[00:00:00] Luke Storey: I'm Luke Storey. For the past 22 years, I've been relentlessly committed to my deepest passion, designing the ultimate lifestyle based on the most powerful principles of spirituality, health, psychology. The Life Stylist podcast is a show dedicated to sharing my discoveries and the experts behind them with you.

[00:00:29] Zappy, here we are, dude. 

[00:00:29] Zappy Zapolin: Wow, finally.

[00:00:30] Luke Storey: So fun.

[00:00:30] Zappy Zapolin: Hearing, I got to have a chat with you from all kinds of people, and I was like, well, I'm sure the universe is going to serve that up, and I walk in, and probably, the first person I saw today was you. So awesome.

[00:00:42] Luke Storey: Yeah, it's funny. So, I was aware of you because I saw your film, and then you reminded me, I'm like, oh, I connected the dots, but what's really interesting is, sometimes, when I come to an event like Meet Delic, I have a list of people that I'm already very familiar with and I want to interview. And then, oftentimes, I just meet someone on the fly, and without even knowing anything about them, there's just a presence that appeals to me, and that's the case with you. Yeah, I looked in your eyes, I was like, there's depth. That's all we need to work with to have a great conversation. So, maybe we could start out with just like give a plug to your film, which was incredible, and kind of what maybe led you into wanting to document some of these experiences that people are having?

[00:01:24] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. I personally had this psychedelic—I had a crisis in my own life, where it was just like a spiritual midlife crisis, and I started to think, what do I got to do? I already did everything society told me to do. And then, I realized, well, I've had some psychedelic experiences when I was younger that were very positive, maybe I got to go sit with a shaman in the jungle and really like get to the bottom of this. And as I started to work that out for myself and I got like the confidence like I'm going to do it, I was like, I might as well bring a camera and try to document this thing.

[00:01:57] And what happened was kind of, again, the universe putting things together, a friend of mine knew Michelle Rodriguez, the actress, and as I said, we were going to go down to Peru and sit with Shaman, he said, let's go to Michelle's house and tell her what we're doing. We went, and we talked, and she like pulled her passport out of the drawer, and she's like, here, I'm in, and hands me her passport. I'm like, oh, my God, this is happening. I was like, that is it.

[00:02:24] And so, I got the idea that I was going to go sit with the shaman and try to go inside myself with more intent than I had had earlier when I did psychedelics just recreationally and having a good time as a youth. So, that was really my first experience, where I went into the jungle, sat with a shaman, and I kind of knew that if I could bring that footage back and share it with other people, it was going to be beneficial and probably even help myself even more than just if I went down there alone and sat individually with a shaman.

[00:02:56] And so, after that happened, I had this ayahuasca experience, I was just like, that's it, my life's totally changed, I got to dedicate myself to getting other people to have this experience. And so, I just kept on, came back to the States and started telling all my friends, you got to go sit with a shaman, and I realized that most of them couldn't do it, because their families would like Baker Act them if they told them they were going to go to the jungle and just like check them into an institution.

[00:03:26] So, I kept thinking, how do I find a Western medicine approach? And I found ketamine about six years ago, and I had the experience myself, and all of a sudden, I was sitting in present moment awareness, like I was back in the jungle with the shaman, and I came out of it, I was like, wow, like this is the Western society way that people are going to go inside their minds in a way that they can handle.

[00:03:52] And so, that led me to, as I was showing my movie around the country, somebody came up to me afterwards and said, hey, I'm friends with Lamar Odom, the basketball player, Kardashian, I just saw your movie, and I think the guy needs plant medicine. And so, I started talking to him, and he said, well, I've never had a psychedelic experience, I've always been told, stay away from that, that you could go crazy.

[00:04:16] And so, I said, look, let's do some ketamine at a doctor's office, you're not going to go crazy, but for one time, you're going to go inside of yourself as opposed to trying to find it outside of yourself. And he agreed, and I asked him, can I film it? He was totally fine with it because he'd been conditioned by that whole Keeping Up With the Kardashians thing. He was just like, yeah, you want to film? And I was like, oh, my God, like I wouldn't let me film my psychedelic experience, my first one, but he was cool. 

[00:04:45] And he went in and he had this experience where he felt like he went to heaven, came back, and he was just like, wow, like this is incredible. I worked with him a little bit more and I wound up, once I got a relationship with him, I said, come down to Mexico with me and let's do some ibogaine, because I think with your addiction profile, you need to really go as deep as you can, and he agreed. I got to film it and we made it into a movie called Lamar Odom Reborn.

[00:05:15] We're talking to some networks now, but I think it's going to be kind of that crossover film where people see Lamar, and because they kind of feel like they know him, they see him go his arc of the character in the movie, you get to see him progressing, and they go, wow, I knew him, I know him, he's better. And so, I just think like when people see this movie, and see his progress, and just see his shift, his energy shift, it's going to bring all these people to ketamine and to psychedelics as a potential different way to deal with what we're dealing with here. 

[00:05:50] Luke Storey: Wow. So cool. When I went to Costa Rica the first time to do ayahuasca, I did kind of an immersive journalism thing. I did, I think, four interviews during the week, and then I obviously didn't document anything when I was on medicine, because it's pretty awkward for a number of reasons, mainly because of the other people around and I'm like so glad I didn't try and do that, because it would have kind of interrupted the experience. 

[00:06:14] But I have gone back, and so I put out a bunch of podcasts about it, but I've gone back and listen to some of those things, and this is not self-patting myself on the back, but listening to some of the days in between, kind of my trip reports, I'm like, oh, my God, that changed the whole course of my life. So, the next day, I'd be, oh, last night, I was really taking a deeper look at my childhood trauma and whatever the things were, and I didn't even realize what an impact it had on me until a couple of years later.

[00:06:46] I go, oh, man, I've totally re-contextualized so many traumatic and painful experiences in my life as gifts, as benefits, as things that I wouldn't change, and these were the things that led me into addiction and numbing out from 10 years old to 26, basically. It's really an interesting way to go about this type of changes is actually documenting it along the way.

[00:07:08] So, kudos to doing that, and it was evident in your film that everyone was really being positively affected by the field that was being created, explored, celebrated, and documented. I think it's a really cool venture. And also, as you said, we want to be wary like taking these things mainstream, but also kind of destigmatizing them for people that classify all drugs in the same category. And I know as a former addict, like there's a huge difference between something taken medicinally and something taken to try and numb the pain of your existence.

[00:07:44] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, totally. I feel like the difference between, and somebody said this, I think, even in The Reality of Truth is like if something's made by a man to treat your symptoms, it's drugs. If something actually heals something, that's medicine. And I think that really is the distinction, and we have to normalize, like you're saying, in society, and that's what I hope these films can do, is just normalize ibogaine, ketamine, ayahuasca, and these things, because what's really interesting right now is that the ketamine, people are coming in there for depression and anxiety.

[00:08:19] They're not coming to like have enlightenment and become enlightened. So, they come in, I'm depressed, and then they come out, they're just like, wow, like, oh, my God, I'm not suicidal, I got so much to live for, this is so interesting. And I think when you get in that present moment awareness state that you get in with these medicines, where it's like, no future, no past, just right now, and you can do so much work in there, to me, that's like the whole benefit, and I think it's like a Trojan horse. It's like, yeah, come on in, oh, you're depressed, yeah, come on in, then they sit on, they're like, oh, my God, I'm a different human being. 

[00:08:59] Luke Storey: Right. Because someone might think that they're depressed from the outward circumstances of their life, right? It's a divorce, or loss, or change of career, unrealized dreams or goals, but as many of us have learned, I'm sure you share this, too, that oftentimes, things like anxiety and depression are just a symptom of some deep underlying wound, a core wound or some trauma that's manifesting as kind of a mild PTSD in these other ways. And so, yeah, you want just symptomatic relief in that moment, and you go in, and you go, oh, there's so much more there. 

[00:09:34] And something to your point, maybe you could speak to the ability that these experiences provide for us to work outside of space and time in that quantum realm. I think that's something that's become very prevalent and obvious to me, in a three to 12-hour experience, I've worked out a lifetime of problems. It might be like in an ayahuasca journey, for example, in linear time, although you never know what time it is, because you don't care, but it might have been a five-minute period of Earth time in which one goes through and unravels five years of their childhood, right? I think that's what's so powerful in these experiences. So, what's your take on evading time and space, and working in a realm that's outside of the confines of this reality?

[00:10:21] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. I think that's like what the whole thing's about for me. It's like when you are in that present moment awareness, and I talked about people who are suicidal coming to ketamine, it's like, what happens is you're in that present moment awareness, but you're looking at it from a slightly different perspective. And then, as you look at it, you're just like, oh, wow, that happened, but like, I'm me, that's just stuff that happened to me, where before, it was like, that was part of you. And I just see that like not only just time stopped, but like you said, and there could be like this kernel that's in there that's like the thing you needed is in that experience.

[00:11:02] And I described part of it in The Reality of Truth, where I said that I had this experience where I asked this question about, why do bad things happen? And I was like pulled out to the edge of the universe and I was sitting there with like God, as God would look at the universe, and I was looking at it, it was so beautiful, and then the first time the ayahuasca voice spoke to me as a voice and it said, do you see that? It's perfectly balanced. And I looked at it, I was like, yeah, you're right, if something happens over here, it's going to be made up over there. It's like it's perfect. 

[00:11:37] And then, I was like, oh, my God, like I had that realization. And then, I don't talk about this in Reality of Truth, but really, the moment that struck for me changed my life was that voice that I'm going to interpret as God. I was there with God and God said, do you know how you're breathing right now? And I thought about it, I was like, no, I don't know how I'm breathing. And it said, you're growing your hair, do you know how you're doing it?

[00:12:03] And I was like, no, I don't. And it said, if you don't know how you're breathing, what makes you think I need your help? And I was like, wow, you're right, like I can't get all upset, because people aren't listening, and they're fighting. It's like I don't even know how I'm breathing. If I don't do that for two minutes, I die. And I've no idea, like it was a total release. In that moment, it changed my life.

[00:12:19] I was just like, whatever, it's a miracle, and I'm just going to live in that, it's a miracle. And I think, nowadays, my philosophy, if I had one, is that we're living this incredible miracle, everything, about the sun's 93 million miles away, so we can have an atmosphere, I'm talking on the phone to somebody in China in real time. It's like if you showed somebody 200 years ago that, they would think you were a wizard. 

[00:12:50] They'd be like, oh, my God. But to us, we're so jaded, it's just like, whatever, it's my phone and life sucks. But it's so miraculous, and these psychedelics, they connect you back to that miracle. And when you connect to it, you come out, for days, months, years, you're just like, you're connected to that miracle and you appreciate it as that. And I think for me, these are connections back to the actual how incredible and miraculous every second is here.

[00:13:18] Luke Storey: There's so much in there. I love that you use the fact that we're not breathing, but we're being breathed, right? I remember working with guys in recovery, and I never really had a problem with the idea of a higher power, now, surrendering my whole existence to a higher power, it's one thing, but to consider that, okay, there's something bigger than me that's at play here.

[00:13:42] But many people come into recovery with just such a impermeable ego and intellect, and just living in that survival fight or flight state for so long that the idea that there's a God, or a supreme being, or intelligence is a real stretch for them. And that was one of the analogies that, I don't know, maybe it just came to me one day, was if somebody has a hard time surrendering their life to this power, you do that every night when you fall asleep.

[00:14:10] I mean, like who's breathing you? Where does that life come from in the body that you are? Let's just say you weren't even a soul inhabiting a body or co-interacting with the body, but let's just say you actually are a body, and when your body dies, you're dead, what's keeping you as even the body alive. It's so simplistic, it's almost easy to miss, but there's something happening there that we can't explain. And even just that is, I think, it's kind of a crack in the armor of the sort of analytical, close-minded person who would lean toward atheism or agnosticism, right?

[00:14:48] It's like, okay, yeah, there's something there. And then, taking it further even in the nature, when you look at a massive oak tree, it's like an acorn fell on the ground, it rained, it got buried in some mud, and then 200 years later, you have that thing, like who did that? There's a molecular or DNA code somewhere that exists, and then there's a force or an energy that activates it, and we have this animation that we call life. I just think that it's so obvious that it's almost easy to miss.

[00:15:20] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, I think it's what it is. It's the simplicity of, it's so incredible that we take it as not that great. And so, I had this experience I talk about in The Reality of Truth, where when I was coming out of the trip, and it was several hours later, what was incredible is that there were about 13 of us, including the shaman and his assistant, and as we come out, we'd all taken different amounts, we were different sizes, men and women, and stuff, as we came out, like the ayahuasca just like left the room, that frequency, and we all open our eyes, and we kind of all looked around at the same, and we were like, Did you just come out? Like we all came out in the same moment.

[00:15:59] Luke Storey: Really?

[00:16:00] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. And we were like, I was like, oh, my God. And just all of a sudden, I started to laugh, because I was like, oh, my God, I just got the whole human cosmic joke, which is you've got God with the white beard, and Buddha, and Mohammed, and Jesus, all these men, and the voice I heard was a woman, and I was like, oh, my God, like that changes everything.

[00:16:22] I'm not tied to a religion, but I believe there's something very miraculous going on, but to hear a woman's voice and to realize, wow, like every time now that I hear somebody say, he, the father, it's like, no, your entire like human written book is based on the wrong thing, and it's like the base unit things are not right, and I think that's so tricky. It's like meditation. They're like, it's so simple that it's hard. And this concept of intelligence in the universe is so obvious that you want to say, well, maybe there's not, maybe this is just a, there was nothing, and then a disturbance, and then everything came out of that. Now, we have cellphones, no, absolutely not.

[00:17:08] Luke Storey: It's interesting that you heard a female voice. In my ayahuasca experiences, it's never male or female, it's always like when I'm communicating to spirit or to the medicine in those experiences, it's always a them. I always find myself going, do you guys want to do this or what do you guys think about that? It's almost like a council. Yeah, I don't see them or necessarily hear them, but it always reflects as a them. It's a group of, I don't know, souls, or consciousness, or whatever it might be. It's really interesting. And it's almost like when the voices come and answer my inquiries, it's in my own voice, but it's coming from those guys. It's those guys. The entities.

[00:17:51] Zappy Zapolin: The Supreme Council.

[00:17:52] Luke Storey: Yeah, it's these entities. And many people see the entities, I've not really, it's just I just get the sense that I'm working with a team of beings that are kind of co-creating these deep healing experiences with them. I could talk about this shit. I'm so glad I'm at this conference because I could give trip reports, probably say this tomorrow in my talk, I have one little tiny trip report, and I'm like, if everyone here gave their lifetime trip reports, it would be a six-month conference, and even like we were talking about, outside of space and time, just a moment, or a thought, or just realizing it's a they, I mean, you could ponder just that one little thread and it could change your whole experience thereafter.

[00:18:35] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. I love like the conformational-type experiences that happened during a trip. I want to tell you a cool story that happened, which is the, I was a guide, I guided maybe 200 people having a ketamine experience when I was first checking out ketamine, and I wanted to see different people with different diagnosis, and different levels of medicine, and everything. And so, I would sit with them and I would just meditate in the room for 45 minutes while they were going through the treatment, and this woman came from California, and she said, do you mind meditating and just staying while I do it? I said, no, no problem.

[00:19:14] So, I sat down, and at the end of the treatment, my stomach started to rumble, and I started thinking about dinner, and I was like, oh, I'm so hungry, I'm going to go up at my daughters, and I'm not going to get the French fries, I'm going to get the baked potato, I'm going to be conservative tonight or I'm thinking this stuff through. And she comes out of her treatment, and she wakes up, takes off her eye sheet, she's like, oh, so happy, that was the most incredible experience. She's like, I was going from dimension to another dimension, to another dimension. She's like, all of a sudden, this giant French fry showed up.

[00:19:45] Luke Storey: Oh, man.

[00:19:46] Zappy Zapolin: She's like, what do you think that means? And I was like, oh, my God, like you really have to be careful what you're thinking about, because people are picking this up. And it was such like an experience, but you could only have that in one of these types of experiences. And I recorded somebody telling me another one, a doctor from Harvard, he has done now our KetaMD at-home treatments, where you take the lazenge and you do the treatment at home.

[00:20:15] And he'd never done any psychedelics before, he was raised Muslim, and he left the religion, and said, I don't need this, I can be a conscious human being without the religion, he went and did his thing. He's now, I'd say, a 55-year-old doctor and very renowned. And so, he said, I want to have this psychedelic experience, we gave it to him. He said, I think I'm ready to go to the next level, we gave him a higher dose. And in that higher dose, he said, he was in there, and then he said, he had a God conscious moment, and he said, I know this is real, but when I come out of this, I'm just going to think it's the trip, so I need some evidence.

[00:20:56] And it tried to trick him a little bit, and he was like, no, I need evidence. And tricked him, and he said, I demand evidence. And he floated up over his house, which he said he's got a slate roof, he said birds don't even sit up there, I've never been up there in my life. He said I floated over my roof and I saw there was a crack in one of the tiles, and he goes, that's interesting. And next day, he goes to Best Buy, buys a drone, has his son set it up, flies it up on the roof, and the tile was cracked.

[00:21:27] Luke Storey: Wow. Damn.

[00:21:28] Zappy Zapolin: Uh-huh. And he's like, he called his family and he was like, I'm back in. He goes, I believe in God. He goes, I'm not in the religion, but like I'm back, I had the experience. So, like there's no other way to have those types of experiences firsthand, directly, and I think you get jaded if you don't have that shocking moment like that.

[00:21:51] Luke Storey: I think that's the issue that we find with faith is, I mean, there's so much proof, right? Like how we talked about, your breath, there's your proof. Okay. We're done. Conversation over, there's a God. Okay. But we still, as humans, I think, our curiosity and our biases, and the fact that we have this ego personality living in us that wants to run the show, and thinks it can manage life and has all these preconceived ideas that it clings to, but some of us need those.

[00:22:19] I mean, when you look at films where there's, say, a priest or a rabbi that's going through a challenge in their faith, right? They're doubting their faith, and they're going, God, just show me a sign, and then the lightning hits, and then they're a believer. I think fundamentally, humans, we just do need some anchor that helps us to see unequivocally that there's something greater there. I got a good one for you.

[00:22:45] Actually, maybe we'll do some trip reports. No. I got a good one. Actually, there's a couple, but this one was really interesting. The first time I went did ayahuasca. There was four, first three nights, just incredible, endless, endless realizations and deep healing. The fourth night, it was a different medicine from Colombia, because each night, they kind of served a different brew from a different tradition.

[00:23:10] And I had what is called a nada, like nothing happened, I just felt sick, I laid there, it was really challenging, because I had to just deal with the physical discomfort without actually being taken on a ride. But at some point, I kind of dozed off for a minute and had kind of a daydream, where I wasn't really under the medicine, no visuals or anything like that, but I had this brief vision, wherein I was approaching a hospital, and I opened the door, and I went down a hall, and opened another door, and there was my mom giving birth to me.

[00:23:40] And I come out [making sounds] a little infant, and she like put me on her chest, and she was crying, and she was so ecstatic, and then the nurses in the white smocks came, and just grabbed me away from my mom, and took me down the hall, and just put me in a room by myself. And it was this kind of like, oh, that didn't feel good, but I didn't really know what to make of it. And I was like, that was weird, because again, I wasn't in like a medicine experience, so I thought.

[00:24:10] So, the next day, I text my mom, I said, hey, I'm in Costa Rica doing ayahuasca. She probably didn't even know what it is, but I'm like, here it is. And I said, and I had this vision, I explained that to her. And she said, and there were more details to it, too, in terms of who is wearing what, and if I was in a blanket and stuff. And then, she said, that's exactly what happened when you were born, because, I don't know, I was late, or premature, or something, and her water hadn't broken.

[00:24:34] And so, there's a risk of infection, so they had to put me in another room for a couple of days by myself without human contact and an incubator. So, the only thing that was wrong was either like they wrap me in a blanket or they didn't. I think that's what it was. She said, no, they wrapped you in a little thing, and then I held you, because I was just on her chest. I mean, that's how detailed it was. And I was like, what the fuck?

[00:24:56] Zappy Zapolin: How is that possible?

[00:24:57] Luke Storey: Yeah, like there's no way I could know that. And not only was it just like an interesting parlor trick of consciousness, but what unfolded in subsequent journeys was that there was a sense of existential separation, and loneliness, and abandonment that started like from day one. And so, that led me to be able to see and heal my inability to be vulnerable and truly intimate with other people, because there's always kind of this fear of abandonment. And if you ask me, oh, do you have fears of abandonment? Like what? Now, my parents were around, that's those other people, but it really was. It was a core wound from day one. Totally crazy. And even without like a really psychoactive experience, it's just the medicine, or spirit, or whatever went, flank, check this out.

[00:25:43] Zappy Zapolin: Gave you what you needed. 

[00:25:44] Luke Storey: And it was such a huge realization, because it gave me something concrete to work with, and I could see all of these developmental patterns that carried on throughout my life that were interfering in my ability to have truly deep, intimate close relationships with people. There was like this barrier of separation that I always felt before.

[00:26:03] Zappy Zapolin: Wow.

[00:26:04] Luke Storey: Insane.

[00:26:05] Zappy Zapolin: That one experience, it's like in the Lamar Odom Reborn movie, he had this experience where his mother passed away at 12 years old of cancer, and then he had a son, six months old, who passed away like infant crib death, and he like never had even processed that trauma, he just kept on going, and going, and going. And he said that in his ibogaine experience, he got to hear his mother's voice for the first time in like 30 years.

[00:26:32] And he was like, oh, my God, just hearing her voice was life-changing, and then he saw his son at that age that he died, and then he saw him grow to be like eight or nine years old, and he grew to see him to be a teenager as he would be today. And he's like, I got to spend time with my kid. He's like, like that's it. Like that can change your whole life, and who hasn't had somebody who passed away to be able to reconnect in a deeper way with that, is like, I don't know, I mean, thank God for this event and culture, almost like the pandemic put this spotlight on mental health to the point where everybody is like, okay, what are we doing that's different now?

[00:27:16] Luke Storey: Yeah. Well, I think that's another interesting piece with this type of work is that it's not only that you're able to get a new lens on some of these experiences that shape your life, and often negatively, but in my experience, it's like the seeing it and experiencing it again, as terrifying and painful as that might be, also heals it. I mean, for me, that's how it's been. I mean, I've gone into some dark, dark crevices of trauma, and just, oh, my God, just to the core of the core, of the core of the wound, the little boy, little Luke, hurt, abandoned, abused.

[00:27:54] I mean, just the gnarly shit that I spent my whole life running from, and in medicine, it's always like there's a question that will come. It'll be like, Luke, do you want to lean into this? And I'm like, oh, not really, put on my mask or whatever the situation calls for, and I'll take a break sometimes, I go, okay, let's go, we're going in, and we go into that, the deep shit. And I wouldn't say it's painful, but oftentimes, those feelings are re-experienced, but it's just seeing like what really happened, and then the threads of how it got built into the fabric of my life experience and who I am, then come out, and it's like, it's gone, and I can actually talk about some of those things and there no emotional tethered-

[00:28:44] Zappy Zapolin: Like an electrical connection, yeah.

[00:28:46] Luke Storey: Yeah, there's no spark, there's no tether to them. It's as if they had happened to someone else almost.

[00:28:51] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. No, I love that. And I think the ketamine is amazing at this. They say that the ketamine, the New Sciences was in Nature magazine, they say, you have this default mode network in your brain and there's this mechanism in there called your lateral habbenula, which is recording all the stress you've ever had in your whole life when it becomes too much. There's a tipping point and your brain goes into burst mode. And burst mode, it shuts off all your dopamine production. So, that's your happiness, your motivation.

[00:29:21] And the first time you do medical ketamine, it takes the brain out of burst mode, you immediately start getting the dopamine back, so we have people call us at KetaMD the next day, the husband or the wife, and they're like, oh, my God, he just cleaned the garage, he said he was going to do that for five years, like whatever you're doing, keep doing it. And it's just like they got their dopamine back. And there's a lot of people walking around going, I don't care about anything, it's like, dude, I think you're in burst mode.

[00:29:49] Luke Storey: I like that term, burst mode. I relate to that.

[00:29:51] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. And so, that thing can be affected. And what the science on the ketamine beyond that is every time you do it, when it metabolizes, it turns into this hydroxynorketamine and it grows new neural pathways in your brain.

[00:30:04] Luke Storey: I've heard that, that's legit?

[00:30:05] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, that's legit. And it explains like why you could have these hereditary patterns running, like I'm a failure, nobody loves me, like you're just patterning, and those patterns might be yours or they might be your ancestors and your DNA fear patterns, and then you do the ketamine, it's building these new ones, it's like from the present moment into the future, these patterns are being grown, and now, the electrical charge isn't on that thing.

[00:30:32] And so, I had this where I was working with ketamine, and then I started to think about this thing that happened to me in business where I had this like chip on my shoulder, because I missed this deal and I should have had another $50 million and I was like all pissed off over it. And I did the ketamine, I kind of consciously said, I want to like look at that situation. As I looked at it, I was like, well, if that had happened, I wouldn't have made The Reality of Truth film, I wouldn't have explored, I wouldn't have, no, like, oh, my God, I'm so glad that that happened.

[00:31:02] But then, when I came out of it, it was like, it happened, but it wasn't me and I had that—like the charge wasn't on it. Like right now, as I talk about it, it's not triggering me, it's just a thing and the charge isn't there anymore. And I think that's like what you're talking about, is like once you see it even slightly differently, the charge is gone. And then, the science says how that's happening is like neurogenesis of new patterns.

[00:31:35] Luke Storey: Wow, that's wild. I've heard that about ketamine. I want to get into ketamine more because it's just such a strange substance. Out of all the things that can change your consciousness, it's, to me, the most bizarre. But I want to touch back on something you said earlier when you pose the question, why is there existence of evil? Right? And this is a huge block for people that can't believe in God, because if it's this benevolent, loving, omniscient God figure, then how do we have war, and famine, and all the things, the rape, and abuse, and all the treacherous shit humans do to one another, and things that the environment just does to us? Right?

[00:32:13] Earthquakes, natural disasters, and fires, and volcanoes melting your village, like, ah. But in the big picture of duality, in medicine, specifically, 5-MeO-DMT, for me, almost every time, there's just such a profound understanding of the purpose of duality and that it's happened to me, especially in the second journey I had, it was like, it's so hard to put into words, because these experiences are sometimes ineffable. I mean, it's just like words are so feeble when you try to attach meaning to something that's so meaningful. But it was like I was looking at evildoers that I think in the world, like this, the Hitlers, the, ah, and present day ones, too. Just for lack of controversy, I won't name them, but people that listen to my podcast know who I think they are, at least. 

[00:33:10] But it was like seeing that each villain is playing their role perfectly. It's the perfect villain. Like that sense of balance that you're talking about, and that in order for God to manifest and experience itself in the full spectrum, you have to have duality, because otherwise, there's nothing there. It's just the allness, if that makes sense. So, like in 5-MeO, it's like different than in ketamine, where I've hit the void, where it's just emptiness and there's nothing, which is, there's somegrist in there to work with, too, but pass the void, there's the everythingness.

[00:33:49] And when I've experienced that moment or moments of everythingness, there's no you to experience it, right? Because there's no perspective of even a witness observer there, like when one meditates or even in some other medicines. In ayahuasca, Luke's in there. Maybe it's my higher self, and there's less mind and ego, but there's still a me kind of working my way through things. In 5-Meon [making sounds] you're just allness, and that's where I really saw that this duality is like the greatest gift, and it gives us the opportunity to have contrast and choices for our own soul's evolution. Because if it was just all love, and light, and unicorns, and rainbows, there'd be no reason to incarnate and like work your way through this stuff and keep elevating your soul.

[00:34:35] Zappy Zapolin: That's so well said. I mean, I think it's like we have this program, like we're a scanning mechanism, are humans who are scanning for danger and everything, and that's all we're doing. It's like this filter of being a human. And when you, in 5-MeO or in ketamine, it's like when you step out of your human filter, all of a sudden, you're like, oh, maybe it doesn't matter, like maybe there is a God, but God just like released this beautiful balance thing into perpetuity in a Fibonacci sequence [making sounds] .

[00:35:06] It's not like going, oh, Zappy wants the Patriots to win, I mean, change the game. It's like, no, this is like you build it like an ant farm, and you're a kid, and you make the ant farm, and then you watch it, and then you grow, and they lay eggs, and you're like looking at it, like just wow. And I almost feel like this thing was set into motion, and now, we have like manifested ourselves into this physical reality, because we want to experience love, and hate, and chocolate, and all these things. And it's beautiful, like for some reason, we manifest it, but we're in this, we have this human filter all the time doing its thing. And so, if you can transcend the human filter, I almost think that that's like the point of the whole game that we're in.

[00:35:50] Luke Storey: Exactly. Yeah, because we're also meaning-making machines, right? And we're also, because of that human filter and wanting to find our proprioception in space and time, and with other people, and fulfilling the needs of the body, it's like we're wired to judge every single thing that we experience as safe, not safe, safe, not safe, I get that, don't want that, want this, want that, attraction, aversion.

[00:36:14] I mean, it's just like just constantly avoiding or going toward, avoiding, going toward. It's like it's crazy. It's crazy, but it's also like beautiful and it's how we're designed. But like you said, in those experiences, when the opinionated one is absent, even for a short period, when the opinionated one, being the observer that we are, comes back in, there's less like attachment to the whole game. I think that's what's been amazing for me in the past two years of this craziness in the world.

[00:36:45] I mean, not to say that it hasn't bothered me, and I'm sure my stress levels are higher to a degree, but kind of not, I'm kind of just living my life, and wish everyone the best, and I'm not taking it all too seriously, because there have been moments where I see, this is a fucking game, this is a soul school, and this is the game, and the game is ascension, and the game is surrendering our opinions, and judgments, and attachments, and merging with love. If I'm going toward love, I'm winning. If I'm not, I'm stuck.

[00:37:21] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. And like I'm almost feeling, like for me, I used to think, well, love is everything, like you got to, and I'm like, well, maybe not. Like I'm sure Hitler loved his dog and I'm sure he loved his mother, whatever. That's not it.

[00:37:35] Luke Storey: He probably loved his bloodline, really. 

[00:37:37] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. So, I feel like beyond love is gratitude. And if you can get yourself in a state of gratitude every day or in a moment and be like, what am I grateful about? And you start to count up what you're grateful about, that changes everything right there. If I had just been going, I love everybody, I'm like, no, maybe I don't, in that moment, but gratitude, I start to do the book check on what I'm grateful for, all of a sudden, I open up like this little bit of space for real miracles to happen.

[00:38:10] And I just think right now, we have so much technology and information coming at us, it's really intense. I don't even think our brains are ready to handle this. And so, ketamine, to me, for example, feels like it's here to like kind of do a quantum leap of our processing power to be able to handle and mute out things that we can't handle. And it feels like maybe our brains are caught right now in this point where they're not—since we're using a limited amount of them, they can't handle this, and we have to readapt and evolve our brain much quicker. We can't take a million years right now, we need to do it now, ketamine and-

[00:38:55] Luke Storey: Quantum leap.

[00:38:56] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah.

[00:38:57] Luke Storey: What's your take on the debates in these circles on the only valid molecules are ones that a plant synthesizes versus the scientists in a lab?

[00:39:08] Zappy Zapolin: To me, these things are all energy, you know what I mean? And I was lucky enough when I was young to have this psychedelic experience, which was the one that changed my life, where I saw all the atoms in my hand and they were like vibrating at a frequency. And I looked at it, I was like, oh, my God. And then, I looked at my friend and he was the same atoms, but he was just vibrating at a slightly different frequency than me. I looked at the table, different frequency. I was like, oh, my God, everything's just energy.

[00:39:34] And so then, when I think about ayahuasca from a plant, or ketamine, or MDMA, it's like they're just energies. You put it inside your energy and you have to synthesize it. So, there is no difference between them, they're just different frequency vibrations. And so, kind of the reason I'm like going for it really hard right now and trying to support ways to go inside yourself is that I am a bit concerned right now, because if you listen to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, he's saying that in 2040, we're going to be in singularity, where we're connected to the internet with all the information in the cloud and AI running all of these programs to figure out what the best thing to do. 

[00:40:18] He said, when that happens in 2040, which isn't a long time from now, people are going to be one billion times more intelligent than they are right now. So, that means that a high school kid who gets pissed off is going to be able to blow up the world to create some sonic boom to ruin. So, every single person is going to have the ability to destroy everything, so we have to, right now, raise consciousness so that when we have that power, people don't use it incorrectly.

[00:40:46] And I think the psychedelics, what they're doing is they're allowing you to go beyond your humanness, raise your empathy, and then you're part of that collective, that if we get enough people raised, we could solve any problem we have as humans and we can also avoid what's absolutely coming in 2040. And so, we can't wait for 2040 to get this out, we've got to do it now.

[00:41:13] Luke Storey: The high tide raises all the ships. Yeah, I agree. Wow. That's a terrifying thought. I mean, I'm a naturalist. I'm like, I'd run around naked and barefoot every day if I could not get arrested. So, the idea of, and I use technology and I appreciate it as a tool, but, man, like the further we drift from nature, to me, the further we get away from, we are nature, we got this fake plant area. I had that in the psilocybin journey. I was out in a creek.

[00:41:41] I was like on my hands and knees, eating watercress and mint out of this creek, and my friend's like, what are you doing, Luke? Are you okay? Said, yeah, man, it's all salad. I was then there eating this salad out of the creek with dirt on it and everything, and I was like, man, God, it feels so good to be in nature, and then the voice said, Luke, you're not in nature, you are nature. Boom. Totally different experience from that moment on. 

[00:42:06] It's like, oh, I'm going to go out and recreate in the park. It's like, no, I am the park. Just a completely different kind of interaction there, rather than like, oh, I'm an outsider here, I'm playing with this world we call nature, no, I'm actually in it. But anyway, back to the ketamine. As I said, this stuff to me is so strange because it's widely known to help people overcome addictions. 

[00:42:36] It's being used in that context in many ways, yet at the same time, out of all these substances, entheogens, psychedelics, whatever we call them, it seems to be, as far as I know, the only one that has some risk or maybe a lot of risk for abuse. I was talking to someone the other day in Austin, and I was telling him, yeah, I have ketamine, I'd take a tiny dose every once in a while, and I'll listen to Alan Watts and just kind of fade off to sleep, not a big deal, not too deep, just if I can't sleep or something like that, just not even recreationally, but medicinally, but in very small doses.

[00:43:09] And I said, but I just forget about it. It's in my drawer. I've had the same little box of lozenges for, I think, over maybe a year-and-a-half, and there's only eight of them in there, I'm not even done with them. And some people would take a whole one, they're like 300 milligrams. Yeah, a lot of people around Austin have these the nasal sprays, and they take it out to parties, and dinner, and club, and they're just hitting ketamine all the time, and I'm like, we, gross.

[00:43:33] I'm not judging them. I'm just like, oh, I would not like that feeling. So, I just want to have an eye mask, and something thoughtful to listen to, and just go within. What's the addiction risk profile with ketamine? I mean, a lot of club kids use it and stuff. That's when I first heard about it. It was like a raver drug, and then I did it, and I was like, how do you walk on this shit? Like dance on it, not even happening.

[00:43:57] Zappy Zapolin: People always say, well, ketamine, that's like made in the lab, and I'm like, no, actually, that's some salts and some minerals that they put together, and they process, and this new ketamine crystal comes out. It's like it seems as natural as that, so it is natural, in that it is an element that we're taking from the Earth and a frequency vibration that we're taking. But the problem with the ketamine is when you use it nasally, it hits opiate receptors in the brain that go through the nose.

[00:44:25] Luke Storey: Really?

[00:44:25] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. That's why when you take the lozenger, you do the IV, there's no risk of abuse. I've had a doctor, Dr. Brooks, in New York. He's done over 60,000 infusions. He's like, no one's ever come in here for depression, done the treatment, and become addicted. No. He's like, but if somebody is abusing drugs and you give him a bottle of ketamine, they're going to use the whole thing. But I think like we're getting like where the science now is starting to be a really cool part of psychedelics.

[00:44:53] I'm involved with a company called Psycheceutical right now. It's like the best of psychedelics and the best of pharmaceuticals. And what we have is patented delivery systems that allow you to deliver something so it doesn't go into the bloodstream where all the systemic effects happen, like nausea and even the hallucinations. Most of that stuff is systemic side effects.

[00:45:15] So, if you can deliver this where it goes directly into the nerve tissue in the brain or directly through the blood brain barrier, you don't have the chance for abuse, really, and you're just getting the benefit. So, what is cool is that as we make these compounds safer and more effective, so you take less, but you get more benefit, this is just going to become normalized. It's going to be like fluoride in the water. It's like, who said that was good? It's not. 

[00:45:49] We know now that it like classifies your pineal gland. And I found with the ketamine, the frequency of the ketamine, it's such a high vibration that it's almost like it's shaking out the calcification off of those crystals in your pineal gland, and you come out, and you're just like, wow, like I'm refreshed. And I just think that is the thing that we have to break through, which is stigma, where, usually, I say ketamine, and people, it's not a horse tranquilizer?

[00:46:17] I'm like, yeah, you can tranquilize an animal, it's also the number one anesthetic used by oral surgeons on children, because it's so safe, doesn't affect your breathing, wears off quickly. So, if you want to say that a knife is like a murdering device, then yeah, you can say that, but it's not like what it's about, so we just have to like recast these things, including LSD. Everyone, I wouldn't do that, that's chemicals.

[00:46:42] I'm like, no, actually, that's a bacteria that grows on a rye seed that we've just synthesized, it's not chemicals. We just have to like—there's no information, really. And I think in 1971, when they made all psychedelics basically illegal, they said, we have to study this for safety. Everybody can conclude it was like Vietnam War, they wanted people to just do what they were telling them, and psychedelics were going to run against that, but they said, we don't know if it's safe, we're going to have to study it.

[00:47:13] Well, now, we're 50 years later, millions of people have done it, many with great effect, so it's like we, as humans, now have to step up and say, wait a minute, like we're in a mental health crisis right now, suicide, addiction, depression, we're coming out of a pandemic with PTSD. Like let's rethink, if we have some tools that could help with mental health, grow neural pathways, let's reset the language, the knowledge, and I think it's not even that there's a conspiracy where the government knows this and they're suppressing it, it's more like they don't know, the medical system doesn't know, they don't even know about—doctors don't even know about like proper eating, nutrition, like why would they know about this?

[00:47:55] Luke Storey: If you've ever seen the food in a hospital, you can really see how far off the mark we are, you know what I mean?

[00:48:00] Zappy Zapolin: It's like a gray hamburger.

[00:48:01] Luke Storey: Yeah. Every time, I mean, it's not often, but every once in a while, I have to visit someone in a hospital, and it's like blue light everywhere, EMFs off the charts, like frank and food being served, I'm like, this is why we need hospitals, it's because of all this shit. There's a hot spring. I'm a hot spring aficionado fanatic. There's only one known one in Texas or something. There's not many. I was sad to move there, but anyway, I found one.

[00:48:27] They're kind of trying to get it open. It's not open to the public. And the history of this place is that it was a children's hospital that treated polio. And how they treated the kids, I mean, they might have done some other things, but essentially, was soaking in these sacred springs and getting them out in the sun all day. You know what I mean? That's like some hospitals used to be like that, like, oh, what you're suffering from is essentially, in many cases, a nature deficiency.

[00:48:54] That's how I look at most illnesses, right? It's you've just swayed the pendulum too far into domestication and you forgot that you're an animal as part of nature, as I was saying before. So, I think that that medicine needs this upheaval at the moment, especially as it pertains to mental health. Because the other thing is, too, when you heal trauma and PTSD, and you're not depressed and anxious, it's much easier to make better life decisions, right?

[00:49:22] Your relationships become more fulfilling and less destructive. You respect and honor your body more. You want to eat healthier food, move your body. I mean, everything you do is sort of a byproduct of how you feel emotionally and mentally. Yeah. And many people, especially kind of in my scene, in the biohacking scene, people think you can like biohack yourself into enlightenment, but it's really the other way around. Like the more spiritually grounded, centered, awake you become, the better choices you make for yourself and for everyone.

[00:49:50] Zappy Zapolin: That's why the gratitude thing to me is kind of like, people are like, well, how do I do it? I go like, just get grateful, just start thinking to yourself what you're grateful about. If somebody's like in a bad situation, just say, okay, well, tell me what you're grateful for, they start going, and you're like, well, what about your kids? What about your health? What about this? And they're like, yeah, that's—and then something just shifts, like their energy frequency just shifts. 

[00:50:12] And I have to do it to myself. You have to constantly hack yourself, because this intense stuff is happening. And so, if we can just kind of get back, I think, to that, like you're saying, your hot spring, sun, plant medicine, this is how we heal everything, we just have gotten so far from it, with nature. And I've got a moniker these days of being like a psychedelic concierge, and what I do is kind of like a concierge at a hotel, I go, okay, you see a concierge at the hotel, you're like, where should we go for dinner?

[00:50:43] He's like, okay, what kind of food do you like? You want to be inside or outside? You want music, even wine? And then he goes, oh, I got a great place for you. So, when I talked to somebody, I go, okay, what's your intent for doing this? And they talk through, I go, what kind of traumas do you have? And they talk about it. And then, I have this realization like, okay, this person's disconnected from nature, so they should probably have some San Pedro and instantly connect.

[00:51:05] Luke Storey: Oh, totally. Yeah. San Pedro and being underwater [making sounds] I mean, life-changing. Just one time for me, just big couple of doses of San Pedro, went in the pool, and was just like, oh, I have a body, like this body feels good in this wet stuff. It's like I'd never seen water or touched it in my life. It's like I was an alien from a planet with no water and you just put me in a pool here. It was just like, oh, my God.

[00:51:37] And it's like, well, people could say, so what? Well, it's that gratitude and appreciation. I think, hopefully, every time I get in water from that day forward, I'll be like, yes, wow, how amazing that we've been given this substance here. So abundant ,and it's where all life springs forth from, and sometimes, it is just those little hints that we get along the way, and they change everything. In your gratitude practice, I think what strikes me about that, because it's something you hear a lot like, oh, write a gratitude list, it's like, it seems kind of simplistic to someone, who's like, no, yeah, I already do that, give me the big thing.

[00:52:18] But I think that is really leaning into changing our perception of our experiences and having the ability to actually control how we perceive and contextualize our experience, and back to that judgmental mind where Thing A happens, and from one perspective, as you said earlier, those opportunities you lost, best thing ever happened to you, from Perspective B, the most tragic nightmare ever, right?

[00:52:44] Zappy Zapolin: Yes.

[00:52:44] Luke Storey: And our whole experience is really dictated by our perception of it. And it's almost so simple that you think, oh, what's that going to do? It's everything.

[00:52:54] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. And I didn't realize it until I got older, and now, I'm in this position where I have kids and stuff like that, and I got older, and I was like, I look back in my life, and I was like, you know what, the things that I thought were the worst thing ever have turned out to be the best, and the things that I thought were so great, they're not even around anymore. So, I was like, I have to re-shift, like I can never go, that's good or that's bad.

[00:53:17] I have to think like there are multiple things here, but the universe is conspiring in some kind of a way to make this into what I needed to be. And I just think that's like so amazing. It's like, never say, oh, that's bad, because from, like you said, one frame of reference, it's horrible, and another, it's the best thing ever. But until time plays out, you can't see that pattern, and then the psychedelics reconnect you or show you that instantaneous, because you don't have all that time. You shouldn't wait 50 years to realize that maybe what you perceived isn't what it is.

[00:53:54] Luke Storey: You're 70 years old, and you're like, oh, I guess I should forgive my brother who stole my wife when we were 20 now, you know what I mean? It's like, I think part of the game that's fun for me is in the midst of an experience that's not pleasing and uncomfortable, and I'm tempted to view it as like, oh, things aren't going my way or this shit sucks, is like, how fast can I re-contextualize it in the moment rather than having to wait until even next week like, oh, okay, I see why I missed the flight. If I hadn't missed the flight [making sounds] . It's like, what if, just right now, we could do that? The building catches on fire, and you go to safety, and, oh, this is the worst thing ever happened, what if right now we could just go, oh, no, let's just see. Let's see. Let's stay open, right?

[00:54:37] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. I have this thing where like in Florida, where I'm living now, in Miami, there are all these trains that go by, and you get stuck at these trains, and people, you see people in their car, they're all pissed off and everything. And long time ago, I was like, I love the Grateful Dead music, and I'm like, okay, any time a train comes, I'm going to turn on the Grateful Dead, if I have a joint, I'm going to smoke it, I'm just going to be like, yes, this is a great time, like I'm getting this moment. And so, just like those types of things where you connect that this thing that is aggravating everybody else, you're in total nirvana. You're just like, yes, the train.

[00:55:10] Luke Storey: The people next to you like, who's that freak with the blunt? I've been doing this, too, in Texas. I live kind of in the suburbs outside of Austin, and weirdly enough, they like defunded the police in downtown where you actually need them when there's crime. There's plenty of police where I live, there's speed traps everywhere, and I'm not used to that. In LA, I mean, you can drive down the road like shooting guns out of your car, you'd never get pulled over.

[00:55:32] So, I was like, God, this place sucks, it's so annoying. And then, I started doing that, so now, I have to use cruise control in all these different areas where I drive to stay at the limit, because even 10 over, they'll pull you over. And I was really fighting with it, and then realized I was fighting with it, and I thought, you know what, what if I just like use that cruise control moment when I see the sign and I'm like cruise control to just not only slow the car down, but just slow everything down.

[00:55:55] So, I turned it into kind of a meditative process where I just sloww it all down, because it's like I can't change the outward reality, but I can change my opinion of it. It's like Shakespeare said, one of my favorite quotes, there's no such thing as good or bad, only thinking makes it so. Like your whole life is literally created right here. It's insane.

[00:56:19] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. And these days, if you look at like your brain on psilocybin under an MRI, you can see that there's activity in the pineal gland, there is extra activity. You look at LSD, there's a bunch of activity. You look at ketamine under there, I have this photo, it's like 80% of your brain is active.

[00:56:37] Luke Storey: Really?

[00:56:37] Yeah. And it's basically like your left and your right brain dissociate, and they're able to communicate freely without your ego getting involved. And so, when you just like lean into that in those experiences and you're like, okay, I'm going to let my brain operate however it wants, I'm not going to control it, I can't control it, you have some of the most powerful experiences, and visions, and things like that. And I just think like we have these movies like the Limitless movie, where I want to use 80% of my brain, it's like, dude, we have it, it's called ketamine, it's lighting up 80% of your brain.

[00:57:13] Now, let's use this, let's study it, and let's use this in a way that it can really help. And one of the things that I think is amazing is like ketamine is it breaks suicidal ideation. And the way it does that is that when you go into it, usually, when you're suicidal, you think I either keep doing what I'm doing or I kill myself, those are my only two choices. And you go sit in the ketamine, and all of a sudden, these 10 other choices open up, and you're just like, oh, I like doing that, which could lead to that, people come out, they're like, I'm not going to kill myself, like this is so interesting, but how could you ever have 10 more options that's open to you when you're in this physical reality?

[00:57:56] Right. Wow, that's really interesting. What about the delivery methods you were talking about? I've noticed with ketamine in particular, I've not done it with a therapist and an IV or anything, I've done sprays or lozenges. Really, actually, it's the only thing I've ever done by myself. I always advise like don't trip on your own, but because of the short duration and an ability to kind of maybe take a little, and then go, oh, I'm not really feeling it, take a little more, but I have had a couple of experiences where I definitely took more than I would have liked to, and one time in particular, it wasn't a very comfortable experience, and partly because I was alone.

[00:58:35] Had there been a therapist there, I could have been like, hey, am I cool? And yeah, you're fine, you're on ketamine. Oh, okay. But I was by myself, and I went into like the deep, deep void. I mean, just empty gray, just gray, nothing. And it was like, it's hard to describe, of course, but I think it was nonexistence, and it was like facing, you don't exist, there's no house anymore, there's no Los Angeles, there's no wife, it's all gone, you're gone, this is called emptiness, welcome, and it was fucking uncomfortable.

[00:59:06] And if I could do it again, I mean, I still derived benefit from that experience, but if I could do it again, I would have liked to have been able to titrate the dose a little bit. So, what happened was I'd been doing sprays that were 150 milligrams per spray, and then someone gave me a lozenge that was 300 milligrams, so I thought, well, 150, 150, 300, did the math, took that, and it like came on super fast, and it was too much. It was not fun.

[00:59:33] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. Like to your point, this is what we need, this is why I'm so excited about this Psycheceutical company, because it's like you can't just say to someone, yeah, take these mushrooms, I don't know, a cap and a stem or something, it's like, no, we need to make these things more bioavailability and more unified. We need, if you take this, we want you to take less of the medicine, but get more bioavailability, and that's what's so amazing about like this technology, is like you can layer these particles in there so you can get 100 milligrams of ketamine, then 20 minutes later, another 100 milligrams, another 20 minute, and stack this stuff, even microdose it throughout the day, and I think it's really what psychedelics need, because to say to a doctor, well, yeah, I just take a cap and a stem, they're going to go, no way, how do you know that and your metabolism different?

[01:00:29] We need these Psycheceuticals to be like, hey, you're going to take this many milligrams five minutes in, this is what's going to happen, we're going to release some CBG an hour later for you to benefit from it, take away inflammation, any of that kind of stuff. And it's like, we need modern science to come into psychedelics right now. And being here at Meet Delic, it's like so exciting to feel like these businesses, and these scientists, and these genius people who have the experience with psychedelics, because the rest of mainstream society don't even have these experiences to bring any weight on this thing, so we need the science.

[01:01:08] And what I love kind of about the Psycheceutical is other people are out there kind of like trying to patent frivolous stuff like what color eye shade should you wear during a psychedelic experience or psilocybin mushrooms for weight loss? And I hope it works, but who knows? With Psycheceutical, we're taking things that work in regular pharmaceutical, we're bringing them over to psychedelics, so we already know they work.

[01:01:33] And the idea is that if you can make it safe, we have one of the patents, we deliver the medicine directly at the base of the hairline right here, and it goes into the nerve tissue, doesn't go into your stomach, in your liver, and cause all kinds of side effects, goes directly into the nerve tissue, we can take out the psychedelic effect that way, the nausea, the dizziness, and people can literally like be walking around microdosing, or taking a psychedelic at the back of the neck like there and not have the psychedelic experience. So, elderly, adolescents, people who are scared, can now access psychedelics in a safe and effective way, and get all the benefit, but without any negative side effects.

[01:02:18] Luke Storey: That's badass. And how far along is that process? When's that going to be commercially available, or prescription, or however that's going to work?

[01:02:26] Zappy Zapolin: So, the good news is it's already basically available, because as the patents exist now and it worked, what happened was it worked in regular medicine, but they were only using it with like cancer drugs that are very expensive because of this technique, but the Psycheceutical patents basically democratized it where we can make billions of particles all the same size, different shapes. They found out in cancer that cancer, if you want to put it in medicine, they like triangles better than their like squares or circles. So, we can make it any shape or size, deliver it wherever we want, time-release it, and it's like it's great because we don't have to prove it, it already works, and now, we're just bringing it over to the psychedelic space.

[01:03:09] Luke Storey: So awesome, man.

[01:03:11] Zappy Zapolin: Such a great time to be alive and this movie.

[01:03:13] Luke Storey: Thank you for doing that. So cool. And so, right now, you're shopping your second film with Lamar Odom. And so, this will probably come out maybe late January or February, do you think that by the time that this releases, that it could be out or shortly after that?

[01:03:30] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, I do. And one of the other things that's really cool about the Psycheceuticals is you can take different compounds and put them together, which was never possible. You couldn't take like an oil-based and a water-based one, and put them together, but now, in the Psycheceutical format, we could deliver multiple compounds, so there's going to be a lot of synergistic things that take place, and then we can bring those out, and say, okay, here, take this drop, and it's going to give you an anti-nausea medicine.

[01:03:59] Five minutes later, we're going to release the ketamine, and then an hour later, we're going to give you some CBG without you doing anything. And I think I'm just so excited about like this moment that we're in, and like I said, I'm a little nervous about 2040 and really trying to raise people's consciousness before that, but like I don't think they're going to do it if it's like, oh, go sit with a shaman. It's like, no, I'm not doing that. Well, okay, go to your doctor and take this Psycheceutical, though, I can do that.

[01:04:25] Luke Storey: Yeah. So, I mean, think about the risky things people are already taking blindly from their doctors. There's a lot of stuff out there right now. It's like, oh, we haven't even tested it, here, take it. What?

[01:04:34] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. And that's like kind of one of the things that when you were talking about sobriety, I've gone to some AA meetings and NA meetings with friends to support them, and you go and there's people there like, I'm totally sober, I'm totally sober, and they're drinking like five cups of coffee with sugar, they're hitting their vape all day, they're eating a Sub sandwich, taking Xanax, they're like, I'm totally clean. 

[01:04:55] And I'm like, holy shit, if you took ibogaine, you wouldn't even have to detox, it would wipe your prefrontal cortex, you wouldn't have any cravings, and you'd have a window to sobriety. That's sobriety. If you're thinking about not using all day having to come to meetings, you're sober, but it's like, why live? And I think if we can bring these ibogaines and things like these, and bring them out in a safe and effective way, people are wide open to it, it's just the technology has to now be implemented in this culture.

[01:05:26] Luke Storey: Absolutely. Well, man, I mean, I went through a lot of difficult times in sobriety for many years, because I didn't even know that this was a viable alternative, this whole world. I mean, I, over time, became more successful in my happiness and all outward expressions of success, but still, there are things I couldn't get over. And the first few years of sobriety, I mean, I was a fucking train wreck because of what you described. 

[01:05:53] It's like, I'm going to say in my talk tomorrow if I go with the plan, what do you get when you sober up a horse thief? You got a sober horse thief, right? You still have the underlying emotional, and mental disorders, and dysfunction, and behavior patterns. That doesn't go away just because you stop putting anesthesia in yourself to become numb and more comfortable.

[01:06:13] You get sober and it's like, oh, shit, now, the real work begins, but there's so much deep construction that has to be done on one psyche and so much healing just to get to the point of being a functional adult that doesn't—it's not like you're not doing drugs because you shouldn't, you actually just don't need them, because you're not traumatized. You've treated your PTSD. Like if you offered me some heroin right now, I mean, A, I wouldn't want to do it because I've committed to not doing it in this lifetime, but I don't feel the need to like sit here, nod out, and drool on myself. I'm not in pain, I'm happy, like I'm living a fucking great life. Heroin is like, oh, I don't need that, you know what I mean?

[01:06:52] Zappy Zapolin: Yeah. 

[01:06:52] Luke Storey: And that's because of the psychedelics and 22 years of really hard work on myself prior to that to just heal, just get my mind right, and the way I think and feel.

[01:07:03] Zappy Zapolin: Well, what's cool is when I spent time with Lamar, and I realized how much trauma he had, and I gave him the ketamine, he had a good experience, I was like, you know what, I was thinking about it, I was like, Lamar, I was like, you're an African-American guy, there's this African root that can break an addiction, I was like, maybe you're supposed to be having this and you've just been like cut off from it culturally, like who's to say? 

[01:07:24] So, maybe it's going to resonate with you. And I just think like we have to rethink and re-calibrate everybody like what is drugs, what is mental health, what is sobriety. And it's like if we have these tools, if you're a religious person and you're like, God knows everything, created everything, well, God put these things that are growing out of the ground here to help us tap into spirituality, like why aren't we taking those? If God's all knowing, he would have done that.

[01:07:55] Luke Storey: Yeah. Oh, the mushrooms are just an accident. Oops. Spilled some molecules over there. Sorry, guys. Yeah. So true, man.

[01:08:02] Zappy Zapolin: Like I feel like people are going to get to heaven and God, he or she, is going to show up, and it's going to be like, they're going to be like, what the hell? Like I put all this stuff there to help you out and you just like didn't pay attention to it? Like wow, like you're not going back for a while, you've got some real work to do. You're not going back into the virtual reality suit, you're not ready.

[01:08:27] Luke Storey: That's funny, dude. Well, man, thank you so much for your work and courage to explore all this stuff. I know it's a field that is probably not easy because some of these paths are not well-worn. You're innovating into areas of business, commerce, medicine that not many people are. It's exciting, but I'm sure it's not the easiest path.

[01:08:48] Zappy Zapolin: Now, but it's so rewarding. Like when you are with somebody that has a psychedelic experience as having mental health challenges, and then you see him transformed, it's like, how are you going to go back to doing anything else? How are you going to be like, oh, I'm creating an app that does a calendar? It's like, what are you talking about? I just cured a guy with like, so it's easy to be on the path once you've had that experience. And I love what you're doing. You've like got so many people that just kind of resonate with your frequency and you're giving them the confidence, a lot of them, I feel like, to take these steps to go inside themselves.

[01:09:24] Luke Storey: It's a gift. It's the best life ever. Being of service is everything. If you can do that well, everything else falls into place. Last question for you. Who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life and your work that you might share with us?

[01:09:40] Zappy Zapolin: That's a good question. Somebody taught me some Kabbalah many years ago, and I started doing a meditation with like these Kabbalistic learnings and things like that that really just reframed what's going on and kind of maybe how to do alchemy in the present moment, and some of that stuff really helped me. I would have to say Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead showing me that like you can just give the music away and just create an environment, don't get caught up, just share. And like if you share, it'll manifest into something much bigger. And I always like try to put that into my own work and share stuff like that.

[01:10:27] So, I'd say watching these people, it's like, I love watching people and how they act. My first job, I'll put this person as maybe a third person, I worked for this famous philanthropist Wall Street guy named Mike Milken, and he always used to say, create something of value and wealth is the byproduct. Like don't go for the wealth, you'll get messed up, but create something of value. And just to watch these people do that and to see them do it, it's like you realize why they're living such fulfilled lives is because they're sharing and they have a lot of gratitude. And so, I think those people have really affected me in my life.

[01:11:10] Luke Storey: I think you're the first person that's named Jerry Garcia, weirdly enough, but I would agree. I would agree. He was kind of the gateway drug for me, the Dead for—I mean, I took psychedelics before that, but I think those were probably the only experiences, like in the early '90s, many Dead shows, I mean, there were rough edges around those experiences because I wasn't doing it intentionally, but there definitely were moments where I was like, oh, something's happening here, you know what I mean?

[01:11:36] Zappy Zapolin: Like when the whole crowd's like in the same energy, time slowed down, like I had some times where it's like, wow, like it's just now, and that's hard to capture outside of a psychedelic experience, and I have captured it in some group settings like that.

[01:11:52] Luke Storey: Yeah, the collective consciousness and the hive mind of a group of people resonating in that frequency, it's powerful. It's powerful. I mean, it's no accident that people follow the Dead around for however many years they did all over the world.

[01:12:05] Zappy Zapolin: That was me.

[01:12:06] Luke Storey: Well, dude, thank you so much. Yeah.

[01:12:07] Zappy Zapolin: Thanks for doing what you're doing.

[01:12:08] Luke Storey: Yeah. Really great chat, man.

[01:12:10] Zappy Zapolin: I'll see you soon, I'm sure.

[01:12:10] Luke Storey: I much appreciate you taking the time. Yes, you will.

‍