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PODCAST

Giants Shoulder

Evan McGloughlin

A Biology & Consciousness podcast chronicling the bio-singularity. 3x times per week I speak with leading scientists at the bleeding edge of Neuroscience, Consciousness and Biology. No idea is too strange, tackled with genuine curiosity and technical rigour. Come follow the journey as I have my brain melted and ontology warped on a regular basis. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is founder of Giants Shoulder.

science life sciences

All Episodes

01:40:19

#101 Meet The Physicist Who Believes Time Doesn’t Exist

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/09

Dr. Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who has spent over sixty years working from a 17th-century farmhouse in Oxfordshire on the deepest question in physics — what is time? His answer: it doesn't exist.He completed the project Newton declared impossible and Einstein never finished, built two bestselling books around it, and at 88 remains one of the most original thinkers alive.Expect to learn why the Wheeler-DeWitt equation implies the universe is frozen and nothing evolves,

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01:20:02

#100 Meet The Scientist Who Wrote the Blueprint for...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/05

Support The Channel:Get 1 Month Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeGet Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett is an award-winning AI researcher at the Australian National University and author of "How to Build Conscious Machines" — a mathematical blueprint for why anything is conscious and what it would take to engineer a machine that

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01:32:20

#99 Matt Segall: Panexperientialism, God, Metaphysics...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/02

Matt Segall is a process philosopher, Associate Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and author of Physics of the World-Soul and Crossing the Threshold — two books arguing that consciousness isn't produced by the brain but is woven into the fabric of reality itself.Expect to learn why there is no scientific evidence that consciousness exists, how one French philosopher broke Western science in 1637 and we still haven't fixed it, why the brain is a

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01:22:06

#98 Chris Fields: Whats Wrong With Quantum Mechanics,...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/26

Support The Channel:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder Dr. Chris Fields is an independent researcher with one of the most extraordinary careers in modern science — from nuclear physics to decoding the first complete genome to quantum information theory — now collaborating with Michael Levin and Karl Friston to

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01:38:19

#97 Matt Ridley: COVID Lab Leak, Jeffrey Epstein and...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/23

Matt Ridley is an evolutionary biologist, bestselling science writer and author of eleven books including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist and Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.He co-investigated the origin of SARS-CoV-2 with molecular biologist Alina Chan — and what they found may be the biggest cover-up in the history of science. A secret Pentagon proposal describing the exact genetic manipulation that may have created the pandemic. Private messages showing virologists

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01:50:11

#96 Meet The Anaesthesiologist Who Started The...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/19

Dr. Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist, consciousness researcher, and co-creator of the Orch-OR theory — a radical and controversial model proposing that consciousness arises from quantum processes inside the brain’s microtubules.For over 30 years, Dr. Hameroff has worked alongside Sir Roger Penrose to explore how the fundamental fabric of spacetime could give rise to awareness itself — and what that means for AI, life after death, and the mystery of subjective experience.Expect to learn why

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02:24:35

#96 Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/17

Philip Ball is a former Nature editor of 20 years and the author of over 30 books spanning quantum physics, consciousness, and the strange frontiers of biology. In How Life Works, he argues that everything we’ve been taught about life — genes, blueprints, biological machines — is deeply incomplete.Get How Life Works: https://amzn.to/46dQRMlBiology isn’t built from instructions. It’s built from self-organising systems that sense, evaluate, predict and act. Cognition didn’t start with brains. Purpose

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01:08:09

#95 Meet The Scientist Who Created The First Living...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/12

Dr. Josh Bongard is a computer scientist, roboticist, and co-creator of Xenobots — the world’s first living robots made from frog cells, capable of movement, healing, and even self-replication.Together with biologist Michael Levin, Bongard’s work is upending some of biology’s most sacred assumptions: that DNA is a blueprint, that the brain is the seat of intelligence, and that only neurons can think. In his lab at the University of Vermont, he’s building AI-designed organisms that challenge our

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01:00:31

#93 Dr Tommy Wood: "Cognitive Decline Is Not...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/09

Dr. Tommy Wood is a neuroscientist and performance expert who trains the brains of elite Formula 1 drivers and studies how cognitive resilience can be built—and rebuilt—across a lifetime.From premature birth to world championship podiums, Tommy’s work spans the full arc of brain health, human performance, and cognitive decline. He’s also at the forefront of research into cutting-edge brain stimulation, virtual reality training, and the science of flow and resilience.Expect to learn what separates F1

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01:58:21

#92 Joscha Bach: “The Nature Of Reality is Even...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/05

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher of mind whose work has shaped how we think about synthetic consciousness and the architecture of thought itself.He developed the MicroPsi cognitive architecture, has held research roles at MIT and Harvard, and just co-founded the California Institute of Machine Consciousness with Karl Friston — a lab dedicated to building minds that know they exist.Expect to learn how emotions are compressed value functions for simulated agents,

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01:33:48

#91 Meet the Philosopher Questioning Everything...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/02

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a philosopher of mind and leading voice on psychedelics, panpsychism, and the metaphysics of consciousness. He’s a research fellow at the University of Exeter and author of Noumenautics and Modes of Sentience — books exploring whether mind is fundamental to the universe.In this episode, we dive into why your brain might not produce consciousness, how psychedelics could reveal deeper truths about reality, the philosophical roots of mystical experience, and why matter itself

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01:25:08

#90 Meet The World’s Leading Executive Function...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/29

Dr. Adele Diamond is one of the world’s most influential developmental cognitive neuroscientists and a pioneer in our understanding of executive functions — the brain’s core control processes that shape attention, self-regulation, problem-solving, and goal-directed behaviour.Her groundbreaking research was the first to show that the prefrontal cortex is active in infants, transforming how we understand child development and reshaping clinical treatment for ADHD and PKU worldwide. She’s also led the

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01:23:52

#89 The Real Reason We Should Revive Extinct Animals

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/27

Andrew Pask is Chief Biology Officer at Colossal Biosciences and a professor of genetics at the University of Melbourne. He’s spent over 30 years on the front lines of marsupial conservation and now leads one of the most ambitious projects in biology: the genetic resurrection and rewilding of the extinct Tasmanian tiger.Sponsors:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements:

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01:41:10

#88 Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/25

Karl Friston is one of the most influential neuroscientists alive and the creator of the Free Energy Principle, a unifying theory that aims to explain how brains perceive, act, learn, and remain alive in an uncertain world.SPONSORS:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3The brain is not a passive receiver of information. It is an active prediction

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01:49:25

#87 Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/19

Dr. Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist, professor at Princeton University, and creator of Attention Schema Theory — one of the most provocative scientific explanations for consciousness to date.He argues that awareness isn’t magic or mystery — it’s the brain’s simplified internal model of its own attention. A trick of information. A self-portrait painted by neurons. And it just might explain why you think you’re a “you” at all.Expect to learn why consciousness is a useful illusion, how awareness

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01:28:15

#86 Meet The Most Influential Social Scientist Of The...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/15

Charles Murray is one of the most influential — and most cancelled — social scientists of the last fifty years. Whether you see him as a dangerous contrarian or a data-driven truth-teller, Murray’s ideas have transformed how we think about intelligence, inequality, class, and what makes a society thrive.SPONSORS:Get Manta Sleep Mask: https://mantasleep.pxf.io/9LXagy and Code GIANTSMANTA10Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements:

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01:28:02

#85 Meet the Psychologist Who’s Guided 100+ Mushroom...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/12

Dr. Rosalind Watts is a clinical psychologist and one of the most thoughtful voices in the modern psychedelic renaissance, known for her work in psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression and her pioneering focus on psychedelic integration.Psychedelics are often praised for their power to unlock mystical states and treat mental illness, but the real transformation, she argues, happens after the trip ends — in how we integrate what we've seen. And her own harrowing experience with ayahuasca radically

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01:24:49

#84 Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/08

Try Sentia Spirits this Dry January: https://tinyurl.com/giantsshoulder (10% Discount with Code GIANT10)Professor David Nutt is a neuropsychopharmacologist, former UK chief drug adviser, and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, Drink?, Cannabis, and Psychedelics. He built the first evidence-based Drug Harm Scale, ran the world’s first LSD brain-scan, and is now engineering hangover-free “alcohol” with GABA science.After the first drug tier list sparked an overwhelming response, this round two

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01:16:29

#83 Meet The Leading Behavioural Change...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/05

Dr. Tali Sharot is a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Affective Brain Lab, whose research reveals the hidden rules that actually change human behavior, beliefs, and motivation.Most people think facts and logic should be enough to persuade someone, quit a bad habit, or finally convince their dad to exercise. But the brain doesn’t work like that. In this episode, Tali explains why our “priors” and identity make beliefs stubborn, why emotion and storytelling sync brains in a way statistics

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01:19:58

Biology Is Cognition The Whole Way Down! Best of...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/02

I've condensed the best moments from a year of Giant conversations with scientists such as Michael Levin, Terrence Deacon, Anna Ciaunica and more on Diverse Intelligence and multi-scale cognitive biology.We explore the radical idea that biology itself is cognitive, all the way down, and that intelligence, agency, and problem-solving did not suddenly appear with brains but emerged gradually across evolution. Its the most incredible idea in modern biology. Are cells themselves intelligent or even

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