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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: [email protected]
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
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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]
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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]
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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]
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: [email protected] 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: [email protected]
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: [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/
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: [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/
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