Ketamine, Ibogaine, & Microdosing: A Path of Transformation

LISTEN ON:


Episode 256

Zappy Zapolin

In this episode of The Psychedelic Podcast, host Paul F. Austin welcomes back futurist and entrepreneur Zappy Zapolin, a guest from the early days of the show. Zappy discusses the urgent need for accessible natural plant medicines for mental health and addiction treatment, highlighting his experiences with ketamine and the innovative concept of 'ketitation' group katamine journeys. He shares insights on how ketamine enhances neural pathways and fosters empathy, and the potential of ibogaine for breaking addiction patterns. Join us for a transformative conversation on the future of mental health.

Zappy Zapolin is a futurist, entrepreneur, and award-winning filmmaker recognized for his expertise in psychedelic therapies. Playboy magazine dubbed him "The man who wants to change the world with psychedelics."
He directed the documentaries “The Reality of Truth” and “Lamar Odom: Reborn”, and founded the Mind Army, which aims to legalize psychedelic medicines.
Zappy began his career on Wall Street as the youngest vice president in the history of Bear Stearns and has consistently identified major trends, including internet domains” names, legal cannabis, and the psychedelic economy.

Podcast Highlights

  • Intro to Zappy and his mission with psychedelics
  • Spreading awareness about iboga for treating addiction
  • ‘Ketitation’ group ketamine journeys
  • Understanding the addictive potential of ketamine
  • Raising awareness of and educating about the healing potential of ibogaine and ketamine
  • Breaking addiction patterns with ibogaine
  • Powerful accounts of ibogaine’s healing potential
  • Psychedelics as a solution in the “11th hour” of humanity

These show links may contain affiliate links. Third Wave receives a small percentage of the product price if you purchase through the above affiliate links.

 

This episode is sponsored by Soltara Healing Center - a renowned retreat center working with the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca under the guidance of Indigenous Peruvian Shipibo healers. With locations in Costa Rica and Peru, Soltara specializes in transformative plant medicine healing in intimate group sizes with extensive before- and aftercare support. Working with trauma-informed facilitators, experienced therapists, and distinguished advisors, including Dennis McKenna, Dr. Gabor Maté, and Bia Labate, the center offers a uniquely integrative approach.

Use code TW200 to receive $200 off your next retreat with Soltara!

Magnesium Breakthrough by BIOptimizers is the only full-spectrum magnesium supplement with 7 unique forms of magnesium that your body can actually use and absorb. And, yes, you need all 7 forms. Visit bioptimizers.com/thirdwave now and use promo code thirdwave for 10% off any order.

Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.2 Paul F. Austin: Hey there, and welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast. This is your host, Paul F. Austin, and today I'm speaking with Zappy Zapolin.

0:00:10.6 Zappy Zapolin: I realized when I did the ketamine in 2015, for the first time in a doctor's office, I was like, this is gonna save Western society. This is what everybody needs. They need to quiet all that chatter going on in their head and just be able to build some new neural pathways about, here I am in the present moment and I'm going forward into the future. Once I experienced it, I was like, this is it. I have to really dedicate myself to getting this information out about Ketamine.

0:00:45.3 Paul F. Austin: Welcome to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, audio mycelium, connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors, and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance, and collective transformation.

0:01:19.2 Speaker 3: We are excited to share with you all about Soltara Healing Center, a renowned retreat center working with the Amazonian Plant Medicine Ayahuasca under the guidance of indigenous Peruvian Shipibo healers. Soltara also collaborates with clinical psychologists and an esteemed board of advisors, including Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Dennis McKenna and Dr. Bia Labate, to support a uniquely integrative approach to healing. With decades of combined experience holding ceremonies and extensive before and aftercare support, their team allows you to experience in-depth healing in a safe and loving environment. Their over 600 five-star reviews support that claim. Soltara offers stunning locations along the shores of Costa Rica and in the sacred valley of Peru with a deep respect for the land and the ethos of safety, integrity, and reciprocity. At Soltara, you'll step into sacred ceremonies in intimate group sizes, alongside highly experienced Shipibo healers, trauma-informed facilitators, supportive holistic modalities, and modern psychotherapeutic practices. For more information or to discover if a retreat with them could support your healing, visit soltara.co. That's S-O-L-T-A-R-A.co. They're also generously offering a $200 discount for listeners of The Psychedelic Podcast with code TW200. Again, that's soltara.co, and use code TW200 to receive that $200 off your next experience with Soltara.

0:03:03.9 Paul F. Austin: Welcome back to the show. Today I have a returning guest, Zappy Zapolin, back on the show. Zappy is a good friend who I first had on the podcast in 2017. It was one of the first podcasts that we actually recorded right after Zappy's documentary came out, The Reality of Truth. And then in 2020, when the COVID Pandemic hit, I moved to Miami and had the opportunity midway through the pandemic in 2020 to do one of Zappy's early ketitations with a few friends. And Zappy has now pioneered that ketitation and done it in a very widespread way. And so it was cool to have him back on the show seven years later to talk about our relationship, our connection, all the things that we had a chance to explore since that initial interview, and just the overall developments in the psychedelic space. So in this episode together, we explore how ketamine and ibogaine are transforming mental health and healing.

0:04:09.1 Paul F. Austin: We go into how we can spread awareness about iboga for treating addiction, ketitation, group ketamine journeys, understanding the addictive potential of ketamine, raising awareness of and educating about the healing potential of ibogaine and ketamine, breaking addiction patterns with ibogaine, powerful accounts of ibogaine's healing potential, and psychedelics as a solution in the 11th hour of humanity. This was a fantastic show and I think you'll really enjoy it. Just a few things about Zappy. Zappy Zapolin is a futurist, entrepreneur and award-winning filmmaker recognized for his expertise in psychedelics. Playboy Magazine has dubbed him "the man who wants to change the world with psychedelics." He has directed the documentaries, The Reality of Truth and Lamar Odom: Reborn, founded the Mind Army, which also is a nonprofit that helps to legalize psychedelic medicines. Zappy began his career on Wall Street as the youngest vice president in the history of Bear Stearns and has consistently identified major trends including internet domain names, legal cannabis, and the psychedelic economy.

0:05:20.9 Paul F. Austin: So without further ado, I bring you a friend of mine and always an interesting interview, Zappy Zapolin. All right. So I'm sitting across from Zappy Zapolin. Zappy, we connected years ago to do a podcast. This was March, 2017. It was right before the MAPS Conference, and then we had a chance to meet at the MAPS Conference that happened in Oakland in 2017. And we've done a few ketitations together which you've really been spending a lot of time and effort on lately, supporting with the Mind Army and microdosing. And you're just always up to some crazy, fun stuff. We've been meaning to have this second conversation for some time, I feel like, so it's good to be back online with you. And you were just starting to talk about... We're recording this right after the eclipse. You were starting to talk about the documentary that you had been working on, and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, let's make sure we start recording and get this juiciness. So anyway, welcome back. It's good to have you here.

0:06:33.2 Zappy Zapolin: Thank you. Thank you. Been a while. Yeah, right after The Reality of Truth came out, I remember we did the podcast and then we connected at Psychedelic Science 2017. But I think the most impactful time I've had with you was during the Pandemic when everything was closed down and ketamine lozenges had just hit the scene. And a group of us, a small group, we were doing some protocol development, personal journey work. And those were some incredible times, just like when you have four people or six people like we did, all together having this psychedelic experience. And the world being the way it was, you didn't really know what was up or down. So to be there, doing something proactive and fun, that was a time of my life during that phase. So, yeah.

0:07:35.6 Paul F. Austin: Yeah. And there were a couple epic places that we did it at, one, at a spot that I later... We happened to host a party at with the Microdosing Collective which is this beautiful private venue and home, in Miami. And then the second was up in Fort Lauderdale, I think, with... There were a couple nurses there. It was a little bit of a bigger group and it was fun to see then how it went from that to the feature that you had in Bloomberg, the first one, 'cause you've been in Bloomberg a couple times. And so it's fun to have helped you to develop that in the early days.

0:08:12.8 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, no, this is... We're in such a cool time where this stuff is getting developed, the protocols and things. And so, for me, the Mind Army, I'm here at the Mind Army headquarters and we're fighting for the right to pursue happiness, and we believe it's your inalienable right to go inside your own mind for answers and healing to break addiction. It's just like, that's your right. And if you're not given that right, I don't know if I wanna say it's like a type of slavery where we Americans, we can explore the new world, just explore the west, explore outer space, but they're like, "No, no, you can't explore inside your mind. No, that's off limits." And pre pandemic, it seemed like it was just gonna take a bunch of time to get there. But post pandemic, you can really feel the urgency of people, government, medical, establishment, families trying to get their hands around, what do we do?

0:09:18.3 Zappy Zapolin: And if we have iboga to break addiction or we have psilocybin microdoses to replace and support antidepressants and things, we gotta get to this right now. I can't sit around here and just wait for politicians and the medical establishment to get as advanced as we are to start allowing access. Because of course, as you know, there's MAPS and Johns Hopkins and University of California, San Francisco, done major work. This is safe, it's effective, it's incredible, and still, we don't have any movement really as far as people accessing these things at this critical time. So the Mind Army's turning its attention through film, through storytelling, through events, whatever it is to try to get this message out that you should be able to access these natural plants. It's your right. And doctors don't... Most of them don't really even know about nutrition. And so, why would you think that they know about psychedelics? They don't.

0:10:29.6 Zappy Zapolin: And if you're gonna wait around for them, when, again, nutrition can solve probably 80% of the problems they have and they're not aware. So we can't wait years and years, have family members die of addiction or depression, suicide, when we have things that work really well. I'm just telling people, embrace what's here and make it work for you. This is a very intense time where you have to take things into your own hands. And so the Mind Army, we're just trying to normalize these things more and more. We were talking about the eclipse the other day. I went up to Lake Placid, New York and...

0:11:11.3 Paul F. Austin: Oh, cool.

0:11:12.2 Zappy Zapolin: Filmed... Yeah. This is my second eclipse. I filmed a road trip in 2017 and a road trip here in 2024. And the idea once again was to normalize psychedelics in some way. And so what I did was, in 2017, when everybody else was looking at this one event and tuned, locked into nature and how amazing it is, I turned my back to the eclipse and I projected into the field, trust nature, go back to nature. And during the whole eclipse, I was putting that into the field. And so, I don't know, maybe it helped a little bit. Certainly, people have gone back to nature quite a bit. But did it help? I don't know. But this eclipse, I thought to myself, wait a minute. Let me try to be more intentional, more specific. And I knew more people were gonna be tuned into this eclipse.

0:12:06.7 Zappy Zapolin: So in that moment that everybody's tuned into, "Oh my God, nature's so beautiful. It's incredible," they're like a blank slate. They're not thinking about their rent or what they're gonna do later for... They're just locked in on this thing that I turned my back once again, sacrificed seeing the eclipse, but I knew I had to do it. And I put into the field for iboga, which is an African root that can break an addiction. I put into the field, trust the healing benefits of iboga for addiction, trust the healing benefits of iboga for addiction. And just try to put that into the field so that next week, next month, six months from now, if somebody's voting in their area for ibogaine research or something, or if a family member's having a problem, that they already somewhere in the field, are gonna be more okay with it.

0:13:00.2 Zappy Zapolin: What we try to do is to use that opportunity to speak up for iboga. And these plants don't have a voice of their own. They really have to... We have to step up for them. And so, yeah, this picture is me, back to the eclipse, and just putting it into the field. I tried to stay as focused as I could, just knowing what I do about the field and the fact that fish don't know they're in water and humans don't know they're in plasma. So there's a plasma field that we're manifesting from, and in that one... Almost like there's a few moments, this eclipse, maybe the beginning of the pandemic when everybody was so focused in this one place that I felt like if I could penetrate there, it would be a great moment for iboga and people to just get a little more comfortable without trying or knowing it.

0:14:07.6 Zappy Zapolin: Because as you probably know, Paul, this iboga can break an addiction, heroin addiction, meth, fentanyl, alcohol, gambling in a single session. And so when you think about it like that, we have this crisis with fentanyl where really good people are... They're not drug addicts, they're really trying... Just having an operation or an injury. They get some pain medications, they run out and they're still in pain, so they get some on the street. And then all of a sudden, they're... Got Fentanyl in there and they're addicted to Fentanyl. So we have to break it. If we know that iboga works, then let's just get to it. Let's educate people. We'll do it through film and taking these things on whatever way we can get attention for it, that we do it. So that's...

0:14:56.4 Paul F. Austin: Well, and you took out a full page advertisement in the Washington Post, is that correct? Am I remembering that correctly?

0:15:02.6 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. Close. New York Times. It was...

0:15:05.0 Paul F. Austin: The New York Times. Okay. It was.

0:15:06.7 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah.

0:15:06.8 Paul F. Austin: Yeah. Okay.

0:15:06.9 Zappy Zapolin: It was like the day after Trump was inaugurated, when we knew he was still reading the New York Times, New York Post and Washington Post. We took a full page ad and we just said, "Hey, Mr. President, please make the addiction crisis a first 100-day issue." And we suggested we put the research for iboga, we put ketamine research in there and just said, "This could be your legacy. Because if you could take veteran suicides from 25 or so a day down to 10 or five, because you have these tools of nature, you'd be doing so much for veterans and for society." And so I think this next election coming up in November, it's gonna have quite a bit to do with mental health and addiction and wellness. So I think plant medicine's gonna play quite a role.

0:15:58.7 Zappy Zapolin: You might see some of these politicians jump onto cannabis legalization, maybe psychedelic research happening quicker in order to get the votes. But it's a very real way to help society, and I think that that's... If somebody can just embrace that, we're gonna have much less suicide, we're gonna have a lot less overdoses. And we have the tools of nature. And I always make this joke, Paul, where I'm like, I would not wanna be at the pearly gates and God's there, I die, and God says, "What are you doing here?" And I say, "Oh, I died." And God says, "Well, why didn't you tap into some of those natural plants that I left there to help you out with this?" And I'm like, "Oh, well, because this guy in a white coat told me not to." I have this feeling if that's my answer, God's going to be like, "Guess what? You're going back another 100 lifetimes right now. You learned nothing. You're still not thinking for yourself."

0:17:04.8 Paul F. Austin: Right. We gotta think for ourselves. That's where real sovereignty begins. And you've done that. And like I mentioned before, we recorded the first podcast, we talked a lot about, I think, in that podcast, Reality of Truth, your initial interest in this space, the role of iboga and ibogaine. And so in today's podcast, it's been seven years now since we've done that. First one, you've started the Mind Army, you've focused on ketitations, which we discussed a little bit. Let's talk about that, Zappy. What is a ketitation and why is it that you are so and have been so passionate about this modality and this approach?

0:17:45.5 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. So a ketitation is basically a ketamine enhanced meditation, is how I look at it. And in a normal moment, you could just be... If we hadn't just come through a pandemic and everything going on with everything from Putin's gonna blow us up, the air's poisoned... People are just frozen. And I think that we need some kind of a biological leap in our consciousness right now. And when I saw ketamine after what I had been through with plant medicine and doing Ayahuasca and iboga and psilocybin and everything else, I realized when I did the ketamine in 2015 for the first time, in a doctor's office, I was like, this is gonna save Western society. This is what everybody needs. They need to quiet all that chatter going on in their head and just be able to build some new neural pathways about, here I am in the present moment and I'm going forward into the future. And so once I experienced it, I was like, this is it. I have to really dedicate myself to getting this information out about ketamine. And so, as I started to work with the doctors around the country and make the movie with Lamar Odom, where I gave him ketamine treatments in the movie, that one's called Reborn, it was Lamar's first psychedelic experience.

0:19:16.5 Paul F. Austin: Wow.

0:19:18.5 Zappy Zapolin: And so it was so impactful that I was just like, okay, well, what about groups? What about taking this out of the sterile environment of the doctor's office and bringing it into your home? And for you and me, Paul, thank God really, probably, that we had those early ketitations during the pandemic together, because when you're in a group like that, there is a magnified effect that takes place. When your brain is on 80%, ketamine turns it on, there's a lot happening. There's probably ESP that we experienced in there. There was a collective consciousness. And what I love about the group is after you come out of it, you have these other people that have had this shared experience.

0:20:09.6 Zappy Zapolin: And then as a feedback loop for you, you get to bounce your ideas and thoughts off of like-minded people. Because what I always saw was, at the doctor's office, people would have this life-changing experience with the ketamine, and then they'd get in the car with their husband or wife, partner, and they would drive home. And you can imagine the conversation, the wife's... Or whatnot is like, "So, how was it?" And the person's trying to put words to it. It's so dynamic that words don't even do it justice. So you're just kind of like, "Oh, it was great. I can't really describe it." And the person's like, "Wow, that's weird." And then they don't ask you about it or anything. But when you do it with a group and you went through this shared experience, well, now you've got a feedback loop to feed how positive it is, the verbiage that you're using and concepts that are hard to describe just with words, your friends and co-journeyers can help you to integrate that experience in a big way. And so I started to take these ketitations around the country.

[music]

0:21:46.9 Paul F. Austin: This episode is brought to you by Magnesium Breakthrough by BiOptimizers. Magnesium Breakthrough by BiOptimizers is the only full spectrum magnesium supplement with seven unique forms of magnesium that your body can actually use and absorb. And yes, you need all seven forms. If you wanna sleep better, feel more relaxed, have healthier levels of blood sugar and blood pressure, lower inflammation, stronger muscles and bones, balanced hormones, and of course, dozens of other benefits, visit bioptimizers.com/thirdwave now and use promo code Third Wave for 10% off any order. That's bioptimizers.com/thirdwave and use promo code Third Wave for 10% off any order.

[music]

0:22:44.5 Paul F. Austin: So that was gonna be my next question. It's like we're doing ESP right now...

0:22:47.7 Zappy Zapolin: [chuckle] Yes. Still in it.

0:22:49.8 Paul F. Austin: We're still in it. Because you've been featured in Bloomberg, you've been featured in various other media publications specifically about the impact on business and leaders. And that's what I really would love for you to focus on, is why is a ketitation such a great modality for those who deal with a lot of stress, who are in positions of leadership, who are in positions of responsibility? Why could that be, and why has that been a very potent modality for them?

0:23:15.4 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. So first of all, because ketamine, it is a psychedelic, but it's not a hallucinogenic, so the walls aren't melting and you're not seeing these crazy things. But what it's doing is basically separating your left and right brain, allowing them to communicate without your ego getting involved. You're just a bystander, watching your brain on 80% and what it's capable of. And it's incredible. And so when you think about a psychedelic experience, one of the biggest and most important parts of a psychedelic experience is, after you emerge from it, generally you'll emerge with more empathy. And by empathy, I mean, you're able to literally put yourself into other people's shoes. And so when you do, now, if we could actually get a critical mass of people to do that, I think we could solve any problem we have as a society.

0:24:13.1 Zappy Zapolin: And to beta test that what I started to do was have the doctor do large groups, 20, 30 people, all together, originally in the pandemic, socially distanced on yoga mats. But as it evolved and we came out of that, I started to go to Silicon Valley with some tech companies, venture capital people, groups like that, and we would have this really short experience, which is the other thing I love about ketamine, because LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, you're talking five, six, eight, 10 hours, who knows how long it's gonna last specifically for you? Where the ketamine, we know the half life, it's gonna wear off in 45 minutes roughly, you're gonna lay there for another 45 minutes to an hour in the best meditation of your life. And so for me, as I think about that, when everybody goes in as a group and they emerge with more empathy for each other in a corporate setting, that can be the total difference.

0:25:19.3 Zappy Zapolin: Where before there was backstabbing and competitive things going on, well, now you're a unified group. You can really empathize with people personally, professionally. And I was seeing that happen, and I was getting feedback from these Silicon Valley groups, that, "Hey, we are a really tight unit right now. And what we did in that one night together would've taken a month out in the wilderness at Outward Bound together." So that's the leap that ketamine's capable of. That's that thing that we need to disrupt our patterns and really expand our consciousness. And so after that, I started to do more groups. I did a Harvard Medical School, Yale Medical School group...

0:26:05.9 Paul F. Austin: Wow.

0:26:07.1 Zappy Zapolin: 20 people in Massachusetts. We had a weekend. Most of those people had never had a psychedelic experience before in their life.

0:26:15.4 Paul F. Austin: Wow.

0:26:17.0 Zappy Zapolin: And we went around the room and the significance of those experiences, because after you... When you have yours, you're thinking, wow, this is pretty incredible. But then imagine that everybody's having this incredible experience as well, but they're different and people are getting what they need. And then we integrate as a group, we have dinner. If there's an overnight, we hang out and we philosophize. And the next day, everybody's really cohesive. And so, did that one, did one in SoHo for a group of Wall Street executives, did a few more that were large corporates. And then most recently, I started doing it in Malibu, in the Malibu Hills. There's a property up there that some friends of mine bought, and I decided to do these Camp Zappies, where I would, on a periodic basis, pull together a group of really cool people, best practitioners, doctors, and do this medically supervised ketamine group ketitation.

0:27:20.6 Zappy Zapolin: And those are really cool, because when you spend the night, you spend a couple nights and you're having these psychedelic experiences, like I said, it's like being gone for a month. It's like you're living lifetimes in that time. So I think for any family, company, organization, they should seriously contemplate doing a ketitation, because these days in the corporate world, you're more responsible than ever before for the mental health of your people. Before, it was their problem. Well, now, if they're working from home and you're not getting any productivity, or maybe they're even negatively impacting you, if you can clear that stuckness and you can get rid of that whole framework of competition, but rather be in co-opetition with all your people, you're gonna be way more productive.

0:28:21.1 Zappy Zapolin: And all the groups I've done this with, businesses have broken out, friendships have happened, people have traveled together, people have gotten into relationships. It's really, really powerful. There's nothing else like this. And I wanna throw something out to you, Paul, 'cause this is my theory about psychedelics and their role right now in society. And the importance of them is that... My theory is that life at right now, because of how we're living it, it actually gets boring because you're going around with your human filter and you're always scanning for danger, danger, danger. And that might have made sense a hundred thousand years ago when somebody walked into your village and they looked different than you, that you were on alert. But now, we're in this global world and you don't need your human filters firing off like they used to.

0:29:18.1 Zappy Zapolin: But we're stuck in that. And so you're also stuck in this thing where before I move my hand to pick up the jar, I know I'm about to do it and I'm filtering out everything that I think is not gonna happen. And all of a sudden, you get in this pattern where it feels like you know everything that's gonna happen. So people, when they feel that way, the way they get out of that or try to, is they go to a horror movie so something will happen that they don't expect, and they can jump. They go to a comedy because the person's gonna say something unexpected. And that's why they're using those tools. With psychedelics, it's a total surrender.

0:29:55.6 Paul F. Austin: Those are the two oldest ways that we entertain, Zappy; tragedy and comedy.

0:30:00.6 Zappy Zapolin: That's it. And then when you add psychedelics to that, well, now you're in this amazing situation where you have to surrender completely. You have no idea what's gonna happen. And in that surrender, it's so freeing because you're just like, "Oh, wow, I'm having all these cool experiences with light and color and sound," all your senses. And so when you come back out, it's like you're born again. It's like you're back in the miracle. You realize, "Oh wow, I'm in a total miracle. I have an atmosphere to breathe and I'm on a cell phone, saw China on video." These are miracle type of things, but we're just a little bit jaded right now, and we're like, "So what? Who cares?" But when you emerge from that psychedelic experience, I believe that it reconnects you to the miracle in a deep way. And that's freeing, and that is fun and it's exciting. And if people aren't getting fun and exciting in their life, this is the ultimate biohack for that.

0:31:04.9 Paul F. Austin: Well, and even the language of that, it's interesting that you mentioned the miracle, because that's something that you've infused through one retreat center in particular that has become really prominent and well known in the plant medicine space. And I think that aspect of magic, that aspect of something that's outside of our mundane reality, there's certainly something to be said for like chop wood, carry water, right? Before enlightenment, we chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, we chop wood, carry water. So there's a need to take care of the mundane. That's part of what makes for a great life. But we don't have the balance of these experiences of awe and mystery and oneness. And so even with something like ketamine, a lot of people think ketamine, oh, that's a disassociative. It was a horse tranquilizer.

0:31:50.6 Paul F. Austin: It's an anesthetic, it's synthetic. And I've told some folks, I've told folks that I've had some of my most meaningful and profound experiences on ketamine. And I've dialed in, I've dialed it in in different ways with troches, or... I've done ketamine rectally, I did the ketamine that you sent on the back of my brainstem. I've done Ketamine IV. The only one I haven't done yet is IM. I've never done IM Ketamine, but I've pretty much put ketamine in every orifice and part of my body at this point in time, is what it feels like. And depending on the set and setting, depending on the amount, I've had a very similar level of mystical experience with ketamine as compared to psilocybin and ayahuasca, and even approaching Five, to some degree and what I've experienced with high doses of Five. So there's all these upsides. There's obviously ketamine is maybe... Has slightly more of an addictive potential than some of these other psychedelics and plant medicines, that it may be over prescribed, that it's being abused in certain underground... People get prescribed a nasal spray and next thing you know, "Oh, I'm not drinking, but I'm doing ketamine every weekend." And so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. How do you navigate that?

0:33:05.9 Zappy Zapolin: The thing about ketamine that's really interesting is you hear a lot of people talk about, is it addictive? What's the story there? We had Matthew Perry pass away, the actor, there was ketamine involved there. And the answer is, if you use ketamine recreationally, and I mean snorting ketamine up your nose, when it hits your nasal cavity, you have opiate receptors in there. So it hits those opiate receptors and it really can trigger an addictive response. Anybody that you know who's using too much ketamine, they're definitely doing it nasally. As Dr. Brooks in New York, at New York Ketamine would tell you, 60,000 infusions later, nobody that's ever come in for anxiety or depression's ever gotten addicted.

0:33:54.3 Paul F. Austin: Interesting.

0:33:55.6 Zappy Zapolin: It's really this response to the opiate receptors. So what's beautiful about ketamine, and I tell people, is that it's not synthetic. It's actually, they take some salts and some minerals and they put them together and they process them, and this new ketamine crystal occurs. And so for me, that is an organic material, number one. Number two, these have now been found in nature. There's a mushroom there where they found ketamine naturally occurring.

0:34:26.9 Paul F. Austin: Oh, interesting.

0:34:28.3 Zappy Zapolin: So this is really something that people just have to get educated about. The good news is it's Schedule 3, so that means that doctors can prescribe it off label. And at this point with the tragedy of Matthew Perry, if there is a silver lining, it's that everybody heard about how incredible ketamine is, but they also understood that you can't play doctor for yourself. You need to be medically supervised to do ketamine in a really positive way, in a way that you can use for your wellbeing. And so this is a moment where education from some of those things... Because I think, Paul, what we're gonna have to deal with every time one of these psychedelics becomes legal, we're gonna have some situation that we're gonna have to combat.

0:35:11.0 Zappy Zapolin: Imagine mushrooms become illegal, could become legal, then all of a sudden somebody takes 25 grams of mushrooms and they go out and try to drive their car, and people are gonna be like, "Oh my God, mushrooms make you go crazy and drive your car." No, this is... There are mentally unstable people and they do all kinds of things in society, that are negative. It's not necessarily what happened. And the disappointing thing about what happened with Matthew Perry is that he drowned in his hot tub because he was trying to be his own doctor. And so the tragedy is that he was... In that situation, it was labeled as like acute ketamine death or some nonsense like that. If he had taken a muscle relaxer or something like that, and then slipped into his hot tub like that and drowned, they wouldn't have said acute muscle relaxant.

0:36:07.6 Zappy Zapolin: No. They would've just said, he drowned. He took some drugs and he drowned in the thing. That's exactly what happened to him with ketamine. So the good news is, as I said, society got this really strong education session when that happened, about how effective it is for mental health. And now, we just have to educate people about how you have to use it. So it's phenomenal. The fact that this is already FDA approved, the way they found out that it worked originally is that they were doing amputations out in the battlefield in Vietnam, and they were using all different anesthetics to do those amputations. And they looked back after the war and they realized that all the people who had gotten the ketamine anesthetic during their amputation had not committed suicide at anywhere near the same rate as the other people.

0:37:00.3 Zappy Zapolin: So they were like, "Wow, something's going on." They sent it to Yale University, they did a large study and came up with, ketamine is 70+% effective against even treatment-resistant depression. And so this is really a bailout for our mental health, and it's a great place to start people, even if they have an addiction situation, medical ketamine can disrupt that pattern. It's known as a suicide interrupter. And you think to yourself, how could this thing break suicidal ideation in one treatment? But what's happening is usually when somebody's gonna commit suicide, they think, "Either I keep doing what I'm doing, or I kill myself. Those are my only two choices I have." But when you're in the ketamine, all of a sudden the chatter goes away, all these new option sets occur, and you start thinking to yourself, "Wow, I could do that, which might lead to this, which might even lead to that."

0:37:58.0 Zappy Zapolin: "I'm not gonna kill myself, this is so interesting. There's something, much bigger picture going on here, and I'm gonna see how this thing plays out." And so what else can do that? Nothing. SSRIs, these antidepressants, you take them every day, they build up in your system, they change your brain chemistry. You got all kinds of side effects you don't want. And then here's ketamine, it's out of your system in a few hours. And when it metabolizes, it actually grows new neural pathways in your brain. And we all need this kind of new patterning of, I'm here in the present moment and I'm moving forward into the future, that's what you're focused on and that's what you're building. And I think ultimately what psychedelics are about for me is putting you in a more neural plastic state at all points so that when something bad happens, which always does in life, there are negative moments in life, it doesn't hit these rigid patterns and spin you out. It's more like a judo thing where it comes in, you move around it and go, "Oh, you know what? Maybe that could actually be good. Let's see where it goes." Or, "Maybe this is not two options only." And so it's just an incredible tool. I hope that people will get the confidence from the things that we're doing, the education you're bringing out, the storytelling that I'm doing just to try to, in that moment where the person's in crisis and they're like, "Should I do it?"

0:39:33.0 Zappy Zapolin: That they go, "Well, Paul Austin seems like a smart guy and he's done the research. I think I trust it." Or, "You know what? Zappy had Lamar do this. It seems like... Or Michelle Rodriguez seems so cool when she did ayahuasca, maybe I should take the leap." And that's what I want the Mind Army's legacy really to be, is that in that moment where you were deciding, that we gave you the confidence or the information to take that step. Because right now, obviously... Nothing else is gonna work. Marijuana is not gonna break your depression. Talk therapy won't. Antidepressants aren't gonna do it. You're either gonna have to have a near death experience or a major psychedelic breakthrough, and you can't count on those near death ones, so we all have to...

0:40:25.0 Paul F. Austin: They're not so common. Better not to mess with that, right?

0:40:30.4 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. And don't wait for it either, because if you can get...

0:40:33.1 Paul F. Austin: I mean, that's why psychedelics been used so long, Zappy, 'cause they're so safe at the end of the day, for these types of... They facilitate a near death experience, but you don't have to go on a motorcycle and get in a crash of high speeds to wake up to it. And it really returns us to this Garden of Eden. It's what you were talking about before, where we enter the state of innocence, or the miracle, or people... Even neuroscientists would say there's a more childlike brain, that there are neurons that open up and connections that are made that are reminiscent of just a simpler, easier time. And I think that's why psychedelics can be such great teachers. And when we started recording, we were gonna talk about Between Two Eclipses. But we haven't gone into detail on that. So you've done... You mentioned the documentary that you did with Lamar Odom. You were involved with The Reality of Truth. You were the main dude in that. You have other documentaries as well that you've done, I know, I just don't know...

0:41:37.1 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. I've got some more docs coming out. I've got one about frequency and how that's gonna be the future of everything medicine psychedelics. Because ultimately, these are just frequencies. You put a psilocybin frequency inside yourself and then you synthesize that with your frequency. So at the end of the day, you're gonna be able to put some headphones on and dial up that psilocybin frequency and put yourself in that state, get yourself neuroplastic without even having to have access to that organic material. And to me, that's exciting 'cause that's the democratization of psychedelics. That's when nobody can tell you that you can't dial up a certain frequency. And so, that is exciting. The Eclipse movie I'm doing, Between Eclipses, has really been a seven-year waiting experience for me, of patience, because I filmed the 2017 eclipse and my theory for this movie is that in that moment where everybody's tuned into this one nature event that is so powerful, you're in awe, you're living in that miracle, in that moment, you're not thinking about your rent or anything like that, you're just in that moment of that present moment awareness. And I thought to myself, what if I go into that path of totality when everybody's focused on nature? I turn my back to the eclipse, so it's behind me, and I put into the field, a message into the field for plant medicine?

0:43:15.1 Zappy Zapolin: And the first time I did it, which was, "trust nature, go back to nature." And arguably, millions of people have now gone back to nature in the last several years with psychedelics and what we're seeing there. And so I thought to myself, well, this time, if I can be even more intentional with what I'm doing, if during this 2024 eclipse when tens of millions of people are now focused on this one event of nature, if I could once again get in that path, turn my back to it and put into the field, "accept the healing benefits of Iboga, accept the healing benefits of Iboga for addiction," that, for me, just getting it into the field, that plasma field that we're in, that people would... It would get uptaken by people.

0:44:11.0 Zappy Zapolin: And when it comes time to vote in their area or somebody's in crisis, it's already gonna be somewhat more normalized for them, because in the field, we put this message. And so that's what we decided to do with the eclipse, was try to use it to a strategic advantage of helping people with addiction, because there's no answer to the Fentanyl thing. There's just absolutely no answer. You can't try to block it at the border because it can be made here. It's cheap, it's easy to make. And so we have to disrupt people once they get addicted. And if iboga, this African root, can break a fentanyl addiction, an alcohol addiction, opiates, crack, meth, we have to get smart right now post pandemic and just embrace it. Do not fight this. Ibogaine was sold over the counter in the 1950s. A French company sold it under the brand, "Lambarene," for virility. And so, it was proven safe. And if you've heard Rick Doblin's story about how it became illegal, it's really a tragedy because what he told me was that some drug dealers in California got addicted to their own heroin supply and they contacted the doctor who was using iboga at the time, and he sent them some iboga, they used it and they broke their addiction. And apparently...

0:45:39.8 Paul F. Austin: Was this Howard Lotsof, or was this...

0:45:42.2 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, yep. Howard Lotsof sent them...

0:45:45.6 Paul F. Austin: It was Howard Lotsof.

0:45:45.7 Zappy Zapolin: Some iboga and it broke their addiction. And a couple weeks later, the cops kicked the door in and they were like, "Everything in this apartment's on schedule 1, the LSD, the heroin, the ibogaine." They put the whole thing on schedule 1. And so, Rick and I were talking and we said, this has been proven to be safe, so what is it doing on schedule 1? Because schedule 1 drugs mean it's... No medical benefit and potential for addiction. So if this thing... It's one of the least addictive compounds on the planet, you can ask anybody that's had iboga or ibogaine. They're not looking to do it again real soon, at all, if ever...

0:46:27.8 Paul F. Austin: Not a flood dose. Yeah, not a flood dose.

0:46:29.5 Zappy Zapolin: No, no. And so you think about schedule 1, and I just wanna make this point, because people sometimes they say, "Well, maybe the government has the psilocybin and iboga on schedule 1 'cause they're just not clear yet how safe it is." And I say, okay, well, if that was the case and it's deemed potential for addiction and no medical benefit, I say, why aren't cigarettes on schedule 1? They have no medical benefit. They're highly addictive. Millions of people have died, and somehow they're not on schedule 1. So it just must be some bullshit thing. And in fact, I've been told that if you follow the money on iboga and psychedelics, psilocybin, you run into the alcohol companies. That's the people who have been suppressing this. They knew that psilocybin and cannabis were gonna disrupt their alcohol business, and they knew that iboga was gonna cure alcoholism, which is their power user. They didn't want that, so they put out negative information about psychedelics for decades. And now, we have to undo all of that propaganda and false narratives that they put out there, because we're in a kind of crisis that's like a sci-fi movie, where you've got this foreign countries sending fentanyl in to us and so forth. So...

0:47:58.7 Paul F. Austin: It's a psy-op.

0:48:00.4 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. You can't stop people from getting addicted, all you can do is break addiction.

0:48:04.7 Paul F. Austin: And Zappy, the irony of it is... Little history lesson for all of us. The British did this, the Chinese about a hundred years ago, 150 years ago with the Opium Act. And they were essentially like, "No, you have to let us in because we are making so much money from the opium we're selling you, that you can't not let us in." And it really decimated Chinese society at that point in time and kind of feels like, well, maybe what comes around goes around, 'cause fentanyl is obviously just a very potent industrialized form of opium. And as we all know, it's a major, major fucking issue.

0:48:36.1 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, no, I would say we're at war with China, but they have like a 200-year approach and we have like a next Wednesday approach to things. And so for them, they're just like, "Oh yeah, let's just send Fentanyl in there. It'll kill a generation of people and they'll be behind by generations and we'll just overtake them, no problem." And so, of course, we don't want to go to war with them, so what we're gonna have to do is use natural plant compounds, use the science and break these addictions, because there's nothing else. When I hear about a war taking place, when Russia invaded Ukraine, million people had to go to Poland, I think to myself immediately, wow, we gotta get a million doses of ketamine over there because these people have PTSD. October 7th happens, I say, we need the Israelis, the Palestinians, they need ketamine right now. And it's such a cheap drug, it's off patent. It's 70 plus years old, and it's very easy to make.

0:49:42.6 Zappy Zapolin: And the reality is that we need to synthesize ibogaine in order to break addiction. We have to make ketamine available. And I feel it happening. Even as much as we're trying on the West Coast and East Coast to drive education, what I'm seeing really happening, Paul, is that in the Midwest, the moms, these moms in the Midwest are microdosing psilocybin.

0:50:12.1 Paul F. Austin: Moms On Mushrooms, baby.

0:50:15.1 Zappy Zapolin: That's it. The Moms On Mushroom movement. It's so real because they're getting benefit, they share it with their neighbors and they share it with their PTA groups. And now, all of a sudden... The women make most of the decisions in the household on health for themself, the husband, the kids, so as they're healing, they get to bring this forward for their family. And so I think while I want it to happen tomorrow, I feel it already happening and that's why I'm not panicking here that the society's about to go over a cliff. I think psychedelics are gonna save us in the 11th hour here. That's what they're here to do. And nature is very intelligent. And if it believes that people need natural things here to help with mental health and addiction, it's very capable of putting these things out into the field for us.

0:51:10.3 Paul F. Austin: I love your approach with ketamine and iboga or ibogaine. You mostly talked about ibogaine, but you could maybe cut it both ways. Ibogaine is really the most probably intense alkaloid because of the length and time that it lasts, some of the stress on the body, the intensity of some of the visions or the dreams that people have with Ibogaine. And then you also focus on ketamine, which is the much more, we could say, beginner, or it's much shorter. Ibogaine can be up to 24 to 36 hours. Ketamine is like an hour and a half to two hours. And so I like how you balance the extremes there. And both obviously have a clear impact and efficacy depending on the context in which it's used. So yeah, I just love the way that you've educated people and how you've brought this out into the world. And then, of course, with Mind Army through microdosing, you're really... That's sort of the trifecta, right?

0:52:19.3 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, that is the trifecta. It's like, triage them with ketamine, put them back to factory settings with iboga or ibogaine, and then put them on a regimen of microdosing on a regular basis like you would take vitamins and things like that a few times a week, because what it is, and my friend says this and I stole it from him, but basically everybody's just trying to regulate their nervous system. That's what you're doing all day long. So when you feel certain energy, you're like, "Oh, I need some coffee," or, "Oh, I'll take some alcohol or some Ambien." "I'll just try to get myself to even." But when you start out microdosing, and at the beginning of your day, well, all of a sudden you're at even so you're like, I don't need any food right now. I don't need any coffee.

0:53:07.5 Zappy Zapolin: I don't need to throw anything in here. I'm fine." And so, how else do we get to that point when people have really serious PTSD and anxiety from things that are really taking place in the world? We have to be able to do a pattern interrupt on them and that is psychedelics 101. I wanna tell you, for me, I would never recommend anything that I didn't try myself. So when I was able to access ketamine through a doctor, I did it. When I was able to access psilocybin microdose mushrooms, I put the regimen into work. And then finally in 2015 when I had really, as a psychonaut, done every single psychedelic known to man, I thought, well, I've never done iboga. I've never done ibogaine, which is the alkaloids.

0:54:00.6 Zappy Zapolin: They take this iboga root and they isolate the alkaloids and they put them together, and you take one ibogaine. And so I went in 2015 to do ibogaine, couldn't understand how it could break a heroin addiction. Didn't even make sense to me. And I knew, well, I'm gonna come out the other side 12 hours, 24, 36 hours, I'm gonna come out the other side, so I'm just gonna white knuckle it through if I need to. And I took the ibogaine guided by a shaman, overseen by medical, which I absolutely recommend. And I had one of the most transformative experiences of my life where it's an... The Bwiti, the tribe that uses this in Africa, they use it as an ancestor based access to their ancestors. And you really do have this incredible ghost of Christmas past experience with yourself, your family, things in your DNA. You realize that every memory of yours and your parents and your great grandparents, and on and on, it's all stored in your DNA and you're able to access it.

0:55:07.7 Zappy Zapolin: And so when I was coming outta the ibogaine, I did have to surrender. It was the hardest surrender in my whole life. I realized... In that moment, I had this realization that maybe I was never getting out of this thing, and I had to surrender to, I had done too much and ruined my brain and all that...

0:55:26.0 Paul F. Austin: Oh God.

0:55:28.4 Zappy Zapolin: As soon as I surrendered to it, I just started coming out the other side and I was like, oh shit, I should have surrendered two hours ago. But, that's the journey. And a lot of times, people say with ibogaine, the iboga tells you to do something. If you don't do it, you're not gonna come out of the ibogaine experience. It could be a week later, you still close your eyes and you go right back in the visuals, if you don't take the step that you were told to take. And you mentioned my first movie, The Reality of Truth with Michelle Rodriguez. At the end of that movie, there's a guy who opens up this Rhythmia resort, a plant medicine place, but his breakthrough came from ibogaine.

0:56:12.2 Paul F. Austin: Ibogaine. Yeah.

0:56:13.3 Zappy Zapolin: And that break was not just breaking his addiction, but really gave him incredible insight into what he needed to do. I don't know if you know the story, Paul, but the ibogaine told him he was gonna open the first legal plant medicine clinic, and it then went on to tell him that he was gonna open it in Guanacaste, Costa Rica, and that he was gonna pay $3.6 million for the property. And he went out searching for this property, he finds a place, it's an 80-room resort, and the comps on those resorts were $80,000 per room, so they were asking 6.4 million for the place. And he said, "Well, I only wanna pay 3.6 million." And the people were like, "Okay, we'll sell it to you for 3.6." And so he's like, "Holy shit, iboga just saved me millions of dollars."

0:57:10.1 Paul F. Austin: Oh wow.

0:57:10.2 Zappy Zapolin: And he would go in there, most people only do it once, as I said, or twice in their lifetime, but he was able to do it on a more regular basis and go in there and ask questions. He would have a notepad from other people whose questions he could ask and bring back. But this is a powerful... Really bring you back to factory settings. I recently sent... There's a place in Cancun called Beond, run by Talia Eisenberg and Tom Feegel. And I sent Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street, down there when he was in crisis...

0:57:48.3 Paul F. Austin: Oh, wow.

0:57:49.7 Zappy Zapolin: Stabilized him with some ketamine and got him down there to do the ibogaine, and he's been amazing since. And this week, I have another psychedelic concierge client of mine, Renee Graziano from Mob Wives. She's going down to Beond to do ibogaine. And it's just so fun when you send somebody like that, 'cause you know it's gonna change their whole life, but you also know that if they have a microphone, a megaphone to turn other people on, that you're gonna save a lot of lives. And so, yeah, she's headed down there. And I've sent friends and family, and anybody in crisis really has to consider ibogaine. If you have somebody that's addicted to any drugs or alcohol or something that's got control over them, the ibogaine is gonna disrupt that pattern. You're now gonna be vibrating at your frequency, and you can make decisions in your life based on how things feel as opposed to just reacting to them.

0:58:54.4 Zappy Zapolin: And my best testimonial, Paul, is from Lamar Odom. He did ibogaine back in 2019, so it's been five years. And the testimonial that really hit me was when Kobe Bryant died, who was like a big brother to him, he called me a couple of days after, and he calls me up and he's like, "Zappy, I gotta tell you." He's like, "I couldn't believe it." He's like, "The night that Kobe died," he said, "I knew as an addict, as a life-long addict, that I could use drugs that night and everybody would give me a pass on it, and I could get away with it." He's like, "But since the day that the doctor gave me the ibogaine," he's like, "I just haven't had the desire to do it. And that night, I just had no desire to do it." I'm like, "Wow." That's what you wanna hear.

0:59:47.6 Zappy Zapolin: And one other thing, Paul, that you'll appreciate is that what I love about iboga and ibogaine is it's really the only one that's gonna help you even if you don't want the help. So with other psychedelics, if you decide, Hey, you take some mushrooms or some ketamine, you're like really strong, intense desire to not have the experience, not get well, I think you can really put up some formidable blocks there. But with iboga and ibogaine, it just strips everything. Every human filter that you have is stripped away. And even if you shot heroin the night before or you came in kicking and screaming, you are gonna be affected. It is gonna wipe your prefrontal cortex so you have no cravings. And without you trying, there's an article out that came out that says, factually, that when somebody does ibogaine, they are 1.3 years younger physiologically after their ibogaine experience.

1:00:54.5 Paul F. Austin: Wow. That's a fascinating stat to end on, Zappy. The testimonial from... Or just not even the testimonial, the story from Lamar about Kobe's death and how ibogaine helped him to reframe that relationship, that's incredibly... And I think one thing I even took away today, it's interesting that you mentioned Beond. I had a friend who called me a few weeks, cousin, older brother, very successful, very well off, has, I think, four kids, but has been deep in addiction and as a last resort is going to Beond. Because I was like, "I think at this point, it's ibogaine." And so even to hear though, ketamine as an initial triage, immediately, 'cause that's pretty much everywhere now, before someone can maybe schedule out the time to go do ibogaine, could be super useful. So that's even something that I'm taking away from our conversation today.

1:01:49.2 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. Triage him with ketamine, get him to go inside, have that experience. 'Cause the resistance is of course there when you know, "Wow, this ibogaine is gonna reset me deep. I'm gonna have this long experience." If you first have a ketamine experience and you're like, "Wow, that was pretty awesome. Now, I guess I'm gonna go deeper and explore more, but it's in this genre." And it really is. To your point, Paul, I've had some of my deepest experiences with ketamine. And I think that has to do with that human filter that we were talking about, because I've noticed in my deep ketamine experiences, I disconnect from my humanness and human means nothing to me at that point. And outside of that, you can have such an incredible awareness and so much healing happen when you're not tethered to that humanness. And so I think to break out of that human experience, I don't get that with psilocybin. I haven't gotten that with some of these other psychedelics. I always feel like, "Hey, I'm Zappy and I know I'm here, and I feel spirit, presence of the plants with me." But ketamine, it's like, all your filters off, you're there in the present moment, and when you come out, it's so easy to integrate it because you were there. There's nothing esoteric to figure out. It's like, "Wow, I was there. Everything's good. I'm a speck of dust, I'm the entire universe. Wow, this is a cool miracle. I'm gonna watch it and see how it plays out." And so, I want that for everybody, so my...

1:03:28.4 Paul F. Austin: I do too.

1:03:29.6 Zappy Zapolin: Always, my prescription is, get in a good set and setting, learn from somebody like yourself, somebody who's been there, done that, and you will change your life for the better every single time that happens. Even if it's emotional and tough, you're gonna live that experience into your... Rest of your life, your relationships, your business in a super powerful way, and that just feels good. And I would say, lastly, Paul, I would end on this note of, I think the psychedelic opportunity as it relates to investment and things like that are very real. Now, you're starting to see MindMed is up dramatically based on their LSD for mental health. You've got COMPASS Pathways doing really well, you've got a bunch of companies now that are well funded and they're pretty far along in their research.

1:04:25.0 Zappy Zapolin: And so it's a great opportunity to make money in this marketplace by companies that have the money to do the research. And who better than us at the beginning of this psychedelic renaissance to make the money, because the people that make it now, that are watching this, they're gonna be high conscious people. I trust that they're gonna do something better with the money than somebody jumps in later to try to make a few bucks off this. It's really... Feels like the right moment. All the risk is out. And if you buy a few of these really good companies right now, it's like buying the pharmaceutical companies in the 1920s or the biotech companies in the '90s. You can create generational wealth by just putting a little bit of money into these companies right now that are gonna be the future pharm and biotech companies. So, great time to be in...

1:05:17.5 Paul F. Austin: And as we both know, this is not financial advice, this is... [chuckle]

1:05:20.7 Zappy Zapolin: No, not financial. Yeah.

1:05:21.9 Paul F. Austin: I feel obligated to say that. This is Zappy's perspective, which I would say, more often than not, has proven to be successful. And we talk a lot about that even in the first episode too. You owned beer.com back in the day. You've always been a little bit ahead of the crowd, right?

1:05:39.9 Zappy Zapolin: I've had the pleasure of tuning into some of these future categories, like the internet and domain names or legal cannabis, and now legal psychedelics for mental health and addiction. And so when you're early on, just like then, I was telling people, "Oh, you gotta get a domain name. Get... " Whatever it was, "For your business," and they would be resistant. And I realized rather than fighting everybody to try to get them to start buying domain names and putting a website together...

1:06:10.3 Paul F. Austin: You would just do that.

1:06:11.6 Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, I'll do it. And that's the moment we're in here. And don't take a lot of risk, but even if you bought... There's an ETF, which is an exchange traded fund, which is a basket of psychedelic companies. If you buy the basket, probably two of them are gonna be super winners. Two will be total losers, and the rest, they'll be somewhere in between, but those two big winners without taking on a lot of individual risk of picking which company is gonna be the best, you could own that ETF and do well, or buy the ones that have the money and are able to do the research, 'cause the research... At some point, the pharmaceutical companies are just gonna buy everything in sight like they've done with other categories. And we're getting very close to that. So, fun time to be investing like this and to be able to enjoy the benefits of psychedelics for yourself, for society, and financially. This is an incredible moment for people who are open. If you're watching this, you're ahead of 99.9% of people out there, so take advantage of that. Enjoy it.

1:07:26.7 Paul F. Austin: Thank you, Zappy. So mindarmy.org. Zappy is on Instagram, zappyzapolin, Z-A-P-P-Y-Z-A-P-O-L-I-N. It's been a pleasure to... I gotta run, so...

1:07:40.1 Zappy Zapolin: Always a pleasure.

1:07:40.3 Paul F. Austin: I'm five minutes late for another podcast. This was fun, and I can't wait for the next one. I'm sure five, six, seven years from now, we'll have a lot more fun and exciting stuff to talk about. We'll do a third.

1:07:51.4 Zappy Zapolin: I can't wait. In the meantime, I'll see you when we do our next journey together.

1:07:57.2 Paul F. Austin: Yeah, I gotta come out to Malibu. So I'm gonna be in LA most of May, so we'll figure something out.

1:08:02.6 Zappy Zapolin: Awesome. I'll see you there. Thank you.

1:08:04.6 Paul F. Austin: Thanks, brother.

[music]

1:08:09.5 Paul F. Austin: Hey, folks, if you enjoyed the podcast today, you can go even deeper into this by going to our website. And share it with a friend, if you thought it was interesting. You can also go to community.thethirdwave.co, our community platform, for more details, more connection, more community, more questions about the podcast. So I really hope you enjoyed the show and wish you a wonderful rest of the day.

[music]

Related Podcasts