Evan McGloughlin
@evan_mcgl • 4,673 subscribers
Founder of Giant's Shoulder. Mapping The Biological Singularity. [email protected]
Videos
"We taxed the ecstasy dealers. They donated 20,000 MDMA pills, and they gave me 19,000 at $3 a dose when it was selling for like $8." "We used that to make legal MDMA, and to make the first 28-day toxicity studies in the dog and the rat, all to support the effort to challenge the DEA." "The first criminalisation of MDMA was itself illegal. We can sell the drug, we can make all this money, and we can use that to sue the DEA." "The effect sizes for SSRIs and PTSD are very small. They're barely effective. But the effect sizes for MDMA is very large. When you add MDMA + therapy, now it's two-thirds no longer have PTSD. It's twice as good." Rick Doblin, Ph.D., of MAPS has the most remarkable story and the world owes him a debt for his efforts in pushing forward drug science. Check out the episode ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin152,163 views • 14 days ago
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"I made a kilogram and a half of pure MDMA for $4,000. So that was quite a deal." "I laid back and closed my eyes and all of a sudden I was projected outside the known universe. I was projected into infinite nothingness." "Suppose consciousness is not in the brain at all. The brain is like a recording head on a tape recorder, and it records it on some type of energy field associated with our being — whatever you want to call it, soul, lifeforce, whatever." The legend David Nichols is live now ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin526,584 views • 3 months ago
"I literally have the technology to create the zombie apocalypse." "I can eliminate the desire for sleep. I can make you voraciously aggressive. I can increase your appetite for brains. I can turn off the circuits responsible for the sensation of pain. Whatever you can imagine, we can do — and we can turn it on and off with a pill." David Nichols and Bryan Roth have carried psychedelic science on their backs for decades. Nichols is the chemist who hand synthesised the molecules behind every famous trial, while Bryan is the pharmacologist who figured out how they actually work in the brain. One made the keys. The other mapped the locks. They're here together for the first time on the Giant's Shoulder to discuss the past, present and insane future of drugs & psychedelics medicine.⬇️ BryanRoth
Evan McGloughlin109,938 views • 25 days ago
"I fell to the floor of the hut, ayahuasca pouring out of my mouth, screaming for help — and no one could hear me. My teacher told me afterward: you got caught in a shamanic battle." "It can't be real because it's not real. That was my logic — as a trained psychiatrist." "I handed a shaman pure crystal DMT. He'd never seen it in his life. He studied it and said: 'There's far too much energy in too small a thing.' He was exactly right." "I showed Amazonian shamans our DNA results. They just shrugged: 'We've known that for thousands of years. We call it cleaning ancestral lines.' Then my teacher said — 'I've been doing it to you, Simon. For years. You just didn't know.'" Anyone else tempted to try ayahuasca? The incredible Simon Ruffell is live below 🔽
Evan McGloughlin87,545 views • 1 month ago
"There seems to be six levels to the DMT experience — each with their own characteristic mathematical properties." "On DMT, you go from a three-fold rotation, to a four-fold, to a six-fold rotation. The symmetries become more packed as the dose increases." "Pleasure has a mathematical shape. We are essentially making the bet that there's a very, very tight correlation between the symmetry of this mathematical object and how good or bad an experience feels." One of my favourite episodes I've ever done with Giant Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson. Check it out, you won't regret it 🙏
Evan McGloughlin87,233 views • 2 months ago
We are truly standing on the shoulders of Giants today! Michael Levin together with Earl K. Miller "Physicalism has been dead since the time of Pythagoras, and probably long before that." "The basement of all this, I don't think, is math. I think this is behavioral science. I think math is a behavioural science of a certain kind of pattern." "It's a bioelectric code, because the network instructs the patterns of gene expression and cell behaviour and morphogenesis. If you want the system to make an eye on a tadpole's tail, or a flatworm that has two heads… you have a chance to do that." Scientists working at the bleeding edge of bioelectricity at very different scales. They agree stuff, they disagree on stuff. Watch now ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin32,314 views • 1 month ago
"Resting state fMRI is probably just a garbage way of measuring the brain." "We analysed every resting-state psychedelic dataset we could find. None of that default mode network stuff held up under 250 subjects. That story needs to go to hell." "This whole default mode network narrative became huge because Michael Pollan wrote about it. When we put the data together, the decrease in connectivity under psychedelics was an extremely unreliable finding." This might be the most sceptical conversation about psychedelics I've ever had on the show, cognitive neuroscientist Manoj Doss is live ⬇️. It got picante 🌶️
Evan McGloughlin15,379 views • 18 days ago
“DNA isn't a blueprint. Frog DNA doesn’t just make frogs. Human DNA doesn’t just make humans. That’s not how it works.” “You can rearrange living material into entirely new organisms—no genetic modification needed.” “We call them Xenobots, but they’re not machines. They’re living, behaving, programmable matter.” “The calcium patterns in Xenobots are almost identical to brain activity in humans inside an fMRI.” A Giant conversation with Josh Bongard, co-creator of the amazing Xenobots with Michael Levin. Check it out ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin87,172 views • 5 months ago
"There is a pervasive assumption that quantum theory only applies at the scale of atoms and below." "The idea that there is a clean boundary between the quantum world and the classical world is starting to collapse." "Biology is undergoing a shift away from classical mechanistic thinking." "Biological systems are not passive machines. They are trying to get their environments to do something." The incredible Chris Fields has collaborated with Michael Levin, Donald Hoffman, Karl Friston and many more. One of the most interesting people alive ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin76,735 views • 4 months ago
"DMT is a little bit like being punched in the back of the head by God. We now have some data to underscore that." "Literally 70, 80% of people can rock up to the pipe and boom, they're gonna have an entity encounter which will probably change their ontology." "Does your geometry being sentient help with your clinical outcomes? I mean, why not? Let's find out." An exceptional episode with the worlds first and only professor of exceptional experience David Luke drdluk ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin23,934 views • 1 month ago
"Ibogaine is still a mysterious substance. It can be a very rough experience." "This guy took ibogaine and relived times in his life where he had caused pain to other individuals. And he experienced that from their perspective. And it went on for an eternity." "The kappa receptor is found in many of the same brain regions as the 5-HT2A receptor, particularly in the claustrum. The claustrum has long been thought to be a hub for perception." The psychedelics legend Bryan Roth is now live ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin27,091 views • 2 months ago
"We don't experience the world. We experience our brain's model of the world." "Your consciousness is only stable because you're plugged into other minds." "Schizophrenia is what happens when our hallucinations no longer align with anyone else's." "The self is just a convenient story your brain tells to explain behaviour to others." The grandfather of cognitive neuroscience Chris Frith is live on GS⬇️
Evan McGloughlin37,474 views • 3 months ago
New GS episode dives into how Michael Levin and Haleh Fotowat gave Xenobots a functional nervous system. What happened shocked everyone... "Mike's proposal was: what happens if we give neurons to this completely new, motile body? Would they even mature into neurons? What kind of nervous system would they build? And how would having a brain change the way it behaves?" "This system has just been dropped into a new universe it doesn't understand — all its usual constraints are gone. And it's like: what do we need? We need a way to navigate. So let's build a sensory system. It's arming itself with equipment." "The most surprising thing was this overexpression of genes for visual perception — the lens, photoreceptors, rods and cones, every type of retinal cell. It was like: whoa, why did that come up?" For those who enjoyed my last episode with Mike and Earl, this is the part 2 with the incredible Haleh Fotowat ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin11,993 views • 1 month ago
"Brain entropy is the best biomarker for consciousness. It's the simplest map for the territory." "When there's more disorder, to a point, you could say there's more consciousness. There's an expansion of consciousness. And that's the psychedelic state." "I thought that decreased brain activity with psychedelics was a pretty consistent replicated finding. No. It's a popular myth." One of my favourite episodes I've ever done. With the remarkable Robin Carhart-Harris ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin27,720 views • 3 months ago
"Physics is a map. Matter is a map. And now we're trying to draw ourselves out of our own map. It's like a painter painting itself and then saying — that's who I am." "Firing neurons don't generate experience. Experience generates the pattern of firing neurons. We've got the arrow backwards." "We don't create life when we bioengineer cells. We disturb the field of existence such that a life bubble pinches off." "These AI leaders saying models might be conscious — it's dangerous. These are influential people and they should be careful what they say." The amazing Erik Bekkers now live below ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin29,124 views • 3 months ago
“Microtubules have orchestrated quantum oscillations that are completely synchronized and coherent.” “Anesthesia comes along and makes the orchestrated, synchronized quantum stuff random.” “It should be the Rosetta Stone for consciousness. It tells us potentially so much.” “If we’re right, it changes everything we think about brains, machines, and the mind itself.” Scintillating chat with the father of quantum consciousness Stuart Hameroff ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin31,259 views • 4 months ago
“Where’s the evidence that the brain produces consciousness? There isn’t any.” “Panpsychism is the view that consciousness didn’t emerge — it’s always been there, evolving with the cosmos.” “If we understood matter more sufficiently, it might contain elements of mind within it.” “The brain generating consciousness? That’s just woo-woo with better branding.”
Evan McGloughlin23,776 views • 5 months ago
"We're not going to explain where consciousness comes from by studying the brain, because it doesn't come from the brain." "The brain is a condition for consciousness, but not a producer of it." "We need new words for what traditional religions would refer to as God. And I think consciousness is actually a decent candidate." "We need to really rewind and question whether mind and nature should have been separated conceptually in the first place." The Giant Matt Segall ⬇️
Evan McGloughlin14,516 views • 4 months ago
"I don't think we make minds, I don't think we create consciousness" - Michael Levin "For the same reason you attribute consciousness to other beings you should be very serious attributing it to other organs of your body." "All living material and probably some non-living material likely has some kind of experience." Full Episode with the legend himself goes live on Monday!
Evan McGloughlin17,213 views • 1 year ago