Psychedelic Concierge to Celebrities: An Interview With Mike “Zappy” Zapolin
Photo credit: Kaia Roman
Mike “Zappy” Zapolin is the Forrest Gump of psychedelic shamans. His career is criss-crossed with celebrities and serendipity: in the early aughts, he flipped domains like Beer.com, Creditcards.com, and Diamond.com for millions of dollars apiece; he made a 2016 documentary about psychedelics with actress Michelle Rodriguez; he authored a Kabala card deck with spiritual guru Deepak Chopra; and most recently made another film about ketamine with former NBA player (and ex-Kardashian) Lamar Odom. He is a self-described “psychedelic concierge to the stars,” taking celebrities on “Vision Treks”—this very author participated in one to Mexico in a 2017 feature for Playboy—with the intent of converting influencers into evangelizers for psychedelics, plant medicines, and ketamine.
Zappy is currently hard at work on several initiatives, such as The Mind Army (legalizing plant medicines and psychedelics), Psycheceutical (making psychedelics clinically-acceptable), and KetaMD (at-home ketamine treatments). We spoke to Zappy about what it means to be a “psychedelic concierge to the stars,” how psychedelics could help us survive the singularity, ketamine’s connection to aliens, and why he wants to take Prince Harry, Vladimir Putin, and Michelle Obama on a Vision Trek.
Thanks for speaking to Countere, Zappy. What is a “Psychedelic Concierge?”
If you ask a concierge at a hotel about nearby restaurants, they’ll ask you a bunch of questions, then go, “I got the perfect spot for you!” As a psychedelic concierge, I ask people about their intent and what traumas they’re trying to overcome. And then I come up with a formula for them.
For Lamar Odom, his formula was “ketamine plus plant medicine plus daily practice (breathing or meditation) equals a conscious transformation.” The reason was that Lamar lost his mom and his son…the guy’s trying not to feel. And because he’s never done any psychedelics before, I’m putting ketamine at the beginning instead of taking him down to Mexico to sit with a shaman. Plant medicine, ibogaine, had to be second because [Lamar] has an addiction profile. He tries to cover up his trauma with that.
Zappy with Lamar Odom.
When I did The Reality of Truth film with Michelle Rodriguez, I knew she needed to do ayahuasca. There were so many reasons why; that’s the job of the psychedelic concierge.
They say in the United States we’re short 4 million therapists right now, and I think a lot of those roles could be filled by psychedelic concierges. It’s going to be a really cool job for a lot of people, that helps a lot of people.
Why do you feel such urgency in your work with the Mind Army?
The futurist Ray Kurzweil—he’s been the Chief Science Officer of Google, and he can track technology like nobody in the world—says that by the year 2045, we’ll reach singularity, where the human brain is directly connected to the Internet, and you’ll have AI running calculations on top of that.
He said the average person who has that setup in the year 2045 will be 1 billion times more intelligent than you are today. It is cool, but it’s super fucking scary. Because if a 17-year-old kid breaks up with his girlfriend, he can say, “I’m going to destroy NYC today,” and he’ll have all the ability to do that.
Zappy with Deepak Chopra.
We need to raise our consciousness right now. We need a critical mass of people having a psychedelic experience, going inside, and emerging with more empathy to create a higher collective consciousness. We’re having an empathy crisis; people can’t put themselves in other people’s shoes. They want to care, but there’s so much information coming at them that they’re overwhelmed.
When someone is going to raise their consciousness or empathy, the only reliable ways we’ve seen to do that are through a near-death experience, which you can’t count on, or a major breakthrough with a psychedelic experience.
The slogan of the Mind Army is that we’re “fighting for the right to pursue happiness.” We believe it’s your inalienable right to go inside yourself and get answers and healing.
What are the most important plant medicines or substances to be legalized right now?
We want immediate legalization of these compounds: ibogaine for addiction, ketamine for PTSD/trauma, and then psilocybin for microdosing.
Ketamine: It’s approachable by Western society. It’s a Western medicine that is proven to be effective and safe. That’s a godsend. Yale has said ketamine is 75% effective against treatment-resistant depression. The number one side-effect of ketamine is that it breaks suicidal ideation. It’s a bit of a Trojan horse because people are coming for PTSD and depression and they’re getting enlightenment.
Ibogaine: Ibogaine was accidentally scheduled as a drug in the early 70s, it shouldn’t be on the schedule at all. A French company actually sold ibogaine over-the-counter in the 50s over the name Lambarene. Ibogaine can break a meth addiction or a crack addiction in one 12-hour session; people need access to that immediately!
Psilocybin: I can pretty confidently say microdosed psilocybin mushrooms will replace antidepressants in the future.
People always say the government doesn’t want you to have psychedelics because then you’ll open up your mind—that’s not even true. What’s happening is that doctors and the government have no idea about psychedelics; it’s a total lack of information. Given the fact that most doctors don't even know about nutrition, which could solve most of the problems we’re facing—you go to a hospital and it’s the most awful food—of course they don’t know about psychedelics!
Zappy with Andrew Yang.
It’s our job as “psychenauts” to explain this to [bureaucrats] in a mind-hacking way. Instead of saying, “Why haven’t you done anything about it,” we’re walking in with smiles on our faces, saying, “Hey, we’ve got the solution—it’s been scientifically-tested—to the opioid crisis, to the depression crisis.”
Years ago, in Mexico, you described the “psychedelic family tree” to me. Could you explain that for our readers?
For sure. Ibogaine is the grandfather. It’s going to give you a very stern look at your situation like your grandfather would do. No bullshit, right in your face.
Then you have ayahuasca, which is the mother; it’s a feminine energy. No matter how crazy it gets in your experience, you’re still getting that hug from your mother, your grandmother, so you’re not terrified, and you’re able to walk through it.
San Pedro Cactus is like the father. The father wants the best for you and has a lot of knowledge to share if you’re open to it.
Psilocybin mushrooms can be described as the cousins; the mischievous, rambunctious cousins.
Ketamine is like the galactic relative. All the other plant medicines, you feel this spirit energy with them, and you run things through your human filter; basically, you still know you’re a human. Ketamine takes you out of the “human filter.” I think that filter is a major problem people have right now: you’re scanning for danger, and it used to makes sense a long time ago that if you see someone coming and they don’t look like you, your body acts a certain way.
In ketamine there’s thing called “dissociation,” where in that moment, you are not human. You’re not thinking, “Me, my body,” It feels like a galactic relative that we have the chance to tap into to evolve really quickly.
Can you tell us more about ketamine and what you possibly suspect to be its extraterrestrial connections?
Ketamine is different than other psychedelics. First of all, it’s not hallucinogenic, it’s dissociative. With all the other plant medicines, it’s very relevant where they’re grown: the soil, who harvested it, etc.
Ketamine are these micro-crystals that are ubiquitous across billions of molecules. So you have something that is super clean. It’s like a technology, some say an alien technology: crystals hold information, they make our watches and computers work. Medical ketamine metabolizes into your brain. It actually builds new neural pathways in the brain, new dendrites. This is literally the evolutionary leap that I’m talking about.
Timothy Leary once wrote about the eight areas of the brain. The highest level of your brain, he said, is where you can communicate with your future self. He said you can trigger that with ketamine. 80% of your brain is active on ketamine. It is literally the “limitless drug.”
I think ketamine is here to evolutionary connect and propel people forwards. People say that aliens buzz by this planet and think, “Oh, they’ve turned on their supercomputers, they found the ketamine.” Ketamine is that evolutionary loop that can allow us to deal with this new technology.
I think that’s the power of psychedelics; I think that’s what we need as a society. People can’t handle this much information, they can’t handle this much technology. So we need some type of evolutionary leap forward in our brain and consciousness and that is through psychedelics. Through ketamine, but if you read more closely, it’s through consciousness.
If you could take any celebrity on a Vision Trek, who would it be?
Zappy with Kim Kardashian.
I’d go for a super top influencer. Maybe Prince Harry. Everyone feels like they know him and everyone wants him to be doing good. You know he’s going through turmoil. The ripple effect would be insane from Prince Harry doing plant medicines and going on a Vision Trek. Michelle Obama, Vladimir Putin, those are some of my other top picks because of how much would change.
I feel like we’re living in a new era. The Michael Pollan special, “How to Change Your Mind,” was a top doc on Netflix—he never did any [plant medicines] until he was 60 years old, then he started to have these psychedelic experiences that changed his life. Then Aaron Rodgers came out and says he did ayahuasca and had the best season of his life. Those are two things that totally shifted the landscape for psychedelics.
Psychedelics are about to come into music like they did in the 60s—like how the Beatles went from boring shit to cool stuff—and I think it’s about to change all of hip-hop. Hip-hop’s going to have a real deep consciousness to it where people are going to discuss emotions, feelings, it’s going to shift the material focus of even hip-hop.
It’s such a cool time to be alive. I think we’re going to get some breakthrough legalization of psychedelics really soon. If we take a moment here, and say we need these things in a mental health crisis, then enough people are going to do them, and we emerge with empathy, we solve the problems, and it’s going to be such a cool movie to watch.
In 2022, we’re not going to let people say alcohol is good, tobacco is good, but somehow psilocybin mushrooms are bad. We just came out of a pandemic where pretty much everybody had some level of PTSD that they didn’t have going in. We’re going to need some new solutions in the form of psychedelics, because they allow you go to inside. They can connect you to the miracle of life.
People say “there’s no miracles anymore.” They’re so jaded. In reality, we’re in a miracle—the sun is 93 million miles away, you’re talking on a cell phone to someone across the world—and psychedelics can help connect you back to the miracle.
What are some of your other plans?
I’m in Delrey Beach, Florida, right now. It’s the addiction treatment capital of the United States; everyone comes here for treatment. What that means is you have this whole community of addicts, and these people don’t even know about ibogaine. So the Mind Army is doing a street team takeover of Del Rey this fall & winter: we’re going to try to get this whole town to realize there is ibogaine available for addiction treatment. If we can penetrate here in Del Rey, the ripple effect will be the biggest it can be.
Zappy in Mexico, 2016. Photo credit: Zachary Emmanuel
Something also I’m working on is [biotechnology company] Psycheceutical. I’m really excited about it because our patents allow for proper dosing with psychedelics. These specific patents can even take the psychedelic effect out, while still creating neurogenesis. This opens up the healing to everyone, including elderly and adolescents.
Changing the format into something that doctors are comfortable with is how we will bring about mainstream adoption. Right now, even if a doctor knows that psilocybin mushrooms would help you, they’re not comfortable handing you a bag, saying “Take two caps and a stem, and let me know how it goes.” They need it in a traditional pharmaceutical format. That’s why I’m working hard on this; it will bring about mass adoption.
Follow Zappy Zapolin on Instagram.
