“A Microdose on Your Wrist”: The Latest Research From Apollo Neuro

Podcast Highlights

• Apollo Neuro’s origin story and evolution.
• Clinical data showing heart rate variability (HRV) & cognitive improvement with Apollo Neuro.
• Longitudinal research on the Apollo’s benefits.
• Sleep’s foundational impact on people with depression and PTSD.
• The best ways to utilize Apollo to induce calming states.
• Apollo’s new AI features to reset circadian rhythms.
• Exploring the different Apollo Vibes and their uses.
• The relationship between neuroplasticity and the Apollo wearable.
• Why clinicians & practitioners use the Apollo in their practices.
• Dr. Dave’s “toolkit” for self-exploration.
• Dr. Dave’s favorite therapeutic tool for brain training.

Show Links

1. Apollo Neuro
2. Dr. Dave’s website
3. Dr. Dave on Twitter
4. Dr. Dave on Instagram
5. The Psychedelic Report with Dr. Dave
6. “Your Brain Explained” with Dr. Dave
7. Psychedelic Coaching Institute
8. Oura Ring
9. Psychedelic Coaching Institute
10. (podcast): Episode 74: Dr. Dave Rabin: Where Science and Spirit Meet: The Intersection of Psychedelics and Epigenetics
11. (article) Can Psychedelics Help Heal a Dysregulated Nervous System?

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If you have ANY interest or aspiration to be involved with psychedelics professionally as a coach, therapist, practitioner, or business this is the one event you should attend.

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Apollo Neuro is the first scientifically validated wearable that actively improves your body’s resilience to stress. Apollo engages with your sense of touch to deliver soothing vibrations that signal safety to the brain. Clinically proven to improve heart rate variability, it can actually enhance the outcomes of your other efforts like deep breathing, yoga, meditation, and plant medicine. Apollo was developed by a friend of Third Wave, Dr. David Rabin M.D Ph.D., a neuroscientist and board-certified psychiatrist who has been studying the impact of chronic stress in humans for nearly 15 years. Third Wave listeners get 15% off—just use this link.

Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.0 Paul F. Austin: Welcome back to the Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, connecting you to the leaders and pioneers of the psychedelic renaissance. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Dave Rabin, the co-founder and chief Innovation Officer at Apollo Neurosciences.

0:00:14.8 Dr. Dave Rabin: We have hundreds of people in the real world who've been using Apollo with their psychedelic experiences and saying that it's helped them to drop in more effectively and just calm their bodies before they drop in. And then also to have more agency during the experience when they have hard or challenging psychedelic experiences. Having that on reminds them to breathe and brings them back to center in their bodies and helps them actually navigate the challenging experience so that it doesn't become like a negative, intrusive thought loop, bad trip.

0:00:46.6 Paul F. Austin: Welcome to the Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave Audio Mycelium, connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors, and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance, and collective transformation.

0:01:18.4 Paul F. Austin: Hey, listeners, today's podcast is brought to you by the Apollo Wearable. I first started wearing the Apollo in the midst of the COVID quarantine over two years ago. It helped my body to regulate itself, to calm down, to stay more focused, and to meditate in the morning. And I use it to really regulate my nervous system in a time of incredible stress, and I've continued to use it on a day-to-day basis. It is indispensable in my daily routine. Here's the thing, the Apollo is a wearable that improves your body's resilience to stress by helping you to sleep better, stay calm, and stay more focused. Developed by neuroscientists and physicians, the Apollo wearable delivers gentle, soothing vibrations that condition your nervous system to recover and rebalance after stress. I tell folks that it's like a microdose on your wrist that helps you to feel more present and connected, especially when in the midst of a psychedelic experience.

0:02:17.6 Paul F. Austin: It's a phenomenal compliment to any psychedelic experience. In fact, Apollo is currently running an IRB-approved clinical trial in conjunction with MAPS to understand the long-term efficacy of the Apollo wearable with PTSD patients who have undergone MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. The Apollo wearable is the only technology with an issued patent to reduce unpleasant and undesirable experiences associated with medicine-assisted therapy, including psychedelics and traditional medicine. And you can save $50 on the Apollo Wearable by visiting apolloneuro.com/third wave. That's apolloneuro.com/third wave.

0:03:03.0 Paul F. Austin: Hey, listeners, this is Paul Austin, founder and CEO at Third Wave, and welcome back to the psychedelic podcast. Today, we have Dr. Dave Rabin on the podcast. Dave is the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Apollo Neuroscience. He's also a friend and faculty member of the Psychedelic Coaching Institute. We first had Dr. Dave on the podcast in 2019 for episode 74 when the Apollo Neuro was in prototype mode. And I'm thrilled to have him back today to talk about the evolution of the technology, the research-backed benefits, and how artificial intelligence will make this an incredible wearable for the future. So in our conversation today, Dr. Dave and I cover Apollo's origin story and evolution, and then we dive deep into the clinical data that shows how the device can improve heart rate variability and cognition research showing its long-term benefits for sleep and nervous system function, the new AI features that enhance sleep and waking cycles, why clinicians and practitioners are using Apollo in their practice, and how this wearable technology can help you to navigate challenging psychedelic experiences. You'll walk away from this conversation understanding nervous system health, Apollo Neuro's research-backed benefits, and what you can do to retrain your brain for enduring calm.

0:04:29.0 Paul F. Austin: As always, go deeper into this episode with full show notes, transcripts, and any links that we mention in this conversation. Just follow the link in the description or head to the thirdwave.co/podcast. And scroll to episode 218 with Dr. Dave Rabin. Dr. Dave Rabin is a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and co-founder of Apollo Neuroscience. He has extensively studied the impact of chronic stress and focuses on non-invasive therapies for treatment-resistant illnesses like PTSD. He is also the executive director of the Board of Medicine, a nonprofit aimed at establishing guidelines for alternative medicines. Dr. Rabin is researching the epigenetic regulation of trauma and the mechanism of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. He holds an MD and PhD from Albany Medical College. Okay, before we get started, I invite you to take a moment to follow the psychedelic podcast on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review there to help others find the podcast. You can also like and subscribe to our channel on YouTube. This is the easiest way to follow the rapid evolution of psychedelic healing and transformation. We have a ton of powerful content coming up that you won't want to miss. Alright, that's it for now. I hope you enjoy my conversation today with Dr. Dave Rabin. Hey, folks. Welcome back to the Psychedelic podcast. I'm here with a good friend, Dr. David Rabin. Dave, welcome back to the show.

0:05:51.3 Dr. Dave Rabin: Thanks for having me, Paul. It's a pleasure as always.

0:05:54.7 Paul F. Austin: So, we first met in mid-2019. I had invited you to be in a panel in San Francisco that was about non-psychedelic modalities that could facilitate expanded and altered states of consciousness. And at this point in time, the Apollo neuro device was in beta. I remember you let me test it out live at the conference. I was like, this is basically like a microdose on your wrist. And since that point in time, Apollo has grown massively, you, I think last year, closed a $15 million series A, you yourself have been on a number of really well-known podcasts to talk about this overlap between the Apollo psychedelics nervous system regulation. And I dare say that we were, or I was one of the first ones to quote unquote "discover you", that when we recorded our initial podcast about four years ago, you were just a young buck in this space starting to make your way.

0:07:05.2 Paul F. Austin: And now you're one of the most prominent people in the world of psychedelics. So, I think in our podcast episode today, I really, I want to talk a lot about the Apollo Neuro and the clinical research that you've done in it over the last few years and what type of results you're seeing. We're gonna explore some of your impressions generally in the psychedelic space and sort of how it's evolved over the last few years. And then weave in any other fun elements that that might come up. So I think a great starting point is, over the last four years, how has Apollo Neuro as a company, as a device grown, evolved, developed?

0:07:47.0 Dr. Dave Rabin: Well, first off, thank you for your kind words. I really appreciate it. And it's been fun to be on this journey together over the years, to see both our companies develop and help to educate the... Our community at large. And I think what's been really interesting about what we've seen with Apollo is just the... Well, first off, I think what we've learned is how people respond to it in the environment and what helps people have really tremendous experiences and why to some people who maybe don't understand how to use the technology the way it's intuitive to us, 'cause we built it, how do we help those people have a better understanding of how to use the technology and get out of it, what we're getting out of it? Which I think is, it's constant...

0:08:36.8 Dr. Dave Rabin: It's a constant challenge when you're building a new technology, a new kind of technology for the world, Apollo being a technology that never really existed before, which delivers soothing vibrations to the body that help to change our state and help to basically primarily give us the benefits of deep breathing or meditation on the go through our sense of touch. And so I think what's... It's been a really interesting journey just figuring out how to teach people how to use it. And then on another level, starting to think about how predictive AI and generative AI can be leveraged to actually personalize the experience for people so that they don't really need to understand that much about it. They just need to strap it on and keep it charged, and then it does its thing, which we have features that are out and coming out with, that will start to do that for people, which is really exciting.

0:09:29.1 Paul F. Austin: So sometimes, I have a tendency to jump ahead. So I think we're... We'll back up a little bit. And just for any listeners who didn't hear that first podcast, and by the way, folks that was published in, I believe September, 2019. So if you want to hear Dave's full personal story and what got him into this work and all that, I would recommend checking out that podcast. But let's just spend a few minutes on what is the Apollo Neuro to start and what's the origin story? Why did you invent this technology and this device?

0:10:06.1 Dr. Dave Rabin: So we were... I'm a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and we were working... I was working at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Psychiatry. We were trying to figure out how to treat, how to get veterans who have severe PTSD, like the folks who were in the MAPS MDMA trials with, we were trying to help them help understand how to get them better care. And one of the reasons that we were doing so is because we were treating these people and they fell into a category, folks who especially had traumatic brain injury, PTSD, and they fell into a category of people who really struggled to get better. And it was really interesting to us, and particularly myself, to study folks who just didn't get better because we're taught how to treat people in medical school and residency training and all that.

0:10:49.3 Dr. Dave Rabin: And we're taught that it's supposed to work more often than not, and not in every case, but in many cases of the practice of medicine. And in mental health, especially when treating PTSD, something like 70% of people who have ever received a diagnosis of PTSD are symptomatic after trying multiple treatments, they still are not feeling well to the point where they're diagnosable. And that's not a very good statistic. So I started to look at everything else, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, deep breathing, biofeedback, and biofeedback was a particularly interesting one because people with PTSD have low heart rate variability. And so we were trying to figure out, well, what predicts somebody who might do poorly with treatment with PTSD? Well, low heart rate variability predicts poor outcomes. Low heart rate variability is a sign that are... If any, anyone who has any wearable device attracts heart rate variability now.

0:11:48.5 Dr. Dave Rabin: And having it low means that we're more... Our body's less recovered and in less often in a vagal state or a parasympathetic recovery state. And that's a state we want our bodies to be in all as often as possible because that state helps us to transition and it helps us to fall asleep and digest our food and fight off illness and be empathetic and loving with our partners. But all those things are things we don't want to be engaged when we're running from a lion. So things that make our bodies go into that stress state, lower our heart rate variability and increase our heart rate and put us into a state of constant threat, that's what people with PTSD feel every moment of every day. So we thought, well, what makes people feel safe? MDMA therapy seems to have something to do with that.

0:12:32.3 Dr. Dave Rabin: And then we... I got MDMA-trained thanks to the good graces of Rick Doblin with a few of my colleagues in 2016. And then I learned from the MDMA training that part of the big way that MDMA seems to work, as well as some papers that had shown this at this time, where that it seems to amplify activity molecularly in parts of the brain that are really important for safety. And that had a big impact, which is like increase, also increases vagal tone over the long term. Safety is like the key stimulus to increase calm in the body and recovery. And so in the MDMA trials, the MDMA was really amplifying in the therapy, the safety that the patients felt, the participants, so that they could be safe enough to go back and like reappraise their own trauma, to actually reevaluate the meaning of some of the most painful experiences in their lives they never ever wanted to think about again.

0:13:26.1 Dr. Dave Rabin: But they could do so feeling safe enough under the influence of the medicine with the therapist present. And so safety really stood out as this key in all of that. And so I started pulling on those threads and thought, well, how else do we naturally induce safe states in the body? Well, it's through soothing touch, and that's the most evolutionarily preserved, powerful, immediate way that we convey safety to each other, which is how mammals have done it for over a hundred million years, by nursing each other, nursing their young as soon as they're born, right? That touch is a pre-verbal, powerful instant communication of safety. And so as we started to look at that, we mapped out all those neural pathways and found out that if you experience soothing touch from a loved one, for instance, like a hug, you're activating very similar parts of the brain that are activated under an experience of MDMA.

0:14:16.3 Dr. Dave Rabin: So why not start? And that theoretically, based on what we know that MDMA does, that's what seemed to be happening. So then we said, well, maybe you can give the benefits of soothing touch and wearable by helping... By training people's bodies with certain vibrations to feel that feeling of soothing touch on the go. And maybe that would change breathing and maybe that would change heart rate and maybe it would help people sleep and focus better during the day. And we did a bunch of studies at the university and the Department of Psychiatry and figured out that we could actually really inspired by biofeedback, combined with like some shamanic Shipibo Icaros, combined with chanting and these deep breathing exercises that have been passed down for thousands of years from eastern traditions and some western science, we were able to figure out that there are certain rhythms you could send to the body that the body really likes, and it resonates with those rhythms and induces breathing states like meditative breathing states. And then Apollo was born.

0:15:10.6 Paul F. Austin: Hey, I want to interrupt the podcast for just a second to invite you to our favorite conference of the year Wonderland in Miami. We cannot recommend this event highly enough. It is the closest thing that the psychedelic world has to an annual gathering of the tribes, from shamans to entrepreneurs and investors, neuroscientists, energy healers, sex therapists, plus artists, yogis, coaches, journalists, and more. Every perspective gets their voice heard at Wonderland. It's really about creating cross-community dialogues and conversation around psychedelics. There's also a near 50/50 balance between men and women, which you do not see often at these high profile conferences. Last year was absolutely epic, and this year seems like it's going to be even better. You'll get to hear from Hamilton Morris, Dave Asprey, Dave Rabin, and many other of our past podcast guests. If you have any interest or aspiration to be involved with psychedelics professionally as a coach, a therapist, a practitioner, or a business, this is the one event you should attend.

0:16:16.7 Paul F. Austin: And as a listener of the Psychedelic Podcast, we've got a special offer for you. By using the code Third Wave 20, you can save 20% on your ticket to Wonderland. Just head on over to wonderlandconference.com and use code Third Wave 20 at checkout to join us at Wonderland in Miami this November 9th through the 11th. That's November 9th through the 11th in Miami, Florida. You can find these links and codes in the show notes. So pause the episode if you need to, and we'll happily wait for you right here to hit play again. Now, enjoy the rest of the episode.

0:16:51.3 Paul F. Austin: There's a lot there to unpack. So the place that I wanna start is, you mentioned research a couple of times already. We've talked about this at length on the podcast and many of the listeners are already pretty aware of the efficacy of MDMA to treat PTSD, and you explained some of those mechanisms as to why it's so helpful. Over the last few years, what clinical research have you carried out on the Apollo Neuro device and how can the Apollo Neuro device potentially help to amplify some of the benefits that we're noticing in psychedelic-assisted therapy?

0:17:34.1 Dr. Dave Rabin: So, that's a great question. So first, I think we started research on Apollo back in... The Apollo technology as it is and used today, back in about 2017. The first trial was published this past year, showing that Apollo is indeed the first wearable technology that improves heart rate variability in the body within as little as two minutes under stress. And the kind of stress that this was, was recovery after intense workout. So heart rate variability, as a sign of recovery, goes up faster with Apollo in that two-minute period between intense workouts. And we've also... And that was a double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled crossover study. So that is one of the studies where everybody goes through every condition and everybody's blinded, including the researchers and the subjects. So nobody knows what vibration patterns are getting or what they're supposed to do.

0:18:28.7 Dr. Dave Rabin: And then we did another study that is currently in preparation for publication, which was the same kind of trial. It was measuring heart rate variability with EKG, in EEG brainwaves, pupillometry pupil movements as a sign of how the nervous system is functioning and how much cognitive processing we're using, respirations from separate respiratory band, sweat from two parts of the body, physical movements and cognitive performance and subjective ratings of stress, all in tandem in an electromagnetic and soundproof shielded room. Both double-blind randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial crossover studies.

0:19:03.0 Dr. Dave Rabin: So these studies are extremely powerful studies because they're actually the gold standard of the most rigorous form of clinical trial to show that any intervention is actually doing something because nobody knows what's going on in advance, including the researchers. And every subject experience is all conditions. So in both of these studies, we showed that Apollo improved... That study is in preparation right now. But in both studies, we showed Apollo improved heart rate variability significantly within two to three minutes. And there has never been any technology that has ever demonstrated you can improve heart rate variability without the user doing anything. So this is the user's performing an intense task or trying to recover from stress. They just strap this thing on, HRV goes up. So that was one of the coolest first findings. That was... Originally, we found that back in 2018.

0:19:51.9 Dr. Dave Rabin: Then we showed that Apollo improved cognitive performance under stress up to 25%, and that as people felt less stressed, over time, their cognitive performance went up and their heart rate variability went up. So there was a direct and statistically significant correlation between how calm we felt that we said we felt, how calm our bodies showed we felt as HRV going up and how well we performed, which is the literal reverse of the futility process. So under that kind of task, which is a task that NASA gives to astronauts before they go into space to test their ability to do really boring things with under extreme stress, we were able to get an effect in people with Apollo vibrations alone, unfocus, that was comparable to what people see with amphetamines, it's 25%. So that's 25% more accuracy on a test. So that's in three minutes, that's like a huge jump.

0:20:49.8 Dr. Dave Rabin: So that was really, really interesting to us. And then we released it to the public and we did five more trials that were mostly real world trials and in-clinic trials with everyone from like nurses experiencing burnout to kids with autism, anxiety, and ADHD to adults with PTSD, to just regular people who are struggling with sleep. And we did that, and in total, like probably like 4000, 3000 people over the last three years. And one thing that was really, really interesting, because we released this technology originally for focus, and those first studies were all on healthy subjects, which is how you're supposed to start clinical trials, 'cause it removes the treatment bias, we saw that people were getting very similar effects because they're sending us data from their wearables in the real world, but they were also... And they were also using it for sleep.

0:21:47.3 Dr. Dave Rabin: And in the lab, we didn't do any sleep studies. So it just really... It really was tremendous help for us to do those like 3000 people in the real world before we ever launched a product because we learned that people were actually using this at night more than they were using it during the day, which is again, like something we'd never learn from a clinical trial. So that became really interesting data for us. And then we used that data to make... To release Apollo as it is today, available on our website at... As a wearable device that can be worn for sleep and for daytime. But sleep became a big focus. And that's where the training for the AI system came about recently.

0:22:30.4 Paul F. Austin: And I want to talk about the AI generative and predictive AI system and how that's been woven in. 'cause I think that's a really interesting feature. But before we do that, I just want to come back to the research element. So you talked a lot about the sort of immediate impact of wearing the Apollo within two or three minutes. It has an effect on HRV, it has an effect on on focus. Have you done any longitudinal research on the Apollo in terms of looking at over time, what are maybe some of the benefits and effects of wearing the Apollo consistently for a month or two months or six months or whatever that might look like?

0:23:00.4 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yeah. So that's actually the paper that's coming out. So I can't disclose too much about it, but I can tell you that we've been tracking people for... This paper will be published in a scientific journal probably sometime between the beginning of the winter and the... Or actually sometime this winter. But it's a study we've been running for the last two years, or two to three years where we've been tracking Oura Ring users because right around the time that... We were tracking Oura Ring users and Apollo users together. And the reason for this originally, now this is actually something that a lot of different study groups do, but back in 2020, this was unusual for study groups to have studies this big. And we've been tracking 1300... Over 1300 people for that long. And it was unusual to do this with wearables, but we started Oura Ring because when COVID happened, all the sleep labs shut down and we were about to do a bunch of sleep studies based on the data we were getting back from our users about, as I said earlier, using Apollo for sleep more than anything else.

0:24:04.7 Dr. Dave Rabin: So we just emailed our users and asked them if they would be open to giving us some of their wearable data from Oura Ring and in exchange for getting access to early feature releases. And people were actually really excited about that. And within one night, we got over 350 people joining our beta program. And so then we sent out a few more messages and we got over 1300 people, and we tracked them for three years. And they had, on average baseline, was like nine months of data on Oura Ring before ever receiving an Apollo. And on average something like 12 months of Apollo use data post receiving Apollo. And this is people just watching people in the wild who have both devices and seeing what happens. And so it was really interesting, is we saw that just adding Apollo to your life introduces a statistically significant change to your sleep duration.

0:25:00.5 Dr. Dave Rabin: Just adding it across all other variables, it shifts everything slightly towards more sleep. So that was interesting. So then we dove deeper into the data and we saw that we were introducing to people up to 30 minutes more sleep a night, and that sleep was concentrated in deep and REM sleep. And that in our older users and the people who use Apollo more, so three or more hours a night... A day and night, five days or more a week, we see that people are having even more sleep gains. There's like... And there's a direct relationship to how much more sleep they get back from how much they use Apollo, like a linear... A nearly linear relationship, which is really, really interesting. So it goes to show and prove some more of what we were seeing in the lab, which is this idea that if you calm the body and by introducing just even a gentle amount of vagal tone, a gentle amount of like parasympathetic calming stimulation to the body safety stimulation, I.e from soothing touch or holding a purring cat or doing some breath work or what have you, that our bodies really like that and they start to be able to wind down and calm down more easily and get deeper, longer sleep.

0:26:14.9 Dr. Dave Rabin: So that's really, really fascinating. And we see HRV heart rate variability goes up consistently over time. We see resting heart rate come down by like 4% over time for many, many people, so on... And on average across the top quartile. So that's a really interesting, really interesting data because it shows that over... And this is over three months in a chunk of three months, that people really have these tremendous benefits just by, again, adding a little more vagal tone to their lives.

0:26:46.3 Paul F. Austin: And so the follow-up question to that is why does that matter, especially for those who may be struggling with depression or PTSD, why is just 30 minutes of extra sleep every night so helpful for those who may be struggling with certain clinical conditions?

0:27:03.6 Dr. Dave Rabin: So I know this might sound crazy as a explanation for that, but 30 minutes more sleep a night is like three and a half hours a week, right? So when you think about that and that your sleep overall is deeper and more restorative, what is happening, right? In deep sleep is when we actually restore our physical bodies so that we feel more like physically rested during the day. And in our REM sleep is where we do a lot of restoration of our minds, and we do a lot of reorganization and re-consolidation of our memories. So if we increase even just a little bit, the amount of REM sleep and deep sleep that we get, then we can actually increase how good we feel by just increasing the amount of physical recovery our bodies get at night and in a significant way by just by doing these small things. And we can increase our memory, we can increase our ability to function on the go because our... When we're asleep, get good REM, our memories go from our hippocampus in the short-term memory center of the brain and go actually up and get organized properly into the larger cortex that stores all of our memories and experiences for the long term in the cerebral cortex. So that is really important. And sleep cannot be understated. It's really like the foundation of all health and healing, starts with a good night's sleep.

0:28:30.7 Paul F. Austin: So at the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned how part of the challenge with a new technology is educating the populace on how to properly utilize it. And because we've now been talking about the Apollo, and by we, I mean Third Wave and you know, our training program, there are a lot of folks listening to this who probably have an Apollo device currently. They may be wearing it at this point in time. So I'd love for you just to talk us through what are some of those fundamentals on how to best utilize the Apollo Neuro device and what is going to be the role of AI to help improve the overall efficacy and utilization of these devices?

0:29:17.9 Dr. Dave Rabin: So the most easy ways to use Apollo are really to think about it like music because it is music that's... We composed based on the neurosciences of our sense of touch, but we compose it for the body instead of the ears. So that's really what it... How Apollo is unique and it's music that's specific for our sense of touch. So it's very slow, undulating rhythms over time that are very similar to our ideal breath rhythm, which is how they help induce those states. And so teaching people that has actually been... Is something I do a lot in person. But it's something that we're gonna be introducing a lot more into the app and giving people a sense of like why they're doing this and what it's supposed to feel like. Other things, for example, like if you think about Apollo-like music, you would never start playing music in your car or in your headphones with your volume turned up to 10 max, right?

0:30:15.0 Dr. Dave Rabin: You would always start it low and then gradually increase it. And so with Apollo, it's the same. The body, if Apollo... Less is more with the intensity and the volume. And so if you start it between 10 and 30% and see how you feel, the goal is to start and keep it at where you just barely noticed it and where you barely notice it and it's never distracting. So as you were saying, Paul, like earlier, likening it to a microdose is really interesting. I was just had the pleasure of spending some time with Jim [0:30:43.3] ____ Fatman recently, and he ended up putting it on. I think, oh, you were there and...

0:30:49.4 Paul F. Austin: At the workshop or the seminar that you were hosting?

0:30:56.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yeah, the seminar in Mill Valley. And he put it on and he also had the realization, he is like, yeah, it's really a lot like a wearable microdose because it's sub-threshold. It's meant to be just barely noticeable and never distracting you. And you can kind of adjust the intensity up and down from there. And when the really... The really high levels of intensity are really valuable if you're traveling on a plane or you're at a rock concert and you get anxiety or you're walking down a New York City busy street where there's a ton of noise around you, that's when the higher intensities are amazing because they help over... They help like over cancel out some of that other stuff that's disturbing. But in general it should just be where you notice it. And then the last thing is scheduling, right?

0:31:34.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: So right now in the app, we have this really incredible feature that can schedule... That allows you to schedule your Apollo vibes to turn on automatically for you throughout the day. And this is one of the best features of Apollo. And because it allows the device to basically do its thing without you having to do anything, you can literally just set it and forget it, and then you just need to keep it charged and strap it on and it will turn on automatically throughout the day and night. And so... But that requires us to set up a schedule. And so we just released a feature called... Well, we released a feature a few months ago called Your Daily Vibes that will customize a schedule for you based on your chronotype. So anybody who's familiar with chronotypes are familiar with like the... Like owl, wolf, bear, dolphin, animals, they that represent how we... The basically our ideal rhythm.

0:32:36.1 Dr. Dave Rabin: And so our circadian rhythm. And our circadian rhythm is a fancy medical or scientific term of describing our sleep and our wake cycles. But it's a really, really important thing to understand. And when we regulate our sleep and wake cycles, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, our entire lives start to... We function better in all parts of our lives. And it only takes 21 days to reset for the most... For most people, a circadian rhythm. And so now Apollo will actually... Up until this point, you could only just find out what your chronotype is, and then you have to make all the changes yourself, which is really, really hard. So now with Apollo, we actually set... We developed it to teach you about your rhythm and actually create a custom Apollo schedule for you that keeps you circadian rhythm aligned.

0:33:21.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: And so that helps you have energy when you wanna have energy during your peaks and helps you sleep when you wanna sleep so that you can have the... Maximize your recovery and your energy. And within 21 days, people start to feel heck of a lot better. So those are the ways people can use Apollo today that are really exciting. And the last piece, as you mentioned, is the AI, which you've been using for a little while as one of our earliest testers. And this has been one of the most exciting features that we developed from with Apollo. Originally, we pioneered this idea about three years ago in the lab at the university, was when we started talking about create, like customizing stuff for people. And that was when we first came up with that like flicker of an idea we can customize things for people.

0:34:15.5 Dr. Dave Rabin: So then over time, as we left the university and we started to work on sleep, when we learned from the community, we said, well, what can we do with AI? Like, how could AI really help us solve something that people really struggle with? Well, we could learn... Use AI to learn from people's sleep behavior from Apollo, and then as they move, for instance, Apollo tracks your sleep movements, which is the gold standard of sleep tracking. And so we can track when you're asleep and when you're awake and when you're about to be awake, and then Apollo can turn on automatically now to keep you asleep. And actually effectively like prevent an unwanted middle of the night wake up, which is a huge problem. It's probably over 50% of the major reason for most people's insomnia. And there's like 70 million people that have insomnia nationwide.

0:35:03.7 Dr. Dave Rabin: So this is a huge problem, and it affects, of course, everyone, also people who don't have insomnia. And so just that feature of AI alone is really interesting for us because it's a opportunity, a window to look at how we can use AI to actually deliver on the promise of personalized medicine. And it's a way for us to think about how we can start to really personalize therapeutic experiences for people. And this is doing it when you're unconscious, right? What a better time to use AI when you actually your brain is... Our normal brains are turned off. So it can do its thing for us when we're not even awake and conscious. And so that was really cool. We've been really excited to put that out into the world, and it's helped give people a lot more sleep back, which is really wonderful.

0:35:50.2 Paul F. Austin: And I think by the time of this publication, by the time we publish this podcast, that will be a feature that's available to everyone who has an Apollo, which a little anecdote you and I had connected a couple months ago and you had mentioned that I had been enrolled and that I had this generative AI, which I actually had no idea at the time. And I remember my immediate reflection was, oh, that's why I'm sleeping so well, because I had, for a long time, struggled with wake-ups. And then I think as soon as I became... Got enrolled in this early program, I noticed that a lot of these wake up just weren't happening anymore, that I was sleeping straight through the night for the first time in many years.

0:36:40.9 Paul F. Austin: And you were like, yeah, it's 'cause you have... You didn't say it's because, but you said you have the generative AI thing. And I was like, holy, I had no idea. And it's working. And I'm a huge fan of the Apollo. One thing I've also been experimenting with lately is wearing two Apollos at the same time. You and I had run into each other at the MAP psychedelic science conference this past June and you were wearing four Apollos. And I was impressed and also curious. And so I remember the way you described it to me was like when you have two Apollos, you can synchronize them. So when one is going up, the other's coming down and vice versa. And so to have it on a mode like social mode, it can mimic some of these effects of taking, let's say, MDMA and amplify it even more. So I'm curious, we've talked a lot about the basics now. What are maybe some of the ninja or black belt tips when it comes to the Apollo Neuro device that you've just been learning yourself or through research that you're like, oh, these are some of the really interesting or advanced ways that people are utilizing Apollo, not just to improve sleep, but to like really improve performance or to really explore sort of new realms of the human experience?

0:38:08.0 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yeah, absolutely. And I think just to wrap up on the last topic was that the Apollo AI is available for sleep and it comes with... And it is a subscription, so it's important to note on top of the hardware, it's like the brain of the hardware. So if you have a hardware, any Apollo hardware, you can upgrade it with Labs software to do the AI function. So I think we... You know, a lot of it is, starts with what we talked about earlier, which is the basics of how to use Apollo to get your circadian rhythm structure in line, because our circadian rhythm structure is our natural rhythm. It's how we resonate with nature. And every single tribal tradition, every single Eastern tradition, for the most part, talks about how... Even ancient Western medicine, Hippocratic medicine from thousands of years ago, talks about how important it is for us to be in touch with nature and for our rhythms to be in line with nature.

0:39:04.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: And we know, we see it all the time, we observe it. In the real world, that when people get more dissonant from nature and we lose our rhythm when we have more erratic sleep cycles, when we use more drugs to throw ourselves in one direction or another, when we work ourselves too much, right, all these things that can result in illness and disease. So the whole idea of Apollo, again, is not that it's a replacement for any natural technique. It's really just an amplifier of almost any other natural technique and natural healing experience that you can use by putting the body into a state that's primed for healing. By just boosting safety a little bit in the body, it primes the body for healing and for change and boosts our recovery nervous system.

0:39:45.6 Dr. Dave Rabin: And so it's a great accompaniment to your meditation practice, to your yoga practice, helps the body drop into those states more quickly. And we're working on a... We're publishing a study now also from the University of Pittsburgh on that topic for enhancing meditation, which is really interesting. And so there's other things, for instance, like using it in and around... Well, so the ones that are not obvious that are might be... That are in the app in some form are like public speaking. So for me, I used to have a lot of public speaking anxiety. You might not notice that now, but a long time ago, when I... Especially when I first started presenting a lot as a young physician scientist, I used to get sweaty and my heart used to race and I'd have like racing thoughts. And using Apollo, the mindful presentness of having that soothing vibration on my body on stage, even in just a few times doing it, just drew my awareness to what I was paying attention to while I was speaking.

0:40:46.9 Dr. Dave Rabin: And what I realized, I think it was like one day I was like wearing my Apollo on stage like the second time and I walked on stage and it was right before I started talking, I was like, wow, I am spending so much time, like well over 50% of my attention is going to thinking about what other people are thinking about me right now in this very moment. And I was like, how could I possibly bring my best self to this presentation if I'm giving over 50% of my energy and resources and attention to thinking about what other people are thinking about me? That's just like a recipe for disaster. And in just having that recognition in that moment, I realized that I could, that for me to like bring my best self, which is what everyone there wanted to see, right? That's what everybody there was coming to see. Otherwise it wouldn't show up, right? And so if I was to bring my best self, I just had to just remind myself to redirect my attention to knowing that I know what I'm here to talk about and that's why I'm here and that's why they're here to see me, which is all true, right?

0:41:44.9 Dr. Dave Rabin: But it just wasn't at the forefront of my attention. And as I started just practicing reminding myself of that all the time, like people are here to hear me present my stuff, like I know my stuff, that's why I'm being asked to do this, right? And then you start to get into the... Into the rhythm of repeating that story, which is true to me. And I was able to retrain myself to no longer have public speaking anxiety, which is really interesting. And that was a social vibe. And the social vibe is great for presentations, create creative work, group work, just reducing like that thinking process I just mentioned of thinking about what other people are thinking about you when you're around other people.

0:42:24.0 Paul F. Austin: The ruminative sort of...

0:42:25.8 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yeah, the ruminative thinking process about, you know, about other people's impressions of us, which happens to everybody at times in our lives. And so, and I think that is an interesting segue into what you brought up earlier, which is this feeling that we started out with, was how do we help people... How do we replicate at least a little bit of the MDMA experience of nonjudgmental human connection and empathy without requiring MDMA? And that social vibe is one of the ones that is most interesting to me, because it really comes... It's maybe like 40%, right? Call it 40% of the MDMA experience. Like, that's what it is, maybe. But it's a really nice uplifting, kind of effervescent clarity where you can feel like really comfortable connecting with other people without judging yourself for it in the process.

0:43:18.6 Dr. Dave Rabin: It's like attention outward and in the moment and not so much inward and self-reflecting. And we have other vibes like calm, which is a meditative vibe. That's great for self-reflecting, not so good when you're socializing. And so I think that to me is really interesting. And that's where we start to get into the future of having two devices, both set on social, wearing them is nice because if one device gets you to 40% of a feeling of MDMA, wearing it kind of in the background, barely noticing it, you add on another one, that's like maybe 10% boost, right? And then you add on another one, maybe it's another 10%, another one, it's another 10%. By the time you're done, you've got to like 80%, right? And you have a body that's like really in a calm space that's kind of in the state that you want to be in.

0:44:08.7 Dr. Dave Rabin: But I think that you have to... All of that being said, the more stimulation you add to the body, the more distracting it can be. So you're increasing the immersiveness of the experience, but that's almost like a separate experience. It's a great experience. And we're working on that in the Lab. But in the real world, the most common use of Apollo is just to strap it on and turn it on and schedule it and have it just kind of run in the background as your like accompaniment for the day.

0:44:36.4 Paul F. Austin: Okay. I have one burning question and then I want to kind of continue this flow. On average, how long does the battery last for the Apollo?

0:44:45.5 Dr. Dave Rabin: Battery last, you know, it depends on how you use it, right? So if you're somebody... I would say you could probably get, if you use it the way we recommend, which is about between 20 to 40% intensity volume most of the time for about three to four hours a day, you can probably get like two to three days per charge, per full charge. If you use it more than that, you're going to have to charge it more often.

0:45:10.4 Paul F. Austin: Okay. So I want to... That's just always a question that I have, cause I know a lot of people ask about that and are wondering about that. I want to talk about this concept. You mentioned this phrase, retraining yourself and you have... You know, you're not only a psychiatrist, but you also have a PhD in neuroscience. And something we haven't yet chatted about is this relationship between the Apollo neuro and neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity is of course a hot topic, especially in the psychedelic space. So I'd love for you to just to weave that together a little bit more. What is this relationship between the Apollo neuroplasticity and actually training us to integrate new states of being so that these aren't just sort of temporary ways that we live, but these are actually permanent traits that we start to exist within utilizing the tool of the Apollo?

0:46:03.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yeah, that's also a great question. So I think the... So there's a lot of misunderstanding around the word neuroplasticity. So I think just to start out, neuroplasticity means learning. And learning. I'm going to use this to... Completely synonymously through this conversation. So they're, they're basically the same. Neuroplasticity refers to certain kinds of learning that happen on a neural level, like the regrowth of new neurons, the repair and regeneration of old neurons and the interconnection of neurons that already exist. And with new neurons called synaptogenesis, but they're all forms of learning. And so those... The reason why that's important is because that happens for our entire lives. That's the baseline of being human, is that we are neuroplastic agents.

0:46:53.8 Dr. Dave Rabin: We're always learning and growing and our nervous system is always changing all the time in real time. So we're always neuroplastic. There are certain things that increase our ability for neuroplasticity, increase our ability for learning. And there are certain things that make learning really hard and stifle learning. And so the way that I would think about this is that things like things that... What does learning require? Like to actually be able to sit down and learn something, like remember, put yourself back your place when you were like a third grader in school being forced to sit in class, right? You need to feel safe. You need to feel heard, right? And you need to feel like nothing's going to come... Nothing's going to come to harm you in that environment, right?

0:47:46.0 Dr. Dave Rabin: Like it's like not judged, right? So you're safe, you're heard, and you're not judged. Like you're able to allow it. It's a free creative space to make mistakes, right? So that you're allowed to speak and be wrong, and that's okay. That's how we learn. And that doesn't happen for most people most of the time, right? And for our bodies, and we know neurologically, like we were talking about earlier, our bodies have a recovery system. And that recovery system, which is the vagal system and the parasympathetic system, it's all the same. That system is stimulated by safety from the environment. Safety makes it increase breathing, soothing touch, slow deep breathing, soothing touch, listening to soothing music, having like soothing vibes from the Apollo, holding a purring cat, right?

0:48:33.9 Dr. Dave Rabin: All of these things increase parasympathetic safety signals, which increases recovery, which increases our ability to focus on things that are not survival-related, which increase our ability to learn, which increases neuroplasticity, right? So safety promoting things, increase neuroplasticity in general. And that's why all of these techniques that we talk about are important. All these natural healing techniques, that's also how Apollo works, because Apollo works to activate our ability to be in a state that's conducive to learning and to memories sticking around because we're safe. And it increases focused attention. So those kinds of things are like really, really important to boosting neuroplasticity and learning.

0:49:22.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: Psychedelics do it in a slightly different way. They do boost safety if used properly, right? But I think what's interesting about psychedelics is that you can learn unpleasant things that are unsafe as well as things that are safe, and because they are non-specific amplifiers of awareness, so they can increase awareness of all things. So ideally, if we're talking about just the psychedelic setting that's clinical, like we would do, you know, when somebody has like guidance and they have a container that they're experiencing the medicine in, or a tribal container or something like that, but some kind of safe container, then the medicines can amplify parts of the brain that are very important for that feeling of safety.

0:50:05.6 Dr. Dave Rabin: And that facilitates learning even more of the stuff that we actually wanted to get out of it. And sometimes we have experiences where they amplify fear, and we have increased neuroplasticity just by nature of the way that that neurochemical works. But it's learning of fear-related stuff, not of... And discomfort rather than comfort and safety, if that makes sense. Does that make sense?

0:50:28.1 Paul F. Austin: Mm-hmm. Okay. I feel like we could talk for hours. So I want to make sure that I get some of the most important questions that I'm sure a lot of folks... So we have a lot of practitioners who listen to the podcast, people who are coaches, clinicians, psychiatrists, doctors. You know, we also are fortunate enough to have you as a faculty for the Psychedelic Coaching Institute, where we have a training program for coaches and clinicians to master the skill of psychedelics. So for any practitioners who are listening to this, what is the utility of the Apollo within someone's practice? How might they be able to communicate its benefits to clients? How might they be able to coach and guide clients to utilize this? And even more specifically, how might the Apollo be helpful in the midst of, let's say, a challenging psychedelic experience?

0:51:21.0 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yeah, I'll start with all clinicians, and then I'll zone in for that last part, because that's a really interesting part that we're doing a lot of work in right now. So in general, the data has shown across nearly all clinical environments where it's been studied that if you come into a clinic with anxiety, with clinical anxiety or clinical depression, or you're just really, really worked up about that visit, that your vitals are going to be more off, like your blood pressure, that you're going to have a higher rate of complications, that you're more likely to lose more blood in surgery, and you often have a longer hospital stay. So you think about all of that. That's just data from the epidemiology of the world. And you think about that data, and you think, well, if my patients could not just... And then also the problems that we have as therapists, right, where we're teaching people in the office, we build in office these incredible meaningful... We have these incredibly meaningful engagements with our patients, right?

0:52:29.7 Dr. Dave Rabin: And we make all this progress in the office, and then we send them home, and they go back to the lack of safety of their regular lives and the outside world, and they often relapse, or they don't make any progress in between sessions, and it can take years for people to enter remission from illness, like PTSD and depression. And so we thought, well, what if we could give people something that doesn't require a doctor to... Or anybody to give them any instruction, that just gives them some of the benefits of that added safety of the clinical environment, like the empathy that we give them in the office, to their day to day when they're at home. And that added safety was also part... That take home idea was like a big part of why we wanted to make it wearable and easy. Like, we have kids using Apollo, so anybody can use it without a doctor or any provider instructions, which is really nice.

0:53:20.0 Dr. Dave Rabin: And so, you know, I think the main way that clinicians use it currently is they recommend their patients get it, and then particularly for sleep and some cardiovascular stuff like high blood pressure and conditions of chronic stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, there aren't a lot of good treatments. So they just say, hey, try this. You might want to try this. And then people use it mostly in between their appointments, and it helps to reinforce the healing process along the way. And we have data showing also that people use wearables, patients who use wearables are more likely to engage with their clinician and stay part of care, right, and follow up more often. So that's all... You know, it all helps.

0:54:00.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: Every little bit helps in the preventative... In the mission to preventative care and improving the health of our community at large. And I think the most exciting part is also the, you know, working in the psychedelic space, because we don't have any tools as clinicians to augment the psychedelic space or to influence it other than medicine, prescription, like benzodiazepines to decrease anxiety, but then they impact memory and prevent people from thinking properly. And then we have candles and and Agua Florida and incense and things, palo santo and things like that from other traditions. But we don't have any modern technology that helps people to have safer and more effective psychedelic experiences. And especially, you know, when they can't get it from a clinician, right?

0:54:54.7 Dr. Dave Rabin: Like, you work with a lot of people who are getting psychedelic... Having their own psychedelic experiences, and they don't have the ability to have a clinician present. And so we've seen... We have hundreds of people in the real world who have been using Apollo with their psychedelic experiences and saying that's helped them to drop in more effectively and just calm their bodies before they drop in, and then also to have more agency during the experience when they have hard or challenging psychedelic experiences. They forget to breathe, right? We all forget to breathe when we're stressed, and having that on reminds them to breathe and brings them back to center in their bodies and helps them actually navigate the challenging experience so it doesn't become like a native intrusive thought loop bad trip, right? Which many people have... I'm sure, listening to this have experienced.

0:55:41.5 Dr. Dave Rabin: So it gives agency within the experience, and then it's used for as an integration tool after the psychedelic experience for... And we have a study with MAP... In collaboration with MAPS going on right now where anybody who's ever participated in a MAPS trial can get a free Apollo. So if you're listening to this and you have participated in a MAPS trial, you didn't have to complete the trial. If you dropped out, that's okay. You can literally go to our website and reach out to us. You can get a free Apollo by filling out our surveys and contributing to the research data that we're collecting around long- term outcomes for MDMA-assisted therapy. And we believe, from what we're seeing, that Apollo will actually increase long-term outcomes in people with severe PTSD after having MDMA therapy. And so that's a big integration trial we're doing right now. So that's my major call to action for today, is anybody who hears this who's ever participated in a MAPS MDMA trial, please, please participate.

0:56:36.0 Dr. Dave Rabin: We need your help to make this trial and get great data for the world and it will have a big impact on many people's lives and you get a free device so it's a win-win. And not that many people get those. And then the last studies that we're doing, we have hundreds of people... We have dozens of ketamine clinics and clinicians using Apollo in their practices because a lot of people have anxiety going into ketamine therapy, and anxiety actually prevents people from dropping in and having good experiences. You have to increase the dose, and it's not ideal. And so Apollo has been used in hundreds of ketamine therapy patients to actually just help them feel more calm going into the ketamine experience. And then it's also being used for integration after.

0:57:25.8 Dr. Dave Rabin: And we have a study with Dr. Pam Kryskow in British Columbia, Roots to Thrive, we're a part of where they're using Apollo and psychedelics with... Psychedelics psychotherapy with first responders with severe PTSD. So it's really exciting because we're the first wearable that's really coming and actually has real utility in the psychedelic space and hopefully there'll be a lot more to come.

0:57:51.7 Paul F. Austin: So zooming out a little bit, I want to talk a little bit about the future of personalized medicine because we've been talking a lot about the Apollo. We've mentioned the Oura Ring several times. You and I are both wearing an Oura Ring, and I've plugged that Oura Ring data into the Apollo app to be able to track and measure various things. Last week I went into Labcorp and got my blood drawn because I'm trying to get a sense of what's going on with a few different elements. So there's more and more, there's this increasing availability of autonomy and sovereignty when it comes to our own health. What we also are noticing in the psychedelic space is, you know, fingers crossed MDMA will become an available medicine next year to treat PTSD.

0:58:42.4 Paul F. Austin: But there are many cities that have decriminalized this. Colorado has decriminalized, Oregon has legalized psilocybin. There's a ballot or an initiative currently on Gavin Newsom's desk for California to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, San Pedro and ayahuasca. All of that to say is psychedelics are quickly becoming more and more accessible. So I'm curious from your perspective, what is the sort of toolkit, not only with the Apollo, but other things as well that practitioners and just people who are interested in this can acquire or integrate that will help them to really have full autonomy and sovereignty over their own health and well-being?

0:59:23.9 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yeah, the toolkit is an interesting idea, right? I mean, I think a lot of us have been working to try to put something together for people. That's kind of like a minimum viable toolkit for you to have safe experiences, safety being the real key word there. You know, I think there's a lot that still has to be done in this area. And, again, we're working on putting together... I don't think I... So in short, have an answer for what the bare minimum is because a lot of it from our perspective has to do with how well-trained your provider is. And so if you have a well-trained guide, like... And I would liken this to going on your first whitewater rafting trip or going on your first expedition out into the Colorado Rockies or something like that on a backpacking trip in the wilderness, most people would take... Would go with a guide the first time, right?

1:00:28.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: You wouldn't just like throw yourself out there and at... Into the most extreme environment, which I would like into like a high dose psychedelic experience and expect it not to be challenging, right? It's gonna be challenging and some people don't make it. That's obviously more dangerous than with psychedelics, but it's, I think, an important metaphor. And so if you have the right sherpa, if you have the right guide to like help you navigate the experience, then they will prepare you in every way they know how with, of course, the safety techniques and everything that you need to do. The safety techniques, I would say, are the most important, which include everything that we can do to take control of a situation in any moment, at any time. These are like the tools of like restoring agency to the body in any moment.

1:01:17.1 Dr. Dave Rabin: So it's intentional breathing, intentional movement, intentional touch, whether we touch ourselves or do so consensually with another human being or an animal, intentional listening, that's listening with our whole body, not just with our ears, and it also includes the production of sound like song, chanting. And those are the things that we can do at any moment intentionally. So we can take control of any situation, right? So that, I think is the... By learning those techniques and practicing them when you're not under the influence and just doing them every day, you start to learn how to restore autonomy to a challenging situation. It's really really helpful. It becomes really helpful when we're stressed in the real world because we don't react impulsively. You're able to like hold it down and take a breath and then be like, okay, this is what I should do right now, right?

1:02:17.1 Dr. Dave Rabin: And make a calm, poised reaction. The other things are, there's little things... It's always a round trip ticket. I think people forget that they think the psychedelic experience, many people lose track of time, right? And part of the nature of a psychedelic experience or any moment that's really truly present is that it's timeless. You lose track of time and time kind of can dilate and seem much longer than it actually is. And so it's important for everybody to know that when you're taking a psychedelic medicine, it's always a round trip ticket. You're always coming back. Most of the time, the people... And I do a lot of bad trip work and psychedelic or drug induced psychosis work. And I could tell you that from what we can tell, and this is not, again, a broad reaching generalization, but I can tell you from the people that I've worked with and that many of my colleagues have worked with, the people who don't come back don't want to come back.

1:03:14.5 Dr. Dave Rabin: And there are lots of infinite places that we can go in consciousness that are not right here in the present with our bodies, but we can help people prepare in advance to know that the purpose is to go on an adventure into your consciousness and look under the hood and then come back. And every ticket by nature is a round trip ticket unless you choose to rip it up and flush down the toilet, right? And that's a choice for most... For people, you know, that's a choice. Think of it like a train ride or think of it like a journey in that way, gives people, I think, a lot of different... A lot of help in that. And then there are other tools that we use in our clinic. Like my favorite tool is the... In addition to like some of the traditional Shipibo tools, like self-gratitude, self-forgiveness, self-compassion, self-love. And there's... My favorite CBT tool, which I would boil all of cognitive behavioral therapy down to this one thing, if you're going to remember anything about this, which is one of the greatest psychotherapy techniques ever created, created/discovered.

1:04:20.3 Dr. Dave Rabin: And it's used also very commonly in the psychedelic space. There's only one thing that we need to remember about that technique. Most importantly, everything else is important, but it's not as important as this one thing, which is that... Which is also combined with the practice of self-gratitude. And it's that if I am to participate in this experience, life in general, right, I have to understand that I need to value my attention because my attention is hands down, the single most important resource that I have as a human being. At baseline, this is what we need to be teaching everybody, right? Our attention is the gateway to our consciousness. If we choose to pay attention to something, we are giving it permission to enter into our consciousness, enter into our awareness, into our consciousness, and it becomes part of us. More time we spend paying attention to things, the more we concentrate those thoughts inside of us, right?

1:05:18.4 Dr. Dave Rabin: And this is... And Eric Kandel has shown that the more we do that, the tighter those neural connections get in those networks, which makes it easier to do. And that includes for things that don't serve us as much as it includes things that do serve us. So it's really, really important that if we understand that core principle of human existence and learning, that we act as if our attention has value, which means questioning our thoughts and where we are being asked to put our attention. And there's one simple question that we need to ask, which is, is this thought true and useful to me right now? That's the CBT question, right? Is this thought true and useful to me right now? And what will come up is that most thoughts, we might be able to convince ourselves are true, even if they're not, most thoughts won't pass that test. They won't be both true and useful. For example, having thoughts like, why am I so bad at this and everybody else is so good at it? Why can't I sleep and everybody else can't? It's a very common one. Why am I not worthy of love? What did I do wrong?

1:06:21.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: What's wrong with me? Those kinds of questions... All thoughts should go through the test, but those kinds of questions, you put them through the test, they fail almost invariably every time. And what we start to figure out is as like 70, 80, 90% of our thoughts, we start to realize on a regular basis are not true or useful. We actually start to retrain that part of our brains, going back to the neuroplasticity concept, to be able to filter out automatically untrue and useless bullshit automatically. We're literally training like a synaptic filter in the part of the brain that goes between short-term memory and cerebral cortex long-term memory, right? We're building and strengthening the muscle that is that neural network. Only true and useful things are allowed in. Everything else is a vampire. It's not allowed in. I'm not inviting it, right? It sucks my energy dry 'cause it's not true and useful to me and I can't do anything about it, right?

1:07:17.2 Dr. Dave Rabin: It causes anxiety. As we start to learn about ourselves in that way and the way we think, that simple test can be fundamentally game-changing in general life, but especially in the psychedelic state because it helps train our brains to know how to deal with stuff that's totally irrelevant, right? When you go into the psychedelic state space, it's like turning on the internet for the first time. You have access to literally everything and anything, you know, all at once. So people, especially who are taking like high doses of psychedelics, right? They're gonna go into that space. They're going to have access to everything and anything all at once that they can be aware of. So it's really important to have some training. Think about like martial arts for your brain.

1:08:01.3 Paul F. Austin: Right. I love that. Dave, this has been a fantastic conversation. I love that rooting in the question of valuing the attention. Is it true? Is it useful? This thought that's coming up. We talked at length about the Apollo Neuro device and it feels like as a final kind of perspective for folks to meditate on coming out of it, coming out of this interview, that'll be super useful. So for folks who are listening to this, if the Apollo Neuro device sounds like something you might be interested in, we do have a 15, one five percent off code, Thirdwave, one word, T-H-I-R-D-W-A-V-E. If you go to, I believe it's, what's the website, Dave? Is it apolloneuro.com for the device?

1:08:53.1 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yep. Apolloneuro.com or you can go to wearablehugs.com, which is what the kids call it.

1:09:00.7 Paul F. Austin: Oh, nice. All right. And use the code Thirdwave to get 15% off. Dave, any final... Or any places, just other places that folks should check out as it relates to Apollo research, your work, any other resources that you want to point them to as we wrap up the conversation today?

1:09:20.4 Dr. Dave Rabin: Yeah, I think the main thing is, you know, I always like to hear from people. So if you have any questions or you're interested in anything we talked about here today, please follow me on socials at Dr. David Rabin on Twitter and Instagram. And check out The Psychedelic Report, which is one of the first psychedelic news shows run by clinicians and scientists. And you can hear me dive deep into some of the really exciting psychedelic news items of the day. There's lots of exciting stuff on there. And then also Your Brain Explained, which is a new show that's quarterly that's come out where we're explaining like more interesting and complex topics of consciousness and neuroscience that we just... You know, Paul, like we talk about this all the time, but there's so much stuff we've discovered that has not been translated to everyone.

1:10:18.3 Dr. Dave Rabin: Right. And it's like, how do you understand... Like if you if you've never been taught to read a scientific paper, how are you going to understand how to take that information actually do something useful with it? Right. Nobody's like synthesizing that, and our field has really, I think, struggled not having more people doing that. And we used to do it as doctors, we used to teach more. And as research scientists, there used to be a lot more emphasis on teaching, but that's just not as it used to be. And so these are two projects and go to yourbrainexplained.co and the psychedelicreport.com or the psychedelic.report and check them out. And please let me know what you think.

1:10:57.6 Paul F. Austin: Great. Dr. David Rabin, faculty in the Psychedelic Coaching Institute, co-founder of the Apollo Neuro and a really chill and wonderful guy. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today, Dave.

1:11:09.7 Dr. Dave Rabin: Of course. That was fun.

1:11:14.9 Paul F. Austin: Hey, listeners, Paul here. I hope you enjoyed our episode today with Dr. Dave Rabin. If you want to purchase an Apollo yourself, just go to apolloneuro.com and put in the code Thirdwave, one word, Thirdwave for 15% off an Apollo Neuro device. That's apolloneuro.com and Third Wave for 15% off the Apollo Neuro device. And remember that you can head to the Thirdwave.co/podcast and go deeper into this episode with full show notes, transcripts, and all the links that we mentioned in this conversation. That's the Thirdwave.co/podcast and scroll to episode 218 with Dr. Dave Rabin. Finally, what moved you in today's conversation? What inspired you? What new insights did you gain? Do you have any more questions that are coming up? You can continue the dialogue with us and Third Waves community forum at community.thethirdwave.co, sign in or create an account first. And then once you're logged in, navigate to the psychedelic podcast menu and leave us a comment. And while you're at it, check out the rest of the platform to find support, meaningful discussions and high quality education resources and providers across our global ecosystem. Sign up for free at community.thethirdwave.co. We hope to see you there.