The Giants Shoulder

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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
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Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeDr 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-Harris03:01 The Journey into Psychedelics06:10 First Brain Scans with Psychedelics12:06 Understanding Brain Activity and Psychedelics17:49 The Entropic Brain Theory24:02 Consciousness and Brain Entropy30:10 Decoding Conscious Experience40:49 Exploring the Entropic Brain Model45:24 The Limits of Consciousness and Ego50:11 Psychedelics and Evolutionary Perspectives53:31 Shared Psychedelic Experiences and Archetypes01:00:06 The Nature of Hallucinations and Collective Unconscious01:04:34 Entropy, Connectivity, and Brain Function01:17:02 The Role of Serotonin Receptors in Psychedelic Experiences01:20:46 The Mechanisms of Psychedelics01:30:18 Cultural Perspectives on Psychedelics01:39:13 Psychedelics and Self-Understanding01:48:36 Cross-Cultural Studies in Psychedelic Research01:53:25 The Future of Psychedelics in Mental Health...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/

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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