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

[00:00:29]David Rabin:   Great to see you, too. Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:00:31]Luke Storey:  Yeah, absolutely. I'm super stoked for this conversation. Well, many of your areas of expertise are of interest to me and we ran into each other at the Health Optimization Summit in London, or at least at the party there. And you were over there in your leather jacket. You had a whole cool little vibe going on between you and Dr. Ted. It's like the coolest and smartest guys in the room, probably. So, I didn't get a chance to really connect with you.

[00:01:01] So, I'm excited we got to do so now. And I'm forever grateful for the technology that allows for us to do this remotely as you were planning on coming to LA and coming over to the studio here. So, I'm glad we're able to make it happen. Just to start off with a little bit of your background and your education, your practice, what you're up to these days, and then we'll go ahead and dive into some of the nitty gritty of it.

[00:01:26]David Rabin:  Sure. So, thank you again for having me. I really appreciate the conversation that you bring to the public ear. And I'm really excited for what we're going to talk about. I'm actually not sure what we're going to talk about, which is why this is even more exciting. And what my background is, in psychiatry and neuroscience. I'm a board-certified psychiatrist and I practice in California and Pennsylvania. I see patients particularly with a focus on treatment resistant, PTSD, depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders, mainly because people who just don't seem to get better in response to any treatment has always fascinated me.

[00:02:13] We have a medical system that talks about different treatment options that we are taught as doctors to prescribe to our patients. And I think it's really important for us as doctors to take a step back and look at how well are those working? Are they having the outcomes that we want them to have or maybe they're having more side effects than they are positive outcomes? And so, I think over time, I started to see that in mental health. 

[00:02:44] And so, mental health really drew me in because I was interested in why do our treatment's not work, maybe there's a different way we could be looking at mental illness that could help us to figure out how to get to the core of what's going on rather than doing what it seemed like we're doing, which is numbing people to their symptoms. And so, all of that kind of came out of my work in college and graduate school. 

[00:03:06] I started doing research with Dr. Sally Temple, who is one of the original researchers who in, I believe it was the '70s, discovered at Cambridge, and then moved to Columbia, that the human brain has neuroplasticity, that we make new neurons in the adult brain, which is a very important thing to understand as humans that we continue to regenerate and make new neurons as we get older. And so, I worked with her for like maybe seven years through college, and then I did a few years in med school.

[00:03:38] And then, I actually did my PhD with Sally in neuroscience and with a focus on aging diseases and chronic stress and resilience, and sort of what makes some of us overcome stress and live 100 years without having any deficits or relatively no deficits to our body, and why do some of us get ill and sort of succumb to stress and not be able to overcome it. And it happens all the time. And that's what we describe as illness.

[00:04:06] And so, just trying to, I think, see the world in a way that science offered us that maybe we weren't integrating, and then into our general view of what does it mean to be alive today, right? What does it mean to be well and what does it mean to be unwell or just ease, right? The roots of the words of use are very important. And so, all of this drew me to psychiatry because psychiatry is really a medicine of language. It's a medicine of just helping to figure out any way we can to get better. 

[00:04:40] Even if you're already well, psychiatry and psychology are really the focus of how do we explore deeper what is going on in ourselves, any of the conflict potentially between ourselves and our inner selves or ourselves, our mind and our body, or however we want to think about it, our families, whatever it may be, and just really dive deep in and knowing that it's just us, there's nothing to be afraid of. And you work through it, you overcome it, and you're better off in the end because we grow from the challenges that we face.

[00:05:11] And so, I really saw psychiatry with the advent of psychedelic psychotherapy and the work that was being done by Rick Doblin at MAPS and all his amazing team. And also, Robin Carhart-Harris in London and many other people. Roland Griffiths, and that work just blew me away. And I said, you know what, psychiatry and studying consciousness through technology, and AI, and psychedelic medicine is the future for me. And I think this is the future because we could actually use this to help treat people who have these treatment-resistant mental illnesses.

[00:05:46]Luke Storey:  Oh, man, this is going to be a really cool conversation. I know when I'm just getting an intro for someone. And oftentimes, to be honest, I don't even do that. I'm just like, whatever, go read their bio, we're just going to dive right into the meat of it selfishly. But I'm trying to be a good interviewer and give people a little bit of context on who you are for those that are less aware. But as someone who has in-depth experience with mental health issues, PTSD, and very acute addiction for long periods of time, and has tried various means by which to overcome those, most of which thankfully have been successful, I'm really excited about what we're going to talk about.

[00:06:29] And I also just want to commend you for your curiosity and your compassion that drives you to alternative means by which to help people because I see the type of psychiatry that you're into and the research that you're into as kind of an adjunct to the functional medicine world when it comes to physical health, and that is looking for root causes and fixing things systemically rather than based on symptom, right? 

[00:07:00] So, I have heartburn, great, I can take medicine that stops hydrochloric acid from being produced, but it's likely that I don't have enough HCl, and that's why I have a heartburn, just as a really simplistic example of how wrong we have it in many, many areas of medicine and in my own experience of, let's just take some mental health issues that I was having trying psychiatric medication and getting worse because of it. And that's not to say that it doesn't work for some people some of the time, I'm just not one of them, so I can only speak to my own experience.

[00:07:32] So, I commend you in your work, and I'm really excited to talk to someone with as much experience as you do about all of these things. So, God, it's one of those like, God, there are so many things to talk about, where do we start? And of course, please don't let me forget and don't feel like you're plugging your thing, your product, but we're going to talk about the Apollo, too, which is this device I'm wearing on my ankle right now. The setting that I have, I think, is the social and open program that I'm running, so we're-. 

[00:08:00]David Rabin:  We have the same vibe.

[00:08:01]Luke Storey:  We're going to get into that because this freaking thing is incredible. It works. And as someone who's in—I mean, I'm in a few spaces, I guess, within health and wellness, I'm really more interested in the consciousness, and spirituality, and mental, emotional health, et cetera. But I often use biohacking and things like that to get the nervous system and the physicality ready to do that type of work. And people send me devices, and supplements, and stuff all the time, which I'm very thankful for. 

[00:08:30] And a lot of them, frankly, I don't really know if they're working. It's kind of like, I don't know, there's so much potential for placebo. And of course, there is for this, too, but we're going to get into some of the research you've done. But whether it's placebo or not, I really don't care. 

[00:08:45] I put this thing on my ankle, and if I'm stressed out, it calms me down. If I want to have a conversation where I feel like I've had like half a glass of wine, and I'm super happy, and open, and social, which I feel like right now, I'm into it.

[00:08:57] So, we're going to get into that as well. But I do want to get into like really some of the specifics of psychedelic, the clinical use of psychedelics, not my prior use, which was going to dead shows and taking dubious amounts of acid just to see like how interdimensional I could get listening to that because I have had recent experiences in the past year-and-a-half or so that have been so transformative. 

[00:09:26] And so, healing with plant medicines, and even to some degree, psychedelics, and the whole microdosing piece. So, there's like so much to unpack. I guess where do you think would be a good place to start us down the path of let's just corner clinical psychedelics in their potential for helping with addiction, trauma, mental health issues. Where's a good place to kind of lead us into that conversation?

[00:09:50]David Rabin:  I think that's a great place to start. I think the best way to enter that might be to start with sort of what psychedelic means. I think a lot of us think that based on what we see on TV and what we hear in public vernacular, that psychedelic means crazy '70s dance party, or festivals, or concerts, or all of these crazy, wild Burning Man-esque type of things, but what psychedelic really means, which was intentionally chosen as the word to describe this experience is mind-manifesting, right? 

[00:10:26] So, mind-manifesting means to, it can be interpreted a number of different ways, but I think the most basic way to interpret it that from my perspective is it's helping facilitate taking things from within our subconscious. So, beneath our level of normal awareness and allowing us to open up our awareness to those things that might typically deep beneath our normal awareness, and then manifest or bring those things into our normal awareness, our normal, what we call, conscious reality, right? 

[00:11:02] And this can happen whether you're on a psychedelic medicine like mushrooms, or LSD, or even cannabis, or MDMA, or ayahuasca, it can also happen with meditation. It can also happen with yoga, with deep interpersonal experiences, like having a great empathic conversation with your friend. These kinds of mind-manifesting experiences can happen at any time. And that's why I think it's so important to understand what that word means.

[00:11:35] And when we talk about addiction or we talk about mental illness, what we're talking about is patterns of behavior that manifest, that exists in our lives, that we develop or practice to cope with trauma or stress over time. Why we develop those patterns? There's a whole host of reasons, right? Some of it's from role modeling from our parents or our siblings or our family members. Sometimes, it's role-modeling from television or music, or whatever, or the people we see around us in our day-to-day lives.

[00:12:07] Other times, it's because we were neglected and we had to figure it out on our own, right? There are all these different reasons why we develop the coping strategies that we develop. Sometimes, those coping strategies work, and they continue to work, and we build on them, and we grow over time. But sometimes, they don't work so well, and then we have to try to figure out what to do. And if we can't figure out what to do because we don't have the adequate support around us, then we oftentimes turn, that we feel we start to turn that negativity or those negative feelings inward, which can lead to feelings of guilt, shame, extreme vulnerability, all of these things that are associated at the core of most mental illnesses.

[00:12:51] And so, what happens is as we practice being in that sort of traumatized or shameful guilty state for moments to hours, to days, to weeks, to months, to years, to decades, what happens is the brain starts to practice training neural pathways. And what happens is, for us to be able to feel, able to go on, those pathways are centered around and the coping strategies typically tend to be centered around protecting the ego. The ego is like that sense of self, right? That's a sense of self that says, I want X, right?

[00:13:29] I want to feel good. I want to go to sleep. That I, that strong sense of I is our ego, and the ego is represented in the brain by something we call the default mode network. And we didn't know about this until probably the last 20 years when we had the advent of functional neuro-imaging where you can actually—it's a very wonderful form of brain scan that doesn't involve any radiation, it's all magnetism. And it's called a functional MRI.

[00:13:59] And it puts you in a very loud machine, and then look at your brain at rest when you're just doing nothing. It's just the basic egoic state, and then doing cognitive stress activities, and doing psychedelics. And I think it's fascinating. Some of this work was originally done by David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College of London. And what they showed was that the default mode network strengthens with the sense of ego, the sense of self strengthens the default mode network. 

[00:14:34] And default by literally meaning default, when we're not doing anything, this is the network of our brain, this is the way our brain is talking to all of the other different parts of our brain. It's like a loop. As we practice being in that loop, then the loop gets stronger. It becomes easier all around that loop. It's like when you're skiing down a slope or snowboarding, and you get to the top, and all the tracks are already skied out, and you just have to follow somebody else's tracks, you follow somebody else's tracks, and you just keep doing that all day, and it's easy because the tracks are already there or you can imagine the alternative with psychedelics, you get to the top of the mountain, and then there's eight feet of powder that just gets dropped on you and you can choose any way to go.

[00:15:12] You didn't necessarily have any idea which way to go now. There are no guides, or there's very limited guides. And so, you can choose anywhere to go and you don't have any path that you have to follow. That's exactly what happens to the brain when we take psychedelics, is we see it as profound destruction of default mode network activity, which corresponds directly to how much ego we have or feel. So, the less ego we feel, the less strong sense of defensive self we feel, the more interconnectedness with our environment we feel has a dosed relationship with things like psilocybin mushrooms.

[00:15:48] The more you take, the more disruption to the default mode network activity, the less ego, the more connectedness, right? And so, when you think about what that means in terms of healing things like addiction, addiction is just training this loop over, and over, and over again, stress, impulse, use, relief, stress, impulse, use, relief. And then, you train this impulsivity over, and over, and over again. Impulsivity trains impulsivity. And it's just practice. Practice makes perfect. We can be great at being impulsive, we can also be great at being patient, right? 

[00:16:24] And so, what psychedelics teach us to do is they just shatter that loop of that default activity that's going over, and over, and over again, and all of a sudden, we're looking at ourselves through a completely different lens, through like eight feet of powder kind of lens, like a version of ourselves we might not have seen since we were a child with all the layers of crap stripped off, and all the layers of negativity and trauma that changed the way we see ourselves, and we have the opportunity to remember who we really are, which helps us move closer and closer towards accessing our full potential by literally manifesting that sense of self that we used to have as children into our current present lives.

[00:17:05]Luke Storey:  Wow. Dude, I'm going to listen back to that excerpt like 20 times. There is so much value in that. I'm like, oh, my God, there's a million offshoots. I'm like, okay, I must start writing it down. I thought, no, trust-

[00:17:19]David Rabin:  I know there's a lot, I'm sorry.

[00:17:20]Luke Storey:  No. Dude, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's so valuable. And there was so much wisdom packed in there. And I really love the analogy of the ski tracks. I've tried to explain that phenomenon before. And in layman's terms, because that's my understanding of it, is layman's terms. I'm not actually coming from a higher understanding, trying to simplify it. I'm just trying to understand it at all. But as you were describing that taking the chairlift to the top of the mountain and that all the runs already trampled, I was picturing psychedelics are sort of like getting off the ski lift and going off the back of the mountain where no one is skiing.

[00:17:57]David Rabin:  Right. Yeah.

[00:17:58]Luke Storey:  We're perhaps saying that. And that's definitely been my experience. And in that cycle of addiction, as I said, having had so much experience with that early in life for a long time, there's the part that you describe where, okay, stress response trigger uncomfortable feeling. How do I fix this feeling? I reach for that thing, whatever the thing happens to resonate with your personality. For me, I like the slow jams, you know what I mean? 

[00:18:29] Like I want to just get into Theta or what feels like that, so downers, and opiates, and cannabis, and things that would just like turn the volume down on everything as quickly as possible, although I did a lot of other things, too, just because in my experience of pain and addiction, being me was so painful that I would change the feeling of me into something I didn't like also because at least, it was different than being me. And so, I would do crystal meth or smoke crack, even though I hated it. But it was better than being sober.

[00:19:00]David Rabin:  Right.

[00:19:02]Luke Storey:  So, there's that part of the habit and those worn ski tracks in the neural pathways, it's like, okay, I feel bad, I know how to fix this. The real tragedy of addiction to me, and I'd love to get your take on this, is when you have some semblance of a moral compass, which I think we all do on some level, just inherently as sentient beings that we know when we're doing something that self-destructive, and also, something that in terms of societal norms is frowned upon, I mean, no one thinks it's cool to smoke crack or shoot heroin, right?

[00:19:39] I mean, I guess if you're around a bunch of other people doing it, it is the status quo, but by and large, you're doing something "wrong", right? So, in addition to those, the habitual just automatic reaction to grab something to change the way you feel is also the inherent shame every time you do it. And when you know you're stuck in that cycle and when I had the awareness, especially with heroin specifically, I mean, that was not cool by any stretch. There was nothing to boast about when I realized I was physically addicted to heroin and also with crack. I mean, God, talk about like just deep levels of shame, but there's also with addictive behavior, I guess, of any kind, too, sex addiction, overeating, debting, gambling, it's like-

[00:20:27]David Rabin:  Video games.

[00:20:28]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Video games. You have this sense of hurt, trauma, shame, then you used to change that feeling, and then so ensues even more shame compounded on top of the original shame, which then necessitates using, again, to overcome the shame you just created by using. And that cycle is so heartbreaking, and one that I know so well, and I'm just forever grateful for the spiritual experience that I had and have had since the original awakening that have allowed me to escape that cycle. What's your take on how shame and trauma lead us into addictions and prevent us from getting out because of that mechanism?

[00:21:14]David Rabin:  I mean, I don't think I can sum it up much better than you just did. I think that what you said is exactly right, and that is the shame and the guilt afterwards. After a trauma is really the biggest tragedy of the thing, right? Because we're all traumatized on a regular basis all the time. I don't think we necessarily think about it that way. And to really understand trauma, let's break it down to its most simple element, right? 

[00:21:40] So, trauma means, is it means one or multiple negative, intense, meaningful experiences, right? The opposite of trauma, healing experiences would be one or multiple positive, intense, meaningful experiences, right? So, the positive or the negative is solely based on the way that we, as the individual, in that experience interpret it. It has nothing to do with what anybody else thinks. And that's the most important thing that people need to know as support following a trauma. However, our society is a little bit backwards in that we don't really teach people about how to deal with trauma.

[00:22:23] And what happens is the ignorance, ignorance, literally, meaning we ignore the trauma and they ignore how to deal with it, and it maybe reflecting that maybe we're not dealing with it in that great a way, results in us constantly re-traumatizing each other over, and over, and over again typically with shame, which is usually in the form of, why are you doing that, what's wrong with you, right? And so, the most critical period of the trauma is not the trauma itself, and most people will agree with this in the psychological and psychiatric field, I think it's the preparation going into it to some extent, but most importantly, just like with psychedelics, it's the integration and support period afterwards, right? After you have. 

[00:23:10] We can't stop a trauma from happening. We're not gods in that way. We can't prevent negative experiences from ever happening to you or to ourselves, but what we can do at the very least is give each other and ourselves the support that we need, knowing that trauma will happen to overcome it afterwards. And what happens is, instead of getting that support, we get shame, we get guilt, we get blamed that it was us.

[00:23:34] It was our fault for the trauma happening in most cases. And a lot of people don't even do it intentionally when they blame people, they victim-blame people for what happened. And so, this is just one example, but we see this all the time. And that what happens is that blaming the person who is traumatized just facilitates whatever little bits and pieces of self-hate were there, if none of it was there at that time, it just feeds it, like watering and fertilizing a seed.

[00:24:04] And it creates this is plant of self-hate that grows within us because we believe that we were at fault for our suffering, which ultimately the cure for is to do intensive psychotherapy or psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, where you work with a person to bring themselves to a point where they feel safe enough to recognize that, hey, wait a minute, this wasn't actually my fault, right? This wasn't my fault. I was just doing the best that I could at the time, was what I knew. And that was all I could do. So, how can I blame myself, right? And so, we know that this is what's happening because the process of healing is reversing that. And does that make sense?

[00:24:46]Luke Storey:  Wow. Dude, does it make sense? You just described my entire childhood. Yeah. I mean, God, it's one of those, you're happy to learn it now, but you'd wish you'd known it a few years ago.

[00:25:02]David Rabin:  Oh, my God. I can't even tell you how many things I come across like that.

[00:25:05]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Because I've examined, of course, in an effort to heal and overcome addiction in my own life, I've really had to get down to the root causes. If you get into recovery, the real purpose of it, as I'm sure you're aware, is to get down to what caused the original pain so that that can be healed, so that the need to anesthetize yourself is gone. It's not about abstinence. It's about healing the underlying cause.

[00:25:37] And unfortunately, a lot of people in recovery and various programs miss that because it seems like on the surface, and this is the rude awakening that I had after quite a few years sober was that when an addict is using or drinking or doing whatever behavior they're doing, it seems like their problems, and their pain, and the shame associated with it are caused by the act of using something habitually, right? 

[00:26:01] And so, intellectually, the misconception arises that if you just stop that behavior, then you'll be fine and you won't have these problems anymore, right? Neglecting to identify the actual fact of the matter that you just described, that underneath that, there's a reason why we feel inadequate or we feel shame, lack of self-worth, self-hatred, et cetera. And so then, we use. And then, getting sober, many of us, myself included, have the rude awakening that like, cool, I quit using, now, I'm going to be happy. It's like, no. 

[00:26:40] In fact, to me, it was almost like, it's like I had a really bad headache, right? And I had been taking copious amounts of like a soul headache. And I've been taking copious amounts of soul headache aspirin for years and years. And it was effective for a while. And then, eventually, the side effects of that aspirin started to outweigh the benefits of relief. And so, I stopped thinking that now, the headache would be gone, but all that happened was the headache that was there being suppressed by that aspirin now rises to the surface with a raging vengeance. 

[00:27:14] And now, I'm left just in what I used to call untreated alcoholism, which is just serious discontent, and confusion, and anger. And all of those neural pathways that you described were cut of ways of negative feeling and thinking that I had no way to fix or reverse other than slow and tedious spiritual work by applying spiritual principles, and doing everything I could in recovery. But back to your statement before, how that cycle begins, I find it really fascinating and so enlightening to think about that.

[00:27:49] It's not so much the original trauma that we experienced because as you so rightly indicated, that is inevitable in the human experience. But what happens in the weeks or months following that, and so tracing back, I've had many traumas like so many people have. But for me, there was sexual abuse when I was five or six. And that at that point, my spirit was just broken. It's just things were never the same after that. And that was just the beginning of my downfall.

[00:28:20] And up until doing ayahuasca, actually, last year, I thought that it was that experience that harmed me psychologically, and that it was the root of my demise that would follow through my adolescence, and teen years, and into my 20s until I finally got help. But what I saw in that plant medicine experience, and perhaps, I could have talked to a psychiatrist that could have illuminated this formula for me or gotten some other kind of help, but what I saw, thanks to the medicine, was that, in fact, as you just stated so perfectly, that it's that I didn't know how to share that with my parents.

[00:29:01] There were no authorities I could go to or I didn't know how, that I couldn't talk to teachers about it. And so, I just held that and walked around with that confusion and shame until I was about 14 years old, and I was finally, I mean, essentially incarcerated as a result of my behavior surrounding that. And then, it kind of came out and I was able to get some degree of help with that. But I was really able to see that it was in the confusion that was created by that experience and not having the maturity and intellectual prowess to contextualize that in a way to see that it wasn't me that was wrong, or dirty, or shameful, or whatever stories that I built around that in order to cope with it, that was what the problem was.

[00:29:47] I mean, sure, it wasn't great for me to have that experience. I'm sure it was very damaging. And there was a scar left there spiritually, emotionally, mentally. But it really was revealed to me through ayahuasca that it was the subsequent years following that, that I walked around with that, that really deteriorated my mental health to the degree that I had to be self-medicated 24/7 until I was 26 years old, basically. So, say you take a kid, and I apologize to the audience, sometimes, I talk a lot, but sometimes, these are interviews, sometimes, they're conversations, so I guess those listening will understand this one's a conversation because I just have to unpack things in this way because I have so much personal experience in these topics. 

[00:30:32] So, forgive me for being long-winded also, but say you take a kid who's six years old and experiences that type of trauma, and there is the framework of awareness within the family, the trust in the family, the dynamics are healthy enough within that family, where there's open communication and a framework wherein that kid has a parent to go to, or an elder, or authority to go to, what's the perfect scenario of coping with that trauma at an early age that can avoid leading down the path of self-destruction and inevitably possibly deaths, which is where addiction ends up?

[00:31:12]David Rabin:  Right. Yeah, that's a really great question. I'm really glad you asked that. And I really appreciate you being so open about your own past experiences. I mean, the work that you've done to change your life is incredible, and I truly commend you for it. And I'm so happy that you're sharing this with everyone so they can hear that there's hope for them to also overcome their trauma. I think that, more than anything, is, hope is the most powerful medicine.

[00:31:46] And that, if more than anything, that anyone could take home from this podcast is that hope is the most powerful medicine. We have lots of names for it. Sometimes, we call it placebo, sometimes, we call it whatever. But hope is hope and belief that we can get better, belief that we can change, belief that we can be different. And I think what belief turns into over time, and going back to your question, what does that environment look like? What that environment looks like is an environment that is radically accepting and radically non-judgmental.

[00:32:23]Luke Storey:  Right.

[00:32:25]David Rabin:  And that is not impossible. It's actually quite simple. It just needs to be taught as something that's important. And it will happen because the most wonderful thing about radical acceptance, and radical non-judgment, and radical self-reliance, and many of the principles that learning that actually incorporates, which I really appreciate about them, is that they're free, right? And so, these are things, gratitude, right? Gratitude is free.

[00:32:59] It is a skill and one of the most enjoyable feelings that we could possibly have, and it's free. And the more that we are taught that that's important, the more that we have the opportunity to overcome challenges that face us. And I think that's what this is all really about, is that it's about us understanding as humans. What does it actually mean to be a human, right? To be a human means that we are the most adaptable creatures to have ever walked the face of this earth.

[00:33:30] There has never been, from what we can determine, a more adaptable creature that has survived more craziness, speaking of what's going on right now in the world, and that has survived more threats to extinction and more threats, in general, than humanity, in humans, right? Our skill is not stability, it's adaptation. And so, when we accept that our true skill, our truest strength as a species is adaptation, and that's what has put us at the top of the food chain, as it were, then what it also helps us understand is that challenge is there on purpose to make us better. We all know people in our lives who have never been challenged or threatened by anything, right? What do those people look like and act like?

[00:34:20]Luke Storey:  Fragile.

[00:34:21]David Rabin:  Right. And they don't typically have that many skills that are valuable because they haven't been forced to develop them and they don't necessarily have a lot of meaning from their lives. I don't want broadly generalize. But because these people who truly are never challenged are actually very rare. I mean, the idea is that we're all challenged and these challenges can come in any form that we can't predict. Like we're talking about earlier, trauma comes and we can't really predict how it's going to come, or what it's going to look, or smell like.

[00:34:51] All we can do is deal with it when it comes in the most constructive way possible, which ideally is understanding it as an opportunity for growth. And I think that is one of the single biggest things lacking in our education, other than empathy, which is understanding that a challenge is not a why me opportunity, it's an opportunity for growth. And if we understand that it's an opportunity for growth, and we jump on it, then we ultimately become much stronger, and much more resilient, and much closer to our fullest version of ourselves.

[00:35:27] But our environment has to foster that. And so, going back to your question. I think that's where the importance of the family dynamic comes in, is that a family dynamic that fosters radical non-judgment and radical self-radical acceptance, and these things that we're talking about, empathy, and sharing, and a place where people can talk about these kinds of things, understanding that it's not something to be judged, it's something to work through in a constructive way to try to help everyone feel better. That's what kind of shifts the outcomes more than anything else.

[00:35:59]Luke Storey:  Wow. I just had a realization, which was illuminated by that statement. And that is that that's a huge part of why 12-step groups are so effective, I mean, comparatively speaking. I mean, we can leave aside the psychedelic path, which we're going to get into a bit more. And I don't have experience like escaping a life of addiction with psychedelics, like I know many people have. But in the model of the 12 steps in general as a teaching, you have a group of people that have one sole purpose, and that is to save their own ass.

[00:36:37] And they know how they do that, is they have to become honest with themselves, and then honest with another group of people that have shared a very similar, if not the exact same predicament, right? So, I've escaped this predicament. This is why I did it. This is how I did it. This is how I'm doing it. I'm coming clean here in this group full of people and inherent to most of those groups, regardless of what particular affliction it is that they're focused on, involved the main premise of unconditional love, reciprocity, empathy, compassion, and that there's no agenda or anything required of you other than your participation and your ability to kind of behave yourself and not interrupt the process for other people.

[00:37:23] And it's in that energy field of unconditional love, and as you said, radical acceptance that a guy like me can walk in a room and go, holy shit, I'm safe. I can finally let my guard down, and be vulnerable, and talk about my inner life in a way that is difficult to do, and in most other surroundings in one's life, apart from perhaps having a really healthy family that's practicing that type of dynamic or seeing psychiatrists like you, where I can let my guard down and really open up my inner experience for examination with someone else, right?

[00:38:00]David Rabin:  Right. 

[00:38:01]Luke Storey:  Do you have kids?

[00:38:03]David Rabin:  Not yet. Business babies.

[00:38:08]Luke Storey:  Yeah.

[00:38:08]David Rabin:  Business babies first, and then perhaps, real babies. But I love that—I'm sorry, go ahead.

[00:38:13]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Nor do I. But for those who do have kids, and I'm sure there's books about this and experts about this, but I'm just imagining the idea where you have kids and the environment in your home is accepting enough, and safe enough, and preemptively prepared for possible traumas of whatever type might arise in the experience of your kid, that that kid then does have a safe place where they can go and tell their parent anything without being shamed or condemned.

[00:38:49] And when and if they do experience trauma of some kind, whether it's just a bully at school, or a more serious transgression like sexual abuse or something like that, where there is a way for them to unravel that in a safe place and perhaps heal it on the spot or in short order, rather than that having something that manifests at 35 years old as a frequent sex addiction, or a gambling problem, or something way later in life, where you're like God, I don't know why I'm doing this while you're doing it because there wasn't a place for you to take that initial trauma.

[00:39:23] So, I think it's a really exciting development in terms of our evolution, where people that do have kids can start to create that sort of environment, where it doesn't have to turn into this cyclical family dynamic that continues on generationally, this handing off of trauma from one generation to the next, which is, God bless my parents and all of my ancestors, and I love them all and all of that, but that's been, on both sides of my family, quite prevalent. And I think perhaps my parents were the first generation eventually to really stop that cycle. And now, we're all on the other side of that. And one could hope that the next generation to follow between me, or my brothers, or whomever else will be under this new model where, sure, trauma happens, but we're better equipped to deal with it on the spot before it turns into pathology.

[00:40:18]David Rabin:  Right. And I think you really hit the nail on the head. I think the idea is, also taking it one step further, I think perhaps, we could deal with trauma better if we also understood the power of language and some of the more ancient tribal tools, right? So, gratitude is particularly an interesting tool. I mentioned it earlier because it's just so important and it forms a foundation of what we call the four pillars, which are critical to tribal plant medicine in South America.

[00:40:49] But they're also used all over the world in traditional Hindu yogic medicine and Buddhist medicine. And the four pillars, usually, some form of gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, and self-love, all directed as a practice and skill towards the self. And when we practice all of these four things directed towards ourselves, what we learn is we build and strengthen this foundation of trust within ourselves to allow ourselves to feel safe enough to be grateful for the opportunity to be challenged, right? 

[00:41:23] So, the opposite of that is, what we're experiencing right now is that we are constantly perceiving ourselves to be under threat. Not all of us, but a lot of us, no matter what lifestyle we live in, particularly today, where we have an active COVID-19 outbreak in the US, and the US isn't necessarily quarantining people or providing safety equipment the way that we thought they might, the government might be helping us.

[00:41:51] And so, this is very stressful. It's stressful for everyone. Literally, no one is spared. But as long as you have access to any kind of media, no one is spared by the threat of the stress that's going on in the world right now. This is happening to everyone on top of all the other stress that we have already. So, what option comes before us any time that we're facing any stress is really one choice. Do we choose to escape from this feeling of unpleasantness as quickly as possible or do we choose to engage it with gratitude, right? 

[00:42:24] And that's really the only choice. The human brain is not good at making choices that have more than two choices or two options, I'm sorry. So, what really works the best is when we can break things down, what's called reductionists, we break things down into two things, two options, escape, engage, right? Problem shows up. What do we do? We can escape or we can engage. The thing is that when you understand that what those two choices are, you actually think through what the consequences of each one might be, what we ultimately find, as you found, is that there is no escape, right?

[00:43:03] So, escape is a figment of our imagination. There is no escape. This is where we are. And this is who we are for the time that we're here on this earth. And so, all we can do with medicine if we try to escape is to really just numb or distract ourselves from the root of the problem that is causing us suffering. The alternative is, and this could be started at any time, I would argue not just with your children, but you can start this for yourself right now with anything that you're struggling with, is to make the choice of saying, instead of going to smoke cigarette, or smoke a crack pipe, or take an opioid, or binge on Netflix because I'm feeling like crap today, I am going to be grateful for these crappy feelings.

[00:43:53] I'm going to be grateful for the frustration and anger that I'm feeling right now. I'm going to take that energy and put into something that actually makes me better. It could be exercising, could be working out, could making a diet meal plan for yourself. It could be learning to cook. It could be learning to grow your own food. It could be learning or doing literally anything about yourself, or to contribute back to yourselves. And it all stems from that foundation of gratitude.

[00:44:20] And so, that's the fundamental choice that we all have to make in the process of healing. It's not just from addiction, it's just in the process of healing in general. And I think Apollo, going back to Apollo, what Apollo does is Apollo helps us feel safe enough to bring that gratitude back into our lives by centering us on our bodies. So, it's similar to breath, paying attention to our breath. When we take an intentional breath, automatically sends a signal to our brain and says, I'm safe enough to pay attention to this breath right now, right? And so, if that signal happens, as soon as you start to feel it, it's a feedback.

[00:44:55]Luke Storey:  Yeah. That's interesting.

[00:44:57]David Rabin:  Like the body's not complicated. We think it's complicated, but it's not that complicated. It's a duality. It's threat and safety. Safety is everything that makes us feel good and thrive in our lives, creativity, digestion, reproduction, sleep, and energy recovery, all of that good stuff that makes our lives rich and enjoyable. And then, the opposite, the fear side, the threat side, is responsible for just keeping us alive so we can enjoy life, right? 

[00:45:26] So, that part is supposed to shut down when we are in a safe environment. But the problem is, when we're constantly threatened or constantly overstimulated by our environment, we constantly perceive threat, and then our recovery system that that safety system shuts down or can't fully turn on, that's when we start to manifest illness over time. So, gratitude and the practice of the four pillars are this old, old way, probably thousands of years old, that uses language to describe skills that help us to self-improve that we can use on a daily basis.

[00:45:59] Apollo is a way to help facilitate that without requiring much practice because we've been so disconnected from these skills for so long that strapping on a wearable is actually a lot easier for us now than intentionally practicing gratitude or practicing deep breathing because we're just so cut off from that part of our culture and ourselves. So, Apollo is sort of our way of trying to bridge the gap of eastern and western medicine to provide a way for people to access these altered states of healing in a much more accessible, and simple, and affordable way.

[00:46:30]Luke Storey:  Yeah, let's get into that. That's a great segue. And then, we'll circle back to some of the more specific psychedelics because I want to dig into the list. But due to the fact that right now, as I sit in my home studio, at my desk here, I've got my feet up. I'm feeling pretty chill. And I have this Apollo on my ankle. And as I said earlier, the setting I used was the open and sociable, I think it was.

[00:46:57]David Rabin:  Social and open, yeah.

[00:46:57]Luke Storey:  Social and open. And just to give people an idea of what I'm experiencing, it's a continual kind of hum, buzz vibration that just kind of just goes in waves and it just sort of feels like you have your leg against something that has a motor or something like that. Just kind of a humming and-

[00:47:19]David Rabin:  Like a [indiscernible] that I knew.

[00:47:20]Luke Storey:  Yeah. It is very calming. And I'm curious about what you just described to me, and let me know if I am off here, but, okay, say at one point—let me think of a good example. Okay. So, I got a good one for you. It's very tangible. Throughout my life, for whatever reason, karma would be kind of my guest. I used to have a very adversarial relationships with dogs. As you see, I've got a great one behind me now. We're best friends. It's all good.

[00:47:51] But earlier in life, I was bit by a German shepherd. My dad used to have this, I think it was an Australian herding dog, sheep dog, used to chase me around because it thought I was a cow or something. And it wasn't trying to hurt me, but I didn't know it. It just terrorized me and chase me on the driveway on the way to the school bus and whatnot. And then, when I was 26, I got bit on the face by a Rottweiler. I still have the scars to prove it, which eventually led to my sobering up because I was drunk, being a dumb ass, which is why the dog bit me.

[00:48:26] So, having those experiences with dogs, I used to have this thing, and I still have it a little bit sometimes, but I think it's being healed probably just from being around one for a couple of years. But I would have this response that if I would hear a dog bark or if one came near me, I would get stuck in this like limbic system trauma loop where my limbic system would get activated as in like, and I don't remember which part of the brain it is that does this, I'm sure you know, but it's like warning.

[00:48:55]David Rabin:  The amygdala.

[00:48:55]Luke Storey:  The amygdala goes warning, warning, danger, danger, you've seen this before, even though there's not a real threat, it reaches back into time, and remembers a similar situation, and prepares me in the same way as if that same threat is going to unravel as it did before, right? And even though in reality, it's not. The dog's way across the street, it's behind the fence, whatever. And that's a pedestrian example, but let's take it a step further in a way that's perhaps more meaningful.

[00:49:25] Let's say, in a past relationship of any kind, I was around someone who was very combative, angry, verbally abusive, very reactive, and they hurt my feelings emotionally. And I had to walk on eggshells around them and be hyper vigilant. And now, I get around someone who's not like that at all and they don't text me back. I mean, I'm speaking from real life here, trying to act like I'm not. I know this guy who had this—but no, this has been my experience and it is revealed largely through psychedelics, actually.

[00:50:00] And then, that person doesn't text me back and I think, oh, they're mad at me, I'm in trouble, we're going to have a fight, there's drama, there's an issue. And then, later that day, I talk to them, I'm like, are you pissed? And they go, what are you talking about? You're nuts. Everything's fine. And just based on a bit of studying and kind of understanding this is that because of past experiences of trauma, the brain activates like that, the amygdala goes danger, danger, and then even though there's not, you can't get yourself out of it because you can't like rationalize to that part of your brain and tell it to shut up and calm down like, hey, amygdala, chill, we're fine, the dog is behind the fence, the girlfriend's not mad, your boss isn't this pissed at you, whatever, the client's not going to fire you, they just didn't return your e-mail that fast, isn't it?

[00:50:45] Like no matter how much I try to rationalize that, there still is that fight or flight response. And in a guy like me, it's gotten much, much better. But with certain things, once that fight or flight is activated, it could go on for hours, even though nothing in reality is actually wrong at all. So, does this Apollo have the ability then to signal to the brain that you're okay and prevent you from going into a fight or flight response or to bring you out of one in short order if you were to put it on after such an event?

[00:51:26]David Rabin:  Yeah, or both or actually even prevent that response. And so, I think what you're describing is the way that most of us feel a lot of the time in response to little things, because we are so stressed that the more stressed out we are, the more what we call misappropriate threat, or we accidentally interpret something as threatening when it's not. By threatening, I mean actually threatening our survival, like could actually kill us, or seriously harm us, or our families in a very significant way.

[00:51:55] We're very rarely actually exposed to that degree of threat. So, what happens is these little things start to trigger our system over time, and it triggers these feelings of lack of safety. And so, what Apollo does is it's effectively—and just so everybody knows, Apollo is a wearable. I'm wearing one right here as well. And what it does is it vibrates at frequencies that we developed in the lab at the University of Pittsburgh, and we found that these frequencies, when tested in double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial, showed that we could reliably improve heart rate variability within three minutes under stress by sending these gentle, layered frequencies of vibration that feel kind of like an ocean wave, or a cat purring next your body, or somebody giving you a hug, or holding your hand, that we send these signals to the body and they activate that safety response system through the body.

[00:52:50] And what happens is when you activate that system at a time where the body is triggered towards threat, if we're not actually threatened, it sends one of those signals to the brain, just like with deep breathing. It says, if I have the time to pay attention to this feeling on my leg right now, then I know I'm not actually threatened, right? Just like the deep breathing, if I have time to feel, intentionally feel the air coming into my nose and down my throat, into my lungs, and then in, and then all the way out, if you have time to do one of those full breath cycles, and actually even if it's just five seconds and actually pay attention to that feeling, then you cannot be running from a light. It would be impossible. You would die, right? 

[00:53:33] So, the body knows that. And the body knows that also through the sense of touch. The sense of touch is one of the most powerful and ancient ways that we have conveyed safety to one another, and that mammals conveyed safety to one another, and lots of different species. And so, Apollo, we figured out in the lab through studying the meditation, literature, and biofeedback literature, and an enormous amount of literature on human touch, and music, and on the neuroscience of all of these different areas, and found that there are certain rhythms in common that the body really likes that make the body—or I should say not make, but they help facilitate the body entering into a calmer state, a calmer, clearer, more focused, really, if there's any single word to describe it, it's a more present, mindful state.

[00:54:24] And this present mindfulness, being in the present, grounding ourselves into our bodies instantly reminds us that we're safe because we have the time to pay attention to our bodies. Even if that's just a subconscious feeling, it gives us the poise and the opportunity to not center ourselves off in a situation where we don't need to be. And we end up making better decisions. People perform better under stress mentally and physically. And we've done these studies.

[00:54:51] And Apollo also has been demonstrated in our preliminary results from meditation trial of 50 people that we're actually able to help non-meditator's brains as measured by EEG, electroencephalogram brainwave studies to look like experienced meditator's brains within 12 minutes with Apollo, which is really fascinating because what is meditation? Meditation, when you've never meditated, is allowing ourselves to feel safe enough to be vulnerable with our own thoughts and with our own selves, right? 

[00:55:25] And that can be really hard when we've never done that before. We've never been taught that that's OK. And so, Apollo helps increase the safety signals in the body so that when those negative thoughts come, you can be mindful of them and actually practice acknowledging the thought, not attaching anything to it, and just kind of letting it go, right? And that practice of being, which is the practice of being centered in our bodies, being centered in the present, and all of that facilitates, over time, the learning of how to meditate and how to get ourselves into those states more effectively on our own.

[00:55:56] So, the technology not only helps us get there and helps us stay there, but it helps us feel it and understand what that feeling of feeling good in a stressful situation feels like, and feeling agency, and autonomy, and the ability to be in charge of our own decisions at any moment. And once you feel that, you'll do everything you can to figure out how to feel that all the time on your own without Apollo. So, over time, people's use of it changes and evolves. And it's really fascinating.

[00:56:22]Luke Storey:  So, unlike using another exogenous source of relief, let's say, oh, I'm stressed out, so I'm going to take a few bong rips. And inherent to that is dependency because I'm still looking for something outside of myself. And I'm not learning how to self-regulate by smoking weed or doing Oxycontin or whatever, right? 

[00:56:43]David Rabin:  Right.

[00:56:43]Luke Storey:  It's like I'm still actually just going to increase my dependency on it over time because I've learned nothing. I haven't earned anything through that means of seeking relief. Whereas, with the Apollo, from what I'm understanding, because that's what I would think to, like am I just screwed if I don't have this thing on my ankle then? So, we're, in essence, learning how to achieve that state on our own because we're learning how to identify that felt sense of being and learn how to activate or facilitate that experience within ourselves. And then, eventually, so then, are you putting yourself out of business then? Because people are like, okay, I had this Apollo thing on the different settings for six months. I use it every day. Now, I learned how to self-regulate, let me just put this in a drawer or something like that.

[00:57:29]David Rabin:  I mean, originally that was something that we were theoretically worried about. This is like many years ago. But then, what we realized is, the beauty of what we're doing is that we have access to state-of-the-art AI, right? And so, what is state-of-the-art AI really good for? Learning about you, and then iterating for you based on what we know about you. So, if we look at how you use Apollo over time, and this is something that right now, we're in the listening phase of AI, so I think a lot of people don't understand about artificial intelligence, the process of development, is you create a theory.

[00:58:04] It starts with creating a theory about how you think things work. So, we know a lot about the body. We know about from our studies and our case studies the way the body responds to stress and the way the body response of stress with Apollo, et cetera, et cetera, in all these different conditions. And by the way, Apollo's used for seven major things. So, energy and wake up is basically like caffeine or a brief like boost of energy. Social and open is supposed to feel kind of like MDMA, like it's a very positive heart-opening, heart-warming socialist gains.

[00:58:36]Luke Storey:  Honestly, with that one alone, if it just had that, I'm in because my interviews have been so bomb. I put it on the 120 minutes social and open every time I do an interview now, and it's like going, dude, how can I—it takes me a minute to hit empathy with people, and nonverbal communication, and the flow, that it's depending on my mood sometimes, and the energy of the other person as they're reciprocating what I'm putting out and all of that.

[00:59:02] Sometimes, it's challenging. It takes a bit of work. And I'm not trying to be like a cheesy commercial here. I just, when I like something, I'm honest about it. But that particular setting, it does. And in fact, earlier today, I was trying to describe on an Instagram Live what that setting feels like. And I said, you know what, it kind of feels like MDMA lite because it does. It's like I do feel very like open, and empathetic, and just kind, and like I want to connect with people. It's really weird. 

[00:59:31]David Rabin:  Yeah. So, what that is and what you're describing is we figured out in the lab that there are certain frequencies from other people's work that built a foundation before us, and then from our own testing, there are certain rhythmic patterns that help nudge the mind and the body into a state of feeling present, and clear, and wakeful, all the things we want in a social situation, but not in our own heads in the moment, right? 

[01:00:00] I could instead, if you were to put on the meditation frequency, the meditation frequency is a different setting that we found that we used in that meditation trial I told you about that actually helps the tension turn inward into the body, right? So, if you use that in a social situation, what we have heard from people, it's kind of interesting, is it makes people sometimes more self-conscious than they thought they would be.

[01:00:22] Why? Because they're not present in the moment, and they're more centered in their bodies, and they're not in that sort of empathic heart-open state. Whereas, with the social and open frequencies, those frequencies tend to correlate with these states of what you described, attention is more outside of the body. It's more in the environment, which includes other people. It includes that sort of empathy rather than a deep, introspective, self-work state, right? 

[01:00:48] And so, by changing these patterns in the way that you see in the app, so energy and wake up, social and open, clear and focused is kind of like amphetamines, amphetamine lite. And then, rebuild and recover is like jumping in a hot tub after a workout or an intense stressor. It just rapidly brings the body back into homeostasis and reduces heart rate and blood pressure under stress. And then, the three after that are the relaxing and more introspective frequencies, which are meditation mindfulness, relax and recharge, and then sleep and renew.

[01:01:06] And so, all of these seven settings kind of allow people, they're not going to force you or make you go into a state if you resist. It's like, if you drink coffee before you go to bed, you're not going to sleep very well, right? If you take a sleepy time tea in the morning, you're not going to wake up very well, right? Your actions have to be aligned with your intention and your goals. And so, what Apollo does is it's basically, in simplest terms, music that I composed based on neuroscience of music and touch for your skin rather than for your ears, that just helps nudge the body and the mind into a more pleasant state for whatever activities that you choose to be doing.

[01:02:09]Luke Storey:  Cool. Wow. I'm forever grateful at the opportunity I have to get firsthand experience and lessons in these things. I'm just so stoked to do what I do. I just take a moment of gratitude. It's like I would be a guy that found this online, someone would send me a link, I would buy it, and I would read the FAQ, and watch a couple of videos. And if I had questions, I might email customer service. They would send me kind of a canned answer, a pre-written piece of copy, and I'd just be kind of left to figure it out.

[01:02:39] So, I just feel so fortunate to get to experiment with things like this and talk to the chiefs that are really at the forefront of these innovations. And I have to say also, in addition to liking this one a lot, and I used the wake up one because I'm a slow waker. But because of what's been going on recently and things have just slowed down, no one's coming over to the house, I'm here with my girlfriend, thank God or I'd be losing my shit completely, but we have a great time.

[01:03:12] I mean, we can order food. And as long as that happens, we're good. We're not going to kill each other as shut-ins. But I've been waking up and doing something that I'm a huge proponent of, and have lacked the discipline to do at different times, and that's sun gazing and doing my breath work at dawn, right? If I do that, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have a good day. So, I do that, and then I come home and meditate. And I've been a Vedic meditator for many years.

[01:03:35] And up until, oh, a few months ago when I found the work of Joe Dispenza and started really digging into that, and went to his week-long intensive, and started doing like Joe Dispenza meditations, which certainly, I did, which I always thought were, I was like, guided meditations were for novices and sort of prided myself in being able to follow a tradition from India and like meditate the "real way". But anyway, I really like these Dispenza meditations. And they're quite long. They're an hour, too, sometimes an-hour-and-a-half. Some of them, the ones that you do at 4:00 in the morning, the pineal ones are like four hours.

[01:04:11]David Rabin:  Wow.

[01:04:12]Luke Storey:  And when I get back from the sun gazing, I put on that meditation on. And like this morning, I did it, the Apollo, put on my ankle, make sure it was charged when I got back to meditate, I put on my Joe Dispenza thing, and dude, I go into like the deepest meditation imaginable without being asleep. And you might look at me and think I'm asleep, but I am just in the sweetest spot of Theta, I would say, where my body's asleep, but my mind's slightly awake.

[01:04:47]David Rabin:  Right.

[01:04:47]Luke Storey:  In other words, if somebody said something across the room, I would hear them, but barely. And that's the state that I find that I really have the most relief of stress, and also, just the most-

[01:04:58]David Rabin:  Quiet mind.

[01:04:59]Luke Storey:  Yeah. And the most insights, the downloads come, the ideas come. It's from there that I can really envision my day, envision my life. I can actualize goals and I can manifest. And like that's where the magic happens for me. And I think I'm fairly skilled at it just through repetition and practice over the years on my own, but like the combination of those two things for anyone listening, like if you're someone who has a hard time meditating, download a couple of the Dispenza mp3s, which, they're really expensive.

[01:05:29] They're like 15 bucks a pop on the side or something. I meant to ask him about that when I interviewed him, like really, dude, 15 bucks for one meditation. Damn. But hey, on the other, you got some skin in the game though, it's like if you dropped 15 bucks on an mp3, you're going to listen to it, which I have every one. But the combination of the Apollo on the meditation setting and that, after doing some breath work and sun gazing, dude, I am having the best days ever. Meanwhile, the world is crumbling around me, seemingly. 

[01:05:58] So, anyway, huge fan of that one. And then, the energy one, I'll put on after I meditate because I'm pretty groggy coming out of that experience, plus just getting up that early, which I'm not quite used to. But the energy one, I'll be damned, I've tested it, like not drinking coffee, not taking my cold shower, and I just do that on the notch, and when I'm really groggy, and I just see, all right, let me see if this shit does anything. And I put the energy in whatever went on, and lo and behold, 50 minutes later, I'm like, God damn, I'm actually super awake and alert. It's weird. I'm like, I can't believe it.

[01:06:33] So, kudos to you for inventing something that actually works and does what it says it's going to do because a lot of this stuff doesn't really do anything, frankly, in the tech world. I like the Oura Ring. It's effective and useful. There's a few other things around, but I have a lot of things I've tried. I have like kind of a junk drawer for tech, biohacking stuff. And then, people send me stuff, and it just sits in there, and I don't want to sell it because someone gave it to me. So, I don't know what to do with it. I don't want to give it away because I'm like, I'm not going to give it away to a friend of mine because it doesn't work or it'll be-

[01:07:12]David Rabin:  I have a good use for that, Luke. If you ever have any of that extra biohacking stuff you want to get rid of, just send it my way and we'll put that stuff to good use.

[01:07:19]Luke Storey:  All right. I will.

[01:07:20]David Rabin:  Consider that donation for a cause. 

[01:07:22]Luke Storey:  I actually, literally do. The other day, I cleaned out my work office closet here and I found a bunch of these old EMF devices and just different things that I liked for a while, and then I found something better or whatever. One of the things I want to give you kudos for on this is having the ability to turn the Bluetooth off once you activate the particular journey or something that you want to do. I'm forever frustrated by people that come up with products that are intended to provide health benefits that also fry you with EMF, almost like, why, you guys? 

[01:07:59] Like it's not that hard to, if you have to activate some of these Bluetooth to have a setting where you can turn it off. So, this is for all the entrepreneurs out there that want to invent a health or biohacking product. Also, a lot of them produce incredible amounts of blue light. And so, you can't use them at night, which is equally as annoying. So, I've like hacked all of my devices by putting the true dark red tape over everything because what good is a device if it screws with your melatonin, your sleep? So, that's my rant on not thought out technology design.

[01:08:35]David Rabin:  Yeah. Well, thank you. And we really tried to make something that would—I mean, I think the test with all this is that we listen to our customers. We have not made technology before. Apollo is a labor of love from my wife, Catherine, and I to the world to try to just help make things a little better for people in any way we can. And it's been an incredibly, incredibly difficult task to bring a product to market. 

[01:09:02] And so, the only way that we could do it was to ask people like you to try our technology, and tell us what you think, and how we can make it better, and what you would want to see it do, and all of those things. And we didn't know about EMF when we started this process to the extent that we do now. But in large part, thanks to Tim Gray's Health Optimization Summit, we learned so much about EMF that we have put the airplane mode into the Apollo app on purpose because we really think that that's important to address. And I think that a lot of other apps do it, too. And I really appreciate that the Oura Ring does it as well.

[01:09:37]Luke Storey:  Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's one extra step. Sometimes, I forget to do it on my Oura Ring. And listen, is it the end of the world if I have Bluetooth on my finger a few nights? Like whatever. I realize we're all going to check out eventually. It's like, I'm not one of these guys that's trying to live until I'm 300 or something. I just would prefer to not suffer while I'm here. And prolonged use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and all of these things is not good. So, why add it if you don't have to? Before we get into some of this other content around psychedelics, I'm just having so much fun here, so thank you for humoring me with so much time. And if at any point you're like, dude, I got to go, just let me know because-

[01:10:24]David Rabin:  I have four minutes.

[01:10:25]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Really?

[01:10:26]David Rabin:  Yeah.

[01:10:26]Luke Storey:  Okay. Good.

[01:10:28]David Rabin:  Because I have to use the little boy's room before my next meeting, but if you want, we can do this again.

[01:10:36]Luke Storey:  Let's do it. Well-

[01:10:36]David Rabin:  Happy to.

[01:10:37]Luke Storey:  Yeah. Let's do it. Well, actually, you know what, maybe we could—I wonder if we could do like a—either we do a part two or we just do a continuation of this one. But then, I'd have to like make everything look the same and we'd have to wear the same clothes and all that, which is, it's Hollywood continuity. You know what, what we'll do is we'll go ahead and just wrap this one up. And then, I'll just have you come back on and we'll do an adjunct to this conversation because I really do want to get into like specifically, how do you work with LSD? What's up with these ketamine journeys and IVs? And my recent experience doing a one-on-one journey with the healer where I did MDMA and mushrooms. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my freaking life.

[01:11:33]David Rabin:  I bet.

[01:11:34]Luke Storey:  I got so much accomplished in that few hours. And all of the other things, nootropics, and microdosing, and neurofeedback. And I want to talk about psych meds, and when and if they're valid and useful and all kinds of different stuff. So, we'll shut her down and I'll let you get on your next five minutes to go to the bathroom. I think this was a really good introduction to your work, and also, turn people on to the Apollo and whatnot. And in closing, I'm just going to ask you my classic question, which I remember most of the time, and that is who had been three teachers or teachings that have influenced you and your work?

[01:12:14]David Rabin:  That's a good question. It's a tough one. I mean, I would say, the easiest way for me to answer that question is with the teachings. I've had a lot of teachers who have been incredibly important as mentors to me over the years. I think the two most important have been my parents. And I'm so grateful for them helping to make up for some of the gaps that I think I would not have—the gaps that I had from school that I would not have figured out how to make up for on my own. 

[01:12:48] I wouldn't even have thought about what to do. But I think the main teachings that I've taken with me from my parents, and also, from my studies of tribal medicine, and psychedelic medicine, and psychology, and psychiatry are really these teachings of gratitude, and forgiveness, and compassion, and self-love. And I think, where the neuroscience comes into that is that Eric Kandel, who discovered and won the Nobel Prize for discovering the mechanisms of learning and memory in 2002.

[01:13:22] Also, it basically discovered, the way that we learn is practice makes perfect, right? So, the more that we practice anything, whether that's gratitude, or compassion, or forgiveness, or self-love, or whether that's anger and ruthlessness, or aggression, or self-hate, or what have you, the more you practice any of those things, the better you get at them. So, the more of our precious limited time on this earth that we can spend practicing things that help us like gratitude, and self-forgiveness, and self-compassion, and self-love, as much as we possibly can practices things in our lives, then the closer to our fullest, happiest, most fulfilled whole versions of ourselves that we can be. And again, I think the most exciting part of all that is it's free. So, you can start today.

[01:14:09]Luke Storey:  Absolutely. Thank you for that because we do get a lot of people writing in to the show wanting to know about the things they can do to improve their sense of well-being and health in general that are free. And because it's easy to get caught up with all the devices, and supplements, and all the things, and some of them are quite pricey. Thankfully, by the way, the Apollo, how much is the Apollo? It's not as much as some of these things.

[01:14:31]David Rabin:  The Apollo is $349.

[01:14:33]Luke Storey:  All right.

[01:14:33]David Rabin:  But we'll give a special discount to your listeners.

[01:14:36]Luke Storey:  Okay. Cool. I mean, to some people, that's a chunk of change. Right now, for me, that's not a lot, especially in comparison to some of the coin I've dropped on some other things here at the house. But I always tell people like if you don't have any money and you don't want to buy devices, or supplements, or anything like that to improve your life, like get up, watch the sunrise, do some breath work, meditate, take a nice bath, so many other things, pray, all of the attitudinal things that you just described, gratitude, human connection, love, touch, sex, affection, all of that, giving service.

[01:15:13] And a lot of people don't want to do those things because they require a little more effort and self-discipline. People, when I used to do one-on-one coaching, like if people have depression, my number one thing was like, all right, you're going to watch the sunrise for seven days and watch your depression go away because you're going to make a shitload of dopamine throughout the day, and your serotonin, then the melatonin metabolites that, you're going to be good. Probably, just that. And very few of them could do it. They're like, yeah, what about that nootropic? So, thank you for closing with that profound wisdom. And it's with much anticipation and enthusiasm that I'll look forward to our next chat.

[01:15:52]David Rabin:  Likewise. Thank you so much for having me.

[01:15:54]Luke Storey:  You know what, there's one less thing. Actually, give us your social media and any websites you want people to go visit. 

[01:15:59]David Rabin:  Oh, sure. So, if you want to find out more about Apollo, you can go to www.apolloneuro.com or apolloneuroscience.com. It's A-P-O-L-L-O-N-E-U-R-O-.com. We also have some really great tips on how to cope with stress in this particularly stressful time, so please check those out. Those are also free. And I personally use them and I think they're extremely effective at helping me maintain my health and resist getting sick. And you could also reach out to me personally at my clinical practice website. It's drdave.io. And I'm also on Twitter @daverabin and on Instagram @drdavidrabin.

[01:16:43]Luke Storey:  Awesome, man. Thank you. We'll put all that stuff in the show notes. And for those listening, you know the drill. Get on the newsletter at lukestorey.com/newsletter. And we're going to send you the transcripts, all the notes, all the clickables, every link that was mentioned throughout this conversation to your inbox every Tuesday. And with that, my friend, I will bid you farewell. You have a great next appointment. And I can't wait to talk to you again. We'll get on email, and we'll book a part two, and we'll go at it again.

[01:17:09]David Rabin:  Can't wait.

[01:17:10]Luke Storey:  All right.

[01:17:27]David Rabin:  Thanks, Luke.

[01:17:27]Luke Storey:  Yeah. You, too.

[01:17:27]David Rabin:  Take care.

[01:17:28]

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