The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #275 - Dr. Dave Rabin

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
Friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have. So backstory on today's conversation, I was just checking when I first had this guest on the show and it was episode 50 forever ago, back in 2020, the dark days or the pandemic. So a lot has happened since then and listeners, friends, I am not exaggerating or joking or kidding when I say that the device that this incredible man has created is honestly one of my favorite things in my life. I use it and have used it probably almost every single day since I got it back in 2020 or maybe even 2019. And it's also one of those things where I hear from listeners all the time, often in my Facebook groups, people share stories about how this device was the game changer thing that fixed whatever XYZ issue.

Melanie Avalon:
Like, so for me, I really struggled with insomnia and this really helped me fall asleep easily and more effortlessly and not have fear surrounding that. And it helps me wind down every night. And I hear so many stories from listeners about how often how it helps their kids. I hear that it helps people with anxiety, with ADHD, with stress, I gave one to my mom and she loved it until she just stopped using it because that's like what happens with her. I give her things and she tells me how amazing it is and then she just like forgets to do them. But in any case, I haven't even mentioned any of the names here. So I am here with Dr. Dave Rabin. He is the founder of an incredible device called Apolloneuro which I'm sure we will talk all about. And I have also met Dr. Dave in real life. We met at Dave Asprey's biohacking conference which was just so, so exciting and I love getting to meet people in real life and we're gonna see each other soon at another conference which is awesome.

Melanie Avalon:
I knew I needed to have him back on the show because it has been so long. There's been so many updates. I've actually, I was highly impressed going on the Apollo website and seeing all of the studies that have been conducted since we last had him on. So I have so many questions. Dr. Rabin, thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Of course, thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Melanie Avalon:
So to get things started, it was so long ago. I feel, I'm just like gonna go in fresh with this and pretend like listeners have not heard any of the content with you on this show before. To start things off, your personal story, could you tell listeners a little bit about why you're doing what you're doing today? Did you have an epiphany one day that led to, you know, the insight of this invention or what led you to doing what you're doing?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Kind of a long story, so I'll give you the abridged version. But basically, I am a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and I've always been fascinated by dreams and consciousness and the way we think about the world. And of course, stress plays a big role in that and how our bodies respond to stress in ways that can either make us stronger or cause illness, which we call resilience. And this has been a topic that's always really interested me. And then I found mental health, and mental health was really fascinating because I started to notice in the clinic that, especially when I was working with my veteran patients who had PTSD, substance use disorder, sometimes traumatic brain injuries and things of that nature, and folks with PTSD in general, that most of them, upwards of 70% of these folks, were not getting better with the treatments we had available.

Dr. Dave Rabin
70% of them were stuck with a lifelong disorder called PTSD that they were either taking medication for life, which often had side effects, or they were symptomatic for life, or both. And this seemed like an area that was ripe for discovery and for help and improvement, because we're only nailing it on 30% of people. So there's a lot of better stuff we seem we could do. And so I started to explore the fields of psychedelic assisted therapy and technology and how we can understand by understanding how the brain works to interpret meaning from things that with psychedelic medicines and without, we can start to understand a lot more about how we heal, which is really interesting. And it hasn't really been taught very well how we heal. But one of the main ways that we heal is by increasing activity in our safety response nervous system, which is known in neuroscience as the parasympathetic nervous system, which is governed by the vagus nerve.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And that by just doing things in our lives, like deep breathing, yoga, exercise, getting more hugs, and soothing touch and things like of that nature, the more vagal tone, terasympathetic activity we have on a regular basis, which dramatically improves our overall health, well being, sleep, increases our ability to fight off illness and to get better faster from illness. And so as I started to see these patterns, and that psychedelic assisted therapy works in a lot of ways, especially with MDMA assisted therapy by amplifying safety cascades in the emotional brain, all of these light bulbs started going off around safety, emotional, mental, physical safety being the most important foundation of all healing. And if you go back and look at because it unlocks the vagus nerve recovery nervous system that heals the body by itself. And if you go back into Eastern and tribal techniques, they all talk about this too, as does Hippocrates and Maimonides, the fathers of Western medicine.

Dr. Dave Rabin
So, so this all was kind of the light bulb moment that you were talking about. And I realized in that moment, that if safety is the key, or safety is the door we need to unlock that the key is probably something like soothing touch because soothing touch evolutionarily for over 50 million years since the beginning of the first mammals that nurse their young, after they were born, soothing touch was the fastest neural pathway to safety. And it immediately non verbally communicates safety. So that soothing touch became a big focus for me. And then we figured out, start between 2014 and 2018, how to induce similar safety states in the brain to about, you know, something kind of like 50% of an MDMA experience, which is like pretty darn powerful, just by sending a little soothing vibration to the body, and that became Apollo, which I'm so glad you're having such a great experience with, by the way, me too.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it. Like I said, when I first started using it, I really would struggle to fall asleep. And I think a lot of that had to do with the anxiety about not falling asleep. And it was honestly the key to fixing that for me. And like I said, now I use it every single night and it helps me wind down. It's part of my routine. I love it. Questions for you. So this concept of using touch to activate safety. Do all people respond the same way to touch. And my background for asking that question is I know for me, I'm assuming this is the reason. This is what I've been told. When I was born, I was like put directly into a ICU box and my mom didn't hold me right away. And I have a, I don't really like people touching me. Like I don't like hugs. I'm like not about it. Does it matter if you perceive that you like touch as to the effectiveness of this device?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, so it doesn't actually matter that much with Apollo. And the reason is because the source of touch matters. Because the source of touch conveys a kind of emotional meaning. So there are lots of people who like to get hugs from people they like. And those same people don't like to get hugs from people they don't like, but even if the hug is exactly the same.

Melanie Avalon:
Does that make sense? It does, yes. And I guess we should clarify for listeners. So Apollo, it's like a wrist, sort of like a wristwatch strap thing. I put it on my wrist, which you can put, I think I asked you this last time. Can you put it also on like your ankle? We did, we talked about this because we were saying that maybe it might look a little weird on your ankle. Can you put it anywhere?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Apollo works anywhere in your body, and most people wear it on their ankle for sleep. Yeah, sleep is ankle. Ankle is the most popular Apollo location, actually.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, mind blown, I did not know that, okay.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, it feels really, really good on the ankle. And it's the best for sleep because it's just kind of out of the way. And it still does its thing really, really nicely. So I would recommend for everybody that the ankle is the best location for sleep. I usually wear mine on my ankle or my chest. I just like clip it to my shirt with the apparel clips. You can really wear it anywhere because it works with a sense of touch. And it sends these gentle sound wave vibrations to your body that kind of feel like, I don't know that they feel like to you, but to me, they feel like a cat purring or like ocean waves gently washing over me and that kind of like just keep my body really calm and present.

Melanie Avalon:
It never occurred to me to not put it on my wrist. I'm excited. This is like a whole new world I'm going to try. Some other questions about it. You were talking about what it feels like. It does feel like a cat purring. Have you adjusted the programming of the strength over the years? I don't know if it's that I just, because I've been using it so long, I don't feel like I feel it as much like physically or if it's actually changed.

Dr. Dave Rabin
No, I mean, I think you we have made some adjustments over the years that improve like dramatically improved battery life. So and the and the ability for the device to last a long time. So we have put some, some updates in there, you probably as that's probably what you're noticing. But the interesting thing about Apollo is that it doesn't just help your our bodies get into these states of presentness and flow. It also trains us to get there on our own more often. So by using Apollo, one of the most interesting data points that's come back from our user research is that people continue to use Apollo like you and me, like most days, but they actually but they over the course of however long they're using for years, but they'll but we all start to actually decrease the intensity more often. So we're using it at a we become more sensitive to the vibration over time, which is really interesting. And it's not the same for everybody.

Dr. Dave Rabin
But that's what we see in most cases across the board. But I think it's really interesting that you brought up the point that you are someone who typically is like avoid hugs, but you like Apollo so much. So that's really interesting, too.

Melanie Avalon:
And speaking to that about the increased effectiveness, does it matter? Okay, you've done so many studies. Have you done any studies where people use the device and are told what it's supposed to do, kind of like placebo controlled? I guess my question is, if you're told that using this will make you feel safe or help with your stress, your anxiety, your PTSD, does it make it more effective?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah. I get your question. I think we don't do studies like that because those are non-blinded studies. That's a study of the blinding process. What we're looking at is three different study groups. Each group contains a few thousand people. The first group is real people in the real world. These are people who are non-randomized groups that are just regular people out in the world who use our product and who use other wearable products. Then we collect information from them like in the thousands every day for years and track their data. There's a big study on sleep that we did with ordering that's coming out in the next, I don't know, three to six months that is all about that in a study of over 1,300 people.

Dr. Dave Rabin
That's really, really exciting. The next group of people we study is people with treatment-resistant illnesses that don't get better with anything else. This would be people with PTSD, stage four cancer, severe autoimmune disorders, long COVID, and people who have these really, really severe issues that really, they've tried everything and nothing's worked. We explore Apollo in those populations, which are also unblinded. People know that they're receiving Apollo and they know what it could do. We're not comparing it to a group of the same people because those studies are very, very expensive. That's what generally falls into our third group, which is regular people who are going through double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled crossover settings. That means that's the most rigorous level of clinical trial.

Dr. Dave Rabin
We have one of those published already in Collegiate Athletes. We have another showing that Apollo improves heart rate variability as the first technology ever to improve heart rate variability, which is the leading metric of the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagal nerve system and predicts longevity and health span and cognitive performance and physical performance and recovery and illness resistance and all these things. Apollo is the only technology to improve it just by wearing it. Those studies are the studies that actually we did between 2017 and 2021, which were at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, that resulted in us actually making the technology because we saw that data come back in these very rigorous double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled crossover studies where everybody knows that the vibrations can change their body,

Dr. Dave Rabin
but no one actually knows which vibration they're receiving. The researchers didn't know which vibration the individual was receiving, and there were like 20 different vibrations we ran people through, and then they rated them, and then we measured their cognitive performance, brain waves, heart rate, heart rate variability, all of their metrics time-synced with 20 different vibration patterns, and nobody had any idea what they were or what they're supposed to do. That is the truest form of a clinical trial that you can do with technology very easily. That was one of our first trials, and it was the results from that showing that Apollo improved cognitive performance significantly and heart rate variability in just two minutes that no other vibration patterns did and no vibration controls didn't do it either. That was such an incredible discovery, and from there we said, okay, we need to turn this into a product.

Melanie Avalon:
When the participants were rating the vibrations, was there a correlation between the ones that they thought that they perceived that they liked more? Were they more effective for them?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yes, the ones that people liked more, especially in the athletics trial, the ones that people liked more were more effective, but those were also the vibration patterns that we had already shown were calming the body. So nobody liked the super intense vibrations or the placebo vibrations. They only liked the Apollo vibrations because the other vibrations that we were using weren't soothing. So if you liked one of the other vibration patterns, it didn't necessarily mean your performance increased.

Melanie Avalon:
Gotcha. With the athletes, how did that compare? I know you did one in 2022 as well with athletes.

Dr. Dave Rabin
That was all I'm talking about. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, that is the one. It was published in 20, was it? Oh, I just have the wrong date here.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Coalition 21 or 22. Yeah, all of anybody who's listening can see all of this on our website, by the way, it's all in our research page. If you want to learn more about the science and how we came out of the University of Pittsburgh ecosystem, you can follow along with everything we're talking about over there.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, gotcha. So it was published a little bit later, basically. And you also found in that study that it affected their blood sugar levels?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Oh, so that was a pilot study. That study was never published because it was done as a pilot, and pilot studies are not typically IRB approved studies. In the United States, you have to have approval from an organization. Because of the Tuskegee experiments, do you remember, and some of these famous experiments that violated human rights in the US in the 20th century, there was a rule passed where all studies to be published in a peer-reviewed journal have to be IRB approved. Which means that there's a board of people, it's like eight or 10 people, that are experts in different fields of research and medicine. And then there's always a person, a regular person on there who's like a civilian, who reads all of the study protocols and makes sure there's no human rights violations occurring in these studies.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And most studies don't have human rights violations, but not all studies are IRB approved because it costs money to get approval. It's like $3,000 to $7,000 every time you approve a new protocol. So if you're just doing pilot research where you're going, like what we did in that other athletic study that you ran on the website is we went to one of the world leaders in HRV, Cal Dietz, who works with elite athletes in the military. And he's now I think the Olympic women's ice hockey, one of the main ice hockey trainers for women's Olympic ice hockey and for the US. And so he tests new technology that affects heart rate variability. And he ran this pilot study that was not controlled in any way. So it was like a very exploratory study with 30 to 40 athletes through different measures in his training facility. And it's not a clinical trial, but he is very reputable.

Dr. Dave Rabin
He's one of the leaders in the heart rate variability space. And he also tests new technology for the military. So having his blessing was really important to us to make sure the technology was doing for him what we saw it doing in the lab. And he saw and reported decreased blood sugar in folks who were given a glucose tolerance test before and after. And he saw increased recovery times, increased heart rate variability across everybody within just a few minutes of using the product. So it was very similar to what we were seeing in the other studies, which was really great.

Melanie Avalon:
So when you're doing these studies, how do you decide which studies to do? Is it, do you have an idea and then you have to go find people who would like to be engaged in it? Is it more that people come to you? How do you decide?

Dr. Dave Rabin
So the biggest challenge, oh, I should say actually, before I answer your question, for anyone who's listening to this and has never tried Apollo, if you have an iPhone, you can go to your app store right now and get on the same vibe with us by just downloading the Apollo neuro app from your app store, and then opening it and clicking feel Apollo, which appears in about 10 to 15 seconds after opening the app, and then just hold your phone in your hands or next to you or on the floor or next to your chest, and you'll feel your phone emanate Apollo vibes. So that is available to anyone who's listening, and so you can share in the experience. But to answer your question about clinical trials and study design, it's really about like timing. And, you know, it depends on like what you have to do first. So we did the double blind randomized placebo controlled crossover studies, the most rigorous studies first, right after doing the exploratory stuff.

Dr. Dave Rabin
So you always start with pilot stuff, you always start with stuff that's not IRB approved, that's like really small sample, so that you can understand like under 30 people under 40 people, you just want to understand really quick is your is this technology doing anything in the in real people, right? And so before you put in any significant amount of work, like this is like a real, really important people to understand is, you know, you have this idea, you create this technology, you got to test it on other people in yourself and measure the outcomes in some objective way. So you don't waste a bunch of hours, like, you know, it's hundreds of hours or thousands of hours and, and, and money on starting research that isn't going to pan out, you can usually tell how something's going to pan out by doing the pilot studies, which costs basically nothing.

Dr. Dave Rabin
So we spent a bunch of time doing pilot studies, like that athletic study we told you about. That was with prototype devices. Then we did clinical trials and with prototype and Apollo devices. And then we did, those are the double blind studies just showed that the technology is working regardless of placebo effect, regardless of whether people know what they're getting. The technology is working, it's improving heart rate variability, it's improving cognitive performance, and they're related. So that was critical to do because we had to decide at that point in 2018, when we got those results, first results came back from those studies, we had to decide like, am I going to go work as a doctor full time and make twice as much money as I would make running a startup or I'm going to make the take the leap and go into startup life and make half as much money and work twice as hard and,

Dr. Dave Rabin
you know, the results came back positive and we said, okay, we're going to do the startup thing, let's give this a shot. So that it actually goes out to help people. And then from there, we expanded that into much larger clinical trials with thousands of people between real world and the clinic. And you'll start to see, we should have about six publications coming out in the next six to 12 months. So you'll start to see all of those coming out on our website.

Melanie Avalon:
Are you enjoying startup life?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, I love it. I mean, it's thrilling to be on literally the cutting edge of technology and creating products that are actually life changing for people. Like I think as a psychiatrist, when I think about like if I worked as a private psychiatrist, seeing like nine or 12 patients a day or something like that, at most, I would help like, I don't a thousand people, several thousand people in my, in every like 10 years, I would help that many people get to a point of like actually making real change in their lives. And we release Apollo to hundreds of thousands of people. And now, you know, the technology we created is like disseminating the healing that we teach in therapy to people without me having to be there for everyone because I just can't be. And this does it so much faster, so much better now through your iPhone. People can get access to this. So there's all these opportunities now to disseminate healing literally through our technologies that we have access right in front of us.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And nothing can be more rewarding and exciting to me than that, even if it's super hard work.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm excited to see it get more and more out there. I'm just thinking about how I just did a whole episode on childhood trauma with a researcher and author and everything. And at the end, he had a chapter about the future of addressing childhood trauma. And he talked a little bit about—he did not talk about polyneuro, but he did talk a little bit about some of the stuff in the, quote, biohacking world, but I'm basically really excited. I'm excited for this to become more and more mainstream, hopefully. Question about the studies too, what did you find in the study on meditation and meditators?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Well, so the meditation study was an interesting study. This study is also in line for publication, but basically we wanted we wanted to see what we saw in the first trial with Apollo when we gave it to people with in the cognitive performance, HRV brainwave study, we saw that people had improvements in their body's biometrics, like their heart rate, respiratory rate, brainwave patterns, that's an HRV that started to resemble what it looks like when you enter a meditative state. And that was just that was in within as little as three minutes. We started to see the trend towards like people's bodies looking like they're entering a meditative state. So we started a study where we compared 25 people who have never ever accessed a meditative state or use psychedelics who and they and by their own knowledge, they have never accessed meditative state willingly, and then 20 to 25 expert meditators who have been practicing accessing meditative states for at least 10 years.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And we measured their brainwaves with and without Apollo with a guided meditation track. And what was really fascinating that we found about that study, you can also see a preview of this on our website, is that as people is that for people who unsurprisingly people who have no meditation experience could never reach the EEG signature of meditation, which trends towards what's called gamma coherence in EEG. And alpha is a part of that at first, of course, relaxing the body and then gamma coherence is where people ultimately get to and where we see a lot of people who are the expert meditators, they all get to gamma coherence roughly in about 12 minutes, or at least mostly there. And then the people who are naive to meditation, they don't get anywhere close, they are just kind of stuck in their heads. They're not entering any different state, no state change detected. All of a sudden, you administer Apollo to that Apollo vibes to them.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And not only do all of the naive meditators start to embody and demonstrate gamma coherence via EEG within 12 minutes, but they say they start to notice a state change subject subjectively. The report, I noticed that I felt different in that 12 minute period that I did in the last one. And so that was really interesting. But on top of that, and that confirmed what we saw in the previous study, but on top of that, we saw the added bonus that if you're already an expert meditator, that they got to gamma coherence faster with Apollo. So if even if you're an expert meditator, and you're good at getting into these states quickly, if you have something that assists you to calming the body, in advance of getting into that state, you will still be training yourself to get there faster. So that was a nice added finding that we discovered in that study.

Melanie Avalon:
That's so incredible. So it can enhance meditation, regardless of whether or not you're already a meditator and help you get there faster.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Before we change topics, if we are going to do that, I just wanted to add that the meditation study is particularly interesting because it helps us understand how Apollo works with all of the other things it does in your day-to-day life. The practice of meditation, according to Eastern tribal Eastern traditions, is really a lifelong, every moment of everyday practice. It's about noticing when your attention deviates from what you were intending to focus on in this moment to something else, and then noticing that and bringing it back without judging yourself. And the quicker that you bring back your attention, which I would call the return, the quicker your return to your point of focus in anything you're doing, not just sitting cross-legged, but in anything you're doing, the quicker you return, the better you are at meditating.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And so the way Apollo works is it increases what we call somatic awareness. So it's the awareness of the body in your mind. And our bodies are always present in the moment, and always listening, always taking in information. They don't go anywhere. Our minds can be in the past, which they are a lot of the time, or the future, but they're not often in the here and now. And so by doing somatic, what we call body-focused practices, of which Apollo is one of them with technology, we can restore your power of your mind back into the present. Because 50% of it might be in the past, and 30% might be in the future, that only leaves 20% of your brain power left for the present. So if we're fully present, we actually amplify the amount of brain resources and body resources we have available to accomplish the task at hand that we're trying to accomplish in this moment without messing it up.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And so Apollo trains us to do that by helping us enter this mindful meditative state in whatever we're doing, because our bodies are always present in the moment, by doing activities like breathing or soothing touch from Apollo or from a loved one. We're automatically reminding our minds to recenter into our bodies and be more present. And so it is the access to meditative states more of the time, not just at night, not just when we're sitting cross-legged, and practicing meditation, which is still important. But throughout our day, it's reminding us to be present and be in a meditative mindful state. And in doing so, by calming the body, we are able to sleep better and focus better and socialize better and just be more of our full selves in whatever it is we're doing. Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon:
I'm so happy you said that. That was literally going to be my question because I was going to ask what part of meditation was it affecting? Because when I think of meditation, I think of this practice like you just talked about where we're noticing our thoughts and being able to realize that they are not us and we're disconnected from them or observing them coming back to the present moment. So my question was going to be, is it affecting that process in the brain? Like the actual viewing of thoughts and coming back to the present moment or is it actually or is it just changing the brainwaves on a like a physiological level? So it sounds like it's kind of affecting both.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, I mean, it's it's doing more of the ladder before the former, right? Like if you were to start doing a five to seven minute breathing exercise or get a hug in that you would be your body would start to enter the same state that Apollo takes you into. And in that state, your it's easier to access meditative, like meditative and mindful, which I would refer to like, in neuroscience or psychology, it's kind of like, deeply internally self reflective experiences, if that makes sense. Right. So it's like non judgmental self reflection is what we're talking about when we say, for most people, the practice of meditation and mindfulness. And so it's makes it easier to access that state. And then when you start to access that state, because that's what you're intending to do, all of a sudden, your brainwaves start to shift to reflect that you're state changing. Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon:
I've, I've heard with breathing, I've heard it described casually that the way it works is because evolutionarily if we were able to like sit there and breathe calmly, it meant we weren't in a threat state. Is it similar to that?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, it's very similar to that. Right? It's that's where the safety comes in is that part of what makes meditation hard, and states of non judgmental internal self reflection hard, that we don't talk about enough, is that all of us, almost all of us, almost every single human being on the face of the earth in who's alive today has been taught to fear the unknown, even the unknown about ourselves. Right? And on the unknown, that's not everyone, but for the gross majority of us, I would put myself in this category of somebody who was originally taught in large part in life to fear the unknown and to fear uncertainty. Uncertainty also happens to be an evolutionary trigger, you know, in the in the jungle millions of years ago, that something could harm us in the environment. Right, and we need to get our protective senses up.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And so what happens is, if we are taught to fear the unknown and uncertainty rather than embracing it and rolling with it, and then we accidentally make the application of that fear towards ourselves, then we start to internally generate a sense of fear and uncertainty. And that triggers the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system, which is the system we don't want to be triggered most of the time are active, and getting resources, we want the recovery, parasympathetic rest and digest system to be active most of the time, getting resources because that nerve that nervous system, the vagal nerve system governs reproduction, digestion of your food, immunity, metabolism,

Dr. Dave Rabin
your sleep, the rest and recovery, all of those things are vagal, parasympathetic, and they're all activated by safety. So if there's an internally generated sense of fear of the unknown, which again, I would assume is something that you probably have been taught or have experienced, then if you're listening to this, because it's like probably 95% of people, there is a fear of what might come up in your meditative state, right? What might come up when you start to look underneath the hood of your typical conscious awareness of what you know yourself to be, maybe you'll find more in there that is painful or shameful or stuff you feel guilty about or regrets or all the things that humans have, right? But the point is that when you feel safe enough to go down there and to lift open the hood, like pop open the hood of your consciousness, human consciousness vehicle, and look underneath, you can start to actually fix stuff.

Dr. Dave Rabin
That's where all the good stuff is, is in the subconscious and unconscious. So meditation is the natural way by which we're able to train ourselves to access all that subconscious and unconscious information that is critically important for how we act in the world and how we respond to stress and all these things, but it's oftentimes buried deep down because it's not fun necessarily to talk about or to feel or to process. So that's what safety comes in as the opportunity to say, oh, you're safe enough to address this, you're safe enough to feel what might be unknown or might be hard or might be stressful, you're safe enough to feel it. And if you know you're safe, when you feel it, then you don't resist it, you just kind of feel it and you process it and you let it go. But you have to feel safe. So safety is where Apollo comes in. And that's where how psychedelic medicines like MDMA work.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And that's really how all psychotherapy works, which is rooted in this concept of making sure people feel safe enough to heal. That's it.

Melanie Avalon:
Does that also apply on the seeming flip side of anxiety with something like depression, looking back at the past, rather anticipation about the future? Yeah, absolutely. Amazing. And what about, we keep using words like the calming state, the parasympathetic state. There's also tracks in the app. For listeners, in the app you can choose different modes that you can put it into for your specific goals. So what is something like the energy mode?

Dr. Dave Rabin
That's a great question. There's seven vibes in the basic version that go from energy to sleep and everything in between to get you through pretty much anything that you would have to face during the day. Then we have smart vibes, the upgrade, which detects and prevents unwanted wake-ups at night using AI and turns on automatically, which is my favorite feature. That also unlocks a whole bunch of other vibe patterns like good morning and good night and good evening and things for different times of day, love, joy, and more stuff that we continue to release. Basically, the Apollo vibration patterns are all different vibrations that we discovered originally at the University of Pittsburgh research that we then patented into ways to get into different states.

Dr. Dave Rabin
We've been talking about calming and sleep and recovery and that kind of thing, but Apollo can also give you focus, improved ability to public speak and socialize with less anxiety and energy. Energy vibe is really interesting because it is the one vibe that is not meant to calm you down. It's meant to actually stimulate your body and give you energy kind of like an espresso shot, not like an espresso shot and a hug. Whereas when you think about the social vibe and the focus vibe, focus vibe is like half an espresso and a big long hug. You still feel awake but you're calm, clear, and present and zoned in on whatever you're doing at the same time.

Melanie Avalon:
My favorite one is the Unwind one. That's the one I use every single night.

Dr. Dave Rabin
That's a great one before bad.

Melanie Avalon:
for years and years. So speaking of this idea of getting there, like into the meditative states, into all of these states, how fast does it work when somebody turns it on?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Well, so, so, I mean, how fast did it work?

Melanie Avalon:
for you that's like that's a really good question because it's been so long

Dr. Dave Rabin
I think everybody is slightly different. When we were together at Upgrade Labs with Carissa, she admitted to having a tiny bit of social anxiety with being around a lot of people she didn't know. And she said it worked immediately for her. I noticed it works pretty quickly for me now. As I use it regularly, I'm much more sensitive to it. So as soon as it turns on, it works basically instantly. But I think for the average person who's trying it out, I would say about 50% of people notice feeling different right away. Just a little calmer, a little more relaxed, a little more in the moment, maybe a little more uplifted. And then the other 50%, I would say most of them start to notice pretty significant improvements over the first three weeks of use. But if people use it as recommended, we have like 95% of people see a statistically significant improvement to their sleep within just three weeks. And three weeks makes sense because it's how long it takes to reset a new circadian cycle.

Dr. Dave Rabin
So Apollo just turns on to put you to bed, turns on to wake you and keep you asleep, and then turns on to wake you up and keep you awake during the day. And it's like structuring your entire circadian rhythm. And people are getting 30 more minutes of sleep a night or more. And it just takes 21 days of regular use. So it's pretty incredible how well it works. I think I got 46 minutes of sleep back last night.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, wow. Yeah, I do. I noticed now when I use it that it's pretty instant for me. The for me, the feeling of it now is like when you, um, you know, when you like take a side that you didn't realize you needed to take, like you didn't realize you had all this tension and then it's like you take a side and you're like, Oh, wow. Like I just let out a lot of tension. That's like when I turn it on what I feel like. Same. And going back to when I first started using it. Oh, it definitely was working for me in days. I'm just trying to remember. I'm trying to remember like the, I don't remember the first time I put it on, which is sad, but okay. Yeah, that's amazing. And, um, I've, I've not heard that before the three weeks for the circadian rhythm. That's a thing like three weeks.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, so if you travel, if you change from working days to working nights, for instance, or you go to live in a new time zone, it takes you three weeks to fully restructure your circadian rhythm so that you're not losing deep in REM sleep and you're sleeping through the night, not waking up in the middle of the night, not feeling like you're slacking during the day, right? You're fully back to your normal. It takes about three weeks.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, maybe that's why I've never been able to change my horrible circadian rhythm.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Well, the other part about it that's hard for people, I would say the most difficult part is that in order to restructure your circadian rhythm, you basically have to go to bed around the same time every night and wake up around the same time every morning within about 30, give or take 30 minutes, right? So you have to be pretty strict about it. And if your energy is not aligned, like say you have to work late and you're still amped up at your normal bedtime, for most of us, we would just stay up for longer until we start to wind down, right? But that's really not good for our circadian cycle and it decreases the amount of recovery sleep we get, the deep and the REM, which is our most important sleep. So that's one of the major benefits of Apollo is that it regulates that entire circadian cycle for you.

Dr. Dave Rabin
You can literally outsource it to Apollo. And Apollo will, you just set your bedtime and you set your wake up time. And then Apollo turns on automatically day and night to make sure that you have the energy you need when you need it and that you have the calm you need when you need that to wind down. So it helps to basically regulate your energy throughout the day, which then has these dramatic improvements for sleep within that three week time period.

Melanie Avalon:
That is so cool. I'm so excited right now because I didn't realize I'm such a creature of habit. I've just been doing my like my unwind thing. I didn't realize there were all these really amazing features. That's awesome that you're continually evolving and developing it. How about for kids? I know like Carissa actually was saying how she thought it'd be helpful helpful for her son. And I've like I said or in the beginning I've heard so many listeners say that it helps their kids. So what have you found with kids using Apollo?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, it's a great question. We've had a lot of kids using Apollo over the years. I'd say the numbers now are probably in the thousands of kids using it. And we've seen great results in clinics, especially. We have a few parts. We have a lot of pediatric clinics that use Apollo and recommend it to their patients, but we have partnerships with a few of those clinics where we've done pilots and shown that kids who receive Apollo, especially when they fall into that treatment-resistant category of either anxiety, ADHD, or autism, that kids who use Apollo with their regular treatment are starting to do a lot better, which is really great because a lot of those kids have exhausted all treatment available. There's nothing left for us to do for them except sedate them, which includes prescribing them very addictive and kind of harmful medications like benzodiazepines as a last resort.

Dr. Dave Rabin
And so if we can avoid doing that as doctors, many people don't realize that we don't want to do it, but if we can avoid doing it, we always try. And so Apollo has been really helpful in that regard by in these kids who are really struggling with actually throw PTSD in there too, right? It's PTSD, anxiety, ADHD, and autism. When those kids have really struggled with regulating their own emotions, Apollo has been dramatically helpful and it's helped kids not escalate their medication programs, which is really great. So it's not a replacement for medication, but it is something that is safe for kids and anybody who has a child who is struggling with sleep or focused during the day, you can try this and just give it to them and they don't even need a phone to use it.

Dr. Dave Rabin
You can install it on your phone and they can control it with the buttons. It works without a phone around. You can set school programs with a lot of parents who will give their Apollo to their kids and then set a program where it turns on automatically to keep them focused in class and then focus through their homework time and then wound down after. So it's really helpful. And I think a lot of parents like Carissa as one example, it's like changed their lives, which is really wonderful to hear.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I remember like right after we met and when she got one for her son and was, you know, talking about how incredible it was. That is amazing. So speaking of, it's not medication, but speaking of things like that as well, what's, it's not the same thing at all, but what study are you doing with Apollo and ketamine?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Apollo is interesting because it's the very first technology that has been shown to improve the quality of psychedelic experiences. And we've seen that in our survey studies, which will be published on the website soon. And then we've also seen that in our clinics, that are ketamine clinics using Apollo. And one thing that's really interesting about how ketamine works, which most people don't realize is that the experience, and I'm a trained ketamine-assisted therapy provider, and I train others to do this work, so that's where this is coming from. And you remember that conversation we were having just a few moments ago about how entering like the unknown of your subconscious with meditation can be scary for people, right? And they hold back, and then they don't actually go there.

Dr. Dave Rabin
They don't get the information that they could be getting. So ketamine, the state that ketamine induces, is like a deep meditation state or a dream, but you're awake. And so it allows you to kind of, for that hour that you're under the influence of the medicine, it allows you to basically watch yourself and see all the good stuff, the good stuff, the stuff you're not so happy with, the stuff you could do better. It allows you to kind of see all of it without judging yourself and without the pain of self-judgment, which is really kind of quite, it's just a phenomenally interesting medicine for depression. And when you go into that experience with ketamine, for people who are new, it can be quite jarring, and they can resist it because it's new, and new unknown, and unknown means uncertainty, and uncertainty means fear,

Dr. Dave Rabin
right? So if you think about that, the same problem we have with people trying to get into deeper meditative states is the problem we have with ketamine patients getting ketamine for the first time. And so they have to increase the dose of the ketamine, people have less good experiences because they're not prepared adequately, and then they don't remember as much of the experience because their dose of ketamine is higher to get them into the state because they're resisting the medicine. So ketamine clinics, we have probably thousands of patients over the last few years who have been treated with Apollo plus ketamine. Ketamine clinics that use our product will just hand Apollo's to their patients when they come into the waiting room, they'll use it for five to 15 minutes before they go into the experience, and they'll be that much calmer before they get into the experience.

Dr. Dave Rabin
So when they get the medicine, they're not resisting it, they're not trying to control the experience. They're just kind of ready for whatever the medicine has to show them and experience it. And that's where people get the most healing. And it's under their control, so they don't have to worry about it. The Apollo, they can change with the buttons anytime without opening a phone. And so it is kind of like a safety tool for people that helps them get more out of their psychedelic experiences. And it helps with integration afterwards, which were also the only technology product to collaborate with maps like us for extending the seeing of Apollo can extend the benefits of MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD.

Melanie Avalon:
This is so cool. I feel like psychedelics comes up on just so many interviews and episodes that I do right now. I actually have never done any sort of psychedelics. So it was on my to-do list for sure. And I just think there's so much potential there. What are you most excited about with the future of all of this? I'm just so impressed with how, you know, all these studies that you're doing all the time and how it's constantly evolving. I mean, it's like overwhelming. So what are you most excited about?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, I think the thing I'm most excited about is generally the future of psychiatry and mental health. I mean, everybody should know and be excited that this is the most exciting time for new developments and new treatments for mental health ever. There's never been a more exciting time for psychiatry. And I can see that between what we can do with technology like Apollo and other things, and what we can do with psychedelic medicine, that within the next five to 10 years, we're going to start to enter a phase of psychiatry and mental health where we're actually treating the root cause of people suffering, not just the symptoms of people suffering. And at that point in the next five to 10 years, we will start to see the rates of mental illness decline dramatically. I would say in 10 years, if we set it as a goal that we could cut the rates of mental illness by 50%, I think that's achievable.

Dr. Dave Rabin
If we all run in the same direction towards these new treatments that are technology-based and psychedelic-assisted therapy-based, I think those are the most exciting treatments on the forefront of psychiatry. And if we all can just focus on getting those things over the line and accessible to patients and making them legal to do research on, especially in the psychedelic world, we're going to start really making a dent in mental illness rates. And potentially, we might even figure out cures for mental illness. And wouldn't that be great?

Melanie Avalon:
That's amazing. Yeah, the whole field is so interesting just in how it existed for so long and just a completely different paradigm where it's just interesting how I feel like the whole field has had to be uprooted a little bit with this new perspective of using therapies like Apollo and psychedelics and things like that. And not just, you know, not to say that talk therapy doesn't work, but you know, you're not just doing talk therapy or taking all these medications.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Right. I think that up until this point, the only solutions for mental health problems have been talk therapy that you do with a clinician and then medications that you take at home. I think our biggest weakness has been giving people other things to do at home that complement what we're teaching them in psychotherapy, talk therapy, that improve the results that aren't medicine. Because medicine often has side effects, even side effects that we don't predict, like numbing you to your emotions. Numbing you to your emotions is not helpful in psychotherapy. In psychotherapy, which is actually getting to the root cause of what's making you feel unsafe and what happened to you and how to process past trauma and all of these things and change your behavior, change your old habits,

Dr. Dave Rabin
that's what psychotherapy is about. But you have to be connected to your emotions, not numb to them to be able to participate in it effectively. Right. So they think like we need more tools that we can send home with people out of the office, which was actually part of the original way we discovered Apollo working with veterans with PTSD. I think I mentioned earlier that we needed to give something that was not medication to these people to take out of the office and continue the therapy work at home on their own because the medications just weren't working. And medications are great for certain people, but they don't work for a lot of people or they have side effects. So how do we move the field in a direction where if you're taking medication like psychedelic medicine, it's not every day.

Dr. Dave Rabin
It's like three times a year or 12 times a year or something like that. It's not every day. It's punctuated experiences that are very intentional. And then if you're using technology, technology you can use every day if it's the right kind of safe technology. And so Apollo is the first demonstration, true demonstration of that.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, exactly. Like to that point, I feel like we know of modalities that do help like exercise or meditation or breathwork, but prescribing that to a patient to do at home is a lot more difficult to, you know, get people to follow through on where this is, you just, it's like a touch of a button. Like you just put it on. It almost, it doesn't feel, I don't know, it almost feels lazy. Like it almost feels too easy in a way.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Well, I think the idea is it's supposed to be easy to feel good, right? Like it's supposed to be easy to feel good. We just accidentally surrounded ourselves by all this stuff that makes us not feel good, like smartphones and the news, right? So if you think about what our natural state as humans is, it's peacefulness, it's calm, it's recovery, it's feeling good. And so the challenge is, again, we're surrounded by so much that makes us not feel good that we have to teach ourselves new techniques to feel good again, which is hard when we're already not feeling good. So Apollo just takes the edge off so that you can feel good enough to change your behavior. And you can feel good enough to be able to make different, you know, positive changes in your life, even if it's just a different way of thinking about yourself, or a different way of thinking about how you sleep or whatever it is, right?

Dr. Dave Rabin
It's those little changes that we try to teach in psychotherapy, that people could take years in psychotherapy to learn, that people can actually figure out on their own once they start feeling good again. And that was kind of the promise of medication, was that if you can give somebody a medicine that makes them feel good, then maybe they'll feel good enough to start the therapy process. But a lot of the mental health medications are so sedating or emotionally numbing that they don't actually work in that way. And that's part of why we see so many people not doing well with them or after them. Technology can do, it can make you feel safe and help you process your emotions at the same time, right? So that's like the era we're moving into.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so incredible. Well, I know listeners now are likely very eager to get an Apollo. Again, like everything we've said on this show is exactly how I feel and has been my experience with this device. And I'm just so grateful for it literally every night when I use it. So listeners can go to apolloneuro.com. That's A-P-O-L-L-O-N-E-U-R-O.com/melanieavalon. And that will get you 15% off. So thank you so much, Dave, for that. I appreciate it so much. Thank you. Like, seriously, thank you for what you're doing. It is changing so many lives. Like you said, you know, you can do a lot of work with one-on-ones and what you're doing with Apollo reaches so many people beyond that. The last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Dr. Dave Rabin
I would say the thing that I always try to be grateful for first that I think does not receive enough gratitude is myself, just for getting here today and showing up and doing what I know how to do and giving me the energy I need to do it because life is hard a lot of the time, you know, and particularly I'm very aware as a psychiatrist and because I still see patients that life is actually harder now for a lot of people than it has been for a long time. I am certainly not spared of life's challenges. So, you know, I think one of the things that is I actually learned this from Shippebo tribal medicine practices, which is at the core of healing and helping us to feel safe in our own skin is just spending a little more time thinking about things about ourselves that we can be grateful for, even small things. And if we do that, we naturally just help to restore a sense of safety in our own bodies on the go.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. I love that so much. Well, thank you so much. I really cannot express my gratitude. Like it affects me personally so much and I see it in so many people. Yeah. Any other links you want to put out there for how people can best follow your work and all the things.

Dr. Dave Rabin
Well, first off, thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure. This was really fun. And you're a great interviewer as always. And anybody can find me at my clinic website, Apollo.clinic. And you can also find me on Spotify and iTunes. And at my shows on psychedelics and consciousness called the psychedelic report and your brain explained. And you can always reach out to me on socials at Dr. David Rabin on Twitter and Instagram. I always like to hear from you.

Melanie Avalon:
Awesome, are you seeing new patients?

Dr. Dave Rabin
Yeah, I run a training clinic, so we are seeing new patients quite often, so if anybody is looking for care, we are able to provide in the mental health space.

Melanie Avalon:
Awesome. Well, I will put links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time and everything. And I can't wait to see you in a couple of weeks now. Super excited. Oh yeah. It's our pleasure. Yep. Talk to you next time. Thanks. Bye. Bye.