The Giants Shoulder

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: [email protected] ❤️ 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: [email protected]
❤️ 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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]