18: Apollo with Dr. Dave Rubin MD, PhD

Welcome to my podcast called you'd Must Be out of youf Mind. My name is Dr. Don Wood. Everyone has experienced some trauma at times during their life. These traumatic events and experiences create a significant impact on how your mind works on a day to day basis. At the same time creates long term effects on your emotional and physical health. It will interfere with your ability to stay present and in the moment. After years of research, I used my knowledge of neuroscience to create what I call a memory reset. This memory reset reduces and eliminates the impact of the trauma and allows you to experience peace and clarity. My podcast will share many stories of people experiencing similar symptoms to you and how their lives have been positively impacted by our TIP program. I can't wait to share with you how the impossible is possible and why you must be out of your mind. And there it is.

So welcome to another episode of you Must Be out of youf Mind podcast. And as always, we always bring on some great guests that have some amazing insights into what we do and, and things that they're doing as well that are sort of innovative and, and helping to change the world. And today I've got another great guest that I think you're gonna absolutely love with some of the things that he's doing. Dr. David Rabin is the co founder of Apollo Neuro, which is a fantastic device. It helps work on stress, helps you to get better, rest, sleep, also works on heart rate variability. So you learn a lot more about that today. So welcome, Dr. David, to the you Must Be out of youf Mind podcast.

Thanks so much for having me. Dr. Don. It's a pleasure.

I'm very familiar with your product and I think it's amazing. So, but if you could maybe start off by you know, telling the audience that were that are listening here about what Apollo Neuro is, how you guys developed it. So I know they'd be fascinated with it.

Yeah, happy to. So Apollo, like you can see that is being worn on my chest here. This is a wearable that delivers soothing, gentle vibrations to the body that are interpreted by our skin as safety signals, similar to the way that our body would listen to a song. And that song makes us feel happy and safe and joyful because it's a song we really like. This is very similar to what Apollo does for the body. It's effectively we figured out in the University of Pittsburgh laboratory in the Department of Psychiatry when we were studying folks with and working with patients with severe ptsd, many of whom were veterans who were not responding well to treatment. And we were trying to figure out how to help them better. And we realize that they all listen to music and they all benefit from holding purring cats and. And dogs as safety animals. And they generally feel better with the benefits of feeling safe with extra connection and extra touch. Touch points, really, that they can't take with them normally easily out of the office, because not everybody has access to these things and not everybody has the means to afford them. And so we wanted to create something that people could take with them that could give them the benefits of these tools over time that also train the body how to access those benefits more effectively. Ultimately, we realized when we were using the early prototypes ourselves, after doing some early clinical trials, we found that it worked for us too, and it worked for all of our physician colleagues. And it helped us function better in the ER and be more thoughtful with our patients when we were having bad days and sleep better at night. And so we realized that this just had to be released as a consumer technology. And then that became Apollo, which came out in 2020.

Yeah, no. And I love it because it makes a lot of sense. And there's a lot of synergy in what we're doing as well. And I know you've done clinical trials. You've got more clinical trials coming up. So what have you sort of seen in the clinical trials? Like, what do the numbers look like?

The numbers are really interesting. They're actually not that surprising. They're similar to what we see with other tools that work in a similar way. So if you. It's very well known, for instance, that meditation and mindfulness practices, if practiced for three months, every day, or even in the short term. Practicing mindfulness increases your ability to control your attention, it increases your ability to focus in very significant ways, and it decreases anxiety and improves mood scores. Similarly, we see that with Apollo in similar amounts as mindfulness. If you look at. In the.

Other things that have these kinds of benefits, you're talking about biofeedback, which is one of the oldest tools going back 50, 60 years, that helped us understand the way that heart and breathing rhythms relate to the way we feel.

Apollo is very much inspired by the way that biofeedback works. And so we. We compared it to similar techniques with biofeedback, and we're seeing the similar degree of benefit with just putting this on as you would get if you were putting yourself into heart math or a biofeedback setup and watching your heart rate and your breathing rate. You can wear this passively and get similar benefits. So what are those benefits? In the lab, in a very highly controlled setting, we see statistically significant improvements in heart rate variability, which is the way that we measure resilience in the body. It's the rate of change of our heartbeat over time, which also corresponds to a recovery level in the body, how recovered the body is. When heart rate variability improves, we see cognitive performance improve by up to 25% accuracy on very stressful tasks. What that means is that when you're under stress, it's well known that our mental performance goes down because we get distracted from the task we're trying to focus on, to actually do the task. Right. But if we do a little bit of mindfulness or deep breathing or center ourselves in our bodies in the moment and we're not nervous about what we're trying to focus on, then all of a sudden the task becomes much easier. So Apollo sort of seems to reconnect people with being present in the moment, with what they're doing. And therefore cognitive performance goes up by up to 25%, which is effectively comparable to what we see with amphetamines under stressful tasks. This is a huge improvement in cognitive performance. And now we're starting to see the similar things with the increasing the rate of physical recovery and increasing the quality of physical performance as well. It's mental and physical performance improve. And then in sleep metrics, we have a sleep study that we just finished in hundreds of people that is going for review. And the preliminary results from over 500 people showed that we're seeing that people get, when people use Apollo consistently, they can get 25 minutes more sleep a night, 19% more deep sleep on average, 14% more REM, 24% reductions of resting heart rate, 11% increases in HRV over the course of three months, which is similar to what you see with exercise or meditation. It's very, very interesting because Apollo works in a similar way. And so you would expect that it would similar benefits. And it does.

And, and it all makes so much sense because this is why I was glad to have you on, because to share what we're doing, where I think there's a lot of synergy, is we call our, our program as well a performance program, but the genesis of it is based in trauma. And so the idea is, is that we, when we can eliminate the effects of trauma, we can increase performance. Because as we both hear all the time, you read all the self help books, they'll say, well, stay present, be in the moment. Right? But that's not how our minds work. Right. There's so Many things that can pull us out of being present and then that's going to affect performance. So what we do is we have a program that basically takes them through about a four hour process to reset the way the mind has been responding to trauma. So we've been working again with veterans with post traumatic stress, anxiety, panic attacks, all of those things, and we can help them dramatically change that. And so we, we got a patent on the product that we're, that we're using and the program that we're using that we can eliminate panic attacks, we can eliminate anxiety. And when you do that, added to what you're doing as well, which is training them on how to deal with the current stuff, I think we could show some tremendous strides and how much we could change a person's life. Because as long as that trauma keeps looping, it's going to have a major effect on their ability to stay present and in the moment. And that's what we can eliminate. And then it's going to be a lot easier. Then I think what you're doing as well could be even more effective in helping people because now they don't have all that old stuff running in the background.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the, you know, trauma by nature of what a traumatic event or what we end up looking back later and seeing as a traumatic event does to us is that it keeps us in the past. It keeps us thinking about the past, not not in the present, thinking about the present. Right. And so if performance, if performance at doing anything, including sleep is at our sleeping at our best is, imagine on a graph, it's directly proportionate to the amount of presentness that we are, then the more distracted we are by past stuff, then the less present we are and therefore the less we sleep and the less well we perform. Right. So there's an actual, like there's really a linear line relationship between how present we are and how well we perform at anything. Right. And that is a very critical relationship for us to understand. And I think the other reason why it's so important to understand is because it allows us to really understand what we can do about it. Right. There's what most people do, which we've talked about. You know, I'm sure you talk about this a lot, which is like, you know, top down learning, which is I'm going to tell you something and then about, and give you some understanding or give you some techniques or some behaviors of things that you can do differently that will change the outcome of your life. And that's really important. And that's what we call top down learning, which is you take it into your brain and then you make it happen to your body. But then there's also bottom up learning, which is, or experiential learning, which is what Apollo does and what some of the other techniques that you use do, which are you're helping the body feel calm. You're showing the body and the brain what it feels like to be in a certain state, which could be a slightly sleepy state or a calm state, or a focused state. And then when you show the body that, and then you show the mind that, all of a sudden the brain tries to recreate those experiences for itself. And so you give through experience the benefit of understanding the feeling you're going for and then you understand how to self generate it. And when you put those two together, then you actually get on the, you know, you're really on the path to obtaining your full potential as a human being by combining everything you're learning through here and here with everything you're learning from here.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that, that we always talk about as well, is this is possible to train. You don't have to live. Like one of these people will come in and they'll say, well, I have really bad anxiety. And what I say to him, I said, well, no, that's just a symptom. It's not what you have, it's a symptom of something. Why is your mind anxious? There's something that's creating the anxiety. Your mind just doesn't wake up deciding to be anxious for no reason. It's got a purpose, right? Everything is purpose driven. So there's something that's bothering it and it's trying to get your attention, is trying to get you to look at something. Right. That may not be happening at all, especially if it's trauma related. So you know, I would talk to somebody who would say, you know, they had a major trauma and as they're starting to talk about it, they're starting to shake and cry. And I said, do you know why you're shaking and crying right now? And they'll say, well, because I'm talking about it. And I'll say, yeah, but your mind thinks it's happening now. It's looking for a response. Anytime you have an emotion, your mind's calling for an action. The purpose of fear is to escape a threat. The purpose of anger is to attack a threat. So if you think about something that happened to you five years ago, right. And your heart Starts pounding in your chest and you're feeling fear. It's a glitch. Your mind is actually activating your nervous system, right? Your sympathetic nervous system about something that's not happening, right. That keeps running all the time. It's going to drain the energy so you have less power. Right. And your mind is now using that energy. So as soon as we can get that out of the way, we can increase performance because now you have more.

Power and resource allocation. Yep, yep.

And so it's just a different way of looking at it. What I always say is that the brain is coding. It codes constantly. So what you're, what you're doing with Apollo Neuro as well, is training them, right. To code the response to what's going on in their environment now. And so the brain is just a giant computer. It's going to code it. It has to. It's just science. Right. And that's what I love about what you're doing as well. And what we're doing is people say, well, what if I don't believe it's going to work? I go, well, you don't have to believe in science for science to work. It just works as long as you follow. And just like you said, if people stick with your program and stay with it, it will just work. It has to.

Yeah. I mean, you don't even have to like, that's, that's a very interesting point that you brought up. Right? You don't have to believe in it, but belief is important. You, you ideally want to believe in it because we, we know that the belief effect has an effect, right? Like in mental health treatment, if you believe that your mental health treatment is going to work, it's going to work better for you 30% more of the time. Right. And similarly, if you believe that it won't work, you can actually make it not work 30% of the time. 30% of the time more often it will not work. Right? So aligning our belief with the intended goal and outcome that we're trying to achieve so that we have the best chances of getting what we want out of something we're putting energy into is amplifying of our power, right? So we want to make sure that belief and action, or intention and action are aligned. And if they're not aligned, then we are just less likely to succeed. So maybe we should take some more time preparing for what it is we want to do. So we actually make sure that we are aligned when we do it so we get the most out of it and don't have to do it again at the same time. I think the other part that you were saying is that with these kinds of techniques we're talking about, this is just science and it is a real, very real resource allocation problem. And there's another side of it which is do you notice the change? Because believing that something will happen because you're putting in the effort, which is often usually a long term thing, and then, and then noticing whether it's happening right away or in the long term is different because a lot of people, myself included, for many years were just never trained to listen to our bodies effectively. So for many decades, things would happen in my body when I would do things like eat a certain food or engage in a certain kind of stressful experience. And I would have no idea that there was any relationship between those things. Right. Even though now looking back, there was absolutely a very clear relationship between those things. That would have saved me a lot of trouble had I been listening to my body from a younger age. But I was just never taught. So if you're never taught, then you don't, you don't listen. And so I think this actually is similar for many of us humans on the earth right now is that we were just not taught to listen. And so we are in fact taught to ignore our bodies. We're taught to not notice. We're taught to suck it up and push ourselves to our, to our basically the edge of burnout right before we actually do something to nurture ourselves and take care of ourselves. And this is gradually changing in the narrative of the world, including in the military, but it's still, even in medical school, the suck it up mentality is still very prominent. And so, you know, I think it's important to remember that we want to train ourselves to be aware enough to notice changes in our bodies. If we don't notice changes in our bodies and something is scientifically backed and scientifically driven, evidence based, it can still work for you even if you don't notice it. But it's important to still do it and align your belief in what you're doing and the energy you're putting out with the thing that you're doing. So you have the best chances of actually noticing the outcome at some designated future point in time. But if you don't align those things and you focus on, well, what am I noticing right now at time point A, 48 hours after starting a new habit, chances are you're going to notice nothing. And then you're going to feel like, you know, you, you're going to start thinking about giving up because you're not focusing on, you're using it as an, as a means to an end rather than experiencing the process for what it's worth, which is learning and training our bodies to do something new and to achieve more of our potential, which takes time. None of us got here overnight.

Yeah. And that's one of the things too. When I, when I say to people, just follow the program. And what I do in the, in the four hour program that I do is the first hour and a half to two hours is all education. Because by the time we're two hours in and I've explained to them why this is going to work. Right. What I hear every, almost every time is this is making sense now. Now I understand why I've been anxious or why I've been depressed or why I'm dealing with post traumatic stress. It's just the way our system works. And if you understand how it works, right, you can see how the solution is right in front of you. All we have to do is this and then that's going to change the way the system operates. It's not trying to say it's good or bad, it's just saying it's going to work as long as you follow the protocols that are set up for you. And so, you know, if you came in with a broken leg and you reset the leg, the legs are going to heal, you know, as long as there's something else not interfering with that healing process. But chances people are going to heal if they just come in and get the treatment. And you know, and I always related back to my, my life. And this is sort of how the program for me got developed was because I had this sort of idyllic childhood. I had no trauma. I had amazing parents that stayed calm all the time. My brother and sister and I can't ever remember them arguing or raising their voice. Now that's an unusual world to grow up in.

Extremely unusual, yeah.

However, I thought everybody lived in my world and then that's not even an exaggeration. They never yelled, never raised their voice. So my nervous system stayed regulated. And if I went to school and the teacher said something or a friend or a coach or whatever, I could get bumped here and there. But as soon as I came back into my home environment, everything came back into balance and I felt safe again. I believe that was the biggest contributor to my health. I've been healthy all my life. I played hockey. I'm originally from Canada. I had 60 stitches in my head, six concussions, never missed a hockey game. And they used to just say, well, you just heal really fast. Right? Now I know why I healed fast. I was getting two or three times the maintenance sleep that my teammates were getting because they were dealing with all this trauma that I had no idea existed. I didn't know. A lot of my friends were dealing with emotional, physical, sexual abuse. That was foreign to me. And so when I met my wife, I realized she was living in a different world. She had a very traumatic childhood with a very angry, violent father. So she was living in fear all the time. Her sympathetic nervous system was always on, very seldom not on. And I had none of that. So that, I believe, is a big contributor to health. And I'm sure, again, that just using the kinds of tools that Apollo's providing and that we're providing will change your life, because you can then get that nervous system to do what it's supposed to do. If there's a lion, then you'll activate for a lion, but if there's no lion, you shouldn't be activating.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And it really. And again, I think it's always important for people to know. I'm sure people hear this all the time, but, you know, from two experts, this is. You know, if you're hearing this, it's not your fault that this is happening or that you're stuck in the situation. It's very important to note that it's not your fault. These are learned behaviors that we learn from our environment, from coping with stress in the best way that we can as we grow and go throughout life. And most of us don't, myself included. You know, you don't have the guidance or the support in every challenging situation to help us through the way that we need to be helped through. And sometimes we just have to do it on our own. And when we do it on our own, we learn things that are not. And we learn to associate things like certain things that might make us feel threatening at one point in our lives that then become associated with other things that are actually not related. Like many people I know who, you know, feel. Well, there's. I mean, there's lots of examples of this. But, you know, sometimes people have a certain smell that they remember that. That they were smelling like the smell of popcorn or something like that when they got. They got attacked by a dog as a kid, right. And then all of a sudden, every time they smell it, smell of popcorn, their blood pressure goes up and their heart rate goes up. And they start sweating and they can't talk, communicate in social situations because their body is in a panic state. And it's not again, the fault of that individual. It's that person learned to associate in accidentally and continue that association accidentally of these smells and these fears. And then that becomes a learned neural pathway that actually gets hardware encoded in the brain in between the neurons. So what we're really talking about here, that's so exciting is in, in the field is retraining these neural networks by understanding what the associations are that are serving us, that are true and are serving us now and what aren't. And when we understand what associations we've made and what we've learned in the past are not associating us or not serving us, they're not helping us, they're not useful, then we can let them go and we can reassociate, meaning form new memories, right? We can retrain our brain to be updated based on what we now know, which is that I am safe to smell buttered popcorn, right? When I'm in the comfort of my home. I can have popcorn in a movie without watching a movie with my family and not be stressed out because I'm not under threat, right? I could even do it with my, our family dog around and not feel under threat, right? And still relax. I can go to sleep and fall asleep at night without worry because I know that I'm safe in the comfort of my home with my own bed and my own, blah, blah, blah, every, you know, safety net nest that we set up for ourselves. And a lot of us just have never realized or, and, or never taken the time to actually update that software on the brain. And so that's really what we're, the software and the hardware which are connected. And that's, that's really what we're talking about, which is really reestablishing this fundamental safety response in the body that helps us to free up resources for performance. So it's a very exciting time to be in this field. There's so much we can do.

I think it's the future of everything. Neuroscience is going to be the answer to a lot of these things that are going on.

Dr. Dave, that's the same thing I always say to people too, when they come in. The first thing I say to them, there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing wrong with your mind. Your mind is doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is protect you. However, it's dealing with some error messages, some glitches that Got set up because of the way your mind has stored the information about that. It's coded it for you. Right? And so like you were talking about, the popcorn smell was associated with a traumatic event. So when it thinks there's a popcorn smell, this traumatic event is happening. And so it's going to do something. It's going to activate your nervous system to get you into a flight stage more than anything. Right. To protect you. It's not trying to hurt you. It's actually doing what it's designed to do. How could it do it any differently? It's like you said, it's not your fault. You haven't done anything wrong. You couldn't change that until you reboot the system and we get those glitches and error messages. So I'll say, you know, if every time you hit the M key on your computer, your computer shut off, you wouldn't say, oh, I've got a bad computer. You'd say, there's a coding error. Right. We need to reset the code so the M key doesn't shut off, the computer becomes an M key.

Right.

As opposed to saying, well, I just can never touch the M key again. I got to avoid words with M's in them.

Let's just fix it, right? Let's not manage it and work around it. Let's go directly to what the root cause is. And what we're doing is saying that that's coming from trauma, from events and experiences earlier in your life that your mind has learned how to protect you against. But it's constantly looping, which is then going to affect your. Your health, it's going to affect your ability to stay present, which is going to affect your ability to perform at your highest level. And once we've got that reset, then your mind right is not going to start looping through that trauma anymore. And now you can stay present. If a threat shows up, you'll deal with the threat. If there's no threat, you stay present. Yeah. It's really that simple?

Yeah, absolutely. And if we don't deal with the threat, if we don't deal with these experiences that are impacting us and taking our resources away to survival mode when we don't need it, then that can actually increase our rates of burnout and downstream mental illness. This is really, really important to understand, and you don't have to take our word for it. There's a really interesting study that just came out, which is called an umbrella study from the University College of London, I think came out in July of this Year. That said, finally, that gave complete consensus across an umbrella study is like one of the biggest studies you could possibly do. It's what we call like a meta analysis of meta analyses. So, so it's looking across lots of studies in a certain area. In this case, it was depression and what factors relate to depression across over a hundred thousand people worldwide. And what it showed is final, is finally, that there is no statistically significant relationship between chemical imbalances in the brain around serotonin and depression. People are not born depressed. People are not born mentally ill in most cases. There are some rare cases where people have a very strong predisposition or they're born with a genetic disorder that results in mental illness most of the time. But it's very, very, very unusual that people are fit into that category. The 99% of people in the world who suffer with mental illness like depression have it in the. In. What the study is saying is because of traumatic events that have not been processed properly, and that traumatic events are more correlated to.

Depression than anything else from, from the study. And that the things that have the biggest outcome, the best outcome in depression are exercise, right? Dealing with your trauma, doing the trauma work, and doing things that get the energy that was created or, you know, and stored in the body as a result of the unprocessed trauma out. So exercise, for instance, physical movement is an amazing way that people can start to introduce more autonomic tone or more balance between the fight or flight system and the recovery system and start to reset that resource allocation situation. The other thing that's really important is the kind is the therapy that we can all do for each other. So the number one trauma therapy that we can all do that is basically a very junior version of what.

Dr. Don and I are talking about is called exposure therapy. So this is again, something where if your body has been around and is now afraid of the smell of popcorn, because popcorn reminds you of a past traumatic experience that was threatening to you, and so it restarts that and relives that traumatic experience. Every time you smell popcorn, then what you have to do to fix that, to start, at least start the process off, is you start to surround yourself by the smell of popcorn in environments where you know you're safe, right? And then you start to, what's called reassociate. So you start to reconnect the idea of, of popcorn smell in an environment where you know that you are not at risk. And then all of a sudden, your. Our brains over time start to say, oh, well, now I've been smelling popcorn for 150 times and the last 150 times I can check the safety box. So I think I'm good. And then from then on it starts to become automated in the safety pathway rather than in the survival pathway.

So, so one of the things that we do too in our four hour process is we can reset that actually even faster. So we're basically going to take that memory and reset that memory in that period of time so that it's no longer activating the nervous system. And so when we do that, then the mind stops calling for the action. And I, I wrote an article about that and I said depression is a function of the brain, not a dysfunction of the brain. The brain is going into a depressed state because it can't fix the trauma, can't fix something. So to protect you from that pain, it's going to shut down to stop that loop of pain. So it's because there's no action that has been able to, to get, to get the problem solved. When you resolve what the mind's been trying to get done, then the depression will lift.

Right?

Because it's not trying to hurt you, it's trying to protect you. All of those things. Right? It's the same thing. What I thought was interesting where I sort of made the connection with, with trauma, especially visual, with trauma and memory, was that I, I found some studies that talked about there's never been a person that was born blind to develop schizophrenia.

Which then says they never stored the information about it, they couldn't visually store that information. And so people who have been became blind after birth could develop schizophrenia, but they've never got a documented case before. Which I thought was fascinating, which is fascinating that it's, the brain has been looking at data and responding to it in real time. And what we can do is reset that so that the mind no longer doesn't erase the data, it just takes it out of that high definition mode and stops activating the nervous system. So I worked with a US army sniper who had to shoot and kill a 12 year old boy. And he said to me, he goes, I just can't talk about this anymore. He goes, I got arrested at the VA because I started throwing tables and chairs. And I said, well, I'm not going to need you to talk about it, we're going to reset that information for you. And he goes, without me talking about it? And I said yeah, I can do it without you talking about it. So I took him through the whole process. At the end of it, he Gave me a complete description with absolutely no fear and said, how did you do that? And I said, well, for eight years, your mind's been trying to get you not to pull the trigger. It thought you were shooting. When every time you thought about it, your mind was seeing that in real time. Wouldn't it make sense that the solution to that problem was to not shoot? Your mind didn't know that that wasn't possible because it's active in the moment. Your subconscious mind's fully present all the time, and that is your survival part of your brain. And that will always override reason and logic. So the reason, the logical part of your mind would say, well, I'm not shooting anybody right now. But your subconscious is operating about 400 millionths of a second faster than you can logically think. And so it's already activated your nervous system. Your conscious mind is not even engaged. It's still putting on his pants. Yeah. And the subconscious already gone off and started to solve the problem.

Yep. Yeah. Or, yeah. It has already put together, like, eight solutions for you to evaluate. Yep.

And so. But we can fix that. Right. And then. And then again, using your product as well, we can also then continue to train the codes that got built because your mind has been constantly responding to that event over and over and over. So again, using the popcorn analogy is every time you smell popcorn, you built a code about popcorn.

Right.

So once we get the popcorn memory reset, now we want to work on the codes about popcorn, but it's a lot easier to fix those codes when you don't have that memory, keep activating the system. So now that's why I love what you're doing, is because I think doing what you're using and what we're doing together could be very efficient and much faster at getting those codes to reset, because we have people listen to a series of audios for 30 to 60 days to start resetting those codes. But adding your product into it as well, I think gives them another, you know, technology to sort of really get some. Some data behind it.

For sure. Yeah. I mean, and I think it's just. It's a. They're all complementary tools. Right. The idea is that that.

Trauma has a way of seeping into all parts of our lives. Not just the times when we're in the office or not just the times when we're trying to fall asleep, and not just when we're at work. It's all the time. It impacts us when it's not addressed, and it impacts our whole bodies and our brains. So if we think about treating it or addressing it as only the time we spend in the office with one of us, or only the time that you're listening to the audio recordings, then you're only still getting to part of the solution. And, you know, really the entire solution is integrating the concepts you're learning from your work and from our work in the office and, you know, all of these sessions and everything and everything you're hearing into something you could take with you every moment of every day to remind yourself that you're safe. And so we noticed that was a huge deficit in the community, particularly for veterans, but even for doctors is a huge deficit in the community of tools that help us calm down and help veterans calm down and be able to restore that sense of safety on the go. And remember that just because we have, like, just because we're 10 patients behind on the, on the, on the clinic roster and we're already. Everyone's taking more time and we're going to end up being here two hours later than we wanted to, that does not mean that we're under survival threat. That just means we're having a really hard day. Right. And so we can use that by integrating tools like Apollo especially to complement programs like what, like yours is that. And general office therapy visits, which can take a lot longer to tackle some of these goals. But you integrate different tools, like your tools and our tools, and all of a sudden what happens is your body and your mind come more into sync around the actual program, which is. Which is taking time out to. To listen to the recordings, taking time out to do the work. But then it's also about what do you. What is your. What is your mind and body doing when you're not taking that time out, when you're doing everything else right? And so then integrating Apollo is an interesting tool to complement that because it creates a passive thing that people can just wear in the background. And it doesn't actually take any time out of your day to use. It just kind of is your friend that goes along with you and holds your hand when you're. When you're in a challenging situation or even in advance of a challenging situation. And so that is. It's actually of the products that are available now to do this, it's the first of its kind that actually allows you to take it with you passively in the background without having to do other things. So it, it fills that big void in treatment for these kinds of challenges, which is what do you do when you're not listening to the therapy tapes. You're not listening to the meditations or you're not in the office. Right. Like, what do you do then? So it's really neat to see because when you combine all these things together, they work that much better.

And that's what I like about it because sometimes what happens is after I do the four hour session, people are feeling so good that they're like, well, I really, I'm okay. I don't really need to do any more. I can think about this event now. I'm not having a panic attack, I'm not having anxiety. I'm good. Right. And we always have to keep saying, keep working on the audios. But what I like about the Apollo is that it's something that they don't have to. Even if they didn't listen to the audio, they're still getting some training. Right. And they're continuing. The combination is better, but at least they don't. If they go, oh, you know, I just got busy, I didn't have a chance to do it. Well, how hard is it to put the device on? Right, yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty simple.

Yeah. Now you can set it and forget it because you can literally just schedule it and it'll turn on for you. So now all you literally need to do is put it on and keep it charged and it'll do its thing. You don't have to do anything. Yeah. Try to make it real easy.

And again, that's what we're looking for. So we think it's pretty simple just to listen to 10 minutes of audios a day.

But that's pretty good. That's pretty good.

You'd be surprised how people will go like, oh, I just find the time.

I mean, it's, it's a lot easier than 50 minutes of psychoanalysis four times a week. So.

Yep. Yeah. When again, we're just getting the, the results speak for themselves. You know, we've got all kinds of data. We're doing brain mapping to show the differences. And what we're showing is an average of about 45% change in brain, brain plasticity after going through the program, which is pretty amazing. And about 38% on average, a normalization of the brain coming back into, you know, into a normal state. And so just shows interesting big trauma is. So those are studies that we're doing. That's why I was interested in what you're doing in your studies as well. Because I'd love to see the combination of what we do together and how much we can change the brain, and it just. And it just works. And it brings people back into the way they should be living. And like I said, my wife always says we were the perfect petri dishes for it. Because I knew what the model was. I'd lived the model most of my life. It's not that I haven't gotten bumped along the way, but as a child, I had learned to regulate my nervous system. So even when something goes wrong, now as an adult, right. My wife was. Before we developed the program, my wife was always amazed at. Why aren't you still worried about this? Or why are you. Why aren't you still bothered about this? You know, something that happened, I go, well, what do you want me to do about it? Right, yeah, but aren't you bothered when you think about, you know, what happened? And I'm like, well, no, if I think about it, it'll be bothered. But I learned to be able to. To go back into regulation and not think about it all the time. That's training. I didn't know that that's what was happening to me as a child, but that's what was happening. So that kept me in a constant state and I believe was a significant factor in my health issues and why I've been able to stay healthy. I mean, I've lived in Florida 30 years. I never go. I've never been to the doctor. I just don't have any issues. I don't get sick.

You're very blessed.

Very blessed.

But the point is, it is trainable for everyone. Right? Which is the takeaway. And it's really exciting, I think, for me, I learned it in medical school because up until school, I was always stressed about lots of things like grades and all these other things. But then when you get into medical school and you start treating patients, all of a sudden you realize that everything, every problem you have is really minimal in terms of significance. When you have to deal with somebody that could die in front of you. Right. It just puts everything else into perspective. When you're treating somebody who is so sick that they could die in the next, like, 15 minutes right in front of you based on one single action or inaction that you take.

Everything else just comes into perspective. And all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, if. Is anybody going to die right now? Is anybody going to be mortally wounded or injured? Okay, all right, well, then I can settle down. I can take my time and I can think through this and come to a solution thoughtfully and, and. And intentionally rather than. Than, you know, Letting my nervous system kind of take hold.

And that's why I think it's so great for, you know, for people who are in that kind of a position to also learn how to do this. Because, you know, don't you want your surgeon calm? Right.

Oh, yeah.

You. As opposed to.

Well, I think they generally are. That's what's so interesting about that, about medical training for us. It's kind of like. It's kind of like Navy SEAL training in the way that you. You are. You learn to be. I don't know if this was your experience in. In your training, but in the surgical training that we did, and in, you know, like, very severe, like, intensive care settings where people could die at any moment, or there's very, very severe consequences for making a mistake. We learn to thrive in those environments. Like, we learn to be calmest in those environments in some respects, which is really, really interesting. I've worked with surgeons who, like, when. When trauma starts coming through, physical trauma starts coming and rolling into the ER because of some catastrophe that happened, they are excited. Not excited because people are hurt, but they're excited to do their jobs and to be able to have the opportunity to help people who are suffering or who are struggling, who could have very severe issues happen as a result of not getting care. And that is trained, right? That's like a very, very highly trained stress response where they are so attuned to it that they are actually thriving in that environment, which is so interesting.

I look at it like athletes, right? They're like athletes, right? The higher the stress. So why does Tom Brady, Right. The greatest quarterback of all time, he's not faster than anybody, you know, but his ability, under stress to perform. So it's the same thing with, you know, with you or surgery or stuff like that, or surgeons. If they can't do that, they're probably not going to last. They'll. They'll be out of it before very long. And. But if they can do it, then they can. They've trained themselves to be able to do it, then they can do it under the most stressful situations. In fact, they become very focused.

Right.

Which is exactly what they need to do. Otherwise, you know, they would never last. Yeah. Burn out.

Yeah. We. And you have to be able to do it and enjoy it. Right? Which is. There are a lot of people who could do it but don't particularly enjoy it. I was able to do it, but it was not my favorite, favorite lifestyle choice to have. And when, you know, it comes down to that, I think that, you know, I really wanted to treat the whole person, not just a certain dysfunctioning organ in a person, but the surgical aspect of it. And being able to just take something out or put something in and make somebody better is absolutely incredible. You know, it's one of the coolest things about western medicine is being able to do those kinds of procedures. But again, you know, being able to do it and then train yourself is something that we can all do. Not all of us will enjoy being under that level of stress on a regular basis. We need to figure out our own balance, and that's not for everybody. But the training part is for all of us. And if we don't recognize that and take advantage of it and actually train ourselves, then the environment will effectively control us. We will not be able to achieve our potential or even get close. If we don't recognize that we have the ability to train ourselves in any moment to do these things again doesn't mean you have to do them all the time. It just means that you should recognize. We should all recognize what we're capable of, which is a lot more than we think we might be.

100. Well, this has been fascinating. So, Dr. Dave, I really enjoyed this. I know everybody's listening to this, are going to be fascinated with everything as well. So I appreciate your time and I know we've both got schedules to get onto with some other stuff, but I appreciate your time here. Is there anything else that you'd like to finish with or any other comments or pearls of wisdom?

No, I think that's about it. I really heard a lot of great stuff. Yeah, this was a really fun conversation. I really appreciate you having me, Dr. Don. And yeah, if anybody wants to find me, you can re, you know, reach out to me at my socials, which are @doctor davidrabin on Instagram and Twitter. And you can also find me at my website, Apollo Clinic, A P O L L O clinic. And if you're looking or interested in checking out this little guy, Apollo neuro, you could find this@apolloneuro.com or wearablehugs.com beautiful.

Well, thanks so much. I encourage everybody to take a look at all those things. We'll have all those things as well, and all the. The notes as well. And again, I appreciate your time and I appreciate everybody listening to another episode of you must be out of your mind. And there it is.

Thanks for having me, Dr. Don.

Thanks. Thanks, Dr. Dave. I appreciate it.

My pleasure.