The Giants Shoulder

Evan McGloughlin
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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.

  1. 23 hr ago

    #126 - Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Bioelectricity, Platonic Spaces, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots

    Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Michael Levin is a developmental biologist who builds living creatures that have never existed before, and Earl Miller is a neuroscientist who has spent thirty years arguing that your thoughts live in the brain's electric fields, not its wiring. In the same room together for the first time, they agree on something that sounds insane — that bioelectricity is the engine of mind at every scale of life, from a single cell deciding to grow an eye to a human deciding what to eat for lunch. Expect to learn how cells use a bioelectric code you can read and rewrite to grow an eye on a tadpole's tail, why no single cell knows what an eye is but the collective does, how a flatworm regrows a whole new brain and keeps its old memories, why the brain is an orchestra of electric waves and not a telegraph of wires, how three different anaesthetics switch off consciousness through one mechanism reductionism can't explain, why consciousness may just be the story your brain tells about what it already did, whether memories can be transplanted between bodies, what the Platonic space of minds is and why Levin thinks physicalism died with Pythagoras, and much more … Timestamps: 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:46 The Vacuum Tubes That Started It All 0:08:36 How to Read and Rewrite the Bioelectric Code 0:12:36 Why No Single Cell Knows What an Eye Is 0:15:22 Your Brain Is Not a Telegraph System 0:19:30 Why They Called It Magic and Bullshit 0:24:56 Flatworm or Human Brain — Same Code? 0:30:00 Where Is Memory Actually Stored? 0:32:24 The Flatworm That Regrows Its Memories 0:34:34 People Living Without Most of Their Brain 0:40:32 Can Memories Live Outside the Brain? 0:43:26 Will a Rat Pop Down to the 7-Eleven for Smokes? 0:49:14 Consciousness Is Overrated (Says a Neuroscientist) 0:53:17 Hey Liver, Why Do I Feel Like Crap? 0:54:20 Nobody Knows Why Anaesthesia Works 0:57:21 Three Drugs, One Mystery, One Mechanism 0:58:50 Why Anaesthesia Is Dangerous When You're Old 1:02:12 What Is a Neurobot? 1:08:18 The Eyes That Shouldn't Exist 1:13:28 What Is the Platonic Space of Minds? 1:20:44 Devil's Advocate: Have We Just Not Figured It Out? 1:24:03 The Free Lunch: More Out Than You Put In 1:29:36 Why Physicalism Died With Pythagoras 1:32:52 How Bioelectricity Touches the Platonic Space ... GS Episodes Mentioned Anil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o Guest Links Michael Levin — Allen Discovery Center (Tufts): https://allencenter.tufts.edu/our-team/michael-levin/ Michael Levin — Website: https://www.drmichaellevin.org Earl Miller — The Miller Lab (MIT): https://ekmillerlab.mit.edu/ Earl Miller — X: https://x.com/MillerLabMIT

    1hr 39min

  2. 3 days ago

    #125 Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist

    Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about 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: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com 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

    1hr 47min

  3. 28 May

    #124 - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's

    Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Get Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulder Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community (100% free): https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about 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: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ❤️ 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/

    1hr 46min

  4. 26 May

    #123 - Meet The Most Persuasive Panpsychist Alive Today

    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: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ❤️ 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/id1752486249

    1hr 17min

  5. 21 May

    #122 - Meet the Psychiatrist Training To Be An Ayahuasca Shaman

    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% 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: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com 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

    1hr 40min

  6. 18 May

    #121 Meet The Neuroscientist Teaching Neuron's in a Dish to Play Video Games

    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: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

    1hr 17min

  7. 14 May

    #120 No.1 Inner Speech Expert: NPCs, Hallucinations, Imaginary Friends, Prayer and Experiential Crossing

    Do you really inner speak? Join my Skool community and find out: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about 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: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

    1hr 9min

  8. 11 May

    #119 Meet The Inner Speech Expert Proving We Can Conjure Other Conscious Entities

    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: evan@thegiantsshoulder.comEpisodes 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

    1hr 4min
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Evan McGloughlin
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    132
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Evan McGloughlin
  • Show Website
    The Giants Shoulder

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