A Whole New Way To Deal With Stress, Trauma & PTSD In Just Seconds: The First Clinically Validated Wearable That Helps You De-Stress, Focus, Sleep, Stay Energized & Remain Calm.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Kids, pregnant women, elderly are not the best to receive medicine because we don't know all the risks. And many of the most, much of the time the medicines are used off label and they haven't been tested. You know, are able to sing to the body to create resonance patterns with sound waves that actually facilitate the release of these blocks that allow our energy to flow as freely and optimally as possible, which allows us to get closer and closer to our truest best selves.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, folks, this is a first. I'm, I'm vaporizing as I am giving you today's introduction and, and telling you about today's sponsor. So it could be kind of interesting. I'm not just smoking weed in my office. No, I'm much more fancy than that. What did you expect? After all? Basically, this is a trick from my friend Paul Chek. I've actually talked about this in my previous interviews with Paul Cech, which you can find on my website. I am vaporizing a blend from my Buddha vaporizer of organic tobacco, organic Swedish tobacco, touch of a sativa herbicide, pesticide free strain of wonderful Washington state Mary Jane and a touch of nutmeg, which is a little bit of a pick me up and as they, as they say in prison, a bit of a cheap psychedelic in and of itself. So I've got nicotine from tobacco, a little bit of weed and a little bit of nutmeg that I'm vaporizing and it's a nice little little blend. Thanks to my friend Paul Check for teaching me about how to blend herbs and essential oils and get a much different mix than just like, you know, taking a hit on a vape pen. All right, so it was probably, I think like three weeks ago that this dude was coming through Spokane and he swung by my house and he had this wearable he wanted to show me. And it seems like everybody and their dog these days wants to show me some wearable, you know, yet another self quant device or yet another thing I got to put on my wrist or my ankle or my finger or my neck. And so I was, you know, I just kind of let him come into my house and, and show me this thing and socks blown off, you guys. Socks blown off. This person who you are about to get filled in on is someone who has designed a way to almost develop and, and hopefully he's not going to be mad at me for Saying this plant medicine on your wrist, that's the best way I can describe this. It's literally like taking everything that you would want for enhanced meditation and focus and DMT release and activation of the parasympathetic nervous system and you put it on your wrist or your ankle. And I mean, I monitored my HRV in real time. When he put it on, I paid attention to what my body felt and something's going on here. So I don't just want to talk about wearables on today's show. I want to talk about the parasympathetic nervous system, about trauma and trauma release and about stress and even plant medicine in general. And fortunately, this guy is not just a dude who makes wearables. His name is Dr. David Rabin. He is an MD, PhD, he's a board certified psychiatrist, he's a neuroscientist and he specializes in the treatment of ptsd, depression, anxiety and substance use disorders. He actually has been involved with maps. I know many of you are familiar with the multidisciplinary association of psychedelic studies, but he's worked with MAPS to specifically determine the mechanisms of the therapy that you get from psychedelic assisted treatment of normally treatment resistant mental illness. So he's organized the world's largest controlled studies of psychedelic medicine in collaboration with Yale, the University of Southern California, Mount Sinai, and they're now collecting DNA samples from folks who have treatment resistant PTSD and who are participating in specifically MDMA assisted psychotherapy. He has a deep history in the treatment of stress and stress disorders and he'll be able to tell us a little bit about that and what he's learned from it during today's show. And of course, as I've already alluded to, he has now, along with his wife, co founded and been responsible for developing this brand new wearable called Apollo. It's called Apollo and I'll let him describe you because he will do a far better job at that than I how this thing works. But David and I have had a chance to get to know each other the past few weeks. I'm very pleased, very honored to have him on the show. Everything that you hear about that we talk, you can get the show notes for if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Apollo that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com AP P O L L O David, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you so much for having me, Ben. It's a real pleasure to be here and it's been a real pleasure to get to know you over the last few weeks.

Yeah, yeah, it has. And I remember one thing that you told me when you came to my house, I think this would be kind of a good jumping off point, was that what you've studied is really the link between stress and perhaps even arguably trauma and the human need to feel safe. The human need to feel safe. Tell us more about that, because I feel like that's a big part of the equation here.

Sure. Yeah. And I think that is, at least from my studies over the years, I found that that seems to be the core of importance in terms of what we can take home about how the stress response system works in our bodies. And I really do appreciate your kind introduction earlier and. And talking about how you explain the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system balance to your audience, I think is very important, and you do a great job of that. And one of the major focuses of health that we're starting to realize a lot more about now is autonomic balance. So balance between your sympathetic fight or flight nervous system, fight or flight or freeze response nervous system, and your parasympathetic rest and digest and create and reproduce and recover that those nervous systems are in a counterbalance together. And what's interesting is when you think about what those nervous systems are responsible for, it also helps us understand how we induce activity in those nervous systems and why they exist. So. And we can go back millions of years into ancient mammals. You know, Eric handel studied snails 300 million years old, and they also have similar responses in their nervous systems to two major stimuli in our environment. And those stimuli are safety and fear or threat. And the reason for that is because safety increases activity. So safety increases activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, and threat or fear increases activity in the sympathetic nervous system. And this balance helps to make sure that when a bear comes up to us or a lion comes up to us when we're walking in the jungle, that our blood pressure and our heart rate and our energy goes way up immediately. And we end up directing energy only to the parts of our body, like our motor cortex and our fear center and our skeletal muscles in our limbs that help us get out of that situation as rapidly as possible to ensure survival.

Right. You don't want to take a nap when somebody's coming at you with a spear or when you need to chase down a gazelle or when a lion's coming at you.

Exactly. Or worry about reproducing or digesting your food you want to get out of.

Right, Exactly. Yeah, That's a good point. You shut down reproductive function. And that's like, you even see that in elite athletes, right, who are constantly hard charging, constantly stressing that sympathetic nervous system, sending their body an evolutionary or ancestral message that they're not safe because the human body is still hardwired to think it's in battle. You do see a downregulation of fertility, and you see a loss of some of the normal circadian rhythmicity and a lot of the things that kind of keep their bodies in that fight and flight mode. Because, you know, even from an athletic standpoint, as silly as it sounds, you're making your body know that it might not be safe out there.

Exactly. And like, you wouldn't. You wouldn't want to fall asleep when there's a lion lurking around outside your tent. You want to be ready to respond or your cave. And so ultimately, the body has these natural ways of diverting energy to the places that need it most. The problem is, and that's good, you know, that's good for responding to acute threat. And we see that, you know, I think the problem is when that threat or that sense of threat, the perception that we are threatened or need to be afraid is something that is experienced every single day, sometimes many, many times a day, you know, and we see it manifest in all these different ways, like in the corporate environment. Burnout was just declared by the World Health Organization as a medical condition that warrants treatment. And the reason for that is because when people are working as hard as they are every day, where most people, something like 80% of people in the US alone, are spending the majority of their waking day doing something they don't enjoy, that creates an enormous amount of emotional, existential mental stress. Sitting in a chair creates physical stress and lack of physical activity, et cetera. Eating, you talk a lot about this. Eating not good food. And this culmination of stress increases inflammation.

And if I could throw this in here because it's fresh on my mind, I was reading last night, I'm studying some books on how to teach your children the spiritual disciplines like meditation and study and fasting and prayer and things like this. And in that book, it talked about how preschoolers are now the number one growing demographic as far as needing targeted use of antidepressants, or at least they're being set up for that based on everything from school start times to homework to. To social media, to, like, all these things that preschoolers are now being exposed to. So even young children now in an environment where you think that safety would Be the ultimate priority, no longer feel safe.

Exactly. That's exactly right. I haven't actually seen that specific, that specific information, but it sounds consistent with, and very interesting in terms of the way that we do see as clinicians. We see that these medicines like antibiotics, depressants and amphetamines get prescribed at a younger and younger age every generation. And part of that, I think, is because, you know, similar to what we were just talking about, you know, our bodies were not meant for the way that we work. We were, we are, you know, we are. The demands of modernity and the stresses that we're put on every day because of the responsibilities that we have in this current lifestyle in society that we subscribe to is extremely stressful and it takes a toll on the body. And so I think the important part of this, coming back to the original question of safety, is that by practicing techniques or strategies like deep breathing, meditation, yoga, biofeedback, positive thinking skills that we teach in psychotherapy, all of these different techniques float tanks, there's lots of different ones which all tend to improve heart rate variability. As the best known current biometric, that improves. That is a measure of our ability to recover or how recovered we are, our resilience and the effects of stress on the body over time, which we never had the opportunity to measure before. By practicing safety techniques like the ones we just, I just mentioned, you can increase that and increase your recovery and your ability to recover from stress and decrease some of these issues that we're seeing that result from chronic stress or chronic perceived threat responses, which ultimately leads to depression, anxiety, ptsd, but also metabolic disorder, diabetes, injuries. If you're somebody who plays sports or in the military, there's sleep, insomnia, chronic pain. All of these things are related to imbalances in the autonomic nervous system and low heart rate variability. Safety boosting techniques like Apollo being one of those tech strategies to make it accessible to the public, they all improve balance in the nervous system, which helps retrain the brain to know that it's not actually running from a lion in that moment. And when you feel that calm, that pause, then you're able to regulate and perform at your best and recover at your best, right?

Yeah. And we'll eventually get to Apollo. But I have a couple of thoughts. The first is, you know, the big picture here, really the takeaway for me, the more I think about this is that, you know, like, I live in a comfortable house. Like, I was even talking to my, my son, I took him out on a dinner date. The other night and I was telling him, dude, mom, mom and I used to go check the checking account before we would go out to dinner to see if we had enough money and what we might be able to buy off that list and if we could get a cocktail. And we also used to go over all of our bills at the end of the month to see how we were going to be able to scrape together rent and if we could aff stay in the home that we were currently in, etc. Etc. And now it's like, I don't have to think that much about buying an organic grass fed rib eye, right? I don't have to think that much about my bed being comfortable at night, me having a roof over my head, me being able to take my son to dinner at a fancy restaurant and be able to just like take out the credit card and know that there's money in the account. But yet I can still at the same time be doing things to my body to make it feel as though it's not safe. The way that I approach my email inbox, the way that I interact with my employees, the way that I manage stress throughout the day, the way that I respond when I'm in traffic, what my body does that I'm not even in control of from a subconscious or an evolutionary standpoint. When I step onto an airplane or walk through the airport or I'm in a big crowd of people. We live these seemingly comfortable, you know, post industrial westernized lifestyles, but yet our bodies are constantly under a message, most of us, that they're not safe, even though we might feel as though we have houses and money and cars, et cetera. So, you know, I think that's a, that's a big thing for people is even though you might feel safe, your, your body is technically under a lot of nervous system stress. And then the other thing I wanted to mention before I ask you a little bit about trauma, because I want to, I want to get into trauma and what this has to do with, with trauma. The other thing is that I said that about elite athletes, but I don't want to make people think that exercise is bad because as a matter of fact, research study after research study shows that regular, consistent, smart exercise actually lowers HRV in the long run and increases parasympathetic nervous system activity. And I suspect that part of that might be that you feel more equipped to take care of yourself. You feel more confident. I mean, I posted on Instagram this morning a photo of me flexing with my shirt off and I commented that, you know, muscles aren't just for show, but that one of the benefits of, you know, having a fit body is that you just approach life with more confidence. And I would suspect that you also, even if it's again, subconscious, you feel safer when you're fit. You feel like you can take care of yourself. So I don't want to discourage people from exercising. What I'm saying is, you know, don't over train and also know that if you choose to be an elite, hard charging athlete, that might fly in the face of taking absolute care of your nervous system. Performance is not synonymous with health and longevity. So now that I've prepared myself to step off my soapbox, I want to ask you about trauma because I know you studied it a lot. I know it has to do a little bit with what you just described about feeling safe, but I was guilty until probably, I mean, dude, like I would say even like six months ago, I was guilty of kind of snickering when I'd hear people say they'd been traumatized unless A, they'd been to war and actually been like, you know, serving in the armed forces and been subjected to some kind of an explosion or horrific war accident or B, if they'd been like, had a horrific childhood or an event that occurred in childhood or in adulthood, that was just brutal, right? Like seeing someone in your family get murdered or being beaten by your parents or being raped or, or undergoing some horrific occurrence. I always thought that that's what it took to truly say that you had trauma or to say that you had ptsd. And I've personally kind of come around and realized that trauma is a little bit different than, than the way, you know, than my narrow minded view of what it could be. And I'm curious if you could get into trauma and what you studied on trauma, what you found trauma to truly be and what trauma has to do with feeling safe.

Well, I think what you said earlier was a great segue into trauma because what you're talking about before you ask me this question is you're talking about building up physical endurance and physical stamina constitution for a sense of improved and heightened physical safety. And safety is what we like to think of it is mostly physical. And I think ultimately to really understand what we mean when we say safety is to take a step back and look at a holistic picture. Safety, which includes physical, of course, but it equally includes emotional, mental and spiritual safety. And part of physical safety and mental safety is of course financial safety in our society. And so having A focusing on all of those things, physical safety being a very important one that you can contribute positively to with good smart exercise, is a really great idea. You can also over train, which lowers heart rate variability in the long run. And so there, you know, obviously everything with moderation. But I think the way that leads into trauma is that trauma is effectively one or many meaningful and intense negative or unsafe experiences over time. And that is a subjective experience for the person experiencing the trauma. So trauma can be something as little as you're crying when you're a little. When you're young and you need something and your parents ignore you and they do it multiple times over and over and over again. That could be a trauma, an emotional trauma. It's a trauma that we see a lot as therapists when we talk to people who have perceptions that they are unlovable or that they can't love others. And that's a very, very common thing we see with lots of people, not just people who have a mental health diagnosis. So trauma can be anything from that to not having enough food growing up, or to having to, as you said earlier, have worry about finances all the time, to the point where you're making all these decisions in your life directly related to the understanding of exactly how many resources you have. Whereas now you don't have to think about that. But for a lot of people, that can be somewhat traumatizing because it's a very negative or many negative meaningful experiences over time. And those create little stresses, sometimes big stresses, that ultimately result in a reflective response in your autonomic nervous system. So every time you experience one of those events, every time your mom ignores you when you're crying and you're in pain or you're not feeling good and you feel helpless, or your parent ignores you, what happens is that your sympathetic nervous system goes up, inflammation goes up in your body and your parasympathetic nervous system, the system responsible for all the good stuff like digestion and rest and energy, recovery and creativity, all these things, starts to decrease in activity and energy because you're perceiving threat again, like we said earlier, and continuous perceived threat over time, particularly when there's a strong emotional part of the experience, ends up resulting in what we now call trauma, which is something that's not just the Western word. It's been used by, you know, tribal plant medicine cultures for thousands of years to describe very similar experiences.

Yeah, now, now my mind is going to this place there. Have you ever come across the book by Bronnie Ware called the Top Five Regrets of the Dying, or have you heard of that book?

I've heard of that. I've heard of it, but I haven't read it.

Okay. Yeah. So she goes over the top five Regrets of the Dying based on, I believe, a whole bunch of folks that she spent caring for in hospice during the last several weeks of their life. She was an Australian nurse. And over and over and over again, people said the same things. And there were five things they were. I wish I had stayed more connected to my old friends. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. I'd wish I had chosen to be happier. I had these memorized. Now I'm having to pull them back out of my memory. And then I wish that I had the courage to express my true self. And then also, and this one is kind of relevant to the trauma piece, I think it is that I wish I'd have had the courage to be who really am rather than who people expected me to be. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because I've looked a little bit into the work of Gabor Mate and he has this definition of trauma where he just says it's basically a disconnection from self or even a lack of the ability to be able to live. Or maybe not a lack of the ability, but just a lack of living according to who you are, who your true authentic self is. Meaning working in a career or a job that you know doesn't fulfill your true purpose or why you were placed on this planet, or getting so caught up in being somebody who you're not. Right? Like. Like for me, I went for the longest time thinking that I had to show the world that I was this like masochistic, hardcore hard charging athlete because I thought that's what people expected me to be. When in reality I'm like this super soft, fantasy, fiction loving, like, romantic guy who loves spirituality and, and painting and, and playing the violin and chassis. All these things I grew up with. And I eventually like, became this hardcore athlete because I thought that's what it would take to be cool. And even for me, right? Like, I think that was a mildly traumatic experience, me being disconnected from my true self for like almost 20 years, just basically living this life based on what I perceive that the world wanted me to be rather than who I truly am at my core. And I've finally, over the past year or so, come full circle and realized that I can embrace the spirituality and the soft side and the romantic side and still play in the fitness world and the biohacking world, but perhaps be a different person in that world and bring a different message to that world. But I'm droning on a bit here, but I'm curious what you think about that idea that Gabor Mate has presented of trauma simply being a disconnection from self.

I think you and Gabor are right on. You know, I think that that disconnection, so the, so the, you know, taking it back several, you know, many generations, you can go the Sanskrit word for health, and I'm probably going to butcher this, but it's something like svathya. And this word means realizing the self, and that is synonymous with health. And ultimately the practice of realizing the self, back when Sanskrit was the language of choice, was to use breathwork and meditation and physical, healthy physical practice with food and practice engaging with the rhythms of nature in the environment around us and having a balance between physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. And what's really, what's really fascinating about this is, and I think what Gabor hints at a lot in what he's talking about and what you mentioned earlier is this idea that for us to be truly as maximally or optimally connected to ourselves as possible to our sense of self and to have this united sense of self, right, the not a self that's fractured, but a self that is whole. Meaning that the version of yourself that you present to the world is exactly the truest version of yourself that you are or that you believe you can be. The way to achieve that is as the Buddhists and the Hindus have said for again, many thousands of years, that you have to let go of attachment to things in the past that you believe have meaning enough to draw your attention away from your experience of the present. Because what happens is when you have experiences in the past like trauma, right? Trauma being powerful, meaningful or intense, you know, negative, meaningful experiences, experience or experiences over time. And then what happens is we attach more and more meaning to those experiences, and the more meaning we attach to those experiences and the more we identify with those experiences. So for an example of that would be saying not I feel sad or I feel depressed, but I am depressed. And when you say I am depressed, you are attaching the depression to your identity with am, which attaches it to the past and the present and the future. If you say I feel depressed or I feel sad, what it means is you're saying, you're describing the moment, you're describing how you feel right now. And so by using the language and using some of these fundamentally ancient strategies for reconnecting with Ourselves, like breath. Breath immediately is something we can do at any moment, at any time, and it immediately tells our brain that we are safe because we have the time to intentionally take a breath and pay attention to it.

When you're running, that's a good way to think about it. When you breathe, you're telling your body you actually have the time to breathe. That's such a good point.

And then you have the time to be grateful for breathing. And then every time you sort of build on that, or you riff on that with gratitude or with self compassion or, you know, you're reinforcing this safety pathway more and more and more. And then it becomes easier and easier and easier to engage in those deep breathing exercises in the moment, which normally can take tens of thousands of hours of practice. But the nice thing is you can practice anywhere you go. So over time, as you practice these techniques, then it helps you to become more autonomically tone, more parasympathetically and sympathetically in balance and closer to flow. And what flow really is, the science of flow is autonomic balance, sympathetic and parasympathetic balance, where you are maximally or optimally present in the moment with yourself and with your environment around you. And you're as in touch with it as you can be. And you can't be 100% in touch, but you can get as close to it as you can. And all of these techniques kind of help us get there.

Okay, got it. Now, there's one other piece of trauma that I want to unpack with you that I think is important and that I think again applies to the people who say, I've never been traumatized. And that's something that's kind of mind blowing, but that there's some evidence actually exists and that's this idea of epigenetic trauma, meaning stressful events that your parents or your grandparents or I believe it can go back as far as six or seven generations experienced, can be from an RNA standpoint, actually packaged and passed on to you. And you can actually have a stress response that is accelerated or carry biological traces of stress based on something that your ancestors experienced, or at least your close living ancestors experienced. What do you think about that?

So I would say that it is at one point a theory. It is now well founded in the scientific literature that this is the case. I think for a long time, you know, probably about 100 years, therapists and psychiatrists and physicians in general have documented their observations that they have seen the children or the offspring and multiple generations down when they see entire families that appear to have increased likelihood of depression, anxiety, ptsd, and even metabolic disorders, when their ancestors have had these issues or had severe traumas happen, not even usually the same thing their ancestors usually have had, survive genocide or survive flood or natural disaster, famine, these kinds of things, drought, austerity, and it gets passed on. And so Rachel Yehuda, who is an incredible scientist from Mount Sinai and the Bronx, va, who are now working with, is one of the pioneers of this epigenetic field, where she actually decided 20 or 30 years ago to go back and say, maybe it's not just the DNA, right? Maybe it's not just the A, Cs, Ts and GS that are predispositioning us to be well or sick or look this way or look that way, or work this way or work that way. Maybe there's something else going on on the DNA called epigenetics, which we knew about, but we didn't exactly know the role of, because it's very, very complicated. We know that it helps tell cells how to function. And so she went back and she actually did a study with Holocaust survivors and their descendants and showed that they passed on epigenetic changes in stress response genes that correspond to PTSD over multiple generations. And then this, I think, most interestingly, was causally replicated in mice, showing that if you traumatize a baby mouse, that it takes at least four generations of safe living, safe laboratory living, where they're not exposed to threat, to breed out the epigenetic changes that occur on stress response genes as a result of that initial trauma. One experience can take four generations to breed out, and that's in a lab in safe, you know, safety, quote, unquote safety. So who knows how many we can't have safety in our lives. So it may be even more than four generations for humans.

Yeah. And I know some people might be familiar because I think this was an article in the New York Times last year about the Dutch genes. And was it what I think is popularly known as the potato famine, but it was the Dutch hunger winter and how generations afterwards, particularly related to the folks who went through that Dutch hunger winter, as you would experience, they do have what appear to be like calorie storage genes, you know, where they have higher levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol and obesity and diabetes, but also issues with things like schizophrenia and bipolar and some things that are more an emotional response to stress. So it's not just, you know, biological or food based. Some of these Genes that get passed on. They're literally your actual response to stress. And I've actually talked to some people and this might be good segue into the next question that I wanted to ask you who have undergone plant medicine experiences with things like MDMA and psilocybin and actually released trauma that they never experienced, but that their parents experience, which I realize is kind of woo woo, and may seem super out there for some of you listening in. But I believe, and I've personally journeyed several times with plant medicine and never experienced anything, any of the trauma or the stress that I know my parents experienced. However, I always have in the back of my mind that I would not be surprised if I had an unpleasant journey just based on some of the things that I know my parents have experienced and that I might need to release someday. So it's really, really weird to think about.

Yeah, absolutely. I think. And I think what is even more interesting is that when we go back again to our ancient roots in Eastern medicine, we see people and, you know, in tribes and in, you know, Chinese and Hindu and Buddhist culture, Tibetan culture, they're talking about past lives and trauma inherited over time. They've been talking about this for a long time. I think what's truly unique about the time that we're in right now is technology has gotten to a point where we're now able to demonstrate with science that a lot of these really complex and sort of abstract Eastern ideas are in fact real, and they were discovered for a reason. And so plant medicine, I think plant medicine is one of the most fascinating subjects because when you go back and look at the ancient tribal use of psilocybin and the ancient tribal use of ayahuasca in the Amazonian jungle and psilocybin in Mexico and with the Mayas, and then peyote and mescaline containing cactus and iboga and all of these different tribal plants have been used traditionally to relieve or release trauma. And it could be trauma. And when you talk to the people who have administered these medicines, who have been conducting a similar practice in the traditional setting for sometimes thousands of years, in the case of the Shipibo culture in Peru with ayahuasca, we see that these people, they describe what they're doing as relieving energetic blocks in our bodies that they describe as trauma. And they under the, with, by working with the medicine, the spiritual context of the medicine, and they, you know, are able to sing to the body to create resonance patterns with sound waves that actually facilitate the release of these blocks that allow Our energy to flow as freely and optimally as possible, which allows us to get closer and closer to our truest, best selves, best version of ourselves. And when they describe it, they describe double helices. They describe what they call dragons or snakes that look like double helices or look like helices in general that are that western doctors and many anthropologists and even Francis Crick himself, who discovered DNA believed to be the fundamental connecting point between sort of how plant medicine is working and how the effects last over time. And so there's a lot of evidence to suggest, and this is what are the primary focus of our clinical study with MAPS and with a number of other centers like Sinai and Imperial College and others and CUSC is to look at how these epigenetic changes may be able to be reversed from trauma. The changes from trauma may be able to be reversed by intense plant medicine experiences or intense MDMA experiences because they are indeed clinically reversing these trauma. You know, PTSD is 67% of people who go through the MAPS Phase 3 trial, Phase 2 trial are symptom not meeting diagnostic criteria for PTSD at five years out with just three doses of medicine in 12 weeks of psychotherapy. And that's it. That is a miraculous result.

Wait, can you say that again? How many doses and how many treatments?

So the MAPS FACE trial, that's for MDMA, for treatment resistant PTSD is in phase three right now. But in the phase two trial, in 100 subjects who had PTSD that was treatment resistant on average for 17 years or more than 17 years, 67% were symptom free. At five years out, they no longer met diagnostic criteria for PTSD with just three doses of medicine and spread out around 12 weeks of psychotherapy.

Yeah, I sometimes take it for granted that a lot of my listeners are already familiar with things like MDMA therapy or psilocybin. And then I'll do a podcast like this and, and some of my clients will contact me or folks will comment in the show notes. And I realize a lot of people still associate some of this stuff with just partying or with some kind of a journey escape where there's no integration and no long term lasting change. But I realize we could do an entire podcast on MDMA psychotherapy alone. But just so folks know at this point and correct me if I'm wrong, David, the only way to do this type of thing legally would be to actually be a part of one of these clinical trials, correct?

That's right. So psychedelic medicines and psychedelic, interestingly for your audience so they know psychedelic does not mean partying at a rave. It means mind manifesting. So it literally is a word used to describe medicine or like MDMA and psilocybin and ayahuasca that helps take things from our subconscious and manifest them in our conscious. And so the only way, but the only way currently in the US to legally experience these medicines is with ketamine. Ketamine is the only legal psychedelic medicine that's used for treatment resistant depression, by.

The way, not to derail you, but just so folks know, I will put a link in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Apollo but I actually did a whole podcast on ketamine both before and after a ketamine journey that I did via intravenous ketamine at the office of Dr. Matthew Cook. I'll link to that podcast.

Oh, you know Matt, I've had one interaction with him, but a lot of my colleagues and friends go to him for care and they really like him. So I've never heard anything, Never heard anything. Not good.

He's. He's amazing. He's been on this podcast four times now. And we also have a country music band now which folks may or may not have already heard of by the time this podcast is released. We're called Rocky Roots, dude. Total rabbit hole anyways though, so another friend of mine, for I would say for those of you who just want a glimpse into what for even someone who may not feel that they have PTSD or trauma, but perhaps this disconnection from authentic self what they experienced when they went through MDMA assisted psychotherapy. One of my other friends, Tucker Max, has a wonderful article on Medium where he writes about his own MDMA experience and how it transformed him basically from being an asshole. He's the famed author of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Quintessential frat boy asshole, turned him into like this soft fatherly figure. And I'll link to the article that he wrote on Medium about that as well as my podcast with Dr. Matt Cook about Ketam. And when it comes to these type of treatments, David, do you think that when it comes to trauma that something as brief as like a single high dose MDMA session or. I believe that a MDMA protocol full on is several sessions of 90 minutes, then a longer session of four to eight hours. Do you think that that's enough for many people to resolve a lot of this trauma?

So I think there's multiple things there that number one, the way that you do have to access MDMA and psilocybin right now is through clinical trials only, just to make sure that everybody understands that.

But you can go to. You can say that. You can say that. But I can say, as many folks are well aware these days, psilocybin and MDMA are becoming increasingly available. If you ask the right people. Just like being in your high school parking lot back in the day, there's a lot of this stuff happening behind the scenes, and you just want to connect with someone trustworthy. And you can often. I mean, my wife and I, for example, we now do couples therapy with MDMA and psilocybin and some other similar analogs. And it's been absolutely transformative for our relationship. And, and so I will tell people, although I know you as a responsible MD, PhD, David, cannot. That even if you aren't in a clinical trial per se, that if these are the type of issues that concern you, you may want to look into hunting down a responsible facilitator for something like MDMA or psilocybin, because I do think that it can be transformative. And this is, by the way, coming from a conservative, libertarian, Christian, homeschooled kid from North Idaho. So I'm. I'm about the least Burning man type of person you'd ever run into, but have indeed found this stuff to be highly transformative. So, that being said, I'm sorry, I interrupted thought pattern that you were on. So did I totally derail you again?

No, we're good. We can just jump right back in. Okay. I think, I think that, you know, you know, just. Again, I think legally speaking, it is important for everybody to be safe when they have these experiences. And so ketamine is a great first step for people. And I'm really glad that you talked about that experience that you had, because ketamine, interestingly, going to the timing of the experience, it only lasts a half hour to an hour of your time. And so it's not a huge investment. And you can do it. And know you're getting medical grade ketamine and know that it's pure and know that you're getting a safe experience. And then follow up with your therapist afterwards who understands what you're doing and why you're doing it and what you want to work on intentionally, what intention you're putting in to heal, what you'd like to get out of the experience, then you can have a very powerful and again, transformative experience with that. I think that psilocybin, MDMA are right around the corner. They both have breakthrough status with the FDA. And so they will be available probably by 2021 into 2022. I think going back to your question about whether or not short experiences like this are able to cure or treat trauma, that is deep seated is first off that everyone has trauma. Every single person on the face of the earth has traumatic experiences. They're just manifesting in different ways. They look different on the surface. Sometimes trauma looks like depression because of extremely low self esteem or, or fractured sense of self. And sometimes your sense of self is so fractured that you become psychotic or dissociated in schizophrenia. Other times it becomes anxious or looks like anxiety, or it looks like OCD or it looks like PTSD or physical illness. And there's all these different manifestations of trauma that we don't necessarily know about yet because we haven't had the opportunity to study them in this way through looking at epigenetics. And now that we're able to look at epigenetics, what I think we're going to find is that there are very specific characterizations of trauma. For example, people with PTSD induced trauma may be somewhat different epigenetically than people with depression related trauma or diabetes related trauma. Like in the case of that great study you brought up, the Dutch crisis, which is fascinating. And so what we're aiming to do with our study with these different groups is to look at the epigenetic markings before their psychedelic experiences, whether that's MDMA or traditional ayahuasca ceremony, or psilocybin at Hopkins or Yale or what have you, or ketamine, and then compare that to their epigenetic profile afterwards and then over time, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 2 years. Apollo is now we're working on a protocol with mafs to actually introduce it into the MDMA protocol after MDMA has been administered. Because what's really interesting is that when you and I think this will really answer your question is ultimately people are getting better from these treatments, not because the medicine is. They're reliant on the medicine to heal them. What the medicine is doing is it's empowering us to remember our own internal innate ability that we're born with to heal ourselves. And the reason we know that is because after the phase two trial with mdma, I mean, the reason we know that to start is because people who use these medicines, they use them just one to three times oftentimes, and they have persistent and consistent improvements in symptoms over time. And this was tracked in the MAPS MDMA Phase 2 trial with 100 subjects, where two months after the last therapy session, which is, and these therapy sessions with MDMA are eight hours long. So it's an eight hour long therapy session with two therapists. There's three of them spread out over 12 weeks. And two months after, 52% are symptom free, are no longer meeting symptom criteria for PTSD. However, five years out, 67% are now not meeting symptom criteria for PTSD and there's been no subsequent treatment. So that is probably one of the most paradigm shifting things for us because when you're that much better at two months out, but then you see continuous improvements where more people are more better at five years out, that means that the subjects, the patients are learning from their experience so much from just this 12 week experience, which includes a lot of integration of what they've learned during the medicine experiences that they take with them and they use that to continually make themselves better when they leave. So yes, what we are seeing is that just three doses of medicine can be completely life changing for people. But again, it's not always accessible to everyone. These can take 100 hours or 80 hours of time and they can take something like 12,000 to $15,000 and they won't be reimbursed by insurance right away. And so we created Apollo as a way to help tap into the nervous system's fundamental safety pathway through the skin, through the sense of touch that could make these benefits of MDMA therapy, like this radical safety experience and these flow state experiences, something you could take with you on the go and make it accessible and scalable to a much larger population.

Yeah, and that issue of some of these things being inaccessible to the general population is certainly relevant to Apollo. But what about, you know, let's say someone doesn't want to or isn't going to put on a wearable, or someone doesn't want to or isn't going to engage in plant medicine. You already brought up one thing that's very powerful and that's breathwork. And there, there is of course also the work of Stanislav Grof who was involved. I don't believe he invented lsd, correct me if I'm wrong, but, but he was heavily involved with the use of LSD as a therapeutic method.

He was one of the first people who tried it from Albert Hoffman after Hoffman synthesized it. And then Grof invented holotropic breathwork.

Yes, holotropic breathwork as a way. And that's what I was getting at to get some of the benefits of LSD in terms of Merging of left and right brain hemispheric activity and some of what Michael Pollan, for example, talks about in his great book Change youe Mind, but without the use of anything at all. And you know, I actually do this. I use my friend Niraj Nirak. He goes by the title the Renegade Pharmacist. I use his SOMA breathwork routine. I'm also taking my kids through his 21 day breathwork program right now. But I use, he has a one hour routine in week three of that protocol where you lay flat on your back, it's music and, and him walking you through a whole routine. I do that one or two times a month, laid out on my back in my sauna and go just as deep as I go with any type of psychedelic or plant medicine. I actually want to do it. I know you're sending me up an Apollo soon and I want to do that whole atropic breathwork session while wearing the Apollo to see what the differences are like. But I found that breathwork protocol in and of itself to be, to be very beneficial. In any of your studies with MAPS or elsewhere, did you come across any type of HRV response, trauma release response or anything like that in response to holotropic breathwork?

Absolutely. I think there's been a number of studies that have looked at these responses in people who have done holotropic breathwork. I think a recent one came out in something like thousands of individuals. It's definitely consistent with what you're doing saying, and people are getting these very powerful healing experiences from holotropic breathwork. And ultimately, when you look back historically, breathwork is the key. It's the key that passes on with many, many, many generations in pretty much every culture going back spiritually. Breath is the key to spirit or to accessing our sense of self, our sense of oneness with the environment. It's the most fundamental way that we interact with the world around us. The problem is that breath work is while breath is accessible to everyone. It can take 10,000 hours or more to master breathwork in real time, to be able to access those states whenever you want. It's one thing to be able to take the time out to go sit in your sauna or to go sit in your living room on a yoga mat and lie down, or sit cross legged and do powerful meditative deep breathing practices. And that's really great for people to do, for all of us to do, because it helps condition our nervous system and helps our nervous system function better and improves our resilience that said, it also takes a lot of practice and we have to cultivate a sense of patience with ourselves to get there.

Yeah, there's no way my mom is going to do holotropic breath work. So even if she did have stress or trauma, she's not going to land her back and get herself to the point of almost being passed out, you know, with these deep breath holds. And this is very intensive breathwork. I mean, like, it would be nice if everybody could do that. But I do understand, like, it in and of itself, it's like me telling somebody, yeah, you wanna get fit, go do squats and deadlifts. But maybe they're just like on the couch with low back pain. Right? They need to, they need to start with something more accessible to them. And that's, that's probably a good place for us to jump into, you know, something other than breath work, other than plant medicine. And what we've already alluded to this idea of using something like a wearable. This, though probably is just a completely foreign concept to everybody listening, as it was to me when you showed up at my house. I was like, what are you talking about? How could you get yourself into a meditative state? Sure, I've used the Muse headband, where you combine quantification, a little bit of neurofeedback with meditation, but never actually put somebody on that just jacks you straight into that state, that parasympathetic state. So let's start here. What does the Apollo do? What's the actual technology behind this thing?

So Apollo is a wearable. It's about the size of an apple watch you can wear on your wrist or your ankle or your arm. That provides gentle vibrations to the body that are rhythmic. It kind of feels like an ocean wave washing over you or a cat spring on you. And these frequencies we found in the laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh actually activate the safety pathway in the skin through the sense of touch. And the reason why we did this is because I'm also an MDMA trained psychotherapist with the MAPS protocol. And I realized that in the MDMA protocol with these people with severe treatment resistant ptsd, as well as with my PTSD patients in the office, the single most powerful thing that helped them get better and help them make change in their lives that were positive and long lasting, were feeling safe. And that was feeling safe in the office, and it was feeling safe outside of the office. And I could control the office, but I couldn't control outside of the office for these people. They had to do that on their own. Looking back, evolutionarily, touch stood out to us because touch is the single most powerful way that we as humans, and even further down, ancient mammals and great apes have all used for bonding and for building relationships with one another that are safe. And that touch pathway is hardwired into our skin. It's evolutionarily conserved for millions and millions of years. And so we thought, well, what could we do? What would happen if we created a technology that was easy to wear, that would provide gentle vibrations that were perceived by the body as safety signals all the time? Or you could wear it as often as you needed it to help with stress, or help wake up or fall asleep, or perform better under stress, physically or mentally, or whatever it is. We started testing this in the lab at the university, and we ultimately showed that in a double blind, randomized, placebo controlled crossover study that these frequencies reliably increased parasympathetic tone as measured by heart rate variability.

And these are sound frequencies.

They're sound frequencies, right? They're just below your range of what you can hear.

I was going to say you can't actually hear them. What about a dog? You think a dog could hear them? Or a cat or some other animal in the house?

These animals typically hear higher frequencies, not lower. I think that many of them can hear these frequencies, but ultimately the intensity level, what keeps them. We can actually hear a lot of them too. But, but the intensity level of the frequencies is very, very low. So the reason why your skin is sensitive to it is because it's close to your skin, and your skin is very sensitive to these low frequency vibrations, more so than our ears. And so our skin picks it up before the ears pick it up. And the intensity level makes it basically not audible unless you hold it right up to your ear.

Okay, all right, got it. So it's a sound frequency that's being emitted. And what exactly is the frequency doing? Is it like interacting with the cell membrane or what's going on?

I think the best way to think about the frequencies, there's the same range of frequencies that would be coming out of your subwoofer that you would experience with music. And so I think what these frequencies are doing is very similar to music. You listen to different music when you work out and when you're doing focus, intense work than when you're going to bed or meditating. And it's important to think about that because the reason why we do that is because music changes resonance patterns in our nervous system between our heart and our lungs and our thoughts and our blood pressure, our vasculature that facilitates our functioning in different settings. So when you're exercising, you're breathing different, and your breathing is different, and your heart rate is different, usually faster and deeper to get more blood to your skeletal muscles to meet the demands of the exercise. And that's going to be very. Look very different than when you're sitting at a desk and reading or dancing. And so the body creates these rhythms naturally when we enter these states. And so what we did is we went back through the literature and did our own experimentation and said, what does the body look like when it's meditating? What does the body look like when it's exercising? What about post exercise? What about sleep? And we started to see very distinct patterns. And then also mental and physical illnesses. We started to see these very specific patterns in the way that people. That people's bodies look when they're in these different states. And we develop the frequencies to basically resonate at those patterns that the heart and the lungs get into when you enter those states. And then the body feels those frequencies, it naturally mimics them, just like biofeedback, but without having to look at a screen and sit connected to all this stuff. It can just do it without the whole visual part.

Okay, so what are the actual states that. Because you showed me the app when you brought it to my house, that ties into this Apollo that's emitting these sound frequencies. But there were multiple different states that I think the one that I tried that you put me on was meditation. And then we briefly tried focus, if I recall tall. But there were more states than that. So what are the states one could actually put themselves into using this thing?

So the states that Apollo can put you in into are bridge from everything from being wide awake to falling asleep. And so it would be wakefulness, which would be the most energy, which is the most sympathetic, most activating, and what.

You might say put on when you wake up in the morning, for example.

Right, exactly. So that would be something that people use first thing in the morning. And many people use it instead of caffeine or stimulants, which is interesting. I started mostly drinking decaf coffee and decaf tea as a result of using this, which is nice. And then when I need caffeine, it works a lot better for me. The next frequency would be clear and focus, which is for, like, long, deep work when you have to focus on anything for a long period of time. I also use that for public speaking and settling my nerves and no matter how many talks I give, I always get a little like butterflies in the stomach before I go on stage. And that just helps incredibly. Throwing events, giving presentations, all that kind of stuff, and also working at a desk for long periods of time. And then there's Rebuild and recover, which is post physical exercise. It helps bring the heart rate down, bring the blood pressure down, bring the breath rate down, and just rapidly bring the heart rate variability up in the body into balance. Post exercise, particularly post intense exercise, can help us wind down and increase that energy recovery response so that we can be ready for the next thing that comes. And not kind of in this hyper adrenaline, kind of overactive state, restless state. Sometimes happens post exercise where you can't sleep. And then the next one is social and open, which is, is one of my favorites. And this is like social safety, social flow. It's the best when you're tired and need to talk to a lot of people or need to go out or just need to be on and you're tired or you've traveled a lot and that kind of thing. And then there's meditation, which is self explanatory. Helps increase access to meditative states. We've now shown that in a study at the University of Pittsburgh that it deepens meditative states with expert meditators and it also helps non meditators access meditative states more quickly. And then we have also relax and recharge, which is winding down at the end of the day and then sleep. And so all of these seven choices are able to sort of help us regulate our circadian rhythms more effectively, which as you said, helps us reconnect us with our best version of ourselves, which is our sense of self that's the most present and most connected and in balance with nature.

And what's the runtime on it like if I choose, if I'm going to go to a party and I want to enhance my social ability, how am I doing wearing it during the party, putting it on for 20 minutes before. Like how do you actually use it?

I think it's very contextual. It depends on the situation. So most people will start using it. In the case of a party, I'll use it. Either I'll start using it on the way or I'll use it. Right, sorry, turn it on right when I get there from our clinical trials at the university, it the effects come on within about two to three minutes. Many people who use it a lot actually get sensitized to it. And so the effects come on more quickly and last longer afterwards. Typically we see people who use it for 15 minutes have continued effects of calm and feeling in flow for 30 minutes to 2 hours after which is actually the known duration of how long someone touching you nicely lasts in our bodies, which is very interesting. And so you can use it as little for five minutes before and five minutes during or five minutes before and 10 minutes during in the beginning and then have it turn off. And there's time settings. There's a 15 minute timer for most of them, a 30 minute timer, an hour timer, and a two hour timer. Other people just find the waves very pleasant and very soothing. And so they'll wear it for two hours and they'll have it on for the entire event or the entire talk. And then they'll go home and switch to a different frequency and then wind down for bed. Ultimately, I think the main point is that the body responds very quickly, but it feels soothing. And so people like to wear it and they continue to wear it over time. But over time as you wear it, you actually don't rely on it and you don't become dependent on it or feel like you need it. Your body actually becomes more sensitive to it. So over time it actually gets better and more effective.

And as far as for the people concerned about health, you know, some people are concerned about what the thing is actually made of. Like if it has, you know, latex, for example, on the interior that some people might be sensitive to. Many of my listeners would be very concerned if this is constantly emitting a Bluetooth signal or a WI fi signal or how it would actually interact with the device, meaning how, how constantly is it like trying to ping a new device? So talk to me about that. As far as for folks who are EMF sensitive or folks who are chemical sensitive sensitive, how you've actually constructed this thing.

So we've taken all those concerns very carefully and sincerely and we wanted to make sure we addressed many of those things because this is a technology that's supposed to make people healthier. And so we built the technology to FDA specifications and we did that because we are taking it through FDA trials to help people with treatment resistant illnesses. And so the device is built, you know, to be hypoallergenic. There isn't any latex. And we've done, you know, we've done the testing that shows that it doesn't have any reactivity or negative reactivity on people's skin with the hypoallergenic materials that we've used. Additionally, in terms of emf, I think it's important to note that the device, and we designed this device to be specifically an extremely low EMF device. So the device is, the wearable is only talking, is only active with Bluetooth when it's talking to the phone. So that only means when you have your app open and you're either changing a setting or tracking your data, if you're not changing a setting on your app or you're not tracking your data, the Bluetooth on the wearable is off. And so you aren't exposed to constant low energy Bluetooth waves. And the frequencies we use are sound. And as sound waves they are, they have been found to be universally safe and never at the intensities that we're delivering them. They've never been shown to have side effects of any kind. And so we are able to deliver these frequencies to the body directly produced by the device itself.

Okay, so basically what you could do is you can, you can activate it, put it into the mode that you want to be at, and then once you've done that, once you've used your phone to kind of activate it, just like I could do with my Oura ring, I can then basically just walk away or turn off Bluetooth on my phone, and it's going to stay in whatever mode that I put it in until I turn Bluetooth back on my phone, which would then log back into the Apollo, which would then allow me to either turn it off or shift it to a new mode.

The idea is that the Apollo Apollo can be set by the phone and you set it to the settings, the waves that you would like to use for a certain amount of time that can also be scheduled. So you'll be able to schedule and set a schedule on the device, on the wearable itself for when you want to use certain waveforms throughout your day. And then it will run by itself without talking to the phone, and it will even run in airplane mode, completely disconnected from the phone. And so, and so we did this specifically to address concerns of not only people who care about not being supposed to EMF like we do, but also the concerns of the military and healthcare practitioners. And we also built it to HIPAA compliance. So the data security level that we're working with is very, very high, which I think is also really important to, you know, to address in these current days where our health data is a little bit scary where, where it's going sometimes.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I appreciate the fact that I can turn that off, because if I'm going to use this thing for a night of sleep, or meditation. That's the thing that drives me nuts. Any of these wearables that emit a signal while you're wearing them or emit a light while you're wearing them, it's just a complete evolutionary mismatch and blows my mind when folks develop a device that. I mean, I'm asked a lot of times, honestly, to invest in the health and fitness industry in the realm of wearables or biohacking technologies or whatever. And like, I turn down 95% of what I see just because it's a cool concept, but it has a bunch of evolutionary mismatches built into it, meaning non native EMF signals or large amounts of blue or white lights or, you know, other things that would actually disrupt biology rather than enhancing biology. So in terms of a couple other just basic usage questions on this, kids, have kids used it? Can kids use it? Do you have any concerns about that?

Yeah, I mean, part of the way we designed this was for kids and for vulnerable populations of people who just aren't great candidates for medicine. You know. So right now, I think you mentioned earlier that kids are being prescribed an enormous amount of medicine and that seems to be only increasing. And we are seeing that with amphetamines and antidepressants. And so, you know, but these populations, kids, pregnant women, elderly, vulnerable populations, are not the best to receive medicine because we don't know all the risks, we don't know all the side effects. And many of the most, much of the time the medicines are used off label and they haven't been tested in those populations. And so we made Apollo to be safe for use with children, and we have tested it on people from age 3 to 93, and they've had fantastic results. And kids, very interestingly, actually respond more quickly to Apollo than adults in a lot of cases, because for them it's a more familiar. It's a more familiar feeling. They're much closer to that feeling of being hugged, that feeling of being touched gently by a loved one than many of adults are. Many times adults haven't had that experience in a very long time. And so we forget how important and meaningful that is to us. But when you put Apollo on kids, they feel it and instantly recognize it for what it is, which is tapping into that touch receptor system, just like somebody holding your hand on a bad day. And they say this feels like hugs. And it's really just the most adorable thing we've ever seen. But now we're doing, we're actually starting unlike so something that is very difficult with A medicine trial with drugs. What we are able to do is because Apollo is so safe and so non invasive, we're able to start a trial right now that's IRB approved. That is a clinical trial for children age, I think we're looking at 8 to 18 that have treatment resistant developmental disorders like ADHD and depression and anxiety and aggression disorders and things that just don't respond to medicine. And we have seen early results, preliminary results from these kids. They are responding just incredibly well. And they're having behavior change and improved sleep and improved mood and focus. And some of them are able to decrease the amount of medicine they take, which is really promising.

Wow. Okay. So another question about the use of the Apollo. You showed it to me and I believe we had it on, because I wear a watch on my left wrist and I don't like to have things on both wrists, my ankle. Is that still the case? Like, can you use it on the ankle and still have it be effective? Does it need to be on the wrist? Can it go elsewhere? Could it go in your pocket? Walk me through that.

So from our case studies and our clinical trials, it appears that based on the way Apollo works, which is by activating the touch receptor system in our skin and in our bones, the vibration response system in our nervous system. Apollo seems to work pretty much anywhere on the body. As long as you adjust the intensity level to match the sensitivity of the location, it works relatively anywhere. I think we really focus on the ankle and the wrist because those are the easiest places to wear it and where people tend to get the most reliable effects and places they can wear it throughout the day. The ankle has particularly been interesting because it's not the wrist. Right. So people wear, as you said, you have two wearables that you wear already. Lots of people wear things on their wrists all the time. Personally, I don't like to wear things on my wrist. So when I was doing therapy with patients in the hospital, I would oftentimes rest my wrist wearing my the Apollo prototype on my ankle. And I would feel the vibration through my ankle. And I realized immediately how much more calming it was when I felt it that way than when I felt it through my arm. And we had a patient with Parkinson's disease who had a severe tremor who had a wonderful response from Apollo on his ankle. And so we actually made a custom strap that would wrap around the ankle and started testing it in over, I think, over 1,000 subjects now. And we've seen even better results on the ankle for the most part, in terms of response times, people just feeling subjectively more calm or feeling better than they do when it's on the wrist. But it's split camps. There are people who enjoy wearing things on their wrist and they're great with the Apollo on the wrist. There are other people who like wearing on the ankle. It's really most of it is personal preference.

Okay, cool. So as far as the actual device itself, is it something people can get right now? Is it still a deal where you got to be a super special podcaster like me to actually get your hands on one? Or where are you guys at as far as being able to ship these things?

So Apollo is available now for $350 from our website, ApolloNeuro.com or ApolloNeuroScience.com and you can also get a special discount that is available to to all the loving fans of Ben Greenfield@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Apollo Apollo.

Okay, cool. So I'll work out with David, for those of you listening in, because we actually didn't talk too much beforehand about what we want to do for you guys for a code and everything like that. But we're going to figure this out. And so I'm not going to announce it right now on the show for all of you listening in, but just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Apollo and I'll get all the details over there after I talk with David after this show. And of course, over@bengreenfulfitness.com Apollo I'll put links to some of the New York Times articles that we talked about on epigenetic trauma, Tucker Max's article on Medium about MDMA therapy, that SOMA breathwork routine from the renegade pharmacist that I talked about, that holotropic routine, the podcast I did with Matt Cook about ketamine. So if you guys want to take a deeper dive into all this stuff, I will put it over there and also link to David, his website and his fascinating body of research. And of course, the Apollo wearable itself, which if you guys see me with some funky black thing on my ankle or my wrists, then you now know that's, that's what I'm sporting. So I now, you know, right now all I wear is a wearable is an OURA ring and I wear a cheap ass like 15 Timex because I always lose my watches. But I am willing to add, and I don't say this a lot, people know that even though there's a lot of wearables out there, Ben Greenfield is not a guy who, who walks around with a lot of stuff on my body. I just like to be kind of unplugged a lot of the time. But I am. I'm going to be adding a third, and it's the Apollo. So there you have it, folks. You got to grab one. So go to BenGreenFelFitness.com Apollo for that. David. Dude, this was awesome. Thanks for getting into all this with me.

Yeah, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for all your support. We really appreciate it.

Yes, sir. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. David Rabin from Apollo Neuroscience signing out again. Check out BenGreenfieldFitness.com Apollo for the show notes and have a an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that, that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.