Brainforest Café

In 2003, Carlos Tanner woke up in his car underwater, having blacked out behind the wheel and driven into a river. Deep in an opiate addiction, he went to the Amazon to save his own life. What he found there became his life's work.

In this episode of the Brainforest Café, Dennis McKenna sits down with Carlos, founder of the Ayahuasca Foundation in Iquitos, Peru, for a wide-ranging conversation on healing, tradition, and what happens when a sacred medicine goes global.

Carlos recounts his apprenticeship under the late curandero Don Juan Tangoa Paima, who first took him in, and how that path led him to build the Ayahuasca Foundation around one idea: to give the next person the map he never had. He and Dennis also trace a shared history back to their involvement in the documentary The Shaman and the Scientist.

At the heart of the conversation is a tension they both clearly feel. Both support plant medicine, yet don’t fully agree on where it should go. Dennis, who first brought the ayahuasca vine to Hawaii in 1976, is openly conflicted about his role in spreading it globally. Carlos presses the question: you can move the plant, but can you move what makes it heal?
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In this episode of the Brainforest Café, Dennis McKenna sits down with medicinal chemist Matt Metcalf to explore a genuinely strange frontier: testing drugs in pea seedlings and the touch-sensitive Mimosa pudica instead of in mice. Along the way they circle the question that started it all, why the opium poppy spends so much energy making opioids at all, and what those molecules might be doing inside a plant that has no nerves.

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Matthew Metcalf is a neuroscientist with a background in the medicinal chemistry and pharmacology of opioids and cannabinoids as analgesic drugs. He is an assistant professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences University (MCPHS) School of Pharmacy - Worcester.

His current research focuses on the development of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs, sometimes called Non-Animal Models) drug tests to limit the use of animals used in drug testing.

His current work focuses on the use of living plants as the biological organisms to replace animal models used as drug tests.

Outside of his research he is passionate about auroras and timelapse photography.
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Dennis McKenna sits down with his old friend Dr. Cedric Baker, an ethnopharmacologist and medical herbalist who studies the ethnobotany of food across more than thirty countries. Together they take apart one of modern medicine's most stubborn assumptions: that food and medicine are separate things. From Thai kitchens where every dish is therapeutic, to the world's longevity hotspots, to the ethics of who owns a plant, it's a conversation that will leave you looking at your own plate a little differently.

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Cedric Barrett Baker is an ethnopharmacologist, food
ethnopharmacognoist, medicinal food ethnobotanist, integrative oncology
medical herbalist, pharmaconutrition research scientist, & medical
botany, pharmacognosy and pharmacy historian. He is also a licensed
Rph.
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As the psychedelic renaissance surges, wild sources are collapsing under
demand—peyote takes decades to grow, safrole extraction is destroying
Southeast Asian forests, and Sonoran Desert toads are being overharvested.

In his book Bioengineering Enlightenment, Prof. Jeffrey Gerst proposes a radical solution: engineer yeast or fast-growing plants to produce psychedelic compounds sustainably. But at what cost? Dennis McKenna warns this could strip these substances from their cultural and ecological roots, veering into biopiracy.

Together, they debate biotech vs. tradition, exploring alternatives like
community-led agroforestry, symbiotic rights, and the “Om Fund” to
return profits to Indigenous stewards. They also revisit Terence McKenna’s “Stoned Ape” hypothesis, asking whether paleogenomics could experimentally probe the evolution of human consciousness.

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Jeffrey Gerst, born and raised in New York, is a Professor of Biology with over three decades of academic experience. He began his career at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and has since held a long-standing position at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where he serves as the Besen-Brender Chair of Microbiology and Parasitology. His research focuses on how proteins are correctly localized within cells, particularly through the trafficking of messenger RNA (mRNA), a process essential for normal cellular function and disease prevention.

Among his key contributions, Gerst’s work has demonstrated that mammalian cells can transfer mRNA between one another, revealing a novel form of intercellular communication. His lab is now exploring this mechanism as a potential gene therapy approach to treat rare genetic disorders such as Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, and Gaucher’s disease by enabling targeted RNA delivery within the body.

In addition to his biomedical research, Gerst advocates for the sustainable production of psychedelic compounds using genetic engineering. He is the author of Bioengineering Enlightenment and has presented this work at major scientific conferences.

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Dennis McKenna sits down with journalist Mattha Busby to discuss the evolving world of psychedelics, including ayahuasca, ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, coca policy, drug reform, and the risks and realities behind psychedelic retreats and clinics. Mattha shares stories from the front lines of psychedelic journalism and reflects on the cultural, scientific, and political forces shaping the future of consciousness research.

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Mattha Busby is a freelance journalist who has covered drug policy, psychedelics, culture and society for VICE, WIRED, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, LA Times and Esquire. He is the author of two slim volume books, Should All Drugs Be Legalized? (Thames & Hudson, 2022) and Psychedelics: A Pocket Primer (Hoxton Mini Press, 2025). He is represented by literary agents Aevitas Creative and is currently working on his first novel. He has also given keynotes on psychedelic culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
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