The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! Psychedelic therapy misconceptions, effectiveness and safety, chronic stress implications, shifting from treatment to CURE, ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, mental health vs. stress and more!
Fri, 16 May 2025
Episode #27 Featuring Dr. Dave Rabin! The Psychedelic and Neuroscience Episode! Dylan and Dr. Dave take a deep dive into overcoming psychedelic therapy misconceptions, the effectiveness of psychedelics and their safety profile, an understanding chronic stress implications, creating a shift from treatment to ACTUAL CURES, discussing ketamine facts, unlocking self awareness, deciphering mental health vs. stress, the creation and benefits of the Apollo Neuro and more!GET YOUR APOLLO NEURO HERE AND USE CODE GEMELLI to save!!https://apolloneuro.com/dylangemelliCheck out Dr. Dave Rabin's Homepagehttps://www.drdave.io/Follow Dr. Dave on instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/drdavidrabin/?hl=en______________________________________________________________________Follow Dylan on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok @dylangemelliHuge thank you to everyone for the support! Please make sure to subscribe, like and comment!!Email Dylan for booking, collaborations and/or to apply for the Dylan Gemelli [email protected] Dylan's homepage here:https://dylangemelli.comTo PURCHASE MITOPURE visit Dylan's landing page and use code DYLAN10 to save!!https://www.timeline.com/promotions/dylangemelliRSShttps://rss.com/podcasts/the-dylan-gemelli-podcastApplehttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dylan-gemelli-podcast/id1780873400I Hearthttps://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-dylan-gemelli-podcast-249695201/Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/show/3In4QlJj4IvHqq0eduKj7mPandorahttps://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-dylan-gemelli-podcast/PC:1001096187Stitcherhttps://www.stitcher.com/show/1096187FM Playerhttps://player.fm/series/the-dylan-gemelli-podcastPodchaserhttps://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-dylan-gemelli-podcast-5933919Listen Noteshttps://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-dylan-gemelli-podcast-dylan-gemelli-HDjBueWOVvG
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Dave Rabin and what is his background?
All right, everybody, welcome back to the Dylan Gemelli podcast. I am really, really excited about my guest today. We've been kind of having some scheduling, but I'm so glad that he's here today. So my guest today is a board certified psychiatrist, neuroscientist, entrepreneur and inventor and He studied resilience and the impact of chronic stress on our lives for over 20 years.
And he's also the co-founder of the Apollo Neuro, as you can see that I'm wearing now. And he does so much more that we're going to get into today. So my friends, welcome Dr. Dave Rabin. Thanks, Dave, for being here, man. Thanks so much for having me, Dylan. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Awesome. Well, I've been following some of your work now for quite a while.
I was really thankful that I stumbled upon you several months ago. Many of the people that I highly respect I saw interviewed you, and so we got a lot to talk about. Obviously, I'm wearing the Apollo Neuro. I'm a big believer in that and your work. So first, let's kind of just talk about your background a little bit, because I'm always curious. Everybody's got a pretty cool backstory on why they...
kind of take the directions in life where they're going. So when was it that it kind of occurred to you or what happened in your life that made you go into the route that you're going?
Well, I actually became interested in consciousness and dreams from a very, very young age. It was probably When I was between maybe four and seven years old, I started to have very vivid dreams that I couldn't really explain, but felt very real to me. And they felt as real as my regular waking life. And I found myself referencing those dreams when I was interacting with my brothers or friends.
And they would have no idea what I was talking about. And then I would instantly remember that this is something I dreamed about. It wasn't something that happened in our regular lives. And that just started to make me interested in what these dream things we have are.
And so I think as I got older and started school, I went to my parents and I said, hey, as I started to have more scary dreams, I was like, what are dreams? What's going on when we're sleeping? And they just kind of gave me the answer that all kids get from their parents pretty much, which is, don't worry about dreams.
They can't hurt you because our parents want to make sure that we don't become afraid of sleep. And that was fine for the time being, but it didn't really satisfy my curiosity because I kept having vivid dreams that seemed real. And it started to make me question, you know, what is the word real really mean?
And, and maybe the, uh, adults don't know the answer to that question because these dreams feel real and regular waking life feels real. So maybe there's more to it. Um, and then from there, I, you know, went and started reading, you know, as I got older into high school and things like that, I started reading science fiction that my vivid dreams kind of like faded. I didn't have them as often. Um,
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of chronic stress on health?
So if you can imagine when you're stressed out all the time, when we as humans are stressed out all the time because of everything that's going on in the world, we're literally sending all our blood to our skeletal muscles, heart, lungs, fear center of our brains, motor cortex.
And we're taking that blood from our recovery nervous system, the nervous system that is responsible for healing our bodies and also delivering nutrients to reproduction, immunity, digestion, sleep, and for helping us to take waste away from those organ systems. So if you didn't have garbage pickup and you didn't have food for an extended period of time, how long would we last?
Not very long, right? Like we need garbage pickups, we need food. You'd last maybe like a week. But in the body, the body has ways of negotiating this and figuring it out and extending our ability to sustain organ systems for years with decreased garbage pickup and decreased nutrients, meaning decreased blood flow to those organ systems, but eventually those organs dysfunction.
And so that's why we see people who have chronic stress and, you know, developing all these different illnesses, physical and mental, emotional, because their organ systems responsible for recovery are just deprived of resources and waste. So you can see this direct connection between like, where's your blood going? And in any moment and stress and organ system functioning.
Thank you.
Right. Okay. So I'm very sympathetic when it comes to people that have like mental health, anxiety, stress, but at the same time, I'm wondering how you differentiate this because what I've seen, I analyze people. I'm no psychiatrist, but I mean, with all of the work I've done throughout the years, I analyze people, actions, reactions, emotions.
That's kind of what I do from being in sales and then to interviewing people and being around people, you kind of have to have a knack for that. So I guess over time, what I've observed is mental health has obviously been talked about a lot more. And I'm also the focus on concussions and things like that in sports, right?
So we see this progression and it's it's I guess it's being more accepted to talk about it and to view it. But I do feel like some people revert to calling being stressed or in stressful situations than claiming they have a mental health problem. So I guess my question for you is, how do you differentiate if I were to come to you and say, Dr. Dave, I've got some mental health issues.
How do you differentiate between just stress and true like mental health conditions?
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Chapter 3: How can we differentiate between stress and mental health issues?
So why would it function properly? It's silly for us to even consider, based on the way that we know now that the body works, that your reproductive system should not be functioning properly when your body-mind perceives that you are running from a lion. right? You don't want it to function when you're running from a lion. So your body's doing what it was designed to do.
It's just that stress has hijacked it. And the idea of stress being, oh, this is actually dangerous. So that's neuroscience, really. And we know this because of neuroscience. So neuroscience is a field that has been around for quite some time, I guess, probably about 100 years in the modern neuroscience.
And what it is, it's the study of the brain and the body and how the brain and the body are connected. and how nerve cells, the brain's core cells that connect information from one part to another, are able to talk to each other and basically entrain learning and information. And neuroscience can be any number of different things. It can be practiced in a lab, which is how I started.
And that's how most commonly people think about neuroscience is a bunch of people in white research lab coats doing experiments on animals or cells. I did that for about eight to 10 years.
And then there's neuroscience on the human level where we're actually studying how people's brains work using brain imaging and biological techniques that help measure the nervous system, EEG, brainwave measurement, things like that, body measurement, heart rate and respiratory rate, all these functions of the body. can be used to help us understand the brain better.
So those are all different neuroscience practices. I am actually fairly unique in that I am a translational neuroscientist. So what that means is I don't work at the bench anymore. I'm not in the lab. And I do work in the clinic with my patients. But my focus is on how do we literally translate the great discoveries we've made in the lab
and then bring them into the community and bring them into clinical care? And how do we change the way we treat patients? How do we change the way we live from all of the incredible discoveries we've made over the last 100 years, most of which have never actually been fully integrated into the way we live and the way we practice medicine, which I noticed when I was in the lab.
I'm like, why are these great discoveries not moving forward into changing the way we work? And They just weren't. There's all these blockers along the way. So one of the main ones is how do we describe the findings and how do we create new tools? Apollo being the first translation that we did from our work from the lab into the clinic and into the real world.
But how do we literally translate what we learn from the lab into a language that everybody can understand? And so that's kind of my specialty is on the translational neuroscience side.
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Chapter 4: What is the role of psychedelics in mental health treatment?
Chapter 5: How does neuroscience explain the connection between mind and body?
55% of people who have had PTSD for 17 years on average that would likely be continuing to have it for life, 55% of those people with just three doses of MDMA-assisted therapy and 42 hours of therapy over 12 weeks are no longer meeting diagnostic criteria for PTSD two months after the treatment's over. Then you look at one year out, those same patients, that number goes up from 55% to 67%.
without additional treatment. So more people are better at one year out than they were at two months out and then no additional treatment with just three doses of medicine, three doses. That is antibiotic level effect. And it invites us into an opportunity to be curious about
Can we effectively develop the same type of cures for mental illness that we developed for infections and extend, have another opportunity in front of us to embrace these new medicines, use them properly, teach people how to use them properly, and then
you know, extend human life another 10 to 30 years and expand quality of life to a level we've never known before just by using medicine and therapy in the right way.
And that's what I'm, I think, you know, a lot of my work is around inviting people to entertain that possibility that's really right in front of us, that the data from the research is showing that we can potentially cure mental illness in the next five to 10 years, starting with PTSD. And nothing could be more exciting than that. I mean, that's like
Game-changing for the field and game-changing for humanity.
100%.
100%. And I like when you brought up the misuse and how so many things you can take too much of anything. So one of the things that I've sat in a lot of conferences on to learn and then now speak on is like GLP-1 use because obviously it's so prevalent and there's so many –
misconceptions and bad information given by some people that have abused it and misused it so and there's always bad players out there that give it out too much or tell people how to use it wrong and then it causes problems and then it trickles down and before you know it it's like this big narrative pushed out in the field that's just inaccurate, right? Because of some bad experiences.
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Chapter 6: What are the potential benefits of psychedelic therapy?
Yeah, so sleep is a great question. Sleep is the single core issue in almost all mental and physical illness across the board. If you're not sleeping well, and we now know this from modern neuroscience, if you're not sleeping well, and you're trying to get treated or heal from an illness, it's going to be a lot harder if you don't fix the sleep first.
So sleep is really the core because all of our major physical and mental emotional recovery happens during sleep, much more than it happens during the day. So the way Apollo helps with this is twofold.
So one of which is if you're using Apollo in the basic kind of like manual mode, we recommend a schedule for you that basically turns Apollo vibrations on automatically during the day and at night to keep you awake and energized and focused and clear during the day. And then to keep you
you know, unwound and calm and relax at night before bed so that you're ready to fall asleep when you hit the pillow and then helps you fall asleep faster. And the vibes that people use at night are unwind before bed and then sleep when you get into bed. And you can schedule Apollo to just turn on automatically for you, which is one of the best features that people use.
And then regarding sleep, we're actually one of the, we're the first fully closed loop AI product. So if you think about what Tonal did for the fitness industry, Tonal was the first closed loop fitness product that changed the way people work out forever by actively training you based on your data and adjusting your workout based on your data. Apollo does that for sleep.
So it's closed loop AI and it is the first of its kind that can detect in real time when you're about to wake up in the middle of the night. and then turn on automatically to prevent you from waking up or to put you back to sleep faster after you wake up. Just like a snoo for adults.
I don't know if you heard of the snoo, but it's like the most popular baby crib that does that for, yeah, for children under six months old. This Apollo works for everyone over six months old. So you can literally now have a tool you can wear anywhere on your body. Ankle or wrist is probably the best for sleep. I personally prefer the ankle, but wrist is totally fine.
And wherever works for you is fine. It can be worn anywhere. And we can actually intervene in real time. We can detect when you're about to wake up. and then turn Apollo on in a very gentle vibration that just kind of, like your mom when you're a baby, rocks you back to sleep. And that gets people upwards of 60 more minutes of sleep a night, which is really exciting.
I mean, 60 minutes of sleep a night is like seven hours more sleep each week You think about seven hours of sleep each week. I mean, most people can't even imagine how they'd function with seven hours more sleep each week. But you notice a difference.
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