Zappy Zapolin Wants To Change the World with Psychedelics – Podcast Episode #1

We are so excited to unveil the Psychedelic Invest Podcast to the world. In the first episode, host Bruce Eckfeldt, sits down with Zappy Zapolin to talk about how psychedelics are poised to change the world.

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You’re listening to the Psychedelic Invest Podcast – where we speak with founders, CEOs, investors, advisors, experts, and thought leaders in the brave new world of psychedelics and entheogenic medicines. Brought to you by Psychedelic Invest, bringing you unparalleled psychedelic investing data and analysis. Psychedelic Invest is the industry’s leading resource for those looking to invest in the burgeoning psychedelic industry. For more information and to access all of the podcast episodes, check out our website at psychedelicinvest.com/podcast 

And now here’s the host of the Psychedelic Invest Podcast, Bruce Eckfeldt. 

Welcome, everyone. This is the Psychedelic Invest Podcast. I’m Bruce Eckfeldt. I’m your host. Our guest today is Zappy Zapolin. Zappy is known as many things. We’re gonna talk about the work that he’s doing in psychedelics, people know him as the psychedelic concierge, he’s working with several different companies on helping bring solutions to various challenges that we have in mental health and general health that psychedelics have some really promising interesting applications for organ talked about the work he’s doing with psychoanalytical as well as KetaMD, and a bunch of other things going on in the industry and the background that he has, and developing some really great content and really great insights around the work of psychedelics and their potential applications. And the people that use them. So I’m excited about the conversation and to see what’s going on in Zappy’s world and hearing what he’s seeing and thinking and where the future of psychedelics is going. 

With that, Zappy, welcome to the program. 

Thank you, Bruce. Great to be here. I’m actually talking to you from California, where I’m at the Milken Global Conference, which is an annual conference that you know, is the all the top decision-makers in Fortune 500 CEOs and psychedelics are prominently featured in the schedule, and people are talking about it, and people are coming up to me, especially in and asking my professional opinion, but you’d be surprised how many people ask on a personal Laubscher themselves or a family member. So exciting to see in that context. 

Yeah, yeah. And how just a little bit of background like how did you get into the space? What prompted you to investigate psychedelics? What was your kind of angle? And how was that developed overtime to get to where you are today? 

You know, what happened for me was I, when I was younger, had had a couple of positive psychedelic experiences. But like any young person, you’re just kind of experimenting, with no real intent to it. And in around 2010, I started to have this spiritual midlife crisis, where I did everything that society told me to do to be happy, and I did it all. It’s like, you know, make money, have a family, all that. And I was sitting there as if, you know, I’m happy. But like, I don’t, I don’t know why I’m even here. Like, I need some answers to some things right now. And so I thought back on my psychedelic experiences, and I had heard about plant medicine, Ayahuasca, San Pedro, some of these indigenous medicines, and I thought, wow, I’ve tried everything else. Let’s I’m gonna have to give this a shot. And I tried to do it with the right intent, I went down to Peru, with some friends, including the actress Michelle Rodriguez. And we filmed that experience just to tie in it kind of documented almost for ourselves. But we turned it into a movie called The reality of truth, which is about our experience, it’s now been seen over 15 million times. And it’s supposedly inspired over a million people to do a plant medicine experience since that’s come out which it feels really good. I get emails every day from people who say it changed their life or save their life or somebody in their family. Sure. And so as I was doing that, you know, I kept I realized there was something incredible here, and I started to investigate all of the psychedelics. And in about six years ago, I was looking for a western medicine approach, because when I would tell people to go down to the jungle and sit with a shaman, they will be like, Zappy I cannot do that my family will bake or acne. If I tell him I’m going to do that right now. So I was I had to find a western approach. And I found ketamine. And I was like, Wow, this could be the western medicine approach, where somebody could comfortably go into a doctor’s office, take an FDA approved medication, but have that transcendental experience, where you go into present moment awareness, and a lot of things change in that those moments. And so I thought, this is incredible. I convinced the doctor to let me experience it. I then became an advocate for ketamine. And I started to run around and you know, get you to know, try to just learn everything I could about ketamine and I met my business partner We’re in gum Powell, who is a patient who is advocating for ketamine at the time. And he and I decided to join forces. And we said, let’s go out and try to, you know, just educate doctors and the public about what the opportunity here is ketamine because we’ve got a suicide epidemic, we got an addiction, depression, this is even before the pandemic was even a thing. And so we’re sitting there going, nothing else’s work, antidepressants do not work better than placebo. You know, meditation only works for people who, you know, are in a certain mental space, talk therapy, you know, all these things are what got us into this situation. And as Einstein said, you can’t get out of a situation with the same thinking or consciousness that got you into it. Yeah. And so I was like, Wow, this could be that. And you, when you look at it, you realize that psychedelics are the most reliable way for somebody to go inside themselves, have that conscious expansion experience, and, in many cases, build new neural pathways in the brain. It’s the only thing and so I started to embrace it as the only thing and started to meet all the ketamine doctors and sit with hundreds of patients myself having treatments. And I realized that this was the silver bullet for the United States and Western society. And so with Warren, we started something called KetaMD, which is an at-home service to do ketamine over tele med with a nurse. And we figured that since this kind of happened, right around Corona, where we were like, people don’t want to come into a clinic and get germs and sit there and have to have somebody drive them and they got to come during office hours only if we could do this at home. This is the holy grail for society. And we could really maybe save a lot of people from suicide and depression and things. And so we’ve launched that we’re in beta, we’re going to go public in the next month or so. And it’s been fantastic. We’ve had all kinds of influencers and celebrities go through it. Yeah. And what happened was two and a half years ago, I was screening my movie, the reality of truth, doing a q&a. And somebody came up to me after it and they said, Hey, I’m friends with Lamar Odom the basketball player Kardashian is in not in a good place right now. And I just saw your movie about plant medicine, do you think you could help them and I met with Lamar and I realized that he’d had a lot of trauma in his life. His mother died when he was 12. his infant son passed away when he was six months old. And so I said, Look, you know, why don’t you come to the doctor’s office, do the ketamine have this experience of going inside yourself, which he had never had? He’d always been told don’t do that. And he did it. And he had a great experience. And he did it a few more times. And he said, he felt like he was really building up some of the neural pathways that he had damaged during his overdose and being in a coma and having 12 strokes and six heart attacks. And he so he got comfortable enough with me that I said, Look, Lamar, you’ve got an addiction profile. You’re an African American guy. There’s this African root called Ibogaine. Iboga. And it can break a heroin addiction or meth addiction or alcohol, whatever it is, you should probably do it maybe even as an African American guy, you should have been having this but culturally, you’ve been cut off from it. Why don’t you come down to Mexico because it’s illegal in the United States, and have a doctor do the treatment? I’ll go with you and guide you. And he allowed me to film all this stuff because he’s just so open he wants to share. So we did that. And we created a movie called Lamar Odom reborn, which we’re talking to the streaming services now it’s shows his psychedelic intervention, which has gone incredibly well for him. He went from Yeah, 12 strokes, six heart attacks to making a comeback in professional basketball and reconnecting with his family and his dad who uses strange for. So it’s like one of these things where nothing else could have possibly worked except psychedelics. And that’s kind of my mantra right now is that we have to step into this thing that we actually know quite a bit about because we’ve been for 50 years, these compounds have been taken for by millions of people, and many of them with great benefit. And so now that we’re in this crisis, with the PTSD coming out of Korea, you know, COVID and the existing addiction, depression epidemic, psychedelics are the most reliable way for us to break this and you’re seeing it, you know, the government just announced that they’re funding the first psychedelic study, you know, all kinds of big-time news events happening around psychedelics because people realize this is medical. This is Mental Health. This is nothing like cannabis for recreation and Oh, yeah, this is an emergency situation. So it’s yeah, it’s just exciting to be in the middle of it, you know, every day, it’s like a new chapter. 

I’m curious, just kind of going back to the original story, like, how have you kind of bridged or transitioned? What sounds like, in the beginning, was a very kind of indigenous ceremonial kind of application of a very plant-based, you know, in the context of kind of a whole kind of belief system process, you know, ceremonial experience to being more of a medical treatment kind of mode, like, how is that? Like, how does that work for you? or what have you noticed around sort of the differences between those worlds? 

Yeah, you know, it’s funny, because it has moved so fast that when I was with, you know, Michelle Rodriguez and we’re in the jungle in 2012, I’m thinking like, oh, wow, like, this is it, this is what I have to get everybody to come to do. But I just as I realized that the impossibility of that of the fact that they’re, you know, most people can’t hop on a plane and go down to Peru, and all that kind of stuff. It’s like, we had to find something in the western culture. And it forced me to, you know, in my own experimentation with different things of trying to use things to when I would try them myself, whether that was five Meo DMT, or high dose psilocybin or ketamine or, you know, Chunga or whatever I was trying for myself, I was always wearing that hat of like, could this help other people? Is this accessible for other people, and it wasn’t really until I found ketamine where I was like, this is Western medicine approachable, you know, you know, and psilocybin, I think micro-dosing, psilocybin is probably going to eliminate all of the antidepressants out there in the next, you know, five years, so it would be my guess, because, you know, when I take the microdose of psilocybin, I wind up at some point during the day going, Oh, my God, this is what people must want to feel like when they take those antidepressants, I feel free energy. You know, I’m connected to nature. It’s like, you know, and my realization is like a psychedelic concierge is that you know, almost like a concierge at a hotel when somebody comes to you at the hotel and says, where should I eat dinner tonight? You ask them a series of questions. It’s like, what kind of food do you like? Do you like music? Do you like wine? Do you want to be inside or outside and then based on that you make a determination about what’s going to be best for them? Yeah. And as a psychedelic concierge, knowing that each one of these plants has a different benefit, I ask these people about their trauma and their intent for doing it. And so if somebody’s you know, disconnected from nature, I might recommend San Pedro, if somebody’s had loss, and they need a hug from the grandmother, I might recommend Ayahuasca if somebody is just apathetic, I might recommend psilocybin microdose or, you know, maybe they need a macro dose, and then it microdose. But each one of these kinds of has its healing property, and you can make a formula so in the Lamar Odom reborn movie, there’s a formula in there that I created for Lamar, which was ketamine plus plant medicine, plus a daily practice equals a conscious transformation. And so by daily practice, what I mean is that after you do these compounds, and you have these transcendental experiences, integration is really important. And so you’re gonna want to integrate, whether that’s meditation, breathing techniques, you know, something for you, that brings you back to that present moment, awareness experience that you’re in reconnects you to that is something you need to do so you can hang on to that experience, get the most benefit from it, and allow it to work for years and years or a lifetime as opposed to it being something that’s kind of short, short term. And this kind of leads me I would say to a company that I’m involved with called psycho surgical, because this is sort of the best of psychedelics meeting the best of pharmaceutical, and I realized that what was missing was the opportunity to deliver these compounds in a safer and more effective way. So that the medical establishment and people in power and individuals themselves instead of saying, hey, take some mushrooms here, here’s a cap and a stem and you know, that looks like about the right amount and take that it’s like, that’s not going to work for mass adoption. We need this to be like the pharmaceuticals that we benefit from, we need the psychosocial articles to carry that opportunity. So what psychoanalytical is done is we have two patents, their delivery system patents, these are patents that work in the regular pharmaceutical industry to deliver medicines more effectively. We have the exclusive for the psychedelic industry. And what that means is we can deliver these compounds where you can take less of the compound, but more bioavailability got it, we can engineer out the psychedelic effect if that’s necessary. So I’ve even had this conversation back and forth with Rick Doblin from maps where, you know, we talked about, hey, when is it appropriate to take out the psychedelic experience or not. And in most cases, you know, like people to have that experience because it can be so life-changing. But at the same time, you know, you’ve got elderly people, you’ve got adolescents, you’ve got people, maybe who are scared, which is probably half the population is scared of these new things. So for them to be able to take it, yeah, and get all the benefit of neurogenesis in these things. But without the psychedelic experience, we have to have the option there. And that’s key. And so what’s really amazing about psycho surgical is that you’re, it’s these Janus particles, they’re layered nanoparticles, which means you can, you can put multiple psychedelics together at the same time, go where you can time release those, as each layer comes off, it’s programmed in time, how when you want it to come off, so you could put together, for example, ketamine, and then, you know, an hour later CBG is released into the body. Yeah, or maybe, you know, in ketamine, it’s always been tough to microdose, because you have to take it, it comes out of your body so fast that you have to take it every hour, and it’s difficult to get people to take their meds, right. So you could take a psycho suitable, and the layers come off every hour or two hours, whatever it is, and you’re micro-dosing throughout the day. And we can even pop in there like I said, something like CBG, or some type of a powerful anti-inflammatory, or even something that’s, you know, you see, some of these companies like mine med or Seibon, or field trip, they have these different compounds, mine med has this 18 MC, well, if you take 18 MC orally, it’s going to go into your stomach, it’s going to degrade, it’s going to go into your liver toxicity. It’s like so when we put that into a psycho surgical format, it bypasses the blood-brain barrier. Because most of the problems associated with psychedelics like dizziness, and nausea, these things, are systemic side effects. So if you’re not going into the systemic circulatory system, you’re going directly to the brain through into the blood, you bypass any of those negative qualities. And I think this is what’s really needed. Yeah, because and also targeting, you can actually target these and instead of having to take extra medicine, because you know that bioavailability is going to below, you take less of that medicine much less, but it’s so bioavailable that so this is what yeah, this is what the pharmaceuticals are the holy grail. And so I’m really excited. We’re working on making that a publicly-traded company because we feel like, you know, we can we have such an opportunity for any of these psychedelic companies like mine med with M 18. MC, they should deliver that in a psycho surgical format. Seibon, same thing, and all these microdose products. Yeah, just time-released. Yeah, I’m releasing the format. Exactly. And then we go into the government, we say, Look, this is the way to ensure that like pharmaceuticals, we’re getting as much benefit with and reducing any harm. And I think this is going to be I don’t want to say mandated, but it’s going to be the gold standard of you know, how you take a psychedelic in the future, it’s going to be a psychosis article, so you can know what you’re getting. And you can get the most benefit without any a lot of that, you know, potentially negative side effects. Do you see the application? 

You’ve talked about kind of two modalities or two sorts of situations? And it sounds like when you first started looking at some of the plant medicine, it was really, I mean, you’re, you know, fairly functional, and I was it was really about how do I find a higher purpose? How do I connect at a higher level? Like, really? How do I kind of tap in my creative energy, all these things, versus you know, a lot of these situations of people, you know, really struggling, right dealing with, you know, whether it’s addiction, depression, various real kind of diagnoses that need to be treated? And some of these, you know, not having a lot of great treatment options otherwise, like, where do you see sort of the future of psychedelics and this is it, is it really kind of treating some of these things that we’ve really struggled with? Or is it about helping people really kind of enhance their lives and enhance performance in those areas? Where do you see this going? It’s a little of both. I mean, I think, you know, I’ve sat personally with a couple 100 people, including many veterans who had extreme PTSD who were on 20 Plus medications from the VA homicidal suicidal and you give them a good ketamine treatment from in the right space and with the right, you know, methodology. And you see those people transform in that single session. And I’ve had, I have a nonprofit with my partner Warren gum pal called the cat didn’t mean fund and we’ve given away 500 Plus treatments to veterans for free a ketamine treatment and booster treatments. And these guys, as I said, one guy went from 20 medications down to zero. He said he went home after his first ketamine treatment, he said he felt hope. And then he said, he went home and he hugged his kids, and he felt love for the first time in 10 years. I’m gonna cry. I know. And that’s like a worst-case scenario I’ve treated people walking in with bandages on their wrists from actively trying to commit suicide. And what happens is so fascinating is that this ketamine is incredible. When you have the experience, about five minutes into the experience, you find yourself in this place of what I would call present moment awareness, where there is no future to get anxious about, there’s no past too, you know, get muddled up in, you’re just in this present moment. And then you can look at things in your life from a third-party perspective. And in that experience that is so transformational when you can do that. And I look at that. And I know that when people are usually going to commit suicide, it’s usually they think I keep doing what I’m doing, or I kill myself, those are my only two options. And they sit down in the ketamine. And all of a sudden, as they’re sitting there with their eyes closed, these 10 Other options sets open up, and they look at him like, oh, you know what, I kind of liked doing that which could lead to this, which could lead to that they’re like, they come out 45 minutes later, like, I’m not going to kill myself, this is so interesting. And I have to pursue what’s going on here. So that I think it has endless applications. There are so many different kinds of things we put into psychedelics, right, there’s plant-based, there’s lab-based, and some of them are, you could argue are less actual psychedelics, but how do you kind of organize this world that we’re dealing with right now in this space? Like, are there buckets? Or how do you see kind of the path towards some of these molecules, some of these plant medicines, some of the formulations? What are the organization’s strategies? 

Yeah, you know, you know, in my own clarification, I find most of these things either to be very organic in some way or to be derived from plants or some organic material. So a lot of times, you know, people are like, Oh, I wouldn’t do LSD that’s synthetic. And yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, no, that’s actually, you know, bacteria that grows on a rice Eve, and they’ve basically just isolated that bacteria. That’s LSD. You know, if you think that ketamine is synthetic, it’s not it’s, they take some salts and some minerals, they process it together. And this new ketamine crystal appears, I said, that’s organic of the Earth, like these things are all here for us. And I kind of characterize it like, you know, whatever is best for you, whatever is going to make you feel the most comfortable, whether that’s plant material, because that fits your you or it’s FDA approved, that fits you. But I think like our opportunities, we do have things that are going to work in all of those different categories. And it’s more a question of sitting with somebody who can determine what it is that you need based on your intent based on what you’re trying to do. Because you know, I personally, I’ve tried Ibogaine myself. I didn’t have an addiction, but I just was super curious, like, how could that break a heroin addiction? While ours, it didn’t even make sense. I’ve got to try this. And I tried it. And it was very clear to me how it does it after I did it, which was to, you know, do this entire history of your life that you’re going through, and you’re analyzing these different situations, and you’re having this very amazing experience, but it’s intense, and it’s emotional. And, you know, when you come out of that it actually does this physical cleanse on you where it basically wipes your prefrontal cortex. So, you know, cravings, you have no, you’ve sweated everything out, you have nothing in your body, and it does that physical but then it does this, you know, a mental one, where you know, Ibogaine is used by this tribe in Africa called the booty. And it’s basically used to commune with your ancestors. And that’s how it was used. And then they realize that if you give it to somebody who’s having, you know, either mental health issues or physical issues, or they want to try for peak performance, just to enhance their life that you give them Iboga or the synthesized Ibogaine, you give them that and they will have these experiences, which will be life-changing, and they’ll get that physical change as well. So I think, you know, we’ve got all these drug and alcohol treatment centers in the US, it’s like talk therapy, plus this and that, and I’m being honest with you, Bruce, I see these people that are supposedly sober at meetings like an AAA meeting or an NA meeting, and it’s like they’re drinking 12 cups of coffee with sugar. They’re on Xanax. They’re smoking a vape You know, they’re eating a sub sandwich and they’re like, I’m totally sober. And the whole time all they’re doing is thinking like, I can’t use, I can’t use, I gotta go to a meeting, I can’t, it’s like, that’s not a life I go. But if you were to just for 12 hours sit with Ibogaine, and you sit there and you have this experience, and you don’t have to detox and you live your life in, you know, in this new state of mind, which doesn’t have to do with, you know, trying not to use, I would do that, you know, 100 times in a row before I did that traditional detox talk treatment, which only works for like 5% of people. And then when you put on top of that, that, you know, Bill Wilson who founded AAA founded that program, because he had an LSD experience, the fact that that was taken out means that the fundamentals of our entire thinking about these medicines are incorrect. And we need to educate people through podcasts like this through celebrities like Lamar, some of the other people that I work with, you know, coming out and saying, This is the opportunity that our society has to heal itself from these other things that nothing else is working for. And that’s gotten us into this situation, to begin with. Yeah, let’s talk about ketamine. D a little bit, because I’m curious how you’re approaching it from a business point of view. So, you know, it seems like a lot of folks are kind of looking at ketamine as a way to kind of develop the models and facilities and the practices and the processes. And then as some of these other molecules and you know, psychedelics come out, we can start integrating them and other ones, like how have you use ketamine to kind of prove the case, build the model, you know, the processes around this providing these therapeutic experiences? And then how, like, how is this kind of building the business? Give me a little insight on the kind of strategy around this? Yeah. So after, you know, when I was going around the country with Warren gum Powell, and we were meeting all the top ketamine doctors and sitting with them and coming up with the best protocols that everybody was combined using, we started to realize that there were certain things that were going to work better than other things. But what happened was the Coronavirus hit and we were like, wow, we can’t recommend people go into a clinic and sit there and do that we were like, we have to create an at-home solution that’s safe and effective. And so what we did was we developed a network of we now have, you know, hundreds of nurses that are in our pipeline, many of them who have been trained. And what we do is we have created a continuing medical education CME for doctors to be able to prescribe ketamine. And so we’re teaching the doctors how to be prescribers. They do a tele med session with the patient, they come up with the prescription they feel they have that prescription created, and then the person gets sent their medication at home. And they schedule a session with one of our nurses and over tele Med, they have the session, the nurse, make sure they’re in the right set and setting we make sure they have a buddy in the House who’s available if needed, we make sure we play them our own frequency based music, we help them to integrate the experience. But basically, what other ketamine companies out there are doing is just may be sending you the medicine talking to you beforehand, and then saying, hey, text us let us know how it goes. We wanted to put another layer of not only safety but a way for you to integrate it and get as much out of the experience as possible. So you have this one hour or more session with the nurse. And in that time as you’re having the ketamine experience and integrating it. It’s a really powerful experience. You know, we put a couple 100 people through this and all kinds of influencers and people, friends and family, frontline workers, nurses, and it’s incredible because not only are the outcomes as good as the ketamine clinics when somebody goes there, but all the problems with the clinic don’t exist, that physical location office hours that somebody’s having to drive you there and back taking time off of work. That means that it’s limited but is at home, Kedah, MD. It’s like you can do this in your own home, do it at night, do it on the weekends, sit in your own bed, nobody has to drive you anywhere. And it’s just like, these are solutions. And then when I think about okay, now you apply a psycho surgical format to this. Now we know we can give somebody a small amount that’s going to be very bioavailable to them, and they’re going to get exactly what they’re supposed to get. Because right now, we’re using with Kedah, MD, a lozenge that you take in melts onto your tongue goes into your mucosa and that’s how you get the medicine into your system. But it’s shown that it’s probably only about 25% bioavailable. So if you want to give somebody 100 milligrams of ketamine, you got to give them a 400-milligram lozenge and that can vary based on their metabolism when they ate You know, all these kinds of things, and we’re trying to take that out. So when you think about a psycho surgical that bypasses the stomach and the liver, and they take a small amount, they get a full benefit. And then it never has to deal with the stomach or the liver, there’s no none of that systemic fact that that is the Holy Grail here, that is what’s going to bring, I think the entire medical establishment, all the research consumers to say, I can have this experience, whether that starting with ketamine, because as you said, Bruce, it’s the one that’s FDA approved and legal right now, and other things will come online, you know, because I think a lot of people who have a flood dose type of experience of anything, need that daily practice and need that integration, probably need something like psilocybin, microdose, or ketamine microdose, that they can just take every day that what’s great about it is and what I love about ketamine is it comes out of your system in a matter of hours. So you get all this neurogenesis, this growing of brain matter, these new patterns in your brain growing, but you don’t have the medicine in you when you take a traditional antidepressant, an SSRI, you’re taking it every single day, it’s building up your system, it’s changing your brain chemistry. And it’s like, That’s not the thing to do. There are all kinds of side effects and so on. It’s like, just we have these opportunities. And this is kind of what I want to say to people is like, we have to get a lot more forceful, more radical right now and say, We demand the right to have these psychedelic compounds for mental health right now, the government needs to make these available and legal immediately for studying and for people who are in crisis. We cannot sit around here and debate something that doesn’t need to be debated. And I feel like, in 2021, where most people have basic scientific knowledge and medical knowledge, we cannot be told alcohol is good. You know, but you know, cannabis is bad. And psilocybin is off-limits, even if your family members, you know, in crisis is like, No, we have a crisis. We need accessibility right now. The other things aren’t working, and we need to get out of this crisis.