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Rick Strassman is the psychiatrist who ran the first new American psychedelic research in a generation — five years of DMT studies at the University of New Mexico, the first rating scale ever built specifically to measure a psychedelic experience, and the book that made DMT famous. DMT: The Spirit Molecule sold a quarter of a million copies and effectively created machine-elf culture. Thirty years on, he is the most sceptical man in the room about what those entities actually are.
Expect to learn why your brain spends energy importing DMT across the blood-brain barrier, why the pineal gland story he made famous fell apart, how brain DMT sits at the same concentration as serotonin and dopamine, why DMT floods the visual cortex of a dying brain, why a molecule that shrinks strokes and protects kidneys should not be psychedelic at all, what the endomatrix is and why it raises the simulation question, why he now thinks psychedelics are super placebos, what a DMT entity actually is and why talking to one is like talking to an AI, how you would actually test whether the entities are real, why only one scientist on Earth is studying endogenous DMT, and much more…

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Steven Barker - Meet The World's Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/gTc5QjyZuvY
David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o
Deborah Mash - Meet The Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist Who First Unravelled Its Big Mystery: https://youtu.be/z7eRtXV6ptA
Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk
Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA

GUEST LINKS
Official Site: https://www.rickstrassman.com/
Books & Publications: https://www.rickstrassman.com/publications/
Substack: https://rickstrassman.substack.com/
YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/RickStrassman
Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of DMT in Mammalian Brain (Dean et al., Scientific Reports 2019): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45812-w

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:04:31 The First Legal DMT Studies in a Generation
0:07:41 The Bomb-Maker Who Became a Psychedelic Scientist
0:14:13 The Iron Curtain Reason We Know DMT Works
0:22:32 Why Your Brain Spends Energy Importing DMT
0:28:26 Your Brain Makes DMT at Serotonin Levels
0:29:26 DMT Floods the Dying Brain's Visual Cortex
0:30:28 Stroke, Kidneys and Heart — DMT as a Survival Molecule
0:32:39 The $64,000 Question Nobody Can Answer
0:36:33 Does DMT Regulate How Real Reality Feels?
0:39:32 Only One Person on Earth Studies This
0:43:52 The Endomatrix and the Simulation Question
0:49:48 "Psychedelics Are Super Placebos"
0:55:12 The Man Who Wrote Down "Bananas Are Really Yellow"
1:03:50 The Barking Patient — Entities as Dream Logic
1:05:42 Talking to Entities Is Like Talking to an AI
1:06:40 The Prime Number Test for Proving Entities Are Real
1:13:36 Half His Volunteers Met Beings — And a Conscious Apartment
1:18:08 "Your Brain On Drugs" vs Another Dimension
1:26:58 The Entities That Curse You
1:29:09 "Have You Started Yet?" — The Man Immune to DMT
1:33:30 Why DMT Is the Only Psychedelic Without Tolerance
1:36:12 Blocking 5-HT1A Tripled the Effect — Buried 30 Years
1:39:06 Aphantasia and Seeing For the First Time

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

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Deborah Mash is a neuropharmacologist who holds the first FDA licence ever granted to give ibogaine to a human being, built one of America's largest brain banks, and discovered noribogaine — the metabolite now entering its first US clinical trial. She has spent over thirty years on a drug that appears to interrupt addiction after a single dose. This April a US president named it specifically. This is the scientist who was right three decades early.

Expect to learn what Trump's executive order actually changes for ibogaine, why Sasha Shulgin put ibogaine in a box of its own, how noribogaine blocks nicotine, alcohol, cocaine and opioid use in animal models, why ibogaine holds the brain's neuroplasticity window open for four weeks when ketamine manages days, why some patients get the full therapeutic benefit with no psychedelic experience at all, why the reported ibogaine deaths are almost impossible to interpret, why more than 80% of her patients said they never wanted to repeat it, and much more...
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EPISODES MENTIONED
David Nutt - Meet the Neuroscientist Fired For Exposing the Truth! Dr David Nutt: https://youtu.be/BLk6a5Vb2O0
David Nutt - Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List: https://youtu.be/G-OZ_UBGvvo

GUEST LINKS
University of Miami Faculty Profile: http://neurology.med.miami.edu/about-us/faculty-list/deborah-c-mash-ph-d
X: https://x.com/drdeborahmash
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4383E7wAAAAJ&hl=en
DemeRx: https://www.demerx.com/team/deborah-c-mash-phd/
2018 Frontiers in Pharmacology paper (St. Kitts cohort): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.00529/full

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https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:00 Why Ibogaine Is Suddenly Everywhere
0:02:22 Trump's Executive Order and What It Actually Does
0:05:55 The Drug That Breaks the Cycle of Addiction
0:08:07 Why One Drug Treats Addiction, Depression and Trauma
0:11:30 Noribogaine: The Metabolite Nobody Talks About
0:14:20 The Real Risks Nobody Reports Properly
0:16:36 How Ibogaine Became a Vast Underground Experiment
0:17:44 Veterans, Brain Trauma and the Testimonials
0:22:55 The Master Molecule: Why Ibogaine Stands Alone
0:23:30 Sasha Shulgin Draws Four Boxes
0:26:48 Is a Psychedelic Just a Hard Reboot?
0:28:11 Four Weeks of Neuroplasticity, Longer Than Anything Else
0:28:44 Fast, Slow and Ultra-Rapid Metabolisers
0:31:39 The First Patient in St. Kitts, Decades Later
0:34:35 Do You Need the Trip to Reach the Destination?
0:35:05 One Molecule, Every Addiction
0:37:39 Miami Vice and the Bodies at the Morgue
0:41:18 The Man Who Slept Through His Own Trip
0:44:11 Why America Will Lead on Ibogaine
0:47:51 Dual Dosing: The Second Stage of the Rocket
0:54:52 Why More Than 80% Never Want to Repeat It
0:57:33 What Would Ibogaine Do to a Healthy Brain?
0:58:18 Why She's Never Taken Ibogaine
0:59:39 Psychedelics, Longevity and Ageing Brains

......Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

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Martin Picard is a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University who just won the inaugural $1.5 million Baszucki Prize for a new theory of life. His radical claim: consciousness doesn't just run on energy, it might actually be made of it, generated inside your mitochondria rather than your brain.
Expect to learn why calling mitochondria "the powerhouse of the cell" does them a disservice, how mitochondria might generate consciousness rather than just power the brain that has it, why some of history's most rigorous physicists ended up believing consciousness is more fundamental than matter, how psychedelics might work by reshaping the way energy is patterned through your body, why grey hair can reverse itself within weeks of a stressful period lifting, how a simple blood test might one day predict whether you're about to have a good or bad trip, why "no drug actually heals you" and what does instead, and much more.
Timestamps:
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:00 What Actually Keeps You Alive (Not What You Think)
0:04:40 Why There's No Experience Without Energy Flow
0:07:11 Are You Conscious Because of Matter, or Despite It?
0:10:13 Why History's Greatest Physicists Became Idealists
0:17:17 The Doctor Who Watched Patients Come Back From Death
0:22:09 Don Hoffman and the Day the Beach Disappeared
0:24:12 What Actually Triggers a Near-Death Experience
0:24:51 You Are an Eddy in a River of Consciousness
0:31:59 Bernardo Kastrup's Idealism, Tested Live
0:33:34 Could We Scan Your Energy and Predict Your Mind?
0:39:37 Stop Calling Mitochondria "The Powerhouse"
0:40:03 Your Cells Are Basically Tiny GPUs
0:41:04 How Psychedelics Might Rewrite Your Energy Pattern
0:49:10 The Study Testing Whether Psilocybin Changes Your Mitochondria
0:52:06 "It's Not the Drug That Heals You"0:52:38 A Blood Test That Predicts Your Best (and Worst) Trip
0:57:27 The Psychedelic Paradox: Less Brain, More Experience
0:58:57 Aldous Huxley's "Reducing Valve" Theory of the Brain
1:02:03 "The Brain Is Overrated"

... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned:
Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

Guest Links:
Columbia Faculty Profile: https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/martin-picard-phd
Personal Website: https://www.martinpicard.energy/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/MitoPsychoBio

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IG2t_uMAAAAJ&hl=en
Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab: https://www.picardlab.org

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Min Zhao is the UC Davis professor whose lab discovered the first genes ever found in electrical signalling — proof that every cell in your body runs on a current, not just your brain. He can reverse the polarity of a field and watch a living cell physically turn around and walk the other way.
Expect to learn why every wound in your body generates its own measurable electric current, how a single postdoc's "failed" experiment revealed a force that overrides genetics, how reversing an electric field can make a cell physically turn around mid-migration, how a damaged potato generates the same electrical signal that guides wound healing in humans, why Min stops short of fully agreeing with Michael Levin on whether cells count as agents, and where the fight between bioelectricity and genetics currently stands.
Timestamps
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:20 What Everyone Gets Wrong About Wound Healing
0:07:20 Your Skin Is Secretly Electric (And So Is Everything Alive)
0:11:09 The 200-Year-Old Discovery Hiding in Every Wound
0:15:19 The Postdoc Result That Changed the Whole Lab
0:19:19 How Do Cells Know Where to Grow? (Five Fingers, Not Six)
0:21:19 The Potato Experiment That Reveals How Infections Start
0:25:24 Reverse the Field, Watch a Cell Turn Around
0:38:10 The Bioelectricity Nobody Taught in Biology Class
0:44:17 Is Bioelectricity More Fundamental Than Genes?
0:45:33 "No Electricity, No Life"
0:49:14 When Electric Fields Override Genetics Entirely
1:03:40 Michael Levin's Xenobots, Debated
1:12:22 Do Cells Have Agency? The Fuzziest Question in Biology
1:15:16 To Be Continued... (Members Get the Rest)
... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
GS Episodes Mentioned
Michael Levin — Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM
Philip Ball — Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SseGx0R0fY
Denis Noble — Denis Noble: Evolution Has Purpose, Cell Consciousness & Why The Last 70 Years of Genetics Is Wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqw-DaWVK24
Michael Levin & Earl Miller — Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mU5nN5nlLA
Guest Links
UC Davis Faculty Profile: https://health.ucdavis.edu/dermatology/faculty/zhao.html
Zhao Lab (UC Davis Dermatology): https://health.ucdavis.edu/dermatology/research/lab/zhao.html
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=G7-zWBcAAAAJ&hl=en
Neuroengineering at UC Davis: https://neuroengineering.ucdavis.edu/people/min-zhao-md-phd
UC Davis Profiles (Publications): https://profiles.ucdavis.edu/min.zhao

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Kirsten Cherian is the Stanford neuropsychologist who gave Special Forces veterans with traumatic brain injuries a single dose of ibogaine — a psychedelic root used in African shamanic ritual for millennia — and watched their injury scores collapse from severe to normal in a month. It's a weak agonist for nearly every receptor in the body, yet it somehow delivers a tailor-made result to each person — a form of pharmacology science has never seen before.
Expect to learn why veteran suicide outpaces combat deaths, how one dose collapsed PTSD, depression, and anxiety at once, why users describe their brains being "defragged," a researcher's 12-hour "conversation" with the ibogaine molecule itself, the bizarre phenomenon of "DMT blocking" by hostile entities, why ibogaine has no single receptor target — "matrix pharmacology," how brain age dropped by over a year in a single month, and why the results contradict science's leading theory of consciousness.
Timestamps
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:11 How This Ibogaine Study For Veterans Began
0:04:06 Veteran Suicide Now Outpaces Combat Deaths
0:07:31 The 30-Veteran Study With Staggering Effect Sizes
0:12:22 Ibogaine Isn't A Trip, It's A Waking Dream
0:13:14 Vivid Trip Imagery: Slideshows And "Defragged" Brains
0:15:02 Reconciling Trauma By Talking To The Dead
0:20:01 What A Bad Ibogaine Trip Actually Looks Like
0:24:50 Purging "Black Demons" In A Room Full Of Strangers
0:27:23 The Scientist Who Talked To The Ibogaine Molecule
0:33:36 Why Elite Special Forces Veterans Still Broke
0:34:30 DMT Blocking: When Entities Refuse To Let You In
0:41:22 The Psilocybin Researcher Who Believes In Telepathy
0:43:00 Why Ibogaine Has No Single Target In The Brain
0:46:25 The 1920s Thought Experiment That Proves We're Too Skeptical
0:49:38 Ibogaine As A Full-System Diagnostic, Not A Drug
1:03:36 Measurable Brain Change From An African Tree Fruit
1:05:19 Brain Age Dropped Over A Year After One Dose
1:17:21 The Finding That Contradicts The Leading Theory Of Consciousness
1:20:28 If Ibogaine Research Got A Blank Billion-Dollar Check
1:23:21 Could Ibogaine Help Parkinson's And ALS Patients?
... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
GS Episodes Mentioned
Dalibor Sames — Meet The Greatest Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9whp_wtCoc
Andrew Gallimore — No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA
David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5o
Matthew Johnson — Consciousness Expert Explains The 5 Levels Of The Psilocybin Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHyy3aW09sk
Robin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk
Guest LinksStanford Profile: https://profiles.stanford.edu/kirsten-cherian
Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab: https://bsl.stanford.edu/
MISTIC Study (Nature Medicine, 2024): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38182784/
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kirsten-Cherian
VETS — Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions: https://vetsolutions.org/