MDMA Therapy Without the Drugs? How Vibration Hacks Your Brain for Neuroplasticity | Dave Rabin : 1260

MDMA therapy is really unique because it's one of the most well understood psychedelic therapy techniques. And it works by amplifying safety cascades in our emotional brain. It sends positive emotion. And so we were trying to use sound waves to replicate some of those safety states in the body. The body has ways of regulating itself based on sound. It's actually been known for thousands of years that music and singing or chanting, the creation of music from the body, can actually induce what's called resonance states, meaning states of harmony between the heart and lungs.

What happens when you have the right vibrations in the right place? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an Upgrade Spotlight edition where I bring an innovator, founder and inventor in to talk about something new and interesting in the world of biohacking. And today we've got a returning guest, Dr. Dave Rabin, who's a well known, distinguished figure in neuroscience, psychiatry and psychedelic medicine, and some of the spiritual sides of it as well. We're friends and have gotten to know each other over the years. And one of the areas in biohacking that has been on the roadmap forever but probably doesn't get enough notice or respect is vibration. The definition of biohacking, when I started this movement, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your own biology. And isn't it weird that vibration is a part of the world around you? And isn't it weird that vibration is something that is a primordial sense you can feel if something's tapping you and you'll know if it's tapping you in a big way, like someone punching you or, you know, we've all stood on maybe a vibration plate or just, you know, you're sitting on a, in a shaky car and you like, why am I tired after this? I used to have that. I had a, an Audi TT Quattro convertible. And by the time I got to work, I felt like someone had abused me. And that's just vibration stimulated my body maybe in a way that I could have handled with a better suspension system. So maybe it's a signal that matters. Well, it turns out there's a neuroscientist out there who said, hell yeah, let's do something about that. And that is Dave Rabin, in addition to many other things. So with that cool introduction, at least I think it's cool. Dave, welcome back to the Human Upgrade.

Thanks so much for having me, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here with you, as always.

Do people make fun of you being board certified, big name neuroscience guy, playing around with vibration?

I think 20, 30 years ago, there was a lot more confusion around this topic. And, you know, I think a lot of the modern approach to what we maybe taking a step back from what we think of as just vibration, as like tactile movement that you can feel, like touch or your phone vibrating on your, you know, in your pocket or something like that, or like what a pager might do in the past, in the 90s, right. These kinds of experiences are what we think of as felt physical vibration. But vibration, really, in the, in the traditional sense of physics, is every sensory experience we have. So everything. And string theory is based on this, right? That we are all composed of little vibrating particles that are subatomic, but also that the cells and the components of our cells also change and turn on and off at different frequencies. Light is vibration that we can see, sound is vibration that we can hear, and touch is vibration that we can feel. And so as we start to take into account the. The understanding of what vibration really is, which is it's just particles moving over time that create a sense of waves or rhythm, it starts to help us understand much more clearly that vibration impacts our bodies and how we feel and our sensation experiences, our whole life experiences, but also that it impacts our biology because it's creating resonance patterns in our cells, between our heart and lungs and between how our all our brain and our organ systems work, which effectively governs almost everything we experience every day. Which is pretty darn cool.

It's beyond pretty darn cool. I think it's foundational in our nervous system. And a lot of the foundational things, you don't pay attention to how hot it is unless it's really hot or how cold unless it's really cold. But a fluctuation by a couple degrees changes all kinds of things in the body. So there are these invisible signals that change your state. And you invented a device. I've got it on my wrist right now. I actually have the strap on it that goes on my ankle. So it's a little bit big on my wrist. This is the Apollo Neuro. I remember when you first launched that in one of the first few units that came out, I'm like, this is cool stuff because you're doing something in the nervous system that's simple, it's non, invasive, but it's relatively powerful. So what happens when you have the right vibrations in the right place? Walk me through the neurobiology of this.

Yeah. So, you know, Apollo is effectively wearable music that is tuned for your nervous system through your sense of touch. So anybody who's ever stood next to a subwoofer and listened to a great live show, or even in your own home or somebody else's home, knows the feeling of sound in our bodies, right? And you feel. When you feel bass, big bass, bass, vibration, you feel it more in your body than you hear it through your ears. And the body has ways of regulating itself based on sound. And sound is sound you can hear and also includes sound you can feel, like bass. So when we think about music, it's really interesting. You know, we've never had a. I grew up as learning music. I was never particularly good at it, but I always loved music. And I always noticed that it had this tremendous impact on my life and those around me. It brought people together. When you're having a bad day and your favorite song randomly comes on in the car or in the office or on the radio, all of a sudden, you start to feel better almost instantly. And when I started to look at the research behind this, knowing that this is a nearly universal human experience, there wasn't a lot of good data on the neuroscience of what happens to this sound wave that comes into our ears on a bad day. And then within seconds, or, you know, at minutes at the most, we're feeling completely different. And that always fascinated me, and how music gets us into flow states, and music helps us recover and enter meditative states and sleepy states more easily. And so this was all known, and it's actually been known for thousands of years, that music and singing or chanting, the creation of music from the body, can actually induce what's called resonance states, meaning states of harmony between the heart and lungs. And that when we induce these states of harmony, our heart and lungs are working at optimal efficiency together. So that can be done through listening to a calming meditation track or can be done through soothing, slow, deep breathing. It can be done through soothing touch. It can be done through yoga, stretching. Lots of different things that alternate in our bodies at different frequencies can either be what we call dissonant with our body's rhythm, or harmonious or resonant with our body's rhythm and with nature's rhythm.

And.

And it turns out that the more harmonious our heart and lungs and our brain are, the more they're working at a rhythm that's similar to nature, the better we feel, and they work together more efficiently. And the result of that is we feel more joy, we feel more present and we feel more like ourselves. And when we are dissonant with the environment, when there's like, too much construction sounds, or like you said, when you're driving in your Audi TT and there is not enough suspension, so you're really feeling the vibration of the road quite a bit, that can actually create dissonance in the body, which manifests as anxiety or restlessness or racing thoughts or increased heart rate or all of the above. And so it's really understanding the relationship that's happening in real time between our bodies and the environment that helps us to get into our peak state or flow, which could be with recovery or performance at any time. And the more we learn the impact of vibration on the body and frequency, the easier it is to teach ourselves to get into those states. Almost like training your muscles in the gym.

How do you know that when someone's wearing an Apollo that it's playing the right vibration for them?

So Apollo works by delivering several different vibration patterns. There's about 12 in the app and 7 in the bass app, and they're all for different times of day or different goals. So the kind of energy similar to music, right? The kind of energy that you're going to want in the morning is different when you're waking up, is different than the kind of energy you're going to want at night when you're about to fall asleep. And that's different from what you're going to want when you're out socializing with your friends or when you're trying to zone in and focus on, like, intense, boring paperwork or whatever it is. And so what we are able to do is have you have our users tell us, okay, I need to do the following. I need to be social right now, or I need to go out to a party and I'm tired, or I have to focus or sleep or wake up. And so people can select from any of those different vibration patterns in the app, similar to choosing a song. And like, an Apollo works in that way at the most basic level. It's a remote control for our emotional nervous system, which is really cool. So you can actually just like putting on a song that helps get you into a certain zone. You can set your Apollo to focus vibes, and you can put yourself into a focus flow for, you know, half an hour to two hours and go at that deep work without distraction because your mind and body are zoned in on exactly what you have to do right now, just like putting on a focus music track. But the nice part about Apollo Is you can wear it with you and it goes with you throughout the day and then you can schedule your day. So it's like you get the benefit of having this ambient soundtrack composed with soothing low frequency sound waves for your body that activate the body in a way that's similar to soothing touch or breath work. But it does it on the go throughout our day, which is what all of us were supposed to do as learn to do as kids in with, you know, old school meditation and breathing techniques. But myself and many other people I know did not learn that growing up. And so we never learned how to master command of our breath, which to your point about what biohacking is all about, you know, it's all about getting taking control of your biology and learning how to deep breathe, learning how to control our thoughts, our attention and be mindful. And all of these different ancient techniques are just as, if not more powerful ways to learn and master control over our biology than the modern stuff. The modern technology based tools are really great and a lot of the stuff that you talk about is really great because it helps remind us how to do the old traditional techniques and they complement each other really well. And Apollo is another tool inspired by, you know, your work in biohacking and helping people assert control over their lives that we can use to give us more, you know, agency over the way we feel, our energy level and our emotion, our emotional nervous system.

Do people use Apollo during psychedelic journeys? Given that you're an expert in both?

Yeah. So this was actually something that we discovered by chance. Originally we developed Apollo as out of my work at the University of Pittsburgh Medical center to treat PTSD in veterans. And we developed it out of the way that MDMA therapy works because I was studying MDMA therapy at the time and treating veterans with severe ptsd and I saw the results coming out of the maps MDMA trials which were, you know, regardless of whatever else you want to think about, those trials, it's the best results we've ever seen for any mental illness in the history of psychiatry.

Oh my gosh, we should ban that right away. We can't have people healing, I mean. Oh, okay.

Yeah. I mean, it's paradigm shifting for the field, right. To be able to give somebody one to three doses of medicine with 42 hours of highly condensed intensive psychotherapy, which is a recipe for remission or cure, is a totally different paradigm of mental health than what we were doing before, which is I'm going to stabilize you for life, but actually just, you know, walk around, steer around the core problem and never really talk about it, right. And so, and so MDMA therapy is really unique because it's one of the most well understood psychedelic therapy techniques. And it works by amplifying safety cascades in our emotional brain, which tells our amygdala, that fear center that all animals have, all even going back to ancient reptiles hundreds of millions of years, it tells that little fear center amigols, it's blasting off saying, hey, you might be under threat, you might be under threat, you need to watch out for your survival. And it, it sends positive emotion safety signals to that that says, hey bud, you don't need to blast off right now. You're safe. You're safe enough to be present, you're safe enough to heal, and you're safe enough to remake meaning around past traumatic events. And so when we developed Apollo, we really were trying to use vibration sound waves to replicate some of those safety states in the body. And soothing touch is one of the fastest ways to get there. So now come full circle, people started using Apollo in psychedelic experiences. And in the real world, when we started doing our testing, just prototype testing between 2018 and 2020, we started to get tons of reports back from just regular folks who were testing Apollo, using it with ketamine, mdma, ayahuasca, psilocybin therapy, lsd, recreational experiences, and the three things that came back repeatedly over and over again that were so interesting were number one, this helped me drop into a deeper experience or helped me relieve some of my anxiety about what I was going to experience with this psychedelic. The second one was this helped me navigate challenging experiences and uncomfortable experiences that came up while I was under the influence of the psychedelic or helped me actually get out of a bad trip, which was actually fascinating. And number three was this is helping me integrate what I've learned. So it's helping me remind me of that feeling, the pleasant feelings of the psychedelic when it was active in my body during the medicine experience, so that I can start to unpack and integrate what I was learning from that experience into my day to day lives life. And these are the three most critical phases of psychedelic use. And this is and therapy. And this is what people were doing without instruction. So now we've actually started two trials, one with Dr. Pam Crisco, who's doing some of the first group therapy studies for psilocybin and ketamine in traumatized first responders in British Columbia, with Apollo in group therapy settings with ketamine and psilocybin before, during and after. And then we're also running a trial with MAPS for integration specifically where anybody who has ever experienced MDMA in a MAPS controlled trial can get a free Apollo device just by reaching out to us through our study website. And then we'll do the long term follow up of seeing can we sustain remission by by facilitating integration with the wearable. And then we have ketamine clinicians using Apollo just in the wild right now treating over a thousand patients over the last couple of years because it's our wellness device that anybody can access. So we've seen a lot of great results just in the wild with ketamine therapy as well.

I absolutely believe it.

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Ketamine is a really powerful substance and we're talking about, you know, an Apollo neuro device here that provides these low level neurological inputs to the body that evolved from psychedelic therapy. And we're in the late stages of turning on ketamine assisted neurofeedback at 40 years of Zen where ketamine enhances neuroplasticity in a very meaningful way. So I can help people who choose to add ketamine to their experience to have a more flexible brain. Question for you though is if I'm using Apollo neuro and I'm not using psychedelics, is it also going to increase neuroplasticity?

So we haven't done the, the official neuroplastic studies yet where. And neuroplasticity is very commonly misunderstood word. So for everybody listening, neuroplasticity means learning. So that's just the fancy neuroscience term for learning. And neuroplasticity on the biological perspective has three components, one of which is neurogenesis, so the formation of new neurons. The second one is neurogeneration, so the regrowth and repair of old, dead and dying neurons. And the third is synaptogenesis, which is the most common form of neuroplasticity or learning, which is the building of new neural connections. And one of the core premises, premise, the core premise actually for all neuroplasticity to take effect and for learning that we've seen in neuroscience research for the last probably 50 years is safety. We have to feel safe and be in a vagal dominant state, so more parasympathetic, more rest and digest recovery to optimize learning and neuroplasticity. And if we're not safe, what happens? All of our blood flow gets diverted to skeletal muscle fight or flight systems, skeletal muscles, heart, lungs, motor cortex of the brain and fear center of the brain. And the first things that happen are tunnel vision, right? Emotional lability, emotional irritability because we're diverting resources away from the empathy center to the survival centers. And open mindedness closes as symbolized by tunnel vision. Because you don't want to be open minded when you're running from a lion. You need to get the heck out of there as quickly as possible. We don't want to be thinking about reproduction or digestion or immunity. We need to get the heck out of there. And that's what our bodies evolved to do. So the problem is we don't have those kinds of threats in our day to day lives. We have overstimulation from too much news, too much, too much, too much like inbound, incoming, overwhelm, too many responsibilities, too much stress, all of it. And so that tricks our bodies into thinking that we're under threat when we're not. So that makes learning really, really hard. And so when you're doing these practices, whether it's with Apollo or with neurofeedback, with, or with psychedelic assisted therapy, what we're all of those therapies to work well are rooted in a foundation of safety, which is as soon as you walk in through that door and meet your clinical provider, you feel comfortable, at ease and ready to have the experience you are there to have. And that safety sets a foundation for taking that tunnel vision of our day to day and doing what we call widening the window. Right. So it's expansive of our awareness. And so any technique like or tool like Apollo, psychedelic medicine, neurofeedback or empathy breathing, slow, deep breathing, soothing touch, soothing music, all these things that boost vagal tone or are inherently neuroplastic and neuroplasticity inducing because they facilitate learning by reminding us we're safe enough to learn. Does that make sense?

Oh, it not only makes sense, it's. There's so much richness in there, the idea of safety and just that you're being cared for. When I designed the 40 Years of Zen location, every little thing there is about safety. And you go into these pods that are designed, they're womb shaped and you sit in this kind of round thing, but you just feel neurologically held and that you're in a safe space. Not because you thought it was safe, because your body recognized it as a safe space. Like you're. You're in your own cave.

Exactly.

And you don't have to watch your back right now. And you've got a staff who's caring for you, so you can just really let go and go deep, which creates those learning states. And to hear you explain it that way, you also opened something else up for me, the tunnel vision thing. So I was born in a fight or flight state because I had the cord wrapped around my neck coming out. So you come into the world thinking that something's trying to kill you. You can get stuck in that state for a long time, and it's classical ptsd. So part of my recovery from that and also from Asperger's syndrome, when I was younger, I came to understand that I always had tunnel vision. And it took about six months of very intensive vision training for me to learn how to see in my peripheral vision, because I had never done it as a human being, because I was born in tunnel vision, I just always used that. And I had no idea that you could see other things outside of it. And part of that was reprogramming the way my eyes work together. These are all invisible to your consciousness. But I learned how to make my eyes team properly. I removed the need for corrective lenses through training my eyes, which is another thing. And I learned how to see the world in a working visual system that I never had. As someone who'd been on the spectrum, it was one of the many things I had to rewire. But the idea that someone listening right now, you might be in tunnel vision, and you wouldn't know it because it may just be a state that you're used to. And if you take a few deep breaths and you relax and you sort of like, what can I see at the edges of my vision without moving my eyes? Well, that's part of the relaxation response. And I kind of wish I had an Apollo back then, because I could have put it on and I think my vision training would have been a lot less work. Sound likely?

Yeah, I think so. And. And I think because every. Like, we can stack these tools, right? That's one of the coolest things, is they're not. They don't. They need not be used independently. You know, you can stack all these tools. If you stack music with your meditation experiences, they get better. If you stack music plus meditation plus Apollo, your meditation experiences get better and deeper. And for anybody at home who's like, I really don't understand the difference, like, what this Apollo thing really is. If you have an iPhone and you're listening to this right now, you can download the Apollo Neuro app on your iPhone, and you can get on the same vibe that Dave and I are on right now just by opening up the app and clicking Feel Apollo. It's only available for iPhone right now as a demo, but it gives you all a chance to feel Apollo and what it is we're talking about. And if you hold your phone to your chest for two minutes with a. With the Apollo vibration going up and down, especially if you sync your breathing with it, you will Notice what Dave and I are talking about, which is when your vision starts to relax and you start to widen your window of awareness and start to become notice. Start to notice. What am I feeling in my body, right? What is all that stuff that might be going on down here? What does my heart rate feel like? What's my breath rate? What do my clothes feel like on my skin? What am I seeing outside of this that I didn't notice before?

Right?

And all that stuff starts to come into our awareness. And that is fundamentally the most basic psychedelic state that we talk about as humans. Because psychedelic doesn't mean drugs. We talk about it a lot around drugs because drugs, psychedelic drugs are super cool because they induce these states, you know, for a time limited period, very reliably. But psychedelic means psyche, means mind, and delos means to show or to reveal. So we're really talking about doing stuff, whatever it is, drug or behavior that expands awareness to all the things in our Freudian subconscious or Carl Jung described as a subconscious or what's just beneath awareness for us, what's normally just stored deep down. And that is essentially how we get access to all of our healing abilities.

I can see a few people saying, okay, this major neuroscientist has made a wrist vibrator for your soul.

A vibrator for your soul.

A vibrator for your soul. Okay, that's really good. But I mean, so people are going to say that and then the next question is, yeah, but okay, we have mechanisms, but can you prove it works? And the good news is you're kind of a real neuroscientist. So you've done a few studies. Tell me about how many studies you've completed. How big were they and what did you find?

So we've completed about 13 clinical trials to date, or 13 clinical studies. I would say about three of them were just early stage pilots that were done in the real world with different mentally ill and general regular healthy populations. Those are not. Those are published on our website, but they weren't done under IRB approval. The other 10 studies because Apollo came out of the university ecosystem were all done with university partners under strict IRB approval. So the same quality oversight that you require for publication of peer reviewed scientific studies that anyone from a university, academic setting, or pharmaceutical company or medical clinic would have to file to make their research valid. And the very first trial, anybody can view and you can see all of our studies to date on our website, on the research page with all the current updates, we have one trial published to date that Was a double blind, randomized, placebo controlled crossover study, which is the most reliable form, or, sorry, most rigorous form of clinical trial that is not by any means required. But we needed to prove to ourselves that Apollo actually was doing something different than other vibrations in the world. And so we conducted two of these very intense laboratory grade run at the University of Pittsburgh in electromagnetically in soundproof shielded rooms. These double blind, randomized, placebo controlled studies which showed us that the Apollo vibrations are reliably improving heart rate variability. And heart rate variability is at the time back in 2016-2020, heart rate variability was just known to be important for a sign of vagal tone or parasympathetic recovery, nervous system activity. And it was known that that having a higher heart rate variability reflects a higher recovery in the body and a higher vagal tone. Higher, more parasympathetic recovery, nervous system activity and more sleep gives us more heart rate variability and more recovery. And that if it's low, if our HRV is low, our chances of getting sick go way up, Our chances of recovery from illness go get, get worse, and our performance under stress goes, goes down significantly. And so what we were able to show in these first two trials was that under physical, like workout level work, intense workout stress, and collegiate athletes, or in regular people undergoing intense cognitive stress, that only when you apply Apollo vibrations to the body and not placebo and not no vibration conditions, and nobody had in the study at any idea what they were receiving or what the vibrations were supposed to do, that heart rate variability reliably went up in a statistically significant way under stress. And usually again, stress makes HRV go down because stress increases fight or flight activity. So HRV went up reliably. And as HRV went up, physical and cognitive performance both went up, and cognitive performance increased to a level that was near amphetamines. So you think about the benefit of calming the body, and that calming the body could give you as much improvement on a test score as amphetamines is pretty darn phenomenal. And it just goes to show how powerful our natural ability to access these states of flow and peak performance actually are. So natural to us, we just need to bring ourselves into the state. So that proved to us in the beginning that this is actually doing something different to the body. These are very specific vibrations and they are composed in a way that is specifically augmenting cognitive and physical function and recovery. And then from there, we did seven more trials, that six of which will be published this year in 2024, showing that Apollo improves sleep significantly as much as Ambien within three months.

Wow.

And that it improved deep sleep and REM sleep, unlike Ambien. So Ambien is commonly one of the most commonly used sleep aids, and it gives you about 22 minutes of average more sleep a night that it decreases deep in REM sleep because it's a sedative hypnotic agent similar to a benzodiazepine. And we use them for insomnia, but they're not ideal because they increase your duration of sleep, but they decrease your quality of sleep. So we showed that by just adding Apollo every night to your sleep routine, that we can increase your sleep by eight minutes more than Ambien. And we get concentrations of deep and REM sleep improvement, which is really, really interesting. And that's the same thing that happens if you practice a deep breathing or meditation or yoga or exercise routine regularly. So we're really starting to tap into using technology, these native healing states and in the body. And we see the benefits long term in those who have diagnosed illness, but also in regular people like you and me.

If you're as excited about this as I am, go to ApolloNeuro.com DaveAsprey and get a discount on it. And thanks to Dr. Dave for giving us a discount. Because I want your biohacking to be affordable. Heart rate variability is something that I brought in very early into the world of biohacking because in 2008 I was an advisor to the Heart Math institute. And Roland McCready, who now runs the Global Consciousness Initiatives, another friend of yours has been on the show a couple times. So I, I did a lot of work on learning how to control my heart rate variability before I started the biohacking movement. And one way is to consciously control it. So suddenly you have a gauge to know what it feels like when you're in fight or flight or rest and reset and to actually have a physical way to change it. But it requires attention and effort, and over time you become calmer. And I'm a much calmer, happier person than I used to be because I learned that. But having external signals in the environment that don't require effort is an add on bonus. So even if you never learn how to control this, well, if you're going to sleep, you might as well get more sleep and less time. And if you can put an Apollo on your wrist or your ankle and it just makes your sleep work, especially if you have a hard time going to sleep, that's cool. But then you wake up and say, well, maybe I should have it in that stressful meeting with my boss because I just know my nervous system won't betray me because I want to be calm and focused, but it won't let me. And so you could say, I'm going to take a tranquilizer before my meeting. That's just not a very good longevity strategy or a very sustainable strategy. And it's also expensive. So this is one of those really cool biohacks that's just worth paying attention to. And it's not terribly expensive. It's about 350 bucks. Is there a monthly fee as well?

There is a monthly subscription now Since October of 23 that you can add on. And the monthly subscription pays for the brain. So similar to a Peloton or Tonal or Tesla, you buy the product and then the product does what it does in its basic manual form. You can program it to do everything you want it to do, but if you pay the 100 bucks a year for the brain, then we actually developed over the last five years, from studying our generous users data who have volunteered to share with us for research purposes, we were able to train predictive and generative AI to actually predict what vibes will work for you, to augment your life and feeling for you in advance of a situation you're going into. So if you have Oura ring, we will pair with your Oura ring and then we'll generate vibes for you throughout the day. And then all you need to do is wear both products and sync your turn on your apps once a day. And then your aura data will get better just by nature of wearing both products because we're generating vibes tuned to your aura data. So it's really neat because it creates a wearable ecosystem. Opportunity play.

Right? I haven't connected mine. I didn't realize that about it. I mean, I've had. I've used it for years.

You can connect in the little settings. There's a. If you hit the gear in the upper right of the Apollo app, then you'll see a little button that says connect my Oura ring.

Well, there it is. Who would have thought, right? I'm doing it right now. And yeah, connect Oura Ring. God, that's cool.

You'll have to put in your name and password for aura. But then the. But then the best part about the AI is that we developed one of the. One of my most favorite features because it actually impacted my life. Because ever since we started this company in 2017, Catherine, my wife, who's the CEO, has not been able to sleep through the night. And when your partner can't sleep through the night, even if you're the best sleeper, you're not going to sleep through the night.

Yeah, they keep getting up, right?

Yeah, right. Or waking you up. And so, and so what we developed was we thought, well, what is AI great at doing? AI is great at monitoring stuff that we can't monitor when we're unconscious. So what if we monitor your sleep behavior and we track when you're sleeping well and deeply, when you're sleeping restlessly and about to wake up and when you're awake in the night and then train Apollo to turn on just with Apollo alone, without any other wearable, train Apollo to turn on on the edge before you actually wake up when restlessness is detected. And what we've seen since launching that, which was the first versions came out in April of 2023. What we've seen since launching that in studying it in over 7,000 people is that people who wake up in the middle of the night are getting an hour or more sleep a night that's concentrated in deep in REM because we're actually be able to use predictive AI to prevent unwanted wake ups. And for anybody who's familiar with sleep science or biohacking or psychiatry psychology field, we have not had a successful treatment that's non drug for this problem ever in the history of sleep science. And AI is actually solving that for us. So that's really, really cool. And that's the primary benefit that most people get from using Apollo with the AI subscription. Wow.

Okay. This is a new advance since the last time you and I connected on it. I'm pretty impressed our upgrade collective is listening in. This is my mentorship group. You guys can join it. Go to ourupgradecollective.com and you get to be a live audience member in the podcast. And Jim says he's been using Apollo for a couple years mostly for sleep and wake up modes. But he wants to know, okay, sometimes he doesn't put it on at night. If you're used to using Apollo at night and then you sleep without it, do you lose the benefits or do they stay with you?

So for most people, when we've done. Because we've done tracking of folks for three years with OURA Ring, which is how we ended up building a lot of these features was through a three year study partnership with Oura, that study's coming out in the next quarter across 1300 people. But from looking at these people, we wanted. I'm an Addiction psychiatrist by training. So I wanted to find out how long will the effects last and will people become dependent on the technology or will people integrate it in a healthy way into their lives. And what's so interesting is it's actually the latter. So people often start using Apollo all the time in the range of like four to eight hours a day. And then gradually, even though over time they still use it, but they use it at a lower intensity, meaning they turn the, they turn the volume down because their bodies become more sensitive to the vibration. So they require less, not more. And they use it slightly less each day over time to the tune of like not eight hours a day, but maybe like two to four hours a day. And that's really neat because it's actually. And from what we've seen when we track aura data is that there's a residual tail on how much, how long your biometrics stay in a better range after using Apollo. So even if you, in the lab, if you use Apollo for 3:30 minutes in the lab, what we see is there's usually a 15 minute to 2 hour tail in terms of how long your HRV stays high after using it for 30 minutes and how long your heart rate resting, heart rate stays low, and how calm you feel. Kind of like Shavasana or how you feel after a massage. It lasts about that long. And it depends on how much stress you have right after obviously. But it's roughly 15 minutes to 2 hours. Now if you, if you look at people over time and like I've been using Apollo every day for one month, two months, three months, a year, and then you stop using it. It seems like the effect tail on the bio, on your biometric baseline lasts for anywhere from two to four weeks before you start to come back to your regular pre Apollo baseline. So it's similar to a meditation, a breath, work practice. If you stop, if you do it every day and then stop doing it for a month, the effects will gradually start to fade away.

That's pretty solid. And by the way, I just got my Apollo hooked up to my aura as we were talking. So I'm excited to give that a try tonight. I just didn't realize there was an integration. So there you go. You gotta do better marketing on that.

More coming.

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Now there's some other things that are kind of unbelievable, but they're real studies. Talk to me about what happens when kids with ADHD wore Apollo in a study.

So this has been a big focus for us because Medic A lot of the medications used in children with psychiatric disorders, ADHD being one of the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorders nowadays in children. A lot of these medications have really unpleasant side effects. They cause weight loss in kids, they cause irritability, they can. They cause appetite suppression and they impair sleep. And for kids to function at a high level without drugs on board, we don't want to impair any of that stuff. Right. We don't want those side effects of drugs. So while some small minority of children often do require medication for adhd, it's the medication like Adderall, Ritalin, they're all widely over prescribed and the disorder is way over diagnosed, which is a huge issue. And so we're trying to combat that as a field. But in general, you know, we wanted to develop more tools for children that could help them and teens who could help, that could help them avoid having to rely on drugs if possible. And so the very first vibe we developed, and it turns out that PTSD and ADHD actually are highly co occurring illnesses. So this is something that more recently has come through the literature in the last five to 10 years. And so when you think about that, a lot of our PTSD patients also have attention issues during the day and focus issues. And a lot of our ADHD diagnosed kids actually have a history of trauma. And so when we developed the very first Apollo Vibe, which is the focus vibe on the app, that Vibe was specifically for folks who had what we would call a trauma history or stress history that had attention and focus issues. And it also happened to work for all the rest of us too, which is really interesting. And so that's why we released it to the public as a consumer product. But we ended up putting it out to many different pediatrics clinics. And the first pilots of those clinics were in kids with adhd, autism and anxiety disorder, which we call the triple threat. And these kids are most often do not respond to medication.

Well, that would have been me as a kid, by the way.

Right, right. You were talking about that earlier. Right. Oftentimes like kids and those kids just don't respond well to medication and they wind up getting the prescribed the most medication, usually like three to seven or 10 different drugs and they're, and, and then nobody knows like why is this kid still struggling? Well, the medication's not getting the root cause, which is this kid doesn't feel safe in their own skin. Right. And so that's what psychotherapy, talk therapy and really good therapy. That's what it's all about. But now we're in a drug focused mental health world and so we need, we're going back, right? We need to go back to the root cause. And so Apollo really helps with this by creating these safety states in the body. And kids, kids are using it in school, they're using it in therapy, and they're using it for these three specific issues which are anxiety, autism and ADHD. And it's been extremely helpful. And we saw 90 plus percent success rates in the clinics that are actually just providing it as a wellness product to their kids who are struggling. We see 90 plus percent success rates because kids are just able to control it themselves. So being in control of your feelings automatically drops your anxiety level a little bit. Being less medication dependent drops your anxiety a little bit because you're more in control. And then it's also a self soothing tool that helps kids feel safe and comfortable focusing and being present in their own bodies. And so when you combine all these three features together, kids have really gravitated to Apollo. And so now we're actually working on taking Apollo through the FDA for adhd and we have a little more work to do on that front. We just finished our first trial and we should be getting the results back in the next several months.

Isn't that just going to make it 10 times more expensive for autistic kids versus just having them with the wellness device?

Well, the Wellness device will always be available so people can get it any way that, any, in any way. The benefit of going through the FDA and getting additional approvals for the FDA is so that we can get insurance to cover it for those who can't afford it on the consumer device. So the main goal is let's get insurance to pay for this because all those veterans who are, you know, financially struggling, who are at the VA and all of the kids who are, who are from, you know, social economically disadvantaged backgrounds with depression, adhd, autism, they need help too. And if we can get insurance companies to cover this for them, then it could be life changing and it could help them take less meds. And what would be, what could be much better than that?

You know, it's remarkable what focusing on wellness does for disease states.

Exactly.

Versus focusing on the disease state. But I like the idea. Look, let's make insurance pay for it because insurance doesn't pay for that many useful things anyway. So let's make it pay for something.

Useful because they should.

They should. If, if the goal of insurance was to make you well, that would be definitely what they would do. It's, it's interesting though. I mean, a 50% reduction in stress, 90% efficacy, 100% of the kids and your, your pilot had improvements in mood and behavior. It's hard to say that it's placebo. It, it's not, it's affecting low level systems that are invisible to us most of the time. And your background, understanding psychedelics and neuroscience the way you do I think has allowed you to, to hone in on, let's change a very low level system to get high level responses. And that's just a very efficient way of doing things, which is what biohacking is about. I, I don't think any of us need to spend, you know, $2 million a year biohacking ourselves. In fact, most of us are never gonna be able to do that. I've spent $2 million over 20 years and of that I really should have only needed about 200,000. If we'd have just known what worked. But there wasn't biohacking, there weren't tools like this out there. It would've been vanishingly easy with what's available today, including Apollo for me when I was 19 years old, say, you know, I've had enough of all this and just completely change everything about how I think, how I move, how I feel, how I look, how I take tests, how I engage with people. In about six months I'm gonna have to change my diet, but we know what to do. I'm gonna have to change my sleep, we know what to do and we're gonna have to change my nervous system. And this is a tool to do it. And yes, I would layer in neurofeedback and vision training and some of the other stuff that you do, but I am now, not only I'm not on the spectrum, I would say, and I think most neuroscientists would agree with me, but I'm so much higher performing than I've ever been at any time in my life because of low level, you know, mitochondria on up kind of biohack. So I, I just think this is something that doesn't get enough attention. Apollo specifically because it's affecting heart rate variability. Everyone listening to the show has probably heard me talk about it, has maybe heard an episode on it, and we're all working to do it. And I've talked about supplements that raise it and breath work like yoga, Nidra, how that can raise it. So there's all these different ways and you could be sitting here going, I, I feel kind of helpless. Well, you can be in control of your biology and here's a $350 way to do it. And there are cheaper ways to take more work and more expensive ways that have different effects. But this is pretty darn unlikely to have any negative effects on you. I mean, have you, have you seen negative effects from Apollo?

Not anything more than the negative effects of like listening to music too loud, you know, like, because Apollo is sound. So when you think about, like, if you turn your volume up too loud on your stereo, right, you're gonna. You're gonna not enjoy the music as much because it's overstimulating. So it's the same thing with Apollo. So it's really, you know, if you. When you adjust the volume to where it feels good, the whole idea is that it feels good. And that's. I think that really gets to the core. And it. Which is why we don't see side effects is because it put. We put the user at the center of the experience and the individuals in control of what feels good to them. Right? And I. And I hesitate to go back to these ancient principles, but Occam's Razor is an important one. We don't teach that much anymore, right? Occam's Razor is the simplest explanation, is likely, often likely, the right one. And it's easy for us to try to come up with a thousand different explanations that are multifactorial explanations for why everything in our lives is not exactly the way we want it to be or how we're not feeling the way we want. Want to be. But, you know, what's one simple explanation? We don't get enough hugs. We don't get enough physical, intimate contact that doesn't have sexual expectations. Right. We don't get enough affection and community connection. What happens when we don't get enough connection? We feel alone. What happens when we're alone for too long a time? We feel lonely. And what happens when we're lonely for too much of the time? We start to think there's something wrong with us, that we're lonely and that we're alone. There's nothing wrong with us. It's just that our society has not been set up for us to have as many genuine, authentic connections with each other and to prioritize that as part of our lives. Because we're always in this thing, the black mirror, right? And this is great when it's used intentionally for productivity. Like, I don't think that we could have built this business the way we did if we didn't have access to smartphone technology. And at the same time, I can't let this decide what I'm paying attention to at any time. This decides, right?

Your brain decides, not your phone.

Yeah, exactly. Novel idea, right? But it's. But it's the way that we think about intention, which comes up a lot during, you know, your conversations with 40 years of Zen and psychedelics and my conversations with psychedelics and Therapy is where are you putting your human energy, right? Are you putting it into solving the problems from the simplest point of reference first, not getting enough connection, hugs and human affection? Or are you trying to solve things and come up with a complex explanation for how all these other things are actually wrong and that you don't have control? First step is take control, right? Take control of the things you have control over. Your breath, your attention, your movement, what you put into your body, what you surround yourself by, the people that you connect with. Take control over that. And then when you still haven't figured out what's going, what's going on, or you're still having some issues you want to deal with, then start to take the questions up another level, right? But do the simple stuff first. And I think that's really the elegant approach that you and I are both trying to teach people.

The idea that you can control your state is. It's profound because if you're always in charge of your state, you. You're unprogrammable. And I used to think that brings you a feeling of peace, and it does. But ultimately it brings you a feeling of danger. But you are the one who is dangerous. Because who knows what you might do? You can choose to do whatever you want to do versus what you're told or what you're programmed to do. And it's a state of freedom where you, oh, what am I gonna do? I'm choose to be peaceful. And that's the kind of piece that's ultimately freeing versus constraining. You can be peaceful because you're exhausted, but that's no good.

That's most of us.

Exactly right. I, I want everyone listening to the show to just realize, you know, I've got more than enough energy today to handle anything that comes my way. And just when you have that, you're not going to yell at your kids, you're not going to cut someone off in traffic, or if you do, you know, you'll wave, you know, and apologize or whatever, but it just doesn't have to be a fight. And I spent so much time making it a fight. And, you know, there's a different way and approaching your nervous system very low down, so it chills. So you chill. That's just OG Biohacking. And Dave, I appreciate your work in the field, both in psychedelics and on neuroscience and on Apollo. It's a really cool biohacking device, I've gotta say. And I'm super stoked on the aura integration, so I'll see how I sleep Tonight I better make sure I have a full charge.

Yeah, I'm excited to hear how that works for you and definitely get it above like 60% before you go to bed and then wear it to sleep and it'll turn on automatically throughout the night to keep you in your deepest sleep stages.

I cannot wait. I'm going to back it up and I'll tell you about this when we chat after the show. I've got a new hospital grade EEG sleep monitor that, that is so incredibly accurate and also very lightweight and wearable. So I'll tell you about that and see if that's worth some clinical studies. There's also a question, the final question I've been asking guests lately on the show and it's assume you're going to be as healthy or healthier than you are right now. How long do you want to live?

That's a really good question. I mean, I think I would be satisfied somewhere in, you know, the, you know, 80s to 90s range if I could maintain that's satisfying.

How long do you want to live?

How long do I want to live? I don't know. I don't even think like that. I'm just like, try to be as present as possible, as much of the time as possible. But I think the, you know, I mean, I think it's hard, it's a hard question to ask, right? Or to answer because we all age and to, to think that we can, you know, that there's a fountain of, a magical fountain of youth out there that's going to constantly keep us at the same age, biological age we're at for the rest of our lives. I mean, it's a really nice idea and people have been searching for it since the dawn of time or the dawn of humanity, but I'm not certain that it exists. And I, and I'm concerned a little bit about, about, you know, what I think you're alluding to, which is idea, the difference between health span and longevity, right? Like, how long do we live our best lives healthily versus how long do we just live?

Extending life without health is a bad idea, right? But assuming that, oh, we're only going to extend our health, but we're still going to die at the same time. It's not even very logical because then what's going to kill you?

Well, right. Something eventually.

I'm a truck. End of the universe.

Yeah, right.

I like the idea of dying at a time and by a method of my choosing. And I figure I'll be pretty bored by about 180.

I think you'll be pretty bored by 180.

Or, you know, the world may just keep changing and just be so interesting that, you know, I'll say, huh, I guess I'm not done yet. Or maybe I'll say, you know, I'm 130 and I'm done. Yeah, that just feels a lot more peaceful than, you know, the last 20 years have sucked in the hospital and, you know, I've worn my last diaper and I'm done here. And I, I just don't think that's natural or healthy. And I know we can, we can fix healthspan. That's a solved problem, which is why I'm all about lifespan. But a lot of people are now sort of saying, well, do I want to live to 120 if I'm super healthy and I have an active love life and have a community and I, I can help give back to my great grandkids and, and I have active friendships and all of a sudden you go, actually being wise and having energy might be fun and, and that's what I'm opening up to.

Yeah, I mean, so, so to, to, to entertain the fantasy that it's possible. I think I would agree with you. You know, I think if, if we could, if I could maintain my current state of health and well being and, you know, relationships and I could actually have some say in predicting that degree of my future that far in advance. Yeah, I think living over 100, you know, 120, 130 would be fantastic, you know, to be able to continue the same quality of life. Is it possible yet? Probably not. But we'll see. Time will tell.

We're getting there. And by then, I mean, that's another 80 years. You go back 80 years, what do we know about health? And we didn't even have AI. So I actually think it's a nearly solved problem given some of the stuff that I know in private companies who are working on this problem. So we are very, very close to, at least for some of us at first and for all of us soon enough, being able to just add decades and to be able to solve things that are today unsolvable. And it's getting better and better every week, not even every year. So I'm more hopeful and excited than I've ever been. But I don't look like I'm 25 yet, even though I feel like I'm 25 and I'm leaner and stronger and just all the variables are better. But there's More networks to reverse and repair and none of it works unless your nervous system works. Which is why this is a foundational technology. Thanks for being an innovator and doing cool stuff and chatting about it.

Oh yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. And just to leave you all of your listeners, this one last piece of new data that just came out that I think you'll really appreciate is a recent study from blue zones and looking at the people who live the longest in the world, over a hundred and who have good lives. So like good health span that are still healthy or mostly healthy over 100, they all have higher HRV than the rest of us.

They do.

So now HRV is actually coming out as something that is one of the best predictors of not just performance and recovery and whether we recover from illness or not, but also also health span and how long we live good healthy lives. So for everybody listening, anything that we do that improves heart rate variability in a consistent way is inherently going to get us a little bit closer to having those good long lives that we all talk about wanting. And we have the power to do that right now just by engaging in some of these practices and with some of these technologies and, and psychedelic psychotherapy is also coming down the pike as something that may also be contributing to that, that longevity, longevity, health span and overall resilience, which is really exciting. So there's a lot of good stuff to look forward to.

I agree. Do you know offhand so like the longest lived blue zone was Hong Kong where they eat the most meat of anywhere in the world, but somehow it didn't make it into the, the vegan version of the blue zones. Do they also have high heart rate variability?

I'm actually not sure because I didn't see them included in that study. Yeah, I have to, I have to go back and look it up. I think the, the zones that I saw that had the highest heart rate variability in people over 100 year old that had the most overall indices of good health were in like the Mediterranean region. So people who eat meat sometimes sunshine and community. Yeah. And so they walk daily. There's a little bit of daily exercise, not intense HIIT training, but like a little bit of daily exercise. They have more, they have community, a lot of community. They eat mixed healthy diets, a lot of local food that's grown around their area, that's a mix of meat and fish and vegetables. So it's not just one or the other. It's a good, healthy, balanced diet.

Correct.

But what's also interesting is a lot of those people occasionally smoke and drink. And so you think about how, you know, all these, these other things we tell everybody in America not to do because they do adversely impact health. But when you look at these folks that are taking care of all the other pieces of their lives and stress is very, very low on a daily basis that those people can imbibe some alcohol and often alcohol daily and cigarettes maybe or tobacco maybe once a week or a few times a week for, for many years. And they are living longer than the rest of us. And so I think that really draws our attention to the impact of stress. And that if you're stressed and you do things that increase inflammation in the body in addition to the stress, which is already boosting inflammation in the body, then the impact of those inflammatory behaviors is actually much, much, much worse on us than it is if you take care of the stress, then we can actually tolerate a lot more physically, which is really interesting.

You make so much sense there. And man, if we had more time, I'd talk about tobacco and how maybe low dose nicotine isn't that bad for you. In fact, you won't get Alzheimer's if you do it.

But there's been a lot of great studies of nicotine being, being pro neurocognitive, having neurocognitive benefits. Not smoked tobacco per se, but just nicotine. Just nicotine.

Yeah. Yeah, you saw me spray some a minute ago. I've been writing about as a longevity substance when used properly without smoking, that there's benefits. Now one other thing to note, you guys can go to ApolloNeuro.com DaveAsprey and get a discount because I'd like you to save money on all of your biohacking. And I'm pretty sure when you feel it you'll say, oh, my nervous system did relax. This is worth my time. And if you're ready, it's ApolloNeuro.com DaveAsprey to get a discount right now. And again, thanks, Dave.

Pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

A Human Upgrade formerly Bulletproof Radio was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.