Evan McGloughlin

A few weeks ago, our founder, Donald Hoffman, sat down with @BrianMuraresku for a fascinating conversation on the nature of reality, consciousness, and the limits of our current scientific understanding, moderated by @evan_mcgl, founder of Giant's Shoulder.

Brian Muraresku and I discuss how human understanding of the relationship between consciousness and the physical world has evolved over the millennia, and why all current physicalist theories still fail to explain even one specific conscious experience. youtube.com/watch?v=nUjG6qtG…

Enjoying this. Andrew and I will compare notes on each other’s books with Evan mcGloughlin soon. @alieninsect @evan_mcgl @Graham__Hancock

JUST IN: New Yorkers gather in Washington Square Park for an Elizabeth Holmes lookalike contest.

Ever wonder if eventually cells could be trained out of disease states? We're on the path; first steps: New #preprint - @WesleyPClawson "Goal directed closed-loop training of network bursts in cortical cultures produces improved performance and error correction over days" biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

In 2025, we published a bold proposal to use fusion reactors for gold production. And now we’ve done it: Mercury transmuted into stable gold, using fusion neutrons, at 10x the record set by CERN in 2025. We’ve reduced alchemy to a series of difficult but tractable engineering problems.

Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10. Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years. Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.

I have something to announce. We ran a study to compare the jhānas to 5-MeO-DMT. This was an ambitious undertaking by the Qualia Research Institute @QualiaRI , friends and collaborators. For practically all of May and June, a group of handpicked extraordinary people gathered in Tepoztlán, México: physicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, phenomenologists, advanced meditators, meditation researchers, philosophers of mind, and visual artists specializing in psychedelic replication. It span over two dozen participants and eight weeks: instrument building, ten days of jhāna practice across three meditation sites, a week of 5-MeO-DMT, and then time to integrate and putting the pieces together to figure out the puzzle of consciousness. We're now releasing the first tranche of what came out of it ♥️ Here is an example output: every animation we rated (comparing J1 and J3), in a tool where you can visualize the affinity of each animation to any two pairs of specific jhāna states and/or 5-MeO-DMT dose levels. heart.qri.org/retreats/2026-…

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

John Vervaeke and I discuss perception, evolution, consciousness, collective intelligence, embodiment, and nonspeaking autistics. I take questions from a brilliant audience about theories of observation, and whether we can craft a theory of everything. youtube.com/watch?v=cWEdAnIU…

Sounding the alarm - if MDMA & psilocybin are approved by FDA, most MDMA & psilocybin could still be scheduled I, wildly inconsistent with the science. @Ravarora1 & I lay out the case for why we need to avoid a "bifurcated schedule" that only reschedules the commercial FDA approved product. Please repost & spread the word! illusionconsensus.com/p/psyc…

Introducing Trace Media: podcasts, explainers & conversations on consciousness and reality. Our first podcast is live! @donalddhoffman joins host @evan_mcgl , founder of Giant's Shoulder Podcast, to explore traces, physics & DMT entities. Watch here: traceinstitute.org/media/