Brainforest Café

Daniel Cleland is CEO of Soltara Healing Center, which has gained worldwide recognition in 2019 as THE preeminent Shipibo healing center and is now regularly visited by the most prominent influencers, celebrities, and public figures. Cleland holds a Masters of Intercultural and International Communication, but he learned his hard-knock style of scaling from years of traveling, living, and hustling...

Giuliana Furci is the founder and CEO of the Fungi Foundation. She is also an associate at Harvard University, a National Geographic Explorer, a Dame of the Order of the Star of Italy, the deputy chair of the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee, and the author of several titles, including a series of field guides to Chilean fungi. She has co-authored titles such as the 1st State of the World's Fung...

Caitlin Demaris McKenna is a science fiction writer whose passion for the genre stretches back to her elementary school's Scholastic book fairs. She has chronicled the faraway worlds and strange beings of her imagination ever since. When not writing, she enjoys reading, gaming, and exploring the hiking trails near her home in Vancouver, British Columbia. She grew up in the Minnesota woods, where o...

As an Artist, Thomas Haferlach merges machine learning wizardry with music and multimedia art, exploring the realms of psychedelia from artistic and scientific perspectives. He founded Voodoohop, an influential art collective celebrated by São Paulo's art scene. Utilizing generative AI, Thomas crafts new musical expressions that blend high-tech in unexpected and glitchy ways. Born in Germany and r...

By the time Annelise was seven years old, she had lived in Istanbul for five years and travelled around the world. By the age of twenty, she had lived in England and Spain, and had a passion for learning languages and experiencing diverse cultures. This contributed to her going to Brazil to study its culture and history, a time which profoundly influenced the rest of her life. Her professional car...

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Rebecca Lazarou’s work is an ecology of different disciplines spanning across medical science, ethnopharmacology, herbalism, holistic healthcare, cannabis and psychedelics. She is also an activist, writer, speaker and herbal formulator. She is currently a PhD candidate at Kew Gardens and UCL School of Pharmacy with a focus on ethnopharmacology and herbal medicines. She was the science and managing...

Wade Davis is an ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic. An Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013, he is currently professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Author of 24 b...

Lee Kaiser was born in Milwaukee Wisconsin in the 1980’s and is a wildlife ecologist who has lived in various communities throughout the Americas. He has worked on permaculture projects, natural building endeavors, hosting and organizing events and retreats, performing surveys for conservation investigations, agricultural and natural medicine initiatives, conducting artesanal essential oil distill...

Dr. Bruce Damer is a scientist working in the field of Astrobiology with his passion being working on the mystery of the origin of life and where life might arise in the universe. Back at our ESPD conference in 2022 he 'came out of the psychedelic scientist closet' in his talk 'Its High Time for Science'. This talk, at which I was sitting in the front row, sparked a movement that has today led to...

Deborah has published over 40 books through her publishing house Synergetic Press, Ltd. in global ecology, regenerative agriculture, ethnobotany, psychedelics, and social justice, since establishing it in 1984. In 1986, she was on the team that designed and built a large-scale closed ecological system, Biosphere 2, developing the publications and educational programs for the complex. In 1990, she...

Joshua Bloom was born and raised in Hackney, London, to a Filipino mother and Jewish father. He grew up in a culturally rich area, sandwiched between Hackney's infamous ‘Murder Mile’ and Stamford Hill, home to Europe's largest ultra-Orthodox Jewish community with over 100,000 residents. Much of his early years were spent exploring the local parks and Hackney Marshes nature reserve, where he develo...

Michael Coe, PhD, is an applied ecologist and ethnobiology research fellow at the French National Institute for Research and Development (IRD) and Mediterranean Institute of Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE) in Marseille, France.  Michael is working to help promote the revitalization of ethnobiology at academic institutions in the United States, to help provide a global synthesis on the sustainabili...

Erik F. Storlie, PhD, entered graduate school at Berkeley in 1962 intending to become a medievalist. Experience with cannabis, peyote, mushrooms, and LSD prompted an interest in Zen and the synergies between meditation and psychedelic medicine. He is retired from teaching meditation and mindfulness at The University of Minnesota and has published two memoirs that speak to sixty years of meditation...

Tom (Tomás) Pinkson has been walking the Warrior Wisdom path far longer than most of the readers of this book have been walking. In it, he shares the wisdom distilled from a lifetime of seeking to understand himself and his place in the realm of shamanic and indigenous practices. In the course of his long life, he has learned from the great medicine teachers, including LSD, ayahuasca, peyote and m...

Dr. David E.Nichols is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the chemistry and pharmacology of psychedelic substances. In 1993, with the collaboration of colleagues, Dr. Nichols founded the Heffter Research Institute, realizing his vision of a privately funded Institute as the most effective mechanism for bringing research on psychedelic agents into the modern era of neuroscience. Since its f...

Don Lattin is an American journalist who has been exploring the interface between psychedelics and religion in America since the end of the 90s. His books include "Shopping for Faith: American Religions in the new Millenium" (co-authored with Richard Cimino & Jose Basse, 1998); "Following our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixities Influence Our Lives Today" (2003); "Jesus Freaks: A True S...

Dr. Ryan is an astute observer, commentator and fellow experiencer of the human condition. Unlike most of us, his insights into the existential human situation undermine conventional wisdom, and are often profoundly unsettling. This approach is reflected in his best selling book, “Sex at Dawn” (2010) which calls into question nearly everything we think we understand about human sexuality. His late...

Dr. Barbara Thiers is the director emerita in the Division of Plant Research and Conservation at the New York Botanical Garden. Prior to her retirement, she was the Patricia K. Holmgren director of the William and Linda Steer herbarium, the world's third largest herbarium, housing over 7.9 million collections of algae, broophytes, fungi, and vascular plant. She applied her interest in herbarium sc...

P. D. Newman specializes in the historical and current use of entheogenic compounds, mystical, magical, and initiatory context. He is the author of the groundbreaking work Angels in Vermilion, the philosopher Stone from D to DMT, and the forthcoming titles Theurgy In Theory and Practice, Myster Mysteries of the Ascent to the Divine, and Tripping the Path of Souls. Native American Shamanism in the...

A conversation with Graham Hancock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A conversation with Shauheen Etminan & Jonathan Lu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices