Latest / ShameOver - The Drink Less Podcast / Psychedelic Medicine Explained: What Every Woman Should Know (Part 1) | with Zappy Zapolin
Transcript
- Erica+ShameOver: Well, Mother Nature clearly had other plans for us. Right as we were getting into some really fascinating territory, the storm decided to interrupt our conversation. This was hail unlike I had ever seen. So we're gonna hit pause here and pick things back up in part two, where Zappy and I dive into microdosing, ketamine, safety, and how to find qualified guides and what all this could mean for women who are using alcohol to cope with stress, overwhelm, and life challenges. Today's conversation is unlike anything that we've covered before because we are exploring psychedelic medicine. And this is because it's becoming a bigger part of the conversation around mental health, trauma, addiction, and healing. This is not medical advice, and it is also not an endorsement of any treatment. My goal is simply to introduce you to emerging research and perspectives so you can make informed decisions alongside qualified healthcare professionals. All right, let's jump in. Enjoy. Hey, it's Erica. Welcome back to the Shameover podcast. I am so glad you're here. And today I am with a very special new friend, we'll call him, ⁓ Zapfi. Zappy, thank you for being here. Zappy Zapolin: Yes, great to be here. I am excited. This is a moment in time. So for me, sharing what I'm ⁓ is going on is like so exciting to wake up every day. So thank you for having me. Erica+ShameOver: Yes. I love it. Yeah. So tell us more. Who are you? What do you do? In the meantime, if this conversation has you thinking about your own relationship with alcohol, I have two great next steps for you. First, take my free drink less quiz. It is gonna help you discover the unique drinking style that you have and give you personalized tips that actually fit you. You can also, if you're ready and you wanna stop feeling stuck in the cycle of I'll start again on Monday. Zappy Zapolin: Hmm, so I am a psychedelic concierge. as people, ⁓ know, refer to me, I'm the psychedelic concierge to the stars because I have had quite a few celebrities. I made some documentary films. ⁓ I have two documentaries out. One's called The Reality of Truth with Michelle Rodriguez, the actress from Fast and Furious. Her and I went down to Peru and drank ayahuasca with a shaman in the jungle. T ⁓ put it out 10 years ago. Erica+ShameOver: Amazing. Come join me at the reset and you will spend the next 30 days learning how to drink less without giving up on your social life, without going cold turkey, sober, anything along those lines. Plus, I'll be in your pocket pretty much the whole time. So it's practical, shamefree, and designed for real life. You'll find the links to both in the show notes. Thank you so much, and I'll see you in part two. Zappy Zapolin: She's so good in the movie that ⁓ it's been seen over 25 million times. It's said to have caused over a million people to have a psychedelic experience because they watch the movie. And ⁓ yeah, she's incredible in it. That's on Amazon Prime and YouTube for anybody who wants to see it. And then more recently, I did a movie with ⁓ Lamar Odom, the basketball player Kardashian, and I Erica+ShameOver: Amazing. Yeah. Zappy Zapolin: Did a psychedelic intervention on him and he let me film it over the course of a few years, but put that out a few years back. And he's incredible in that. And I have a new movie coming out. It's called Frequency, The Secret of Everything. And that just starting to drop trailers and stuff like that. So it's, ⁓ you know, I ⁓ I'm just doing my thing, but sometimes I have a camera follow me around, or I bring a camera and Try to turn into some content, share it with people, hopefully it can help them. That's the theory on ⁓ recording it. Erica+ShameOver: That's amazing. So those who are unaware or like me, I've never really dabbled with psychedelics. So give us the very like basics layman terms. What does it even mean? What does it do for you? That type thing. Zappy Zapolin: Cool. Okay. This is a real this is really good information. ⁓ you might have seen a few weeks ago Donald Trump signed an executive order ⁓ for psychedelic medicine, everything from Ibogaine, which is a psychedelic medicine for addiction that's been helping a lot of soldiers. There's a movie on Netflix called In Waves and War, follows a bunch of veterans, and along with Former governor Rick Perry from Texas, they've brought this initiative forward for veterans to use it. and you know, psychedelic medicine, these are for most part naturally occurring plants and things that you have receptors in your brain for. We've just been cut off from it. We've been in a prohibition for the last sixty years. And just to describe why that happened. ⁓ psychedelic medicine was coming out in the 1950s. They were experimenting with LSD and mushrooms and other things. the psychiatrists were having amazing results of breaking addiction and healing people. But a sort of a perfect storm happened in the 1960s ⁓ the Vietnam War was going on, and the government tested psychedelics on soldiers and realized that. If give people psychedelics and they think for themselves, they're not going to go kill people in a war or just do whatever you say. So they were trying to shut it down pretty hard, make them illegal. Secondly, was the pharmaceutical companies because they had just launched their SSRIs, their antidepressants, and they were seeing decades of billions and billions in profits. And so they didn't like things like mushrooms or LSD that was going to resolve your addiction or your depression immediately. they were very against it. And then third, probably most sinister, the alcohol companies, they knew that a day was gonna come like 2026 when k younger generations were gonna opt out of alcohol and be more about cannabis or ⁓ mushrooms and things like that. And so they knew it and they were like, we have to suppress this. They spent tens of millions of dollars a year. On propaganda saying that you were going to go crazy if you took psychedelics, you jump out of building, it would ruin your brain. so for 60 years, we've been in this prohibition ⁓ as turns out, ⁓ a lot of the data that's now come out of Johns Hopkins University, Yale, University of California, San Francisco, Stanford has major medical benefits for. ⁓ mental wellness and addiction using these different psychedelic compounds. And for people that don't know, ⁓ lot of these are mushrooms or ⁓ things like DMT ⁓ ⁓ plant medicines and things like that. And ⁓ happened is the testing's come back ⁓ I after COVID, what we all went through, everyone has some degree of PTSD. Every family has some mental illness. Every family has some addiction. And so the government was kind of like in the last couple of years since Trump took back over with RFK and people who are trying to be sensible, what happened was ⁓ the data that was coming out of these major universities was ⁓ positive for the benefits of these things. So the government, which right now all psychedelic medicines except for ketamine. Those are all they're all schedule one drugs, like with heroin, cocaine, and all that. ⁓ they've been illegal, they've been on schedule one 60 years. But the definition of schedule one is no medical benefit and possibly highly addictive. And so now the government is saying, and this is the executive order they did the other day, and they're fast-tracking psilocybin research. They're admitting that there is major medical benefit. This is going to be the most important part of mental health because it works really quickly. It's very safe and efficient. And they can see that it's growing new neural pathways in your brain, creating a neuroplastic state that is much better to be in right now. So, long story short, the are compounds are coming out. They each have a different benefit to them. A different frequency vibration. I'll just describe, just for example, for your ⁓ users, ⁓ somebody ⁓ out of touch with nature, you could give them a San Pedro from a cactus and connect them back to nature. These people live in a city and never touch the ground and they get out of whack, ⁓ might need that. If somebody's lost the joy in their life, maybe they just need some psilocybin mushroom microdosing. To bring back that elevated joy state. if they have an addiction, they might need ibogaine, which has been shown to be able to break even a meth or a heroin or ⁓ opiate addiction, alcohol in one 12-hour session. That's what the ⁓ president signed off on ⁓ the other day. ⁓ ⁓ and on, if you need a hug from your grandmother, you know, maybe ayahuasca would be good for you if need. Erica+ShameOver: ⁓ well. Zappy Zapolin: Creativity, perhaps microdosing compound, or they just came out and said that stroke victims should be using DMT, which is a naturally occurring psychedelic, ⁓ that you can get a bigger dose from certain plants and things like that. And so you can use it, you can smoke it, and they say that this is growing new neural pathways. but for me, I ⁓ The reason I got into this psychedelic medicine space is that about ten, you know, and two t about 15 years ago, ⁓ had a spiritual midlife crisis where I had done everything society told me to do to be totally fulfilled. They were like, go to work, go to school, get a job, have a family, make money, be a philanthropist. You'll be totally fulfilled. And I did it. I made millions of dollars. I did this and that. Erica+ShameOver: Mm. Zappy Zapolin: And here I am. I'm like, I don't I don't know if this is like I'm not fulfilled. I'm I'm having some nice experiences, but I just really don't even know what I'm doing here. And shit, I can't find it out there. I thought, wow, maybe I have to go inside of myself to get some of these answers. And I'd heard about people doing ayahuasca. I had had a very positive experience with psychedelics when I was a teen, where I would describe like I Erica+ShameOver: Hmm. Sure. It's yeah. Zappy Zapolin: I s looked at my hand and it was trillions of atoms and they were just vibrating at this certain frequency. And then I looked over at my friend and he was the same atoms, but just a slightly different frequency than me. And the table, and I was like, my God, my five senses are muting down what's really happening. And I could never unsee that my whole rest of my life. Erica+ShameOver: ⁓ wow. Zappy Zapolin: So when I got into trouble with this spiritual midlife crisis, I thought, wow, maybe I have to go back inside myself for some answers. And when decided to go down to the jungle and sit with a shaman to do this ayahuasca, which is a a vine that comes from the rainforest that they brew into a tea. You drink the tea, you have this God-conscious experience. you'll see if you watch the reality of truth movie with Michelle Rodriguez, myself, and our friends, and a lot of other Erica+ShameOver: Okay. Zappy Zapolin: you know, key thought leaders from know, Ram Das to Marianne Williamson, Joel Osteen, ⁓ on and on and on. ⁓ they're in the reality of truth. And in time I was ⁓ shown, you know, why why I'm here, why, you know, I should stick around. I met God. ⁓ turns out you'll see in the movie that it was a woman. So the jokes on everybody with their God the Father, he, him, and I'm and here I am laughing, going, sure. I go, Yes, sure, society. I just met God and it actually was a woman. Okay, so let's let's start with that and now you know, and you come back into your own reality and you have to integrate your experience. And so Erica+ShameOver: That is music to my ears right there. Zappy Zapolin: decided that I wanted to start a program where I train people called other psychedelic concierges because a lot of times right now we need a lot of guides and people to help if people integrate their experience with these different medicines. Because as the shamans will say, the the plant medicine does half the work and the other half is you have to do it and integrate it into your life. And so when I I was realizing that, you know, when people get curious about psychedelics and they say that there's thirty nine million Americans who say they're psychedelic curious, percent of those people say they would like to be guided by somebody the first time. And so you're talking twenty million guides we need or twenty million people we need are gonna need to be serviced. And so I thought to myself, wow, you know, we just don't have that because if you if you are curious and you go onto the internet you look up psychedelics, you're probably gonna get like five ayahuasca places and two mushroom places in Jamaica and you're gonna be like, ⁓ I guess I gotta do ayahuasca. But if you were to sit with this psychedelic concierge like myself, I would ask you some questions about what your intention is for doing it, what traumas you're trying to overcome, and then make a recommendation that's probably not ayahuasca. It could be You know, like I said, any of these other compounds based on what you really need meet you where you are. And so that ⁓ Erica+ShameOver: That is really important to know that there are different depending on what type of experience you want and also what the purpose is of going about it, that you would drive them down a different path depending. Zappy Zapolin: Yeah, exactly. And I I say it's just like, you know, at a a s concierge at a hotel, you know, y th you say, Where should we go for dinner? And they ask you a series of questions like, What kind of food do you like? Do you want music? Do you like wine? Indoor, outdoor, and then they go, ⁓ I got a perfect place for you. So for me it's asking those questions about intention, traumas and things. And you know, like I said, before the pandemic peace people used to ask me, Hey, do you think everybody needs psychedelic medicine? And I was like, not really. No, not everybody. But post-pandemic, I'm like, ⁓ yes, like we all have PTSD. And we all have very scary things like, you know, are we in World War Three? the air poison? Like all these things that are so much information and technology that people are kind of frozen. And so these psychedelic medicines, they are pattern interruptions. They just disrupt your your thought patterns that are In a lot of cases, people are just rolling patterns through that are not in their best interests. These are things like, I'm a failure, nobody loves me, I'm a drug addict, and they just even when good things happen, they run it through these rigid patterns and they never get anywhere. But when you do psychedelics, the idea is to put yourself into a more neuroplastic state so that when things happen, good or bad, they don't hit these rigid patterns. They're really more like, okay, well. Let's see where this goes because sometimes, you know, what you think is bad is good. So let's let's see where it goes. Instead of, you know, being like this isn't gonna work out, you know, blah blah blah. And so people really need this right now. Thank God, you know, the president of the United States, RFK Jr., you know, the people at Yale and Johns Hopkins, they've already done the studies. They we know it's safe, we know it's effective. And they also know that they don't have another solution. They can't we can't go back to talk therapy and antidepressants. It's just not gonna it wasn't getting it done before the pandemic.