Jez Hughes is a healer, author and founder of shamanic school Second Sight Healing. Since his early teens, he suffered a series of seizures and panic attacks. He believes this was an initiatory illness to connect with the spirit world. He has mostly trained with the Wixarika community of Mexico, who use the psychedelic cactus peyote as their sacrament, following long-held and uninterrupted traditions. However, in his own work, he uses a drum to bring about trance states, as well as the liberty cap mushroom. He says he would never work with a medicine that doesn't grow in his land, because of a lack of ancestral connection.Jez recalls how an indigenous Mexican marakame visited his late wife in a hospital in Worthing to give her a healing while she was receiving treatment for lung cancer. He imagines a future in which shamanic healings could be available in hospitals, as reiki now is. Jez also reflects on his recent pilgrimage in Mexico to harvest, and sit with, the psychedelic cactus peyote. He made a decade-long commitment to return to the country each year. We also discuss the use of ayahuasca in Brazilian prisons. 

Harry Pack is a visionary artist whose work is influenced by his own psychedelic experiences, and unexplained mysteries. His kaleidoscope pieces, which feature a cast of elves and UFOs, invite the viewer to ponder an infinite realm that exists in tandem with our more volatile world. Harry tells us about experiences in which he was led to suspect he may have been abducted by aliens. He also shares reflections on his recovery journey from dependency on alcohol and ketamine, to his life in recovery and sobriety today. Prayer and manifestation have been key to both his return to health, and success, he explains, sharing details of a number of uncanny coincidences. We also discuss his forays into the NFT art world, and how he ended up exhibiting his work at major events in the UK, US and elsewhere.Today he sees his work as a vessel for self-exploration and understanding. And he is keen to help others develop their own art practice so it can be a vehicle for self-healing. Harry is focused on reconnecting others with their 'sacred soul' through psychedelic art therapy, and integrating meditation techniques into the creative process. His new Purple UFO project has just begun to host 'multidimensional' events to help people unlock their creative juices. 

Seth Ferranti did 21 years in federal pen for selling large amounts of weed and LSD after two years on the run following his initial arrest, during which time he elaborately staged his own drowning in an attempt to throw police off the scent. But he accidentally did it on the wrong side of the river – the one which flows into a dam and therefore would wash up the body – and his 'suicide' was declared a hoax by police. He then got placed of a list of the most wanted fugitives by US authorities. He went back to selling cannabis, and got caught smoking a joint outside a fast food joint while doing a weed deal. His fingerprints matched him up with the man who was on the run.Inside, he gained three college degrees, started website Gorilla Convict, and became a columnist for Vice and wrote about the stories of gangsters from their perspectives and the victims of the war on drugs. He would sometimes get placed in solitary confinement for his articles, so he'd work on his books instead. Released in 2015, his 2017 documentary White Boy, on the story of a FBI informant and cocaine kingpin, was on Netflix for a year before hitting other streaming platforms. He tells us about tripping on acid in prison, his new film, The Secret History of the LSD Trade, and feeling vindicated as a trailblazer, as cannabis and psychedelics are increasingly mainstreamed. His forthcoming documentary, A Tortured Mind, covers the failure of the authorities to reintegrate former prisoners back into society. The protagonist, not long out of prison, OD'd while they were making the film. You can check out the profile on Seth in High Times, as well as this Rolling Stone piece on his case while he was in the early years of his prison 'bid'. 

Is passively receiving a pill, even a psychedelic one, ever truly beneficial? Writer and neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell presents his new book 10 Trips, and speaks of how the new reality of psychedelics is characterised by hype around the current incarnation of them as mental health antidotes. Andy had issues with addiction in his late teens, and stayed drink and drug free for 25 years. But then he ended up revamping Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind and set out to curate 10 different trips with 10 different molecules in 10 different settings. This soon became 40 trips in 60 days, though he hasn't now tripped for a year. His prevailing thesis from the experience centres around a scepticism about the medical model, and a belief that the standardisation and monetisation of the psychedelic experience will dilute its potency, and limit its ability to re-enchant us with the world. Andy describes his intrepid adventures researching and writing the book. Notably, he visited the Kogi tribe in Colombia and explains how he met a former Lithuanian criminal who quit the gangster life and started a recycling company after drinking ayahuasca.

Do we know which psychedelic is best for the brain? Neuroscientist Manesh Girn, the self-styled 'Psychedelic Scientist', riffs on his experiences with 5-MeO-DMT and explains why he, unlike many other researchers, is entirely up front about his own experiences with hallucinogens. We also discuss the dubious claims that psychedelic use can bias scientists more than the ingestion of any other substances that are studied in the lab. Manesh addresses whether psychedelics can effectively de-age the brain and reveals that since 17 he wanted to be a psychedelic neuroscientist.He gives his views on tripping at home after a Washington Post opinion piece asserted that self-medicating with psychedelic drugs was a dangerous plan. We also chat about whether LSD retreats will ever become a thing, how psychedelics can bring users to a pivotal mental state, and the blossoming of above ground psychedelic communities around the globe, as well as spiritual bypassing within those spaces. You can check out Manesh's video on how to prepare for a psychedelic trip on YouTube.

Is psychic surgery really a thing? Explorer and Qigong practitioner TeDeVan Kurzweil, once described as a 'wandering Jewish mystic', tells us about his trip to Havana to visit a machete-wielding surgeon named Jorge Goliat, who was recently featured by the Daily Mail. Kurzweil details how the doctor performs rudimentary surgeries while allegedly drinking rum all day, chain-smoking and swallowing metal needles, which he claims he does not defecate. For his Spiritual Schmuck YouTube series, Kurzweil tested the bizarre, and mildly concerning, surgery for himself, which involved having his scrotum cut open with the 18-inch machete. 'If you want to have children, we gotta fix it,' Goliat told him, as can be seen here in one of his viral TikTok videos. 'Take all your clothes off.' Although blood flowed, it soon stopped after an anti-coagulate frog venom was applied, Kurzweil said. He also witnessed Goliat cutting people to varying degrees of depth with his machete, without anaesthesia. There are Reuters pictures of the queue for his surgery. Kurzweil tells Mattha all about his extraordinary life and what's next for him, exploring more apparent metaphysical phenomenons – or hoaxes.

Will science be able to predict what will happen in people's psychedelic trips? Neuroscientist Zeus Tipado tells us about his ongoing research examining the possibility of recreating specific psychedelic experiences. He declares that it is pseudoscientific to make claims of interdimensional travel or visions of real aliens while on psychedelics; contending that visual perceptions can be neurologically explained and everything can be explained internally.  We discuss how to tell the difference between psilocybin and oral tryptamines, and Zeus also recounts the wild tale of a salvia journey gone awry, in which his coffee table and sofa were destroyed. He reveals his seminal psychedelic experience - at college with 5g of shrooms - and describes it as a life changing experience which led him to study religion. Beer pong cups turned into floating orbs. I omitted to ask him about when he did another heroic dose at a gamer convention, but you can read about it here

What happens when the trip doesn't stop? Journalist and researcher Ed Prideaux tells us what happened when his acid high never subsided. Instead of people's faces and clear blue skies, he would see geometric patterns and melting features. This went on for years. But, curiously, the condition known as hallucinatory persisting perception disorder eased when he stopped smoking cannabis. It led him into advocacy work for a charity and established him as the leading voice on the topic within the psychedelic space. He recently wrote for the BBC about what he learnt from experiencing psychedelic flashbacks. We also discuss lucid dreaming, self-inquiry meditation and Nandos.

Are healers chosen? Davina Mackail pursued the shamanic path after a near-death experience after suffering severe altitude sickness in Tibet and then arriving in Lhasa, the capital, which seemed like heaven. Then, she says, teachers began appearing in her life, and she later trained in Peru to serve ayahuasca and San Pedro according to the indigenous traditions. She discusses the proliferation of plant medicine ceremonies across the world, including in the UK, and the corresponding increase in people calling themselves shamans. Mackail also shares wisdom around feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of arranging space in relation to the flow of energy, otherwise known as chi. She says that homes are not just bricks and mortar, and have living spirits. Terrance McKenna's plan of the plants for the planet is also referenced, as well as Mackail's old astrology column for UK newspapers, and discovering her father. You can read more about shamanism via host Mattha Busby's psychedelics.com article on The Origins of Counterculture’s Most Misused Word.

Why is the Wixarika tribe of Mexico more open to sharing peyote with outsiders than the Native American Church? Musician Diego Perez Lombardini, the only 'mestizo' person to hold a position in one Wixarika religious organisation, gives insights from years supporting the community and undertaking a series of pilgrimages. He discusses the threats to the land upon which peyote grows, how the Wixarika people have preserved their unique way of life over centuries, and how peyote sits at the heart of their cosmology. Plus, his experiences with the medicine. Check out Diego's awesome EP entitled A R P A F U E G O, composed from his time with the Wixarika, alongside indigenous musicians. And here's Mattha's OpenDemocracy piece about peyote conservation.