Giants Shoulder

A Biology & Consciousness podcast chronically the bio-singularity. Three times per week I speak with leading scientists at the bleeding edge of AI synthetic biology, consciousness & inner experience, genetics, psychedelics and drug science. Giants Shoulder is intended to be accessible & entertaining for all ages. No idea is too strange, tackled with genuine curiosity and technical rigour. Come follow the journey as I have my brain melted and ontology warped on a regular basis. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is founder of Giants Shoulder.

Giants Shoulder is a science podcast hosted by Evan McGloughlin, with 159 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Evan McGloughlin hosts Giants Shoulder, a science show with 159 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Giants Shoulder

  #155 - Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of

  Sep 14, 20261h 26m

  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

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  Episode #154

  #154 Meet The Greatest End-Of-Life Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of

  Sep 11, 20261h 27mS2

  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

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  Giants Shoulder

  #153 - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Does Recreational Heroin

  Sep 7, 20261h 14m

  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

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  Giants Shoulder

  #152 - Meet The Biophysicist Who Accidentally Discovered Telepathy

  Sep 3, 20261h 38m

  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

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  Episode #151

  #151 - Meet the Greatest Lucid Dreaming Scientist You've Never Heard Of

  Aug 31, 20261h 19mS2

  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

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