Father's Death

55:56 Eating Disorders, OCD, and the Untapped Frontier

59:25 Why Psychedelics Work Like Rebooting Your Computer

01:00:08 The Bureaucratic Nightmare of Studying Schedule I Drugs

01:06:11 The MDMA Analogue Nobody Will Fund

01:08:16 A Plea to Billionaires: Fund Psychedelic Research

01:09:32 Structure Activity Relationships: Sculpting Molecules to Fit Receptors

01:12:07 AlphaFold, AI, and the Future of Drug Discovery

01:14:36 The Golden Question: What Happens After a Drug Binds?

01:17:39 DMT and the Pineal Gland: Debunking the Myth

01:21:21 Is There Any Evidence DMT Is Released at Death?

01:22:33 DMT Transfusions and Machine Elves

01:26:09 What Excites Him About the Future of Psychedelics

01:28:19 The Legacy of the Greatest Psychedelic Chemist Alive

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [evan@thegiantsshoulder.com](mailto: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/

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris is the world's leading psychedelic researcher, founder of the first Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, and the scientist who put the first person on LSD inside a brain scanner in over 40 years.

His Entropic Brain Hypothesis proposes that consciousness exists on a spectrum from order to chaos — and that psychedelics work by dissolving the brain's confidence in its own model of reality. His landmark trial in the New England Journal of Medicine showed two doses of psilocybin matched six weeks of antidepressants for depression.

Expect to learn why psychedelics don't activate the brain but scramble it, what the entropic brain hypothesis actually means and why entropy may be the best biomarker for consciousness, how the default mode network holds your ego together and what happens when psychedelics melt it, the difference between DMT entity encounters and 5-MeO-DMT ego obliteration, why Robin thinks we could still get psychedelic medicine catastrophically wrong, and much more

…

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris

03:01 The Journey into Psychedelics

06:10 First Brain Scans with Psychedelics

12:06 Understanding Brain Activity and Psychedelics

17:49 The Entropic Brain Theory

24:02 Consciousness and Brain Entropy

30:10 Decoding Conscious Experience

40:49 Exploring the Entropic Brain Model

45:24 The Limits of Consciousness and Ego

50:11 Psychedelics and Evolutionary Perspectives

53:31 Shared Psychedelic Experiences and Archetypes

01:00:06 The Nature of Hallucinations and Collective Unconscious

01:04:34 Entropy, Connectivity, and Brain Function

01:17:02 The Role of Serotonin Receptors in Psychedelic Experiences

01:20:46 The Mechanisms of Psychedelics

01:30:18 Cultural Perspectives on Psychedelics

01:39:13 Psychedelics and Self-Understanding

01:48:36 Cross-Cultural Studies in Psychedelic Research

01:53:25 The Future of Psychedelics in Mental Health

...

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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist and the author of The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything — a mind-bending journey through deep time that reveals how a single molecule shaped life, climate, intelligence, and mass extinction.

Carbon dioxide isn’t just a climate statistic. It’s the raw material of all biology, the original building block of your brain, and the molecule that has repeatedly rebooted life on Earth. Understanding it means rethinking everything from the origin of life to the future of civilization.Expect to learn how CO₂ helped spark the first cells at the bottom of ancient oceans, why hydrothermal vents may hold the key to alien life, how volcanoes rewrote evolution, the truth about the most catastrophic extinction in Earth’s history, how CO₂ shaped your metabolism, brain and the rise of humans, why mass extinctions can reboot evolution, why today’s climate experiment is unlike anything in the fossil record, why the planet has a natural thermostat — and how we’re breaking it, why life might be a universal process of energy dissipation, how the story of Earth challenges our ideas of uniqueness, and much more

Timestamps:

02:14 How CO₂ Became the Most Misunderstood Molecule on Earth

07:31 Life as a Carbon-Fueled Energy Dissipation Machine12:45 The Origins of Life and the Vents That May Have Sparked It

19:08 Why Mass Extinctions Keep Rewriting Life’s Blueprint

26:27 CO₂ as Climate Stabilizer — Until It Isn’t

35:40 What the Permian Extinction Tells Us About the Future

42:55 Deep Time and the Psychology of Geological Thinking

49:18 Why the Anthropocene Might Be a Cosmic Joke

55:36 How Life Changes the Planet — And Gets Changed in Return

01:04:02 The Story of CO₂ as the Story of Everything

01:10:15 Is Earth’s Climate Crisis a Rehearsal of Past Catastrophes?

01:15:49 Carbon, Consciousness, and Why We’re Here to Begin With

01:22:06 What Would a Geologist See If They Dug Up 2024?01:27:31 Hope, Humility, and What Deep Time Teaches Us

...

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/

Dr. Erik Bekkers is an associate professor in Geometric Deep Learning at the University of Amsterdam, an ELLIS Program Director, and one of the most original thinkers working at the intersection of mathematics, AI and consciousness.

He reverse-engineered how the human visual cortex processes reality using the geometry of curved spaces — then used those same principles to build AI architectures that outperform standard deep learning. He recently published a paper arguing that AI will never be conscious, introducing a framework called Biological Idealism.

Expect to learn why your brain lifts reality into a higher-dimensional space just to see a straight line, what autopoiesis is and why it might be the dividing line for consciousness, why psychedelics decreasing brain activity while increasing experience is a problem for materialism, why firing neurons are an appearance of experience not the cause of it, why AI leaders claiming machines might be conscious is dangerous, and much more

...

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Erik Wrote the Biological Idealism Paper

02:00 The Materialist Bias in Society

04:23 Does a Machine Have Consciousness?

06:29 Can You Be a Materialist and Value Experience?

08:24 The Map vs The Terrain: What is Matter Really?

11:03 Bernardo Kastrup and the Path to Idealism

14:11 Psychedelics: Less Brain Activity, More Experience?

15:57 The Idealist Explanation of Neural Correlates

19:54 What Primes Someone Towards Idealism or Materialism?

24:17 Autopoiesis: The Self-Creation of Life

27:32 How Autopoiesis Works in an Idealist Framework

33:30 Where Physicalism and Idealism Actually Agree

41:15 Finding Common Ground Across Metaphysics

47:17 Why Are Some Creatures More Conscious Than Others?

50:18 Donut-Shaped Geometry in Brain Activity

54:46 Can Mathematics Ever Model Consciousness?

59:33 The Geometry of Experiences Explained

01:04:31 Continuity of Brain Structures Across the Animal Kingdom

01:06:03 Can We Make a Machine Autopoietic?

01:09:37 The Robot That Plugs Itself In: Is That Consciousness?

01:14:00 What Would You Do With 100 Billion Dollars?

01:20:20 Will We Ever See a Conscious Machine?

01:24:11 AI Propaganda and Emotional Manipulation

01:27:56 Hinton and Amodei: Is It Dangerous to Call AI Conscious?

01:31:43 The Ethics of Machine Consciousness Research

01:35:39 Animal Suffering, AI Spending and Asking the Right Questions

01:38:10 Closing Thoughts and Anna Ciaunica's Influence

...

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/

Welcome to Giant Conversations — a new format where top experts debate, discuss and unravel the biggest questions in science. Dr. Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst and author of The Hidden Spring. Dr. Ryan Smith is a computational neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research who builds mathematical models of how the brain predicts and feels.

Together they tackle the question: what does it take for a system to become conscious — and can we engineer it?

Expect to learn why consciousness might be raw feeling rather than complex cognition, why your cortex may not actually be conscious, what's architecturally missing from current AI that rules out consciousness, what a machine would need to genuinely feel something, where these two brilliant scientists agree and exactly where they clash, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:01 Introduction to the Giant's Debate

00:46 Mark Solms: What Makes a System Conscious?

05:31 Ryan Smith: The Cognitive Case for Consciousness

13:02 Where Mark and Ryan Agree and Disagree

17:32 The Selection Problem: What Gets to Be Conscious?

27:07 Can We Scientifically Prove Something Is Conscious?

30:02 Blindsight: Behaviour Without Experience

34:20 The Fish on Cocaine Problem

41:25 Different Meanings of Consciousness

54:57 How the Free Energy Principle Explains Consciousness

01:03:02 Ryan Smith: Taking Consciousness Out of Biology

01:12:17 How Do You Give a Computer Survival Needs?

01:18:20 The Brain in a Vat: Does the Body Actually Matter?

01:19:59 What Would Prove AI Is Conscious?

01:22:32 Mark Solms: Why He Believes We Can Build Consciousness

01:27:25 Why Current LLMs Have Zero Consciousness

01:30:36 Mark's Final Word: Goals Must Be Real

01:31:15 Rapid Fire with Ryan Smith

01:37:52 The Neuron Replacement Thought Experiment

01:42:10 Computation vs Architecture: A Middle Ground

01:44:06 Final Thoughts

...

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/

Chris Frith is a pioneering neuroscientist who helped launch the field of cognitive neuroscience — and his work has completely changed how we understand reality, consciousness, and mental illness.In this episode, you’ll learn why perception is just a controlled hallucination, how our brains build reality through social connection, why people with schizophrenia see the world differently, how consciousness evolved to help us coordinate with others, and why your sense of self might be an illusion shared to stay sane.

Timestamps:

02:12 What Is Consciousness? A Brain-Built Social Model

06:34 Predictive Processing and Why You Never Really See the World

11:29 Controlled Hallucinations: How the Brain Manufactures Reality

16:45 Optical Illusions, Schizophrenia, and Seeing Too Much

21:08 What Schizophrenia Teaches Us About the Nature of Belief

27:10 Social Models, Sanity, and the Idea of a Collective Mind

32:43 Consciousness as a Social Adaptation — Not a Solo Experience

38:50 Generative Models and the Brain’s Simulation Engine

45:02 Why Solitude Breaks the Mind and Social Sync Holds It Together

50:31 Can AI Be Conscious? What’s Missing From Machines

56:07 Free Will, Agency and the Brain’s Self-Narrative

01:00:45 The Myth of a Single Reality: Delusions, Politics and Group Models

01:06:58 Consciousness, Intelligence, and the AI Illusion

01:11:41 Why the Self Is Just a Useful Story

01:17:09 Do Octopuses Have Consciousness?

01:21:16 Where Does the Line Fall Between Conscious and Not?01:25:20 Frith’s Thoughts on the Future of Consciousness Research

01:30:03 AI, Prediction, and the Limits of Machine Minds

01:34:38 Final Reflections: Social Brains, Sanity, and Shared Reality

...

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/

William B. Miller Jr. is a Medical Doctor, Evolutionary Biologist, and author of Bioverse and co-author of The Sentient Cell — one of the most radical rethinks of biology published in decades.

Every cell in your body is conscious, intelligent, and making decisions right now. Evolution is not random. Cancer is not a genetic accident — it's a highly intelligent system we've been fighting completely wrong. And the central dogma of molecular biology, the foundation of modern medicine, is broken.Expect to learn why biology begins with intelligence not chemistry, why every cell has preferences goals and experiences, why natural selection is only half the story, how cancer cells are intelligent agents and why that changes everything about treatment, why genes are tools not bosses, why consciousness can never exist in silicon alone, and much more

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction & The Biology Revolution Nobody Is Talking About

00:01:40 Biology Begins With the Intelligent Measuring Cell

00:05:09 Cognition All the Way Down: Is Even mTOR a Smart Molecule?

00:07:20 Are Viruses Intelligent? The Strange World of Social Virology

00:09:39 Defining Intelligence, Cognition and Consciousness

00:16:09 What Is True Biological Agency and Where Does It Begin?

00:17:20 The Constructal Law and The Biogenic Principle

00:21:09 What Separates a Biological Agent From a Machine

00:24:51 Free Will, Doubt and Why Miller Would Refuse To Stop Believing In Agency

00:28:20 The Stem Cell That Searches For Its Identity

00:44:55 The Toxoplasmosis Moment: The Medical Observation That Changed Everything

00:50:21 Slime Mould vs Water: How Do We Separate Agency From Gradient Descent?

00:53:49 Why We Stopped Having Children: States of Preference Are Running Evolution

00:56:06 Where Is Preference Encoded in a Cell?

01:03:30 The Senome: The Sensory Organ That Replaces Gene-Centric Biology

01:07:17 Why Crick's Central Dogma Was Wrong: Information Never Flows One Way

01:10:23 The Six Cellular Principles That Should Govern Human Ethics01:14:47 How Single Cell Consciousness Becomes One Unified Experience

01:18:16 Symbiogenesis, Mitochondria and The Birth of the Eukaryotic Cell

01:20:36 Why It Took 1.4 Billion Years For Multicellular Life To Appear01:28:09 Cognitive Selection: The Real Driver of Evolution

01:34:02 Michael Levin, Morphogenesis and Where the Body's Blueprint Actually Lives

01:39:47 You Never Truly Die: Your Intelligence Flows Back Into the River of Life

01:43:30 What Does All This Mean For Medicine, Biotech and Society?

01:45:50 Why Cancer Is Intelligent and We Are Fighting It Wrong

01:48:31 AI Cannot Be Conscious — And That Might Make It a Better Tool

01:49:21 The Future: Marrying AI to Conscious Biological Cells

...

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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Dr. Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who has spent over sixty years working from a 17th-century farmhouse in Oxfordshire on the deepest question in physics — what is time? His answer: it doesn't exist.

He completed the project Newton declared impossible and Einstein never finished, built two bestselling books around it, and at 88 remains one of the most original thinkers alive.Expect to learn why the Wheeler-DeWitt equation implies the universe is frozen and nothing evolves, what Shape Dynamics is and why only ratios and relations are real, why your brain is a "time capsule" containing the complete illusion of a past, how consciousness might add all the colour and motion to a bare mathematical skeleton, why Newton's gravity might secretly be a theory of variety, and why Barbour believes quantum mechanics itself could be replaceable, and much more

…

Timestamps:

00:00:00 What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Life Question

00:03:07 Weather Observer in the Canadian Arctic

00:05:31 The Dirac Article That Changed Everything

00:08:28 Phoning Paul Dirac at Cambridge

00:12:23 Why Dirac Rejected Four-Dimensional Spacetime

00:15:28 Hamilton, Quaternions and the Dublin Bridge

00:19:36 The Straw Poll with Hawking That Made Spanish Headlines

00:22:08 The Titanic Analogy for the Problem of Time

00:27:26 What the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation Actually Says

00:31:00 Time Capsules: Why Your Memories Don't Prove Time Passed

00:35:03 Flow States and the Experience of Time

00:37:08 The Kingfisher in Flight: Consciousness Plays the Movie

00:40:47 Psychedelics, Pollan and Consciousness

00:44:13 Materialism vs Idealism: Where Does Barbour Stand?

00:48:33 Complex Wavefunctions and the Born Density

00:53:16 The Three-Body Collision Problem

00:55:33 Leibniz, Monads and the Living Mirror of the Universe

00:58:10 "I Am the Universe Seen from My Point of View"

01:04:01 The Punchline: Gravity Equals Variety

01:08:43 Buzsáki and How the Brain Keeps Time

01:13:46 Did Science Take a Wrong Turn in 150 BC?

01:19:32 Barbour's Ontology: Points, Distances, Ratios — That's It

01:25:34 "Invisible Time Is a Monumental Lie"

01:28:08 What Was There Before the Universe?

01:31:46 Newton's Gravity as a Theory of Recognisability

...

Buy Barbours Books The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics: https://amzn.to/4liP9zy

The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time: https://amzn.to/4bw3ZPI

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/

Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett is an award-winning AI researcher at the Australian National University and author of "How to Build Conscious Machines" — a mathematical blueprint for why anything is conscious and what it would take to engineer a machine that truly experiences the world.

Expect to learn why information processing feels like anything at all, how consciousness is built from a hierarchy of selves, why a fly has experience but a slime mold does not, why current AI is fundamentally incapable of consciousness, how cancer is an alignment problem between cells, what building a conscious machine actually requires, and much more

…Timestamps:

00:00 Why Does Information Processing Feel Like Anything?

01:05 The Cosmic Ord: How the Universe Deletes What Doesn't Work

03:59 Where is the Line Between Non-Conscious and Conscious?

05:53 Multi-Scale Competency: Cells, Organs, Organisms, Ecosystems

07:43 The First Order Self: Phenomenal Consciousness Explained

08:27 Access Consciousness: Predicting Your Prediction of Me

13:04 When Do Enough Abstraction Layers Produce Experience?

18:40 Liquid Brains vs Solid Brains: Ant Colonies and Human Networks

21:03 Bioelectricity: How Cells Signal and Cooperate

24:03 Human-AI Hybrids: Prosthetic, Cooperative and Integrated

30:30 Is There a Bottom to the Abstraction Stack?

37:07 Why a Single Thread CPU Will Never Feel Anything

40:56 Feeling Pain vs Knowing You Feel Pain

42:52 Do Dogs Model Your Mind?

46:58 The Paper He Wrote as a Joke That Won Best Student Prize

48:11 Cancer as a Breakdown in Cellular Cooperation

53:22 Why Elephants Don't Get Cancer and What That Means for AI

56:47 How Do You Actually Build a Conscious Machine?

01:01:36 Does a Tesla Robot Have Grounding?

01:04:17 Should We Build Conscious Machines?

01:06:46 If You Design a Robot to Love Cleaning Your Toilet

01:08:25 His Biggest Fears About the Future of AI

01:13:09 The Rise of Anti-Natalism and Losing Hope

01:14:34 The Library of Babel: Why Modern Life Feels Overwhelming

...

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/

Matt Segall is a process philosopher, Associate Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and author of Physics of the World-Soul and Crossing the Threshold — two books arguing that consciousness isn't produced by the brain but is woven into the fabric of reality itself.

Expect to learn why there is no scientific evidence that consciousness exists, how one French philosopher broke Western science in 1637 and we still haven't fixed it, why the brain is a condition for consciousness but not the producer of it, what panpsychism actually claims and why it's making a serious comeback, why the hard problem of consciousness and the origin of life might be the same problem, what it might feel like to be water or a photon, how psychedelics reveal something philosophy has been saying for centuries, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 The Nature of Consciousness

02:52 Evidence and Experience

06:09 Consciousness and the Brain

09:09 Emergence vs. Production of Consciousness

12:11 Panpsychism and Process Philosophy

15:08 Information and Consciousness

17:47 Biopsychism and Early Consciousness

21:11 The Hard Problem of Consciousness

24:08 Subjectivity and Objectivity

27:06 The Role of Information in Reality

29:47 Consciousness and the Universe

48:25 The Relational Nature of Truth

51:10 Beyond Space and Time

54:55 The Self in a Panpsychist View

56:30 The Evidence for Panpsychism

01:00:01 Sociological Influences on Worldviews

01:03:34 Psychedelics and Consciousness

01:10:56 Navigating Reality and Hallucination

01:15:13 Falsification and Progress in Panpsychism

01:19:57 The Ethical Implications of Panpsychism

...

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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Support The Channel:

Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1

Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder

Dr. Chris Fields is an independent researcher with one of the most extraordinary careers in modern science — from nuclear physics to decoding the first complete genome to quantum information theory — now collaborating with Michael Levin and Karl Friston to rewrite how we understand life and consciousness.His central claim: nothing in the universe has a real boundary. Every object you see — including yourself — is a decision, not a discovery.

Expect to learn how quantum theory became a theory of communication, why cells might be goal-directed agents, whether bacteria can experience space, and much more...

Timestamps:

00:00 The Evolution of a Scientific Career

02:06 Understanding Boundaries in Science

09:59 Quantum Information Theory Explained

14:55 Neurons and Quantum Communication

40:07 Collaboration and Implications in Biology

40:17 Exploring Biological Systems as Information Processors

43:44 Agentive Thinking in Biology

48:40 Understanding 3D Space Representation in Cells

56:14 Conscious Agent Theory and Information Exchange

01:15:02 Future Directions in Biological Communication Research

...

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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Matt Ridley is an evolutionary biologist, bestselling science writer and author of eleven books including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist and Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.

He co-investigated the origin of SARS-CoV-2 with molecular biologist Alina Chan — and what they found may be the biggest cover-up in the history of science. A secret Pentagon proposal describing the exact genetic manipulation that may have created the pandemic. Private messages showing virologists publicly denying a lab leak while privately admitting they thought it was likely. And an establishment that chose silence while millions died.

Expect to learn what a furin cleavage site is and why it stunned virologists worldwide, what the secret DEFUSE proposal reveals about the experiments happening in Wuhan, why the virus was suspiciously well-adapted to human lungs from day one, what the recently released Epstein files reveal about how a convicted sex offender directed research at Harvard and compromised elite science, why no major funding body has investigated the lab leak despite 25 million deaths, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 The Origins of COVID-19: A Lab Leak Theory

03:11 Investigating the Wuhan Institute of Virology

06:00 The Role of Genetic Engineering in Virus Research

09:08 The Furin Cleavage Site: A Key to Infectivity

11:58 The Defuse Proposal: A Shocking Revelation

14:51 The Pangolin Narrative: A Red Herring?

18:10 The Call for Transparency in Science

33:16 Controversies in Virus Origins

35:35 Evaluating Zoonotic Narratives

37:30 The Role of Markets in Virus Transmission

40:22 Lab Leaks vs. Natural Origins

42:05 Genetic Manipulation and Furin Cleavage

44:42 Passaging Theory and Virus Evolution

49:10 Implications of High Infectivity

51:22 Suspicion of Early Vaccine Development

54:48 The Need for Transparency

56:24 The Future of Gain of Function Research

01:00:57 The Lab Leak Hypothesis: Recklessness in Research

01:10:01 Trust in Science: The Impact of COVID-19 on Public PerceptionEpstein

01:20:20 Epstein's Influence: Compromising Science and Ethics

01:23:32 Reforming Science Funding: Addressing Systemic Issues

...

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/

Dr. Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist, consciousness researcher, and co-creator of the Orch-OR theory — a radical and controversial model proposing that consciousness arises from quantum processes inside the brain’s microtubules.

For over 30 years, Dr. Hameroff has worked alongside Sir Roger Penrose to explore how the fundamental fabric of spacetime could give rise to awareness itself — and what that means for AI, life after death, and the mystery of subjective experience.

Expect to learn why microtubules inside neurons might be the real seat of consciousness, how anesthetics switch off awareness by dampening quantum vibrations, what happens to consciousness when the brain flatlines, why current AI models may never be truly conscious, how quantum coherence can persist in the warm, wet brain, what a "quantum soul" might actually mean, why critics have called this theory absurd — and how new research may finally be proving them wrong, how ultrasound could treat depression by targeting the roots of awareness, and much more...

Timestamps:

00:00 The Misconception of the Brain as a Computer

03:00 The Journey to Understanding Consciousness

05:51 Microtubules: The Key to Consciousness

09:00 Anesthesia and Its Role in Consciousness

11:51 The Historical Context of Anesthesia

15:06 The Mechanism of Anesthesia

18:01 The Quantum Nature of Anesthesia

21:06 The Role of Microtubules in Anesthesia

24:00 The Unitary Mechanism of Anesthesia

26:56 The Evidence Supporting Microtubules

30:02 The Future of Anesthesia Research

36:35 The Quest for Consciousness Evidence

37:42 Microtubules and Information Processing

39:15 AI, Neural Networks, and Consciousness

41:09 Roger Penrose and the Heart Problem

42:36 Gödel's Theorem and Quantum Physics

44:03 Superposition and Spacetime Curvature

46:54 Objective Reduction and Consciousness

49:16 Microtubules as Quantum Devices

51:30 Fibonacci Geometry and Consciousness

54:49 Integrating Biology and Physics

57:48 Criticism and Defense of the Theory

01:01:26 The Impact of the 1995 Paper

01:05:02 Decoherence in Biological Systems

01:07:11 Experimental Evidence for Quantum Effects

01:09:46 Conductance and Quantum Effects in Microtubules

01:11:41 Experiments and Anesthesia's Impact on Consciousness

01:14:06 The ORCH-OR Theory and Its Explanatory Power

01:18:41 Integrating ORCH-OR with Other Consciousness Theories

01:27:30 The Mechanism of Consciousness and Quantum Collapse

01:36:11 Free Will, Quantum Mechanics, and Consciousness

...

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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Philip Ball is a former Nature editor of 20 years and the author of over 30 books spanning quantum physics, consciousness, and the strange frontiers of biology. In How Life Works, he argues that everything we’ve been taught about life — genes, blueprints, biological machines — is deeply incomplete.

Get How Life Works: https://amzn.to/46dQRMlBiology isn’t built from instructions. It’s built from self-organising systems that sense, evaluate, predict and act. Cognition didn’t start with brains. Purpose isn’t mystical. And causation may not live where we think it does.

Expect to learn why genes aren’t in control, how cells make decisions without neurons, what combinatorial explosion means for biology, why self-organisation shapes development, how agency emerges from physics, and what all of this means for consciousness — and much more…

Timestamps

00:00 The Evolution of Biological Understanding

04:54 Rethinking Genes and Their Functions

10:59 The Complexity of Biological Systems

15:50 Metaphors in Biology: The Need for New Narratives

25:12 Robustness in Biological Systems

30:26 Hierarchies and Interactions in Biology

35:36 The Impact of Genetic Mutations

38:09 Redundancy and Compensation in Biological Systems

39:26 Understanding Noisy Cellular Activity

43:53 The Role of Noise in Cell Differentiation

46:45 Navigating Developmental Landscapes

49:48 Canalization and Robustness in Biology

53:27 The Dynamics of Energy Landscapes in Biology

57:01 Self-Organization and Developmental Goals

01:00:52 The Interplay of Genes and Non-Equilibrium Systems

01:10:54 The Limitations of Genetic Metaphors

01:12:36 Understanding Causal Emergence

01:15:19 Neural Networks and Causal Power

01:17:29 The Complexity of Protein Functions

01:21:05 Cognition Across Biological Systems

01:23:32 The Future of Biology Education

01:29:30 Rethinking Genetic Determinism

01:33:17 Agency and Meaning in Biology

01:44:40 Continuity of Agency in Biological Systems

01:47:02 Defining Genuine Agency in Proteins

01:50:55 Exploring Sentience and Awareness in Cells

01:56:53 Ethical Considerations in Generative Biology

01:59:51 The Future of Synthetic Biology and Regulation

...

Episodes Mentioned

Meet the MIT Neuroscientist Showing Brain Waves Are the Secret Engine Behind Consciousness: https://youtu.be/7OFb-NG3jIw

Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Sponsors:

Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1

Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3

❤️ 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/

Dr. Josh Bongard is a computer scientist, roboticist, and co-creator of Xenobots — the world’s first living robots made from frog cells, capable of movement, healing, and even self-replication.

Together with biologist Michael Levin, Bongard’s work is upending some of biology’s most sacred assumptions: that DNA is a blueprint, that the brain is the seat of intelligence, and that only neurons can think. In his lab at the University of Vermont, he’s building AI-designed organisms that challenge our understanding of life, agency, intelligence, and what it means to be a self.

Expect to learn how a pile of skin cells assembled itself into a replicating robot, why biology may be cognitive all the way down, how AI is learning to design living systems from scratch, why memory and learning might emerge in systems without brains, why the illusion of consciousness could be evolution’s greatest trick, how Xenobots are influencing the future of robotics and synthetic life, what moral standing these beings might eventually require, and why your high school biology textbook may have gotten almost everything wrong

…

Timestamps:

00:00 The Birth of Xenobots

03:08 Understanding Xenobots: Science and Implications

05:57 Cognition and Intelligence: A New Perspective

08:53 Defining Consciousness and Self-Awareness

12:09 Memory and Learning in Xenobots

14:46 The Nature of Experience and Reality

18:00 Exploring Agency and Adaptation

20:52 The Future of Xenobots and Robotics

28:10 The Evolution of Robotics: Learning from Biology

30:21 Human-Like Adaptability in Robots

33:10 Xenobots: The Future of Self-Replication

37:38 Understanding Agency in Xenobots

40:47 The Challenge of Defining Agency

43:35 Ethical Considerations of Xenobots

45:07 AI and the Future of Biological Robotics

47:43 The Role of AI in Understanding Biology

52:05 The Potential of AI in Biological Discoveries

55:15 The Moral Implications of Synthetic Life

01:00:01 Future of Food and Ethical Eating

...

Episodes Mentioned: Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When Consciousness First Emerged: https://youtu.be/ZnasmLpY5_8

Meet the Scientist Who Mathematically Proved Reality is an Illusion! Round 2: https://youtu.be/kTKE8eLo8CU

Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life!: https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E

❤️ 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/

Dr. Tommy Wood is a neuroscientist and performance expert who trains the brains of elite Formula 1 drivers and studies how cognitive resilience can be built—and rebuilt—across a lifetime.From premature birth to world championship podiums, Tommy’s work spans the full arc of brain health, human performance, and cognitive decline. He’s also at the forefront of research into cutting-edge brain stimulation, virtual reality training, and the science of flow and resilience.Expect to learn what separates F1 drivers from the rest of us, why most brain training is a scam (and what actually works), the surprising role of virtual reality in cognitive development, why recovery and adaptation are more important than optimization, how elite performers manipulate arousal to access clutch states, why Sudoku doesn’t make you smarter, how executive function and decision-making can be trained like a muscle, the truth about brain stimulation (tDCS, TMS, vagus nerve) and what’s still pseudoscience, how dancing and martial arts might save your brain, and why cognitive decline is far from inevitable—and what to do to slow or even reverse it.Timestamps:00:00:00 Meet the Neuroscientist Training Formula 1 Drivers00:03:42 The Science Behind Split-Second Decision-Making at 200mph00:05:15 What Sets F1 Brains Apart From the Rest of Us?00:06:20 Is High Performance Born or Built?00:10:13 Why Obsession With Outcomes Can Hurt Your Brain00:11:26 Cognitive Optimization: What’s Real, What’s a Scam?00:13:12 Near vs Far Transfer: How Real Is Brain Training?00:17:01 The Best Activities for Boosting Brain Plasticity00:18:21 Why Complex Skill Learning Is the New Brain Hack00:19:20 How F1 Drivers Train Executive Function Without Driving00:22:09 Optimizing Recovery to Enhance Mental Performance00:23:21 Virtual Reality as the Future of Cognitive Training00:27:14 Why Real-World Complexity Trumps Gamified Drills00:30:00 Can VR Really Make You a Better Athlete?00:33:03 The Secret Behind Federer’s “Average” Reflexes00:34:11 Brain Stimulation in High Performance: Where Are We Now?00:39:41 Flow vs Clutch: What Actually Drives Performance?00:42:00 What Flow Feels Like in a Formula 1 Car00:45:03 Flow Is Overrated for Learning: Here’s Why00:46:34 The “Rule of Thirds” of Human Performance00:47:08 Understanding How and Why the Brain Declines With Age00:48:05 Allostasis: How the Brain Balances Change Over Time00:49:02 Does Routine Shrink the Brain?00:50:04 Can We Reverse Cognitive Aging?00:51:04 Tau, Amyloid and the Story of Dementia00:51:57 Resilience and Reserve: Your Brain’s Emergency Buffer00:53:16 What Triathlons Can Teach Us About Brain Longevity00:53:49 Aerobic vs Resistance Training for Brain Health00:54:54 White Matter and Why Lifting Weights Builds Intelligence00:55:22 The Surprising Brain Benefits of Dance, Martial Arts and Sport00:56:32 The Future of Brain Health: Stimulate or Decline00:57:13 Why Your Cognitive Destiny Is More Controllable Than You Think00:57:59 You Don’t Need Gadgets to Save Your Brain00:58:27 TMS, VR, Movement: The Future of Neurostimulation00:58:43 Final Reflections From the Brain Coach of Formula 1...❤️ 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/id1752486249Sponsors:Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder (Paid Partnership by BetterHelp)Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher of mind whose work has shaped how we think about synthetic consciousness and the architecture of thought itself.

He developed the MicroPsi cognitive architecture, has held research roles at MIT and Harvard, and just co-founded the California Institute of Machine Consciousness with Karl Friston — a lab dedicated to building minds that know they exist.

Expect to learn how emotions are compressed value functions for simulated agents, how brains create recursive world models to predict and control experience, why the self might just be a stabilizing hallucination, how synthetic minds could surpass biological ones, why Joscha sees spirits as information processes, and how consciousness might emerge anywhere complex systems learn to model themselves.

We also explore the implications of Michael Levin’s work, the ethics of synthetic selves, why nature is already computational, and what’s truly at the bedrock of reality. This conversation is strange, deep, and unforgettable.

Timestamps:00:00 Journey into Consciousness and AI

02:59 The Intersection of Neuroscience and AI

05:52 Understanding Consciousness: A Second Order Perception

08:53 Consciousness: An Evolved Property or Fundamental Reality?

12:03 The Concept of Spirit in Consciousness

14:56 Exploring Consciousness in Non-Brain Systems

18:00 The Nature of Consciousness in Organisms

21:12 The Role of Software in Consciousness

23:52 The Potential of Xenobots and Consciousness

37:06 Emergence of Artificial Life

40:12 The Nature of Consciousness

43:56 Comparing Consciousness Across Species

46:58 The Role of Social Structures in Consciousness

54:39 Biological Ingredients for Consciousness

01:10:55 Building Conscious AI

01:16:38 Exploring Ethical Constraints in AI Experiments

01:18:11 The Nature of Consciousness in AI

01:22:18 Comparing Consciousness: LLMs vs. Xenobots

01:24:19 The Binary Nature of Consciousness

01:27:01 Agency vs. Consciousness: A Complex Relationship

01:32:34 The Horrors of Conscious Existence

01:37:41 Concerns About AI and Society

01:40:14 The Role of AI in Society's Future

01:46:57 The Urgency of AI Development

01:51:03 The Future of AI and Society...

...

❤️ 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/

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a philosopher of mind and leading voice on psychedelics, panpsychism, and the metaphysics of consciousness. He’s a research fellow at the University of Exeter and author of Noumenautics and Modes of Sentience — books exploring whether mind is fundamental to the universe.

In this episode, we dive into why your brain might not produce consciousness, how psychedelics could reveal deeper truths about reality, the philosophical roots of mystical experience, and why matter itself might be sentient.

Expect to rethink everything you thought was solid...

Timestamps:

00:00 Understanding Panpsychism

02:49 The Nature of Consciousness

05:56 Defining Mind and Its Ambiguities

09:01 Historical Perspectives on Mind

11:49 The Evolution of Consciousness

14:57 Philosophical Positions on Consciousness

17:41 The Intersection of Consciousness and Biology

20:33 The Influence of Historical Context on Consciousness

23:53 Exploring the Continuum of Consciousness

26:41 The Debate on Consciousness Cutoff Points

32:22 Exploring the Nature of Electrons and Consciousness

34:26 The Interconnection of Consciousness and Physics

36:24 Diverse Perspectives on Panpsychism

40:13 Historical Context of Panpsychism and Its Reception

43:40 Psychedelics: Insights into Consciousness

51:52 The Challenge of Describing Psychedelic Experiences

01:00:23 The Debate of Universalism vs Contextualism

01:01:43 Psychedelics and Consciousness: Fact vs Fiction

01:03:46 Hallucinations: Delusions or Deeper Reality?

01:05:13 Mental Causation: The Connection Between Mind and Body

01:08:55 The Therapeutic Mechanism of Psychedelics

01:12:49 Exploring Panpsychism: Consciousness Beyond the Brain

01:16:22 The Future of Consciousness Studies

01:25:03 Metaphysical Possibilities in Science

Sponsors:

Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3

Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder (Paid Partnership by BetterHelp)❤️

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/

Dr. Adele Diamond is one of the world’s most influential developmental cognitive neuroscientists and a pioneer in our understanding of executive functions — the brain’s core control processes that shape attention, self-regulation, problem-solving, and goal-directed behaviour.Her groundbreaking research was the first to show that the prefrontal cortex is active in infants, transforming how we understand child development and reshaping clinical treatment for ADHD and PKU worldwide. She’s also led the charge in redefining education, proving that joy, movement, play, and emotional connection aren’t luxuries — they’re neuroscience-backed necessities.

Expect to learn what executive functions really are and why they matter for everything from school performance to lifelong happiness, the overlooked role of the prefrontal cortex in ADHD, how dopamine operates very differently in this brain region, the crucial (and often missed) distinction between types of ADHD, why some kids are misdiagnosed when they’re actually suffering from trauma, why psychostimulants can backfire and how we might be overprescribing the wrong doses, why martial arts might outperform cognitive training, how childhood stress reshapes brain wiring, the profound importance of early encouragement and self-concept, how AI and smartphones are degrading our cognitive systems, why social-emotional connection is a prerequisite for learning, and what Adele believes schools are still getting tragically wrong — even today.This is an episode about rewiring how we think about attention, emotion, learning, and what it means to help human beings thrive.

Timestamps:

00:00 Understanding Executive Functions and Their Importance

04:48 The Journey to Discovering the Prefrontal Cortex

11:04 Behavioral Paradigms: Linking Cognition and Brain Function

18:05 ADHD: Understanding the Disorder and Its Nuances

25:56 Dopamine, Focus, and Executive Function

32:58 The Role of Psychostimulants and Long-Term Effects

35:21 Improving Executive Function Beyond Medication

38:00 Brain Plasticity: Can We Train Executive Function at Any Age?

41:26 Self-Identity and Its Impact on Learning and Growth

42:52 The Future of Executive Function in the Age of AI

44:03 AI in Education: Opportunities and Challenges

45:58 Balancing AI Use in Learning

48:04 The Role of Technology in Early Childhood Development

51:57 Attention Span and Distraction in the Digital Age

53:57 Social Interaction and Mental Health

56:03 The Dangers of Over-Reliance on Technology

59:12 The Importance of Social-Emotional Learning

01:03:05 Integrating Emotional Intelligence in Education

01:05:58 The Need for Teacher Training in Child Development

01:09:48 Addressing Childhood Trauma and Mental Health

01:14:03 The Role of Psychedelics in Healing

01:17:08 Conclusion and Future Directions

...

Sponsors:Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3

Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder (Paid Partnership by BetterHelp)

❤️ 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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Andrew Pask is Chief Biology Officer at Colossal Biosciences and a professor of genetics at the University of Melbourne. He’s spent over 30 years on the front lines of marsupial conservation and now leads one of the most ambitious projects in biology: the genetic resurrection and rewilding of the extinct Tasmanian tiger.Sponsors:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3De-extinction isn’t science fiction anymore — it’s a toolkit for saving what’s left of the natural world. From woolly mammoths to dodos to genetically edited quolls, Andrew’s work sits at the crossroads of synthetic biology, ecological restoration, and moral philosophy.Expect to learn why de-extinction might be the only way to preserve biodiversity, how CRISPR and ancient DNA are being used to rebuild lost genomes, what species we can and should bring back, the cultural myths and ethical fears surrounding “playing God,” the truth about the dire wolf announcement, why apex predators matter more than you think, how genetically reprogrammed animals might rescue ecosystems, what Jurassic Park got right — and what it absolutely didn’t, and much more...Timestamps:00:00 The Mission of De-Extinction03:03 Genomic Advances in De-Extinction05:52 The Process of Rebuilding Extinct Species08:53 Conservation and Genetic Diversity12:04 Targeting Endangered Species14:48 Rewilding the Tasmanian Tiger18:06 Monitoring and Managing Ecosystems29:23 The Complexity of Ecosystems and Species Interactions32:01 Genetic Diversity and Its Importance38:12 The Role of Genetic Diversity in Climate Resilience40:51 The Urgency of De-Extinction Technology43:19 The Future of Tasmanian Tigers and Rewilding45:39 Woolly Mammoths: Ecosystem Engineers50:09 Funding and Ethical Considerations in De-Extinction53:42 The Moral Obligation of De-Extinction56:42 Navigating the Controversy of Species Classification01:01:04 The Role of Marketing in Conservation01:04:38 Defining Ethical Boundaries in Genetic Engineering01:10:30 Policy Challenges in Genetic Conservation01:14:06 Future Projects in De-Extinction...❤️ 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/

Karl Friston is one of the most influential neuroscientists alive and the creator of the Free Energy Principle, a unifying theory that aims to explain how brains perceive, act, learn, and remain alive in an uncertain world.

SPONSORS:

Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1

Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3

The brain is not a passive receiver of information. It is an active prediction machine, constantly generating expectations about the world and the body, updating those beliefs when they fail, and acting to make its predictions come true. Under this framework, perception is inference, action is prediction fulfilment, emotion is bodily forecasting, and the self is a model the brain uses to explain its own persistence.

Expect to learn what the Free Energy Principle actually is, why living systems must minimise surprise, how predictive coding and active inference work, why perception is a controlled hallucination, how attention and precision shape experience, what interoceptive inference reveals about emotion and the self, how psychedelics relax beliefs, where consciousness might fit in a predictive hierarchy, and why this theory may be one of the deepest explanations of mind we currently have.

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to the Free Energy Principle

02:54 Deflationary Nature of the Free Energy Principle

05:48 Explaining the Free Energy Principle: High Road vs. Low Road

09:02 Predictive Processing and Perception

11:49 Active Inference and Its Implications

15:07 Interoception and Emotional Inference

18:02 Generative Models and Selfhood

20:54 The Role of Emotions in Predictive Coding

23:55 Transformative Experiences and Learning

26:44 Conclusion: The Practical Applications of the Free Energy Principle

48:58 Understanding the Role of Psychedelics in Therapy

52:48 Mechanisms of False Inference and Precision in the Brain

57:24 Relaxing Priors: The Impact of Psychedelics on Sense-Making

01:01:03 Generative Models: Individual Differences and Shared Structures

01:06:49 Cognitively Impenetrable Illusions and Prior Beliefs

01:15:15 Sensory Attenuation and the Role of Attention

01:19:03 The Free Energy Principle: Implications for Psychiatry

01:25:48 The Future of Neuroscience Education and Research

...

❤️ 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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Dr. Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist, professor at Princeton University, and creator of Attention Schema Theory — one of the most provocative scientific explanations for consciousness to date.

He argues that awareness isn’t magic or mystery — it’s the brain’s simplified internal model of its own attention. A trick of information. A self-portrait painted by neurons. And it just might explain why you think you’re a “you” at all.

Expect to learn why consciousness is a useful illusion, how awareness emerges from neural models, what happens when these models break down in brain damage or stroke, why future AIs might think they’re conscious (and what that means for us), whether subjective experience can be explained without magic, why attention is the gateway to control, how consciousness helps us navigate the social world, what ventriloquism reveals about the mind, and how understanding this theory might shift everything we believe about thought, selfhood, and machine intelligence.

SPONSORS:Try Sentia Spirits this Dry January (10% Off with Giant10): https://sentiaspirits.com/giantsshoulder

Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3

Timestamps:

00:00 Michael Graziano on Consciousness and the Brain

03:47 Can Simple Creatures Be Aware?

06:56 Where Selfhood Begins: Models in the Brain

10:13 Why Awareness Is Useful for Control

14:09 The Phantom Limb Illusion and Consciousness

17:56 Consciousness as a Model, Not a Magic Spark

21:32 What the Brain Tells Itself About Experience

24:40 What Are You Actually Conscious Of?

27:18 Graziano's Critique of the Hard Problem

30:01 How Illusions Like the Body Schema Help Us Understand

33:00 Phantom Limbs, Puppets, and Ghost Awareness

35:08 What Is Attention, Really?

39:02 The Brain’s Internal Sketch of Focus

43:00 Attention Schema Theory Explained

47:09 How Brains Build the Feeling of Mind

50:25 Can Machines Ever Be Truly Conscious?

54:18 AI That Says “I’m Aware” — Should We Believe It?

58:10 When a Chatbot Starts to Suffer

01:02:45 Society’s Slow Acceptance of Machine Awareness

01:07:40 What Makes Human Selfhood So Stable?

01:12:10 Training AI to Build a Model of Us

01:16:05 Does AI Need a Theory of Mind?

01:20:00 Graziano on Theory of Mind and Early Development

01:24:25 Why Modeling Consciousness Matters in AI

01:28:52 Can Language-Free Minds Still Model Others?

01:30:28 ChatGPT and the Hinting Task — Reading Minds?

01:34:12 Storytelling, Semantics, and Machine Intentions

01:38:40 Could an AI Learn a Stable Personality?

01:41:01 What the Next Decade of Neuroscience Might Reveal

01:43:16 Final Thoughts: The Real Importance of Consciousness...❤️

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/

Charles Murray is one of the most influential — and most cancelled — social scientists of the last fifty years. Whether you see him as a dangerous contrarian or a data-driven truth-teller, Murray’s ideas have transformed how we think about intelligence, inequality, class, and what makes a society thrive.SPONSORS:Get Manta Sleep Mask: https://mantasleep.pxf.io/9LXagy and Code GIANTSMANTA10Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3Expect to learn how his years in 1960s Thailand shaped his libertarian worldview, why he thinks welfare programs destroy long-term happiness, what “The Iron Laws of Social Programs” reveal about human behaviour, why he advocates for a Universal Basic Income — and why he believes it could save community, family, and meaning itself. We also cover the controversial genetics of intelligence, embryo selection, the dangers of elite cognitive stratification, and why he thinks Brave New World was more prophetic than 1984.And yes — we go there. Chapter 13. Race, IQ, academic cowardice, media distortion, and why Murray believes honest conversation is the only way forward.This one will provoke, challenge, and surprise you. You won’t walk away thinking the same.Timestamps: 00:00 – Charles Murray’s Mission: Happiness, Policy, and Meaning02:37 – Culture Shock in 1960s Thailand That Changed His Worldview06:07 – What Rural Thai Villages Taught Him About Human Nature12:31 – The Real Argument Behind Losing Ground17:15 – The Iron Laws of Social Programs (And Why They Fail)25:33 – Psilocybin, Cannabis & the Future of Drug Policy29:36 – The Bell Curve: What It Really Said About IQ and Class35:03 – Chapter 13: Race, IQ, and the Media Firestorm40:03 – Why Academia Privately Agreed but Publicly Condemned45:25 – Coming Apart and the Acceptable Version of the Same Argument47:03 – Should Scientists Be Held Responsible for Dangerous Ideas?57:15 – Murray’s Surprising Case for Universal Basic Income01:04:34 – Embryo Selection, Polygenic Scores & IQ Engineering01:12:07 – Brave New World vs 1984: Which Future Are We In?01:16:28 – Fertility Collapse and the Future of Human Societies01:19:11 – What the Internet Gets Wrong About Charles Murray...❤️ 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/

Dr. Rosalind Watts is a clinical psychologist and one of the most thoughtful voices in the modern psychedelic renaissance, known for her work in psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression and her pioneering focus on psychedelic integration.

Psychedelics are often praised for their power to unlock mystical states and treat mental illness, but the real transformation, she argues, happens after the trip ends — in how we integrate what we've seen. And her own harrowing experience with ayahuasca radically reshaped how she now prepares people for the depths they might meet.

Expect to learn why integration is the missing key to lasting psychedelic change, how ayahuasca unearthed her own birth trauma, why ego dissolution is often terrifying before it’s healing, how holotropic breathwork can recreate a trip without drugs, what the “pearl dive” teaches us about the gifts hidden inside emotional pain, how connection to self, others, nature, and even ancestors can rewire a life, why trauma may live in the body as much as the mind, the neuroscience of proprioception and the insula, why psychedelics might be blocked by political and corporate interests, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to Psychedelic Therapy

02:04 Understanding Psilocybin and Its Effects

07:20 The Role of Connectedness in Healing

10:19 Personal Experiences with Psychedelics

13:27 Navigating Challenging Psychedelic Experiences

16:01 The Importance of Community in Psychedelic Therapy

19:18 Exploring Birth Experiences and Psychedelics

29:56 Integration and Personal Growth Through Psychedelics

35:55 Preparing for Psychedelic Experiences

41:27 The Connection Between Mind and Body

47:07 Comparing Different Psychedelics

51:44 Frustrations with Institutional Barriers to Psychedelic Therapy

57:45 Cultural Disconnection and Hope for Change

01:00:02 The Quest for Connectedness

01:02:55 Understanding Connectedness Through Psychedelics

01:06:32 Cultural Perspectives on Connectedness

01:08:45 The Role of Mystical Experiences in Healing

01:11:42 Breaking Old Patterns and Embracing Vulnerability

01:16:36 Integrating Psychedelic Experiences for Lasting Change

...

❤️ 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/

Try Sentia Spirits this Dry January: https://tinyurl.com/giantsshoulder (10% Discount with Code GIANT10)

Professor David Nutt is a neuro­psychopharmacologist, former UK chief drug adviser, and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, Drink?, Cannabis, and Psychedelics. He built the first evidence-based Drug Harm Scale, ran the world’s first LSD brain-scan, and is now engineering hangover-free “alcohol” with GABA science.

After the first drug tier list sparked an overwhelming response, this round two episode goes deeper. In this rapid-fire sequel, Nutt ranks twelve more drugs on the same harm scale, responding directly to audience feedback and tackling substances that viewers demanded we cover. From benzodiazepines and methamphetamine to vaping, ayahuasca, kratom, 2C-B, caffeine, and nitrous oxide, this episode exposes how dose, context, purity, and policy shape real-world risk far more than headlines ever admit.

Expect to learn why benzodiazepine withdrawal can be more dangerous than heroin, how meth differs from “speed” at the molecular and historical level, why vaping nicotine is dramatically safer than smoking, how ayahuasca works as indigenous polypharmacy, what we actually know (and don’t know) about endogenous DMT, why kratom sits between medicine and dependence, how edible cannabis changes overdose risk, why nitrous oxide bans backfire, where 2C-B sits between MDMA and psychedelics, why caffeine can induce seizures at high doses, and how harm reduction consistently beats prohibition when it comes to saving lives.

Timestamps:

01:00 Benzos

14:45 DMT & Ayahuasca

32:23 Meth & Speed

45:47 Nicotine Vapes

52:28 Kratom

55:40 Sentia

58:07 Edible Cannabis

01:06:26 Caffeine

01:09:35 2-CB

01:19:46 Nitrous Oxide ...

Buy Nutt's Books

Drink?: 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 Socials

Facebook - @DrugScienceISCD

Twitter (x) - @drug_scienceInstagram - @drugscienceinfoLinkedIn - @drugscience-ltd

BlueSky - @drugscience.bsky.social

YouTube - @DrugScience

More 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-group

Academic Research: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/research ❤️ 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/

Dr. Tali Sharot is a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Affective Brain Lab, whose research reveals the hidden rules that actually change human behavior, beliefs, and motivation.Most people think facts and logic should be enough to persuade someone, quit a bad habit, or finally convince their dad to exercise. But the brain doesn’t work like that. In this episode, Tali explains why our “priors” and identity make beliefs stubborn, why emotion and storytelling sync brains in a way statistics can’t, and why the real driver of change isn’t knowledge, it’s incentives, rewards, and habit formation.Expect to learn why beliefs and behaviour are only weakly connected, how to use social incentives and immediate rewards to build habits that stick, the surprisingly simple intervention that pushed hospital handwashing compliance to nearly 90%, why punishment often backfires in policy and personal life, how to fight habituation to the best parts of your life through breaks and small changes, and why social media may be the “amygdala of the internet” shaping attention, fear, and belief in the age of AI, VR, and deepfakes…Timestamps: 00:00 Why facts bounce off: priors, identity, motivated reasoning06:06 Stories beat statistics: the emotion engine of persuasion07:52 Brain synchrony: why narratives feel contagious09:27 The “dad won’t exercise” paradox: belief isn’t the problem11:53 The 3 levers of behavior change: social, rewards, progress17:18 Handwashing at 10%: the tiny tweak that hit ~90%19:26 Reward beats punishment: the policy nudges that actually work33:25 Aphantasia: the shocking percentage who can’t visualize34:24 Hedonic adaptation: how to stop taking your life for granted50:03 Social media numbness: when stimulation resets your reward bar55:04 Deepfakes, VR and truth bias: why “corrections” fail01:11:06 Closing: the 17M-view TED Talk and final takeaways...❤️ 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/

I've condensed the best moments from a year of Giant conversations with scientists such as Michael Levin, Terrence Deacon, Anna Ciaunica and more on Diverse Intelligence and multi-scale cognitive biology.

We explore the radical idea that biology itself is cognitive, all the way down, and that intelligence, agency, and problem-solving did not suddenly appear with brains but emerged gradually across evolution. Its the most incredible idea in modern biology. Are cells themselves intelligent or even conscious? Is cognition best understood as a spectrum rather than a category? Do xenobots, organoids, and tissues without brains possess goals, preferences, and problem-solving abilities? And what happens to our ethical frameworks if minds exist far beyond animals and humans?

Timestamps:

00:48 Michael Levin: “Cells were doing advanced behaviours we could NOT have predicted!”

32:42 Philip Ball Meet The Man Who Grew Mini Brains From His Own Skin Cells

43:24 Anna Ciaunica Biology is Cognition The Whole Way Down

54:00 Individual Cells Are Conscious And Intelligent William Miller

01:08:31 How Many Times Has The Brain Evolved Independantly? Terrence Deacon

Full Length Episodes

1) Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin - https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

2) Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life! - https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E

3) Meet the Scientist Proving Your Whole Body is Conscious! - https://youtu.be/GCnz1e54GBI

4) Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious! - https://youtu.be/eNi-_2cOVtc

5) Meet the Scientist Exploring Consciousness Through Thermodynamics! - https://youtu.be/sl79x5yti2g

❤️ 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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

I’ve distilled the most revealing moments from a year of Giant conversations on inner experience & neurodiversity into 52 minutes. This episode explores how radically different our minds really are, why most of us misunderstand our own thoughts, and what happens when you rigorously examine consciousness from the inside out using Descriptive Experience Sampling.Through deep discussion and lived examples, Russell Hurlburt reveals why inner speech is far rarer than people believe, how imagery, emotion, sensory awareness, and unsymbolized thinking shape everyday consciousness, and why questionnaires consistently fail to capture the true structure of the mind. The conversation moves from aphantasia and face blindness to meditation, dreaming, and the unsettling discovery that we may be conscious far more often than we think, even during sleep.Expect to learn why people routinely mislabel their own inner experience, how experience sampling exposes hidden forms of thought, why dreaming and imagination rely on different brain mechanisms, how consciousness can persist outside of dreams during sleep, and why the human brain may be best understood as a vast space for cognitive difference rather than a single shared mental template.Timestamps: 02:15 The Five Main Types Of Inner Experience. Which Do You Have? 16:18 Most People With Faceblindness Don’t Even Know They Have it! 23:52 Why Do Most People With Aphantasia Have Vivid Visual Dreams? 34:14 Are We Secretly Conscious When We Think We’re Sleeping? 45:32 Why Does Everybody Think They Inner Speak? Full Episodes 1) No. 1 Inner Experience Expert: Inner Monologue, Aphantasia and How Your Mind Lies to You - https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg2) Meet the Woman With Zero Mental Imagery, Face Recognition or See in 3D! - https://youtu.be/4NeY7OwwJzk3) The Blind Mind’s Eye: How Aphantasia Is Rewriting Consciousness ! Dr Adam Zeman https://youtu.be/SgA2up6-Bok4) Inner Experience Expert: Inner Monologue, Aphantasia and Why You Can’t Trust Your Own Thoughts 5) No. 1 Inner Experience Expert: I Spent 90 Days Discovering If I Really Inner Speak (SHOCKING) https://youtu.be/N9tO1OLdJto❤️ 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/

Final episode of the Giant's Shoulder Inner Experience Mini-Series.

I spent 10 weeks undergoing the process of descriptive experience sampling in order to peal back the layers of my own inner world. What I discovered truly shocked me.

Experiment Website (All 10 Hours of Interviews and transcripts dissecting my experience): https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/ieo/evan/evan_sampling.html

Check out Sentia Spirits the future of drinking (Use Code GIANT10 for 10% discount off your first purchase) - https://sentiaspirits.com/mcgloughlin4209355084

Dr. Russell Hurlburt is a clinical psychologist and professor, and the creator of Descriptive Experience Sampling, one of the most rigorous methods ever developed for studying inner experience and consciousness from the first-person perspective.

We tend to assume our inner world is obvious, continuous, and shared by everyone else — but it isn’t. Inner speech, imagery, emotion, and thought vary radically across individuals, and most people dramatically misunderstand what is actually happening inside their own minds. This conversation follows a ten-week self-experiment using experience sampling to reveal just how unreliable introspection can be.

Expect to learn why most people overestimate how much they inner speak, the difference between inner speech and unsymbolized thinking, why sensory awareness dominates conscious experience, how emotion can drive behavior without being consciously felt, what it means to think without knowing the contents of your thoughts, why questionnaires fail to capture inner experience, how language distorts introspection, why individual variation matters more than personality or gender, and what this all means for neuroscience, psychology, and theories of consciousness…

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Mapping Inner Experience Changes How You See Reality

03:15 The Five Frequent Phenomena Explained (Inner Speech, Imagery, Feelings & More)

07:05 Why People Assume Everyone Thinks Like Them

10:55 Comment Section Chaos: Why Inner Experience Triggers So Much Certainty

14:10 Introducing Experience Sampling and Why the First Day Is Thrown Out

17:45 Evan’s Results Revealed: Sensory Awareness Dominates

21:30 Bodily Sensations, Color, and the Hidden Structure of Awareness

25:10 Why Feelings Appear So Rare in the Data (And Why That’s Misleading)

29:00 Emotion vs Feeling: Having Emotions Without Experiencing Them

32:40 Thinking Without Knowing What You’re Thinking About

36:20 Deep Thought Without Words: Philosophical Thinking Below Language

40:10 Echoes of Thought and the Afterimage of Thinking

44:00 Why Inner Speech Is Vastly Overestimated

47:30 Inner Speech vs Thinking: How to Tell the Difference

51:10 Why Questionnaires Fail at Capturing Inner Experience

55:00 The Refrigerator Light Problem of Introspection

58:30 Are Introverts and Extroverts Experiencing Different Minds?

01:02:10 Why Most People Don’t Actually Know Their Inner Experience

01:05:40 The Illusion of Perfect Self-Knowledge

01:09:30 What the Beeper Really Does (And What It Doesn’t)

01:13:20 Why Confidence About the Mind Is Usually a Red Flag

01:17:00 Radical Individual Differences in Conscious Experience

01:21:00 What This Means for Psychology, Consciousness, and Self-Understanding

01:26:00 Final Reflections: Living With the Knowledge That Minds Differ

01:31:30 What Listeners Should Take Away From This Experiment

...

❤️ 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/

Dr. Robert Prentner is a philosopher of mind and consciousness researcher whose work bridges mathematics, phenomenology, information theory, and the foundations of reality. In this episode, he offers a rare deep dive into consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe, the interface theory of perception, and the radical idea that physics itself may emerge from networks of conscious agents.Consciousness is not just subjective experience. It may be our only window into an underlying structure of reality that is far stranger than space, time, or matter. And understanding that structure could reshape how we think about minds, AI, biology, physics, and the nature of existence itself.Expect to learn why most consciousness researchers quietly converge on “what it is like to be” as their working definition of consciousness, why subjective experience may be far larger than our individual minds, why Prentner thinks a purely physicalist story struggles to explain inner experience, and how the interface theory of perception reframes everything we see as a species-specific user interface rather than a window onto objective reality.Timestamps: 02:30 Defining Consciousness08:25 Conscious Agent Theory Explained14:07 Phenomenal vs Access Consciousness20:05 Materialism vs Fundamental Consciousness25:48 Fitness Beats Truth Theorem31:23 Intuition and Meaning in Consciousness35:56 Exploring Consciousness and Meaning37:53 The Nature of Information in Biology41:04 Information as a Fundamental Concept43:17 Consciousness and Information Theory45:18 The Intersection of Consciousness and Physics49:24 Future of Consciousness and Physics Research52:51 Practical Applications of Consciousness Research54:23 Interface Theory of Perception and Consciousness01:05:13 Exploring the Nature of Time01:10:30 Quantum Entanglement and Reality01:14:40 Conscious AI: Perspectives and Possibilities01:26:26 Biological Properties and Consciousness in AI...❤️ 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/id1752486249Check out my first conversation with Robert here: https://youtu.be/U9IzFqNGf40Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

I've condensed a full year of Giant conversations on topics of drug science and psychedelics into just 59 minutes. From life-saving medical cannabis to MDMA therapy, the serotonin myth, DMT entities, and the future of psychedelic mental health care, this episode brings together the most shocking, eye-opening and culturally important insights from leading experts — all in one place.Expect to learn from David Nutt on why medical cannabis laws are still failing sick children, from Dr Joanna Moncrief on how the serotonin imbalance theory of depression collapsed under scientific scrutiny and why antidepressants may work for reasons entirely different from what we’ve been told, from David Nutt on how MDMA helps people safely revisit trauma, the real neurobiology of psychedelic experiences and from Adam Saffron on what DMT is doing in the brain, why some users encounter “entities,” how misinformed drug policy has distorted science for decades, and much more…Timestamps: 00:42 David Nutt: "They're Lying To You About Cannabis"09:42 Christof Koch: "The Psychedelic Trip That Convinced Me Consciousness is Fundamental" 23:17 Joanna Moncrief: "Debunking the Serotonin Hypothesis of Depression"37:11 David Nutt: "The Insane MDMA Classification Story" 49:49 Adam Saffron: Why Do People See Mechanical Elves on DMT?...Episode Links: 1) Meet the Neuroscientist Fired For Exposing the Truth! Dr David Nutt - https://youtu.be/BLk6a5Vb2O02) The Psychedelic Trip that Convinced Christof Koch Consciousness is Fundamental - https://youtu.be/kJlV-b2bvaE3) Meet the Psychiatrist Debunking The Chemical Imbalance Myth That Fooled Millions! - https://youtu.be/lJq400heTaE4) Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List - https://youtu.be/G-OZ_UBGvvo5) Meet the Neuroscientist Unifying Consciousness, Free Energy & Psychedelics! - https://youtu.be/wlFt7jcaZC0...❤️ 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/

Dr. Johannes Kleiner is a mathematician, physicist, and one of the leading architects of mathematical consciousness science — an emerging field attempting to describe subjective experience with the same rigour that physics brings to space, time, and matter.

He studies the deep structure of awareness itself, from the geometry of colour and time to the dynamics of minimal experience, and is helping rebuild major theories like Integrated Information Theory and the Free Energy Principle on clearer mathematical foundations.

Expect to learn why experience can be treated as a structured space, how meditation reveals the building blocks of consciousness, why today’s AI systems almost certainly aren’t conscious, how quantum theories both illuminate and confuse the debate, what a “no-go theorem” means for artificial minds, and why the future of consciousness science may depend on mapping the shape of experience rather than its location in the brain.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Consciousness Needs Mathematics

02:12 Descartes’ Coordinates and Mapping the Mind

05:10 What Phenomenology Really Studies

07:40 The Geometry of Experience: Is Mind a Structure?

10:25 Colour Spaces and the Mathematics of Seeing

13:18 “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” — Explained

15:42 Meditation and Minimal Experience

18:58 Sensory Expansion and New Human Senses

24:55 The Big Problems in Consciousness Science Today

27:11 Rebuilding Integrated Information Theory

33:39 Predictive Processing in Plain English

40:02 The Free Energy Principle: Why Brains Predict Everything

49:24 Emergence: How Complex Systems Create Mind

52:01 Will Mathematics Become the Next Microscope for Consciousness?54:46 Quantum Theories of Mind: Penrose, Hameroff, and the Debate

01:03:59 Why Today’s AI Is Almost Certainly Not Conscious

01:13:13 The No-Go Theorem: Why Silicone-Based AI Can’t Feel

01:23:05 What Makes a System “Alive” or “Aware”?

01:26:25 Neuromorphic Hardware and Future Conscious Machines

01:32:32 Does Consciousness Force a New View of Reality?

...

❤️ 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/id1752486249

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

I've condensed the best moments from a year of consciousness conversations on The Giant's Shoulder 2025 into 42 minutes. Truly the most Giant episode of the entire year!

You’ll hear groundbreaking ideas from Anil Seth, Michael Levin, Nick Lane, Peter Godfrey Smith and Mark Solms as they explore the deepest scientific questions we can ask. Is perception just the brain’s best guess? Do bacteria have primitive feelings? Why are nervous systems so central to the evolution of subjectivity? Could machines ever develop inner experience? And is consciousness something we create, or something we reveal?

Expect to learn why your brain constantly updates its predictions to control hallucinated reality, how membrane charge and metabolic states may be the physical roots of feeling, why large scale neural oscillations unify experience, and why affective consciousness might be the true foundation of the mind.Timestamps:

00:00 Intro00:31 Anil Seth: The Cognitively Impenetrable Messi Illusion 07:42 Michael Levin: Radical Theories Of Consciousness17:06 Peter Godfrey Smith: How Animals First Evolved Experience 23:39 Nick Lane: How Bioelectricity and Metabolism Creates Consciousness33:27 Mark Solms: How Consciousness is Raw Feeling...Episode Links1) No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI - https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o2) Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin - https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM3) Meet the Neuroscientist Exploring the World of Animal Consciousness - https://youtu.be/DSCX4A8q9sY4) Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Aliens, Metabolism, Bioelectricity, Consciousness and Ai! - https://youtu.be/2Nq-Whmpw5I5) Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms - https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc❤️ 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/

Dr. Adam Frank is a theoretical astrophysicist, NPR science commentator, and professor at the University of Rochester whose work spans the cosmos—from dying stars to the deep nature of consciousness.

In this episode, we explore why life—not black holes—is the most mind-blowing problem in physics, how bacteria challenge our view of machines, and why the science of the future must take subjective experience seriously. We break down why LLMs aren’t even in the right stadium when it comes to sentience, how quantum mechanics reveals the blind spots of reductionism, and what it would take to detect intelligent life on distant worlds. Plus, a journey through Zen meditation, alien technosignatures, and the real problem with Skynet.

Expect to learn why science needs a reboot, why your brain isn’t just code, and how a planet’s lights might give away its civilization.

Timestamps:

02:30 The Emergence of Life Beyond Reductionism

05:33 The Journey from Physics to Consciousness

08:28 Interrogating Inner Experience

11:25 The Role of Subjectivity in Science

14:25 AI and the Misconceptions of Consciousness

17:23 Quantum Mechanics and the Measurement Problem

23:18 Life as an Emergent Phenomenon

29:26 Rethinking Cognition and Experience

32:30 The Challenge of Subjective Experience in Science

36:26 Agency and the Physics of Life

38:57 Astrobiology and the Search for Life

45:25 Technosignatures and the Search for Intelligent Life

51:59 Mars Discoveries and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life

...

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Get Adam Franks Books: The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience: https://amzn.to/4p56MDU

The Little Book of Aliens: https://amzn.to/3KbkBBJ

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is a neurogeneticist at Trinity College Dublin and author of Innate and Free Agents, two very influential books on how brain wiring shapes who we become.

Autism is one of the most heritable conditions in psychiatry — yet for years, headlines have claimed gut bacteria, probiotics, and mouse models could explain or even treat it. Kevin’s new paper tears that story open, revealing how tiny samples, noisy data, and weak statistics created an illusion of evidence that never truly existed.

Expect to learn why early microbiome studies were almost guaranteed to produce false positives, how mouse “models of autism” rely on behaviours that barely map onto human symptoms, why effect sizes of ~1.1 don’t mean what people think, what proper replication actually looks like, why placebo-controlled trials keep finding nothing, how hype and incentives distort entire fields, and how bad science creates real-world harm for autistic people and their families.

Timestamps:

03:30 Introduction and Gratitude

04:30 The Link Between Gut Microbiome and Autism

07:08 The Tylenol Controversy and Misinterpretation of Data

11:24 The Complexity of Autism and Its Causes

16:12 Exploring the Gut-Brain Axis

25:34 Evidence Line 1: Human Observational Data

42:42 Understanding Causation in Microbiome Research

45:16 The Role of Effect Size in Autism Studies

48:04 Confounding Factors in Scientific Research

54:30 Evidence Line 2: Mouse Models of Autism

59:20 The Limitations of Germ-Free Mouse Studies

01:05:45 Statistical Flaws in Microbiome Research

01:13:14 Skepticism in Behavioural Studies and Drug Testing

01:17:15 Understanding Autism's Heterogeneity

01:19:14 The Challenges of Diagnosing Autism

01:24:35 Evidence Line 3: Human Trials

01:29:28 The Importance of Placebo-Controlled Trials

01:34:42 The Role of Citations in Scientific Literature

01:40:15 The Ethics of Marketing Probiotics for Autism

01:45:17 Current Research and Future Directions

...

Professor Lee Cronin is one of the world’s most visionary chemists — the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow — whose work is redefining how we search for alien life, invent new drugs, and understand the fundamental rules of the universe.

He’s the creator of Chemputation, the first real attempt to program matter itself, and co-author of Assembly Theory, a radical new framework that measures the “memory” embedded in molecules — revealing how chemistry becomes biology, how complexity evolves, and how we might detect life anywhere in the cosmos. His lab is building inorganic cells, digitising chemical synthesis, designing billions of new drug candidates at once, and working with NASA to develop a universal test for extraterrestrial life.

Expect to learn why the universe has a memory, why copy number may be the most important concept in astrobiology, how assembly index can quantify causation and complexity, how Cronin’s “chemputer” could democratise drug discovery, how mass spectrometry can reveal alien biosignatures, why he thinks life on other planets won’t look like Earth at all, why chemistry and consciousness are linked through causation, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:02:30 Celebrating Chemify's Milestone Funding

03:06:34 Understanding Chemputation: Programming Chemistry

06:10:38 Exploring Chemical Space: The Universe of Molecules

09:10:19 The Future of Drug Discovery: Beyond Current Limitations

12:26:54 The Intersection of Chemistry and Biology

15:21:51 Building the Chemifarm: A New Era in Chemistry

18:22:50 The Vision for Personalized Medicine

23:19:49 Assembly Theory: A New Approach to Drug Discovery

43:21:51 The Challenge of Pain Management and Addiction

46:44:14 Exploring Assembly Theory and Drug Development

52:34:04 The Assembly Index: Measuring Complexity in Chemistry

54:31:01 Assembly Theory and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

01:02:53 Rethinking Astrobiology: Life Beyond Earth

01:17:26 Radical Ideas: Faster Than Light Information Transfer

...

Black Friday Sale: Get 15% OFF + Free Kit Manta Masks for limited time: https://mantasleep.pxf.io/9LXagy and Code GIANTSMANTA10

Check out Sentia Spirits the future of drinking (Use Code GIANT10 for 10% discount off your first purchase: https://sentiaspirits.com/mcgloughlin4209355084

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Earl K. Miller is an MIT neuroscientist and one of the most influential thinkers in modern brain science. His 2001 paper on prefrontal cortex function is one of the most cited in the entire field, transforming how we understand thought, control, and the architecture of the mind.

Miller’s research reveals that the brain doesn’t compute like a digital machine — it builds models of the world and uses top-down control to guide perception, attention, and action. He discovered mixed selectivity, showing that neurons flexibly encode combinations of rules, goals, and context, giving rise to the incredible adaptability of human cognition. And his more recent work uncovers how dynamic oscillatory brain waves — alpha, beta, and gamma rhythms — synchronize vast networks of neurons, shaping working memory, decision-making, and even consciousness itself.

Expect to learn why the prefrontal cortex is the brain’s command centre, how the mind constructs internal models of reality, why neurons don’t have fixed jobs, how mixed selectivity unlocks high-dimensional thought, why brain waves may be the real “language of the mind,” how oscillations unify brain regions into consciousness, what anesthesia reveals about losing subjective experience, whether consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of coordinated rhythms, why digital AI misses the essence of thought, what it would take to build conscious machines, how the brain computes like an analog system, and much more…

...Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

03:00 The Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience

06:03 Understanding the Prefrontal Cortex's Role

09:00 Consciousness and Decision Making

11:53 The Complexity of Memory and Representation

14:54 Mixed Selectivity and Neural Networks

17:58 Dynamic Stability in Neural Systems

20:55 The Role of Oscillations in Brain Function

23:39 Analog Computation in the Cortex

34:54 Understanding Brain Waves and Analog Computation

38:41 The Efficiency of Analog vs. Digital Computing

40:31 Biology's Energy Efficiency in Computation

41:58 Emerging Paradigms in Neuroscience

46:25 Consciousness and Brain States

53:58 Analog Computation and the Nature of Consciousness

59:57 The Nature of Consciousness

01:02:24 Comparative Consciousness: Humans and Other Species

01:05:10 Integration and Complexity in Consciousness

01:10:41 The Role of Information Integration in Consciousness

01:14:12 Agency and Consciousness in Biological Systems

01:17:43 AI and the Question of Consciousness

01:24:02 The Future of AI and Human Intelligence...

Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/Neuroscience Products I Swear By (Supports the Channel)Sentia Spirits: https://sentiaspirits.com/mcgloughlin4209355084Manta Sleep Mask: Get the Comfiest Sleep Mask on the Planet (Use Code GIANTSMANTA10 https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL )Brain.FM: Music Entrainment for Focused Deep Work (30 Day Free Trial: https://www.brain.fm/giantsshoulder)Consensus.AI: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeFollow My Neuroscience Podcast - The Giants Shoulder Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=b33232eae67b4126Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/brief-enquiry-to-the-brain/id1752486249

Dr. Stephen Grossberg is the founder of computational neuroscience and creator of Adaptive Resonance Theory, one of the most important and misunderstood breakthroughs in brain science. Often called the Einstein of the Mind, he wrote the first neural network equations at just 17 years old, laying the mathematical foundations for modern AI decades before computers could even measure the brain.

Grossberg’s ideas have powered technologies at DARPA, Boeing, and even the NSA, yet he claims to be the victim of one of the largest plagiarism scandals in scientific history, involving several Nobel Prize winners who, he says, built their reputations on his work. Now in his eighties, he’s breaking his silence on the real story behind the algorithms that shaped both human and machine intelligence.

Expect to learn how Adaptive Resonance Theory explains how we learn new things without forgetting the old, why Grossberg believes modern AI and large language models like ChatGPT are fundamentally broken, the neuroscience of consciousness and the six resonances that give rise to awareness, why attention and emotion are inseparable, how perception is shaped by feedback rather than feedforward processing, what “surface shroud resonance” reveals about the feeling of seeing, and why the true brain-inspired future of AI might depend on ideas the world ignored for half a century.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Forgotten Father of Artificial Intelligence

03:15 Writing the First Neural Network Equations at 17

08:10 Modeling the Mind Before Brain Scanners Existed

13:24 How Adaptive Resonance Theory Changed Everything

18:37 The Biggest Plagiarism Scandal in Science?

24:58 How His Equations Were Used by DARPA, Boeing, and the NSA

31:20 Why Modern AI Still Gets the Brain Wrong

38:16 The Fatal Flaw Inside Deep Learning and ChatGPT

45:42 How the Brain Learns Without Forgetting

52:49 Consciousness as Resonance — The Feedback Loop That Feels

59:33 The Six Resonances That Create Awareness

01:06:57 The Thanksgiving Turkey Experiment Explained

01:14:40 The Emotional Side of Intelligence and Consciousness

01:22:19 Building a Brain from Silicon — Vision, Emotion, and Meaning

01:30:44 The Mind–Body Problem and the Limits of Equations

01:38:12 What Science Still Can’t Explain About Experience

01:45:26 Can Machines Ever Truly Be Conscious?

01:52:48 The Legacy of the Real Father of AI

...

Neuroscience Products I Swear By (Supports the Channel)

Sentia Spirits: https://sentiaspirits.com/mcgloughlin4209355084

Manta Sleep Mask: Get the Comfiest Sleep Mask on the Planet (Use Code GIANTSMANTA10 https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL )

Brain.FM](http://brain.fm/): Music Entrainment for Focused Deep Work (30 Day Free Trial: https://www.brain.fm/giantsshoulder)

Consensus.AI (http://consensus.ai/): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

Follow My Neuroscience Podcast - The Giants Shoulder

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=b33232eae67b4126Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/brief-enquiry-to-the-brain/id1752486249

Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley is a neuroscientist and psychedelics researcher whose work is transforming how we understand trauma, addiction, and mental health. From cannabis and psychosis to MDMA and ibogaine, she sits at the frontier of how brain science meets healing.

Grace has led research with the Heroic Hearts Project, helping veterans recover from PTSD through psychedelic therapy, and founded Hystelica, the world’s first research initiative focused on women’s health in psychedelic science. Her studies on cannabis, brain development, and the endocannabinoid system have influenced how clinicians, policymakers, and scientists think about drugs and the mind.

Expect to learn how cannabis actually affects the developing brain, what the data really says about psychosis and THC, why CBD might protect against those effects, how psychedelics like MDMA and ibogaine are being used to treat trauma and addiction, the biological differences that make women’s brains respond differently to psychedelics, what the FDA’s recent MDMA rejection means for the future of mental health, why psychedelic therapy works on both the mind and the brain, and how this new neuroscience could redefine healing itself — and possibly the future of psychiatry.Subscribe to discover why your brain on drugs might not be what you think — and why the future of mental health may depend on rethinking everything we were told about them.

Timestamps:

00:00 Cannabis vs Alcohol: Which Is More Dangerous for the Brain?

04:15 How Cannabis Affects the Teenage Brain and Memory

08:10 Can Cannabis Trigger Psychosis? The Real Science Explained

12:00 The Right Age and Safe Use for Cannabis

16:25 Why Lifestyle and Genetics Matter More Than You Think

21:50 The Forgotten Endocannabinoid System and Medical Cannabis

27:00 The Politics of Drugs: How Science Lost to Bureaucracy

33:05 The MDMA Ruling That Shook Psychedelic Science

38:10 How Psychedelics Are Healing Veterans with PTSD

49:40 Ibogaine: The Psychedelic That Can Reset Addiction

55:20 How Hormones and Gender Shape Psychedelic Experiences

01:03:30 Why Ceremony and Ritual Amplify Psychedelic Healing

01:10:55 Can Psychedelics and Cannabis Improve Aging and Mental Health?

01:12:35 The Future of Psychedelic Neuroscience and Mental Health

...

Check out Hystelica (Grace's Non-Profit, that provides education, research and advocacy around women and psychedelics)

Check out Heroic Hearts: A Veterans charity that uses psychedelics, that Grace is the research director of.

Check out Drug Science (Website - https://www.drugscience.org.uk/Prof Nutt Twitter (X) - @ProfDavidNutt

Drug Science Socials

Facebook - @DrugScienceISCDTwitter (x) - @drug_scienceInstagram - @drugscienceinfoLinkedIn - @drugscience-ltdBlueSky - @drugscience.bsky.social

YouTube - @DrugScienceMore Resources on Drug SafetyMedical Cannabis: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-cannabis-working-group

Medical Psychedelics: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-psychedelics-working-groupHarm Reduction: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/enhanced-harm-reduction-working-group

Academic Research: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/research

Neuroscience Products I Swear By (Supports the Channel)

Sentia Spirits: https://sentiaspirits.com/mcgloughlin4209355084Manta Sleep Mask: Get the Comfiest Sleep Mask on the Planet (Use Code GIANTSMANTA10 https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL )Brain.FM: Music Entrainment for Focused Deep Work (30 Day Free Trial: https://www.brain.fm/giantsshoulder)Consensus.AI: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

Dr. Sarah McKay is a neuroscientist, author, and science communicator whose work is redefining what we know about women’s brains — from hormones and birth control to motherhood and mental health. She’s the author of The Women’s Brain Book, Baby Brain, and Brain Health for Dummies, and host of ABC’s Catalyst, where she brings neuroscience to life on screen.Check Out Sarahs Books The Women's Brain Book: The neuroscience of health, hormones and happiness: https://amzn.to/3LiixYNBaby Brain: The surprising neuroscience of how pregnancy and motherhood sculpt our brains and change our minds: https://amzn.to/47SIG9fBrain Health For Dummies: https://amzn.to/47C70uCSarah has spent her career debunking the myths that hormones “run the show,” revealing instead how the female brain is adaptable, resilient, and constantly changing through puberty, pregnancy, and menopause.Expect to learn how the pill reshapes the brain and influences attraction, why mood changes during the menstrual cycle are far more complex than we think, how pregnancy and motherhood physically rewire neural circuits for empathy and care, why “baby brain” might actually be a superpower, how men’s hormones change after fatherhood, how AI is helping scientists uncover hidden “pregnancy signatures” in the brain, and what neuroscience gets wrong — and right — about women.Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction – What Men Don’t Know About Women’s Brains03:14 Myths About Hormones and Emotion08:29 How Scientists Actually Measure Emotion12:26 The Constructed Nature of Feelings17:05 PMS, Expectation, and the Power of Belief20:18 How the Pill Changes the Brain26:20 The Pill, Mood, and Depression Risk33:35 Attraction, Personality, and the Hormone Myth39:04 Are We Rewiring Evolution Through the Pill?44:02 Maternal Instinct and the Neuroscience of Motherhood52:16 How Pregnancy Rewires the Brain57:26 AI, Plasticity, and the “Pregnancy Signature”01:03:26 What Happens to the Father’s Brain01:08:03 The Future of Women’s Brain Health...Neuroscience Products I Swear By (Supports the Channel)Sentia Spirits: https://sentiaspirits.com/mcgloughlin4209355084Manta Sleep Mask: Get the Comfiest Sleep Mask on the Planet (Use Code GIANTSMANTA10 https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL )Brain.FM: Music Entrainment for Focused Deep Work (30 Day Free Trial: https://www.brain.fm/giantsshoulder)Consensus.AI: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeFollow My Neuroscience Podcast - The Giants Shoulder Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=b33232eae67b4126Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/brief-enquiry-to-the-brain/id1752486249

Michael Cohen is a neurofeedback pioneer and director of the Center for Brain Training, where he’s spent over two decades helping people rewire their brains — not with medication, but with real-time feedback from their own brainwaves.

According to Michael, Neurofeedback could one of the most powerful — and misunderstood — tools in mental health. It uses EEG signals to teach your brain how to regulate itself, improving mood, sleep, focus, trauma recovery and more. And the results can be shockingly fast.

Expect to learn how brainwaves like alpha, beta, and theta shape your mental state, what happens when your brain becomes dysregulated, why left-frontal brain activity is key to mood, how elite athletes use neurofeedback to gain a competitive edge, how trauma and anxiety show up in EEG patterns, the difference between neurofeedback and traditional therapy, what a brain map actually reveals, why your brain is programmable, and how you can begin training yours to heal, adapt and thrive — in just minutes.

Timestamps:

02:15 Introduction to Neurofeedback Training

06:57 Personal Journey and Motivation Behind Neurofeedback

11:34 Understanding Neurofeedback and Brain Function

18:52 Neurofeedback in the Context of Depression

26:08 How Neurofeedback Sessions Work

33:46 Variability in Brain Maps and Attention Circuits

37:55 Understanding Neurofeedback and Its Efficacy

41:35 Research Insights on Neurofeedback for ADHD and Seizures

45:39 Barriers to Acceptance in the Medical Community

47:31 Neurofeedback in Professional Sports

54:03 Transformative Case Studies in Neurofeedback 01:01:40 Sustaining Benefits of Neurofeedback Over Time 01:10:42 The Future of Neurofeedback and AI Integration

...

Neuroscience Products I Swear By (Supports the Channel)

Sentia Spirits: https://sentiaspirits.com/mcgloughlin4209355084

Manta Sleep Mask: Get the Comfiest Sleep Mask on the Planet (Use Code GIANTSMANTA10 https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL )

Brain.FM: Music Entrainment for Focused Deep Work (30 Day Free Trial: https://www.brain.fm/giantsshoulder)

Consensus.AI: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

Follow My Neuroscience Podcast - The Giants Shoulder Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=b33232eae67b4126

Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/brief-enquiry-to-the-brain/id1752486249

Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin is a neuroscientist, molecular biologist, and author of One Hand Clapping: A Natural History of the Mind — a groundbreaking exploration of how consciousness, memory, and intelligence evolved from the simplest forms of life.

In this episode, Nikolay reveals the extraordinary idea that memory isn’t just in your brain — it’s a universal feature of life itself. Every cell in your body can “remember” patterns of experience, learn from them, and change its behavior — using the same molecular logic that neurons use to form thoughts. This ancient cellular intelligence may even hold the key to understanding consciousness, emotion, and the mind-body connection.

Expect to learn why the difference between mind and body is an illusion, how single cells can distinguish patterns in time, why the same molecules that encode your memories also regulate your organs, how consciousness emerges gradually through information integration, why information might be more fundamental than matter, how AI and synthetic biology could help us rebuild the mind from first principles, the mystery of “obelisks” — unknown structures hidden inside your cells — and what all this means for trauma, emotion, free will, and the future of neuroscience.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

03:15 Understanding Cellular Memory

06:20 Emergence of Memory: Human vs. Cellular

09:03 Defining Memory: Perspectives and Critiques

12:21 Research on Non-Neural Memory

15:20 The Spacing Effect in Cellular Memory

18:24 Mechanisms of Memory Encoding in Cells

21:04 Cellular Memory and Emotion

24:22 Consciousness in Cells: A Philosophical Inquiry

27:08 Implications of Cellular Memory for Biology and Medicine

30:10 The Future of Understanding Consciousness

39:57 The Nature of Consciousness

43:10 Reframing Our Understanding of Consciousness

45:53 Tracing the Origins of Consciousness

48:46 Information vs. Matter: The Fundamental Debate

52:24 Artificial Consciousness: A New Frontier

55:35 The Ethics of AI and Consciousness

57:46 Defining Consciousness: A Democratic Process?

01:00:51 The Expansive Potential of Biological Understanding

01:03:02 The Future of AI and Consciousness

01:09:26 The Mystery of Obelisks and Genetic Composition

01:13:57 Synthetic Biology: The Future of Creation

01:18:01 Exploring Cellular Memory and Its Implications

01:22:00 The Gut-Brain Connection and Memory

01:26:51 Trauma and the Body: A New Perspective

01:29:52 Shifting Perspectives on Dopamine and Language

...

Neuroscience Products I Swear By (Supports the Channel)

Sentia Spirits: https://sentiaspirits.com/mcgloughlin4209355084

Manta Sleep Mask: Get the Comfiest Sleep Mask on the Planet (Use Code GIANTSMANTA10 https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL )

Brain.FM: Music Entrainment for Focused Deep Work (30 Day Free Trial: https://www.brain.fm/giantsshoulder)

Consensus.AI: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

Follow My Neuroscience Podcast - The Giants Shoulder

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=b33232eae67b4126

Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/brief-enquiry-to-the-brain/id1752486249