{"podcast":{"title":"Giants Shoulder","slug":"the-giants-shoulder-6943930","podcast_index_feed_id":6943930,"rss_url":"https://anchor.fm/s/f592b1d4/podcast/rss","website_url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/evanmcgloughlin","image_url":"https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/staging/podcast_uploaded_nologo/41100317/41100317-1740226956129-96396ebc63bd9.jpg","author":"Evan McGloughlin","episode_count":140,"summary":"A Neuroscience podcast. Each week I talk with experts on a range of topics from consciousness and neuroplasticity to evolution and everything in between. I have a particular interest in consciousness and understanding our inner subjective conscious experience. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is the co-founder of 2 (failed) edtech startups. He is a professional tennis coach and Triathlete enthusiast.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-03T04:19:34.566536+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930"},"episode":{"title":"#122 - Meet the Psychiatrist Training To Be An Ayahuasca Shaman","slug":"122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman","published_at":"2026-05-21T16:35:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930","url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/evanmcgloughlin/episodes/122---Meet-the-Psychiatrist-Training-To-Be-An-Ayahuasca-Shaman-e3jmia1","audio_url":"https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO4092468350.mp3","summary":"Want to truly understand your own conscious inner experience? I built a tool and its free - https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about 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…","meta_description":"Want to truly understand your own conscious inner experience? I built a tool and its free - https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Dr Simon…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":5990,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/episodes/122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-giants-shoulder-6943930/122-meet-the-psychiatrist-training-to-be-an-ayahuasca-shaman.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}