Brainforest Café

Graham St John, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist and historian of transformational events, movements, and figures. His forthcoming book Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, Sep 30, 2025) is the latest among his ten books, which also include Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (North Atlantic Books 2015). Graham is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Media, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield, UK.

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Tony Ācworth is a visionary herbalist, psychedelic advocate, forest guide, and self-described “wily wizard” living with his wife and five-year-old son amid the coastal rainforests of Brentwood Bay, Vancouver Island.

For 15 plus years, Tony has walked the plant (and mushroom) path, logged over 5,000 clinical hours doing comprehensive intakes with patients, helping them untangle what truly plagues the mind, body, and spirit. Under the mentorship of herbal elder and prolific author and mycologist Robert Rogers, Tony deepened his reverence for the fungal world and its wisdom.

In 2015, he was hired to work in Pacific Rim College’s herbal dispensary. Soon after he created and began teaching their first medicinal mushroom materia medica. From here, Tony began offering herbal clinics, nutrition courses, herbal therapeutics and mycological exploration weekends for students in the community herbalist, nutrition, and permaculture programs at the College. At home, he spent a decade developing his own ritual for psilocybin ceremonies, immersing himself in shamanism from Iquitos to the moss-laden forests of Vancouver Island.
This led to guiding individuals and men’s groups through the ritual experience, facilitating deep
personal explorations for those who participated.

Tony is also the creator behind DelOs, his heart-led line of herbal-supported mushroom microdose blends, with the expressed purpose of supporting the human body and nervous system with herbal medicine to help rewire stagnant, disserving patterns and improve overall well-being.

In 2026, he will expand his offerings by launching a dedicated Psychedelic Therapy Training Program at Pacific Rim College, further bridging ancestral plant wisdom with modern integration practice.
Recently, Tony blends mushroom intelligence with machines as a mycelial-minded systems tinkerer building ethical, living AI ecosystems designed to help people recalibrate and remember who they truly are. His work guides both personal recalibration and scalable AI solutions for human-centered collaboration, ensuring that advanced technology uplifts humanity.

He’s a father, a leatherworker, a Raspberry Pi hobbyist and if he appears in your life, chances are, the mushrooms arranged it.

Tony Ācworth is a techno-mystic wizard: part forest guide, part quantum gardener, part mycelial ambassador – all heart.

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Dr Harry Shirley has a PhD in organic chemistry and research experience at the University of Oxford. His research focussed on the synthesis of biologically active chemicals of marine origin. Having left academia some years ago, he now holds a deep passion for Jungian thought. He recently published his paper “the Buddhabrot and the Unus Mundus” in the International Journal of Jungian Studies, which explores the role of the Mandelbrot set in mind and matter.

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Dr. Andrew Gallimore is a computational neurobiologist, chemical pharmacologist, and writer, living and working in Tokyo. He has a master’s degree in chemical pharmacology and a PhD in biological chemistry from the University of Cambridge and has held postdoctoral research fellowships in computational neuroscience at the Universities of York, Oxford, and Okinawa. He has been fascinated by the neuropharmacology of psychedelics for more than two decades and is the author of three books: Alien Information Theory -- Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game; Reality Switch Technologies -- Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds.; and the forthcoming Death by Astonishment -- Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug, which focuses on the history of DMT and science’s continuing struggle to understand how such a simple naturally-occurring molecule can have such astonishing effects on the human mind. His current interests lie in implications of DMT in understanding the nature of reality, and how it might be developed as a tool for extended communication with non-human intelligences inaccessible to normal waking consciousness.

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Luke served in the Marine Corps for six years and two years in the National Guard, deploying to Afghanistan with an Airborne infantry unit. After his deployment, he faced severe PTSD, a loss of purpose, and a transformative “dark night of the soul.” Seeking healing, Luke explored various modalities, eventually traveling to the Amazon basin in Peru to experience Ayahuasca. This profound encounter brought him personal healing and a spiritual awakening, revealing the vast, interconnected nature of the universe.

Inspired by this experience, Luke delved into shamanism, including rediscovering lost Northern European traditions. Along his spiritual journey, he encountered neurofeedback and QEEG brain mapping, recognizing their transformative potential for healing and spiritual growth—what he calls “spiritual neuroscience” or “electronic yoga.” These tools became central to his evolving vision.

In 2019, Luke met Dr. Richard Soutar, whose mentorship profoundly deepened his understanding of consciousness, healing, and the neurological foundations of spiritual development.

Since December 2023, Luke has been leading retreats in Peru’s Sacred Valley, combining diverse healing modalities into a unique and transformative experience. He has also conducted groundbreaking research using QEEG brain mapping to study plant medicines, including the first longitudinal study on Ayahuasca and the first brain imaging study of Huachuma. Through these studies and future research, Luke hopes to deepen humanity’s understanding of plant medicines, consciousness, and spirituality. His work aims to inspire a greater recognition of our spiritual nature and the boundless potential for personal and collective transformation.

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Paul Stamets, speaker, author, mycologist, medical researcher and entrepreneur, is considered an intellectual and industry leader in fungi: habitat, medicinal use, and production. He lectures extensively to deepen the understanding and respect for the organisms that literally exist under every footstep taken on this path of life. His presentations cover a range of mushroom species and research showing how mushrooms can help the health of people and planet. His central premise is that habitats have immune systems, just like people, and mushrooms are cellular bridges between the two. Our close evolutionary relationship to fungi can be the basis for novel pairings in the microbiome that lead to greater sustainability and immune enhancement.

Paul’s philosophy is that “MycoDiversity is BioSecurity.” He sees the ancient Old Growth forests of the Pacific Northwest as a resource of incalculable value, especially in terms of its fungal genome. A dedicated hiker and explorer, his passion is to preserve and protect as many ancestral strains of mushrooms as possible from these pristine woodlands. His research is considered breakthrough by thought leaders for creating a paradigm shift for helping ecosystems survive worldwide.

Paul´s most recent book (2025) is called "Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats".oms in Their Natural Hbin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats

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Steve Elfrink, a pioneer with over 40 years of experience in psychedelic medicine and integrative healing, is the founder of OmTerra (www.omterra.org). In this podcast, Steve focuses on his groundbreaking hypothesis of Psychedelic Iatrogenic Structural Dissociation (PISD), which was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology (co-authored by Leigh Bergin). Drawing from his own deeply personal journey—from a transformative yet destabilizing ayahuasca ceremony in a sacred Southern Wisconsin valley to years of navigating dissociative trauma—Steve shares how these experiences led him to explore how psychedelics can deconstruct dissociative processes and potentially release trauma too quickly. With his expertise in legal psilocybin facilitation in Oregon and Psycholytic Somatic Integration Therapy (PSIT) using low-dose ketamine for PTSD and C-PTSD, Steve offers unique insights into the importance of cautious, titrated psychedelic sessions and somatic integration. Join him as he recounts his personal story, unpacks the science behind PISD, and discusses the transformative yet sometimes challenging nature of psychedelic therapy.

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Rajnish Khanna, M.Sc. Ph.D., is a Senior Investigator, Biosphere Science and Engineering at Carnegie Science, Stanford. Rajnish is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of i-Cultiver, Inc.

TerreLocal, and co-founder and Executive Director of “Urban Green Project”. He is a strategic biotechnology consultant, plant and soil health scientist applying multidisciplinary approaches for research and development.

Known for empowering the industry through strategic partnerships with academic institutions, facilitating technology transfer into real world applications, and deploying advanced technologies such as CLASlite, a unique software to quantify and monitor crop and tree health at global scale for agro-eco projects. Rajnish applies photobiology to explore the science of consciousness. He has developed a unique and testable “Theory of Spatial Relativity” relating to the origins of consciousness, which aligns modern science with ancient concepts of spirituality.

Rajnish is the host of TerreScience podcast/YouTube channel focused on soil and planetary health. For a full bio, visit  www.rajnishkhanna.com.

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Isaac Abrams was born and raised in New York City.
He is a self-taught artist who started painting in 1965.
Based in Upstate New York, he continues to paint every day.

He first discovered psychedelics in 1962. He then discovered psychedelics again and again. He decided there had to be such a thing as psychedelic art and founded the Coda Gallery - the first gallery of Psychedelic Art in NYC in 1965. He had his first one man show in 1968 at Galerie Bischofberger in Zurich.

Other memorable moments include climbing a tree with Timothy Leary to discuss business, meeting Salvador Dali, shooting a film at Mickey Hart's Ranch in 1971 featuring Jerry Garcia and The New Riders of the Purple Sage, Reality One Group and David Crosby.

MEDIUMS
He’s worked across several mediums from oil to acrylic, sculpture to animation. From brushes to airbrushes, canvas to board, glass to bronze.

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Howard Sprouse, CEO of the Remediators, Inc. and developer of bioremediation technologies since the mid 1990s.  Howard previously worked as a consultant to Battelle’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Sequim, Washington assisting with the development of mycoremediation technology. His work assisted projects aimed towards remediation of petroleum hydrocarbons, biological agents, pathogen degradation, and biofiltration of agricultural runoff.

Howard also worked for the Department of Botany, University of Washington and with US Forest Service, as a research assistant conducting fungal ecology research in Olympic National Park. Howard Sprouse is recognized in the bioremediation industry for commercializing mycoremediation and is a well known lecturer on the subject at universities across the United States. The Remediators have mentored student interns at Peninsula College in Washington State since 2005.

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