Civic Courage Lab

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Guest:
Dr. David Rabin is an MD PhD board-certified practicing psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and entrepreneur who has studied resilience and the impact of chronic stress on our lives for over 15 years. He is the co-founder and chief medical officer at Apollo Neuroscience, which developed the first scientifically validated wearable technology to improve sleep and mood. In his practice, doctor Dave specializes in treatment-resistant illnesses, including PTSD, personality disorders, substance abuse, and more, using minimally or noninvasive treatment strategies. He is a co-founder of the Board of Medicine, a MAPS-trained MDMA-assisted therapist, and a trained ketamine-assisted therapist studying the epigenetics of trauma. He invests as part of the Noetic Fund. Dave is the host of the Psychedelic Report + You Brain Explained podcasts.

About the Episode:

In this episode, we dive into how Dr. Dave Rabin stays highly productive and how you can use his methods to tackle the issues you care about most effectively. Dr. Dave shares simple physical practices to help you stay calm and centered, even when triggered so that you can respond with clarity and connection. We talk about his Jewish upbringing, a culture of curiosity and questioning, and how it shaped his approach to leadership and teamwork. He explains how creating psychological safety within yourself and with your team leads to better conversations, stronger decisions, and improved outcomes. We also explore the fascinating world of epigenetics, uncovering how trauma can be passed down through generations and how you can break the cycle to heal yourself and your family. Plus, Dr. Dave reveals the surprising top predictor of weight gain, burnout, and anxiety—and shares actionable tools to address it. This conversation is packed with energy, practical advice, and wide-ranging insights. I hope you enjoy this engaging and inspiring talk with my friend and expert, Dr. Dave Rabin!

Key Topics Discussed:

· [00:01:51] Episode/guest intro

· [00:05:23] Question everything

· [00:08:40] Beneath the surface of perceptual reality

· [00:13:18] A culture of questioning

· [00:16:05] Coming of age ceremony

· [00:19:22] Casting “spells”

· [00:21:07] The Torah

· [00:22:19] Multi-hyphenate-human

· [00:23:01] Ketamine-assisted therapy

· [00:24:23] Multi-tasking effectively

· [00:27:05] Practicing Presence

· [00:29:30] Increase your cognitive capacity

· [00:30:19] What is “manifestation” really?

· [00:35:35] Technology moves us forward

· [00:36:50] A new mental health paradigm

· [00:39:20] The contribution of LSD to knowledge of psychology

· [00:40:30] Depression: What comes first?

· [00:42:54] Handwashing as heresy

· [00:42:25] Mental health cures coming?

· [00:47:21] Could it be me?

· [00:48:42] Shame is your teacher

· [00:50:07] ELC Foundation donors

· [00:50:46] SPONSOR: ELC

· [00:53:16] The neuroscience of familiarity

· [00:55:13] Neuroscience of psychedelic therapy

· [00:56:42] Create an environment for life-changing growth

· [00:58:27] Vulnerability is where healing occurs

· [00:59:48] Amplifying safety pathways for healing

· [01:01:45] MDMA therapy: What happens in the brain

· [01:02:27] Vagus nerve

· [01:04:40] Why stress makes your tummy hurt

· [01:05:03] Stress: Body and mind

· [01:07:10] You control your physiology

· [01:08:50] PTSD + MDMA therapy

· [01:12:08] Oh fuck - It’s not my fault!

· [01:13:20] Cognative Vs. embodied knowledge

· [01:15:23] Epigenetic code

· [01:16:50] Healing generational trauma

· [01:20:49] How to treat someone who has been hurt

· [01:22:41] Being a “victim” is not your fault, and you are in control

· [01:24:25] Breaking a fearful mindset

· [01:29:15] Hugs matter

· [01:31:27] 1-minute breathing practice

· [01:32:30] Regulating fear in public meetings

· [01:34:00] What ALL humans need

· [01:36:40] Sharing aliveness

· [01:38:22] Structure public meetings for trust and efficacy

· [01:39:54] Where to find Dr. Dave (links below)

· [01:41:03] Final Question: Temple of Delphi (links below)

· [01:50:47] “The Leader’s Handbook” Newsletter

· [01:51:25] Sponsor: ELC

Key References and Resources Mentioned:

· [00:04:00] Jewish upbringing

· [00:11:24] Goosebumps books

· [00:11:24] X-Men

· [00:15:46] Bar-Mitzvah coming of-age ceremony

· [00:20:31] Torah

· [00:21:07] Dark Matter + Dark Energy

· [00:23:07] Apollo Neuro

· [00:23:01] Ketamin Assisted Therapy

· [00:23:06] The Noetic Fund

· [00:36:50] Biological Psychology

· [00:36:50] Sigmond Freud

· [00:36:50] Carl Jung

· [00:36:50] Theory of Mind

· [00:39:20] Albetr Hoffamn

· [00:39:20] 1950’s LSD based research video intro

· [00:42:54] Alexander Flemming + the invention of Penicillin

· [00:42:54] Impact of handwashing

· [00:42:54] Impact of handwashing and Germ Theory

· [00:42:54] Tragedy of Ignaz Semmelweis

· [00:50:07] ELC Foundation donors

· [00:50:6] SPONSOR: ELC

· [01:01:15] MDMA-assisted psychotherapy

· [01:02:27] The Vagus Nerve

· [01:15:23] Epigenetic code

· [01:16:50] Scientist Rachel Yehudah

· [01:16:50] Rachel Yehudah's study on healing generational trauma

· [01:24:25] Science of a gratitude practice

· [01:41:03] Final Question: Temple of Delphi

· Delphic Maxims

· [01:43:17] “The Leader’s Handbook” Newsletter

· [01:44:26] SPONSOR: ELC

Where to Find Dr. David Rabin:

Where to Find Host Skippy Mesirow:

Receive Support at the Elected Leaders Collective
Follow on Instagram www.instagam.com/skippymesirow
Book a free Clarity Call to see if coaching is right for you

Episode Sponsor:

Elected Leaders Collective (ELC)

Helping You Heal Our Politics

The Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) organization is the leading US-based provider of mental well-being training for public servants, conducted by public servants and the world's best mental health and human optimization professionals. With ELC Training, you will learn to rise above and become the political healer you were meant to be, improving your well-being in the process.

Website: ElectedLeadersCollective.com

Contact the HOP Team:

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Creators and Guests

Host

Skippy Mesirow

Skippy Mesirow is a prominent leader, certified Master Coach, and founder of the Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) and ELC Foundation. ELC leads the US in mental health and well-being training for public servants, recognized in The Apolitical Foundation's Mere Mortals report, and named as one of 26 worldwide political well-being "Trailblazer Organizations." A transformational leader in political innovation and wellness, Skippy serves on Gov. Polis’s Natural Medicine Advisory. Skippy’s work has been featured in numerous podcasts and publications, as well as main-stage speaking engagements for organizations NLC, YEO, CML, MT2030, Bridging Divides, and Fulcrum, highlighting his significant contributions to mental health, community, and policy reform. Alongside his professional achievements, Skippy lives in Aspen, CO. with his partner Jamie where he enjoys running ultra-marathons, road biking, motorcycling, international travel, culinary arts, Burning Man, and lifelong learning.

Producer

Aaron Calafato

Aaron’s stories are currently heard by millions around the globe on his award-winning Podcast 7 Minute Stories and on YouTube. Aaron is a co-host of Glassdoor's new podcast (The Lonely Office) and serves as a podcast consultant for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

Editor

Jesse Link

Jesse is a strategy, research and partnership consultant and podcast enthusiast. A 2x founder, former Goldman Sachs Vice President and advisor to 25+ businesses, Jesse brings a unique and diverse background to HoP, helping to elevate the range, depth and perspective of HoP's conversations and strategy.

What is Civic Courage Lab?

Hello,

I’m Skippy Mesirow, host of “Civic Courage Lab”, the show that shows you, the heart-centered public servants and political leaders, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror.

Civic Courage Lab, “CCL,” is a first-of-its-kind show that provides tools and practices for mental well-being, health, and balance, specifically for public servants so we can do good by feeling good and safe in our jobs.

CCL brings together experts, scientists, doctors, thought leaders, healers, and coaches to share their insights in practical, tactical, actionable ways specifically tailored to the public service experience for you to test and implement with yourself and your teams. Episodes feature intimate conversations with global leaders about their self-care practices and personal challenges, providing insights for a more holistic, connected approach to leadership. Whether you're a Mayor, teacher, police officer, or staffer, this podcast will guide you to be the best version of yourself in service to yourself and the world!

Sign up for our once-per-month Leader’s Handbook newsletter to receive an actionable toolkit of how-to guides on topics discussed on the podcast that month to test and implement in your life and with your team: https://leadershandbook.substack.com/

Skippy Mesirow: 00:03

Hello. My name is Skippy Mesirow, coach, former elected official, and lifetime public servant. Welcome to Healing Our Politics, The show that shows you, the heart centered public servant and political leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. It is my job to sit down or stand up with the best experts in all areas of human development, thought leaders, coaches, therapists, authors, scientists, and more, to take the best of what they have learned and translate it specifically for the public service experience, providing you actionable, practical, tactical tools that you can test out today in your life and with your teams. I will also talk to leaders across the globe with a self care practice, getting to know them at a deeply human and personal level, so that you can learn from their challenges and journey.

Skippy Mesirow: 00:57

Warning. This is a post partisan space. Yes. I have a bias. You have a bias.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:03

We all have a bias. Everybody gets a bias. And I will be stripping out all of the unconscious cues of bias from this space. No politics, partisanship, or policy here. Because well-being belongs to all of us.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:19

And we will all be better served if every human in leadership, regardless of party, ideology, race, or geography, are happier, healthier, and more connected. This show is about resourcing you, the human doing leadership, and trusting you to make up your own damn mind about what to do with it and what's best for your community. So as always, with love, here we go. Welcome to the Healing Hour Politics podcast, the show that shows you, the heart centered leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. And, boy, do I have a barn burner for you today as I sit down with expert in neuroscience, non ordinary states of consciousness, wearable technology, and seemingly everything else, doctor Dave Rabin.

Skippy Mesirow: 02:14

Doctor Dave, affectionately known, is a MD PhD board certified practicing psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and entrepreneur who has studied resilience and the impact of chronic stress on our lives for over 15 years. He is the cofounder and chief medical officer at Apollo Neuroscience, which has developed the first scientifically validated wearable technology that improves sleep and mood. In his practice, doctor Dave specializes in treatment resistant illnesses, including PTSD, personality disorders, substance abuse, and more using minimally or noninvasive treatment strategies. He is also a cofounder and executive director of the board of medicine, a MAPS trained MDMA assisted therapist, a trained ketamine assisted therapist. He is currently studying the epigenetics of trauma, more on that, and serves on the board of the Simplify Odyssey Foundation focused on veteran rehabilitation and invest as part of the Noetic Fund.

Skippy Mesirow: 03:13

In this episode, we explore that. How does he do all this and how can you too build systems to be more focused, productive, and effective on a wide range of issues you care about? We talk about his Jewish upbringing, much like myself. We discuss the importance of, yes, cultivating a psychologically safe space, but also a space of rigor and competition and how you as a leader can up level the social dynamics in your organization to get the most efficacy, the best policy, and the best outcomes possible. Doctor Dave shares physical practices that you can implement to own your triggers to return to a rational, calm, connected human.

Skippy Mesirow: 04:00

We dig into the epigenetics of trauma, the coding in our genes that we receive from our parents and pass down to our children, and how you can perform generational healing through the application of work that your children will receive. And the top predictor of weight gain, burnout, anxiety, and more, spoiler alert, they're all the same thing. You will get tools to work on them and so much more. I hope you enjoy this energetic, highly tactical, and ultra wide ranging conversation with my friend and light, Doctor. Dave Rabin.

Skippy Mesirow: 04:43

Welcome.

Dr. David Rabin: 04:44

Thank you.

Skippy Mesirow: 04:45

It's truly an honor to have you, doctor Dave, mister Rabin, on the Healing Our Politics podcast, the show that shows you, the heart centered leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. I don't think people will have quite an appreciation for how much you are doing, how much good you're bringing into the world, and how much impact you can have on them and their leadership. So I'm excited to unravel that throughout our time together. I wanted to start with just getting to know you a little bit. What makes you tick?

Skippy Mesirow: 05:24

How you arrived at now? And I thought it might be fun to start with an anecdote from your partner in life and love and work, Catherine, who I just adore, we share having amazing partners we get to do all the things with, which is really cool. And you and I are of Jewish descent. She's not. And when we were together last year, she told me the story of the first time that she went to synagogue or temple with you.

Skippy Mesirow: 05:54

And the rabbi was giving the sermon of the day, sharing the perspective through biblical Talmudic tradition, and at the end, what happened is somebody who was listening started aggressively questioning the rabbi. And I've heard you talk about the importance of questioning in your own life and work. And I wonder if you could start by just sharing how that upbringing shaped you and how it has helped bring you to this place that you are on all of our behalves, really.

Dr. David Rabin: 06:29

Thank you. And that's a great place to start. And thanks so much for having me. It's always a pleasure to get to connect with you. It goes without saying.

Dr. David Rabin: 06:38

But I think not to dwell on it too much, but at least in my family and many of the families I know of others who grew up Jewish, that there was a constant emphasis on it being okay to ask questions. And not in every situation, obviously, you have to choose the timing right when you're going to ask question, which is something that kids have to learn and sometimes we as adults have to learn it too. But asking questions to learn about the world is okay and not just okay, it's encouraged. And that if we don't understand something, if we don't know how something works, we wanna know how it works there. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 07:16

The only way you can actually learn stuff is to ask. And so I think that having a father who my both my parents are physicians. My dad is also an electrical engineer, and engineers love to figure out how things work. So I growing up with him as major influence in my life, also a researcher, somebody who really enjoyed figuring out how things worked. And so we talked a lot about all of that kind of stuff and science.

Dr. David Rabin: 07:41

And my parents, as young as I can remember, bought me those, like, how things work books that were for kids that broke down the weather and broke down the, like, basic things that exist in your home back in, like, the eighties. I think that was really helpful just getting my inquisitive, curious mind that was interested in discovering new things kind of up and running. And that's pretty much where it started. And then where it really accelerated was when I started having really vivid dreams as a kid. I'm sure you've probably had vivid dreams at some point in your life.

Dr. David Rabin: 08:14

Right?

Skippy Mesirow: 08:15

It's actually not been my experience. I've had a handful that I still remember that we're recurring and we're particularly vivid, but it's actually an area that I've been wanting to, and I've been saying this for 3 years, that I really want to invest in developing because it hasn't been a natural strength for me.

Dr. David Rabin: 08:33

Yeah. It was never a natural strength for me either, so you're not alone. I just think it's very interesting that so many of us as humans have had at one time in our lives like, I've never had a lot of them, but I've had a couple. I've had, I don't know, maybe, like, 3 or 4 really vivid dreams a year for my entire life that were much more common when I was a kid. And I didn't have control over these dreams.

Dr. David Rabin: 08:53

They were just, like, really real. And I remember at the times that really stood out to me were when I would have a dream with my brother or a friend from real life in the dream, and then I would wake up and I'd be chat talking with them the next day, and I would reference something that had happened between us in the dream in real life as if it had happened between us in real life. And they, of course, had no idea what I was talking about. And then I had to ask myself, where did I get that information? And then I realized that information was a memory that I had of the dream the night before or a couple nights before.

Dr. David Rabin: 09:31

And over time, as I got older, you know, in, like, the 6 to 9 year old range, I started to have sometimes, like, more nightmares and scary dreams, and those seemed really real. And so I started to ask my parents, what are dreams? Like, what's going on when we're sleeping that makes us feel so much like real life, and how do we make sense of that in my 6 to 9 year old language? And they basically said, dreams aren't real. Don't worry about it.

Dr. David Rabin: 09:55

It's not something to be concerned about. And I think a lot of parents tell that to their kids because they don't want them to think that their nightmares are real because if they think they're real, then, you know, they can become really scared as kids. Then you start to fear sleep, so that's not good. So I think they did the right thing, but in the back of my mind from that point on, I started to continue to have occasional vivid dreams. It made me realize that they felt so real, so, like, almost indistinguishably real from real life that the way we use and define the word real must be off.

Dr. David Rabin: 10:29

There must be more going on underneath the surface of what we call reality, even as, like, under 10 years old because of just what my parents told me about that word applied to these things that clearly felt real to me. And so from then on, I started to become really interested in consciousness and sci fi and methods of thinking and psychology and dreams, of course, and all of that stuff.

Skippy Mesirow: 10:49

When this was like a clear acute interest, you're 6 to 9. Do you remember where the first place you went was to research or speak to someone or get a body of knowledge?

Dr. David Rabin: 11:01

I think it was like sci fi books.

Skippy Mesirow: 11:02

Yeah.

Dr. David Rabin: 11:03

Like, of course, started to get into things, like and it wasn't 6 to 9. I was probably reading at that time, like, I started to get into, like, scary stories, like, Goosebumps and, like, more, like, sci fi kids books. Right? And then things like X Men and, like, the paranormal and, you know, exploring things that just were weird fantasy type things because I'm just like, I wanna learn more about that. I don't understand it.

Dr. David Rabin: 11:29

Everybody's telling me it's just made up. But as I started to learn more about these things, and, of course, growing up in California as a kid, we grew up in Marin County, and Marin County is named after chief Marin of the Miwok people. And so we learned growing up that they worship animals and have a relationship with animals and spirits of animals in a way that's very different than what we were taught growing up. But growing up in this area, the Miwok traditions are part of and taught of as part of what is considered interesting in schools. And we actually learned about it in school.

Dr. David Rabin: 12:04

So they talk about Coyote as, like, the he was, like, the great father spirit and that Coyote is, like, this kind of trickster spirit, but also the creator of all things. And it was just kind of really interesting when you start to think about all of these different ways of interpreting our interactions with nature, for instance, like the coyote versus god versus any number of other ways that we can interpret it. It makes you realize how relative everything is. Right? Everything seems through a certain lens.

Dr. David Rabin: 12:33

And, yeah, I think to answer your question, that's kind of how I got acquainted with all that stuff.

Skippy Mesirow: 12:37

It's really interesting because you have in your mind, like, the way you're constituted, you have this beautiful balance between this openness and creativity, the willingness to see things beyond dogma and question, but you also have that investigator spirit to then go in and look at it. And I think those things are not often held in concert. Like, that's a pretty rare presentation and a really cool thing. I'm curious if so I grew up in a bilingual you. Yeah.

Skippy Mesirow: 13:05

Of course, man. Bilingual Jewish school. And although even though many of us, myself included, were spending most of our time rebelling against the religion, the culture of questioning, I still think is one of the greatest gifts that I ever got. And in some ways, the culture, like Talmudic culture of taking this thing that's ascribed as truth in biblical text, but then creating an entire valued culture around questioning it and arguing it and refining our understanding of it and adapting it to a modern and changing age in some ways is like the one point o of the scientific method, right, where you have a body of of knowledge that is seen not as the truth, but as the truthiest thing we have, but then to poke and prod and argue about it in the hopes of refining it. And I wonder if that was also part of your Jewish experience where you're getting this creative input from the Native American tradition, from your sci fi books.

Skippy Mesirow: 14:05

Did you find that in community amongst friends, teachers, you had people to talk to and work through that with before you had a specific framework in your scientific work?

Dr. David Rabin: 14:15

Oh, yeah. For sure. I think it was kind of weird to talk about, though. There's a lot of stigma around talking about dreams and paranormal stuff and spirits and astrology and, like, all of that weird stuff that, you know, especially when you grow up in, like, a western science family, there are certain things that are not necessarily, like, topics of general conversation that you would talk about, whereas you need to find those kinds of places and people. So I actually didn't have a lot of people to talk about.

Dr. David Rabin: 14:42

It was mostly like reading sci fi with my friends, doing like our own independent investigation into things. To your point about the questioning and the sort of origins of ancient Jewish thought and the scientific method. I think they are very related. Maimonides, you know, is a very famous Jewish doctor and one of the oldest forefathers of western medicine who, I think, integrated a lot of this thinking style critical thinking style. And I would say that probably, like, studying Torah in Jewish school when I was there for a few years and understanding and then before my bar mitzvah and that kind of thing, and actually having to do interpretations of it on our own based on what we knew and provide evidence to back your interpretations and really try to understand what they were trying to say effectively about how to live a good, happy life.

Dr. David Rabin: 15:28

And what you can learn is teaching how to think. Right? It's teaching you how to fundamentally appraise evidence and come up with an an argument that makes sense, that's based in reality, and then weigh out all the other kind of stuff. Right?

Skippy Mesirow: 15:44

Yes. Yeah. It's so wild. I I can't believe I'm about to do this. If you had asked my 13 year old self, he was gonna go on a diatribe defending the benefits and merits of the bar mitzvah, I would have looked at you physically.

Skippy Mesirow: 15:58

But as you say that it's so true. And tell me this maybe was different than your experience, but you are I was a American English speaking boy who wasn't particularly connected to the religion. But through this rite of passage, I have to learn a different language that's written in a different direction with different characters. I have to open a scroll that's literally 100 of years old that mirrors something that is millennial old, and then I have to read it for comprehension directly in the biblical text, translate it into my own understanding, perform it in front of a large audience of people, including musical notes, and then write a evaluation of it to teach a lesson that applies to the modern day.

Dr. David Rabin: 16:48

Yeah. That's pretty much what we had to do.

Skippy Mesirow: 16:51

That's pretty wild. That's pretty wild. It's pretty wild.

Dr. David Rabin: 16:54

Yeah. I learned as much as I didn't enjoy it at the time, I learned a lot in retrospect. Like, it was very helpful to my learning how to think without a doubt. And I think that a lot of different cultures have stuff like that. Not necessarily the same, but similar, like, coming of age experiences or community based experiences that where we interact with different members of the community traditionally in these cultures to teach us some of these skills.

Dr. David Rabin: 17:20

But a lot of modern society doesn't have that anymore, and I think that we are desperately needing it.

Skippy Mesirow: 17:25

Yes. I'm curious if there was a in my observation, what you were doing then, which is kind of questioning orthodoxy, thinking about new things and both existing in this place of atypical thought. But also, like, I imagine there was a lot of people at your bar mitzvah, you had friends, you were in community, etcetera, and you still straddle that line now in so many ways, working on things that are generally accepted, lauded in the mainstream, but also working on things at the edge of science that do not have universal understanding at this point. And I wonder if there's a point in your path where you thought this is really for me or if you questioned that or if it clicked at any moment that I'm gonna continue to be doing this or if it just sort of happened.

Dr. David Rabin: 18:13

I mean, it did just sort of happen, and it also didn't. When you discover something that's really interesting and you're taught that discovery is important and not just important, but, like, one of the best feelings you can get out of any feeling in your entire life, the feeling of discovering something new, it's like, god, that feels good. That's, like, such a amazing feeling that all humans are capable of feeling. And I just wanted more of it. And asking questions and learning new things and doing research in whatever way, ideally, ways that were not super expensive or commercially or effort costly, was always something that was really interesting to me.

Dr. David Rabin: 18:50

And I always just wanted to figure out dreams, you know, dreams and and consciousness and how we interact with the world, how we make meaning of the world. Like, what is reality? Right? Think about that question in and of itself. What is reality?

Dr. David Rabin: 19:02

Is reality what we say, which is this, just as is, no interpretation needed, or is it seen through the eyes of the beholder, and does it have language to it that is its identity and its function determined by the words we were taught to describe it? Yeah. Think about that and how powerful that is. And it goes back to, like, the indigenous tribes of Mexico and South America and how they talk about the intentional use of language and that the words you choose could be the single most important decisions of your entire life. On a moment to moment basis, we carelessly use words, and then that distorts our nature and our sense of reality.

Dr. David Rabin: 19:45

So I think, like, as I started to learn more about that, then, of course, psychology and mental health by nature of psychology being a tool to help treat mental illness where people who often have been struggling with distortions of meaning in their lives for many years started to really stand out to me as a fascinating field because it's like the interface between healing and language, and that's super cool. And when you think about the indigenous perspectives on this, the last thing I'll say on this for now is, like, why why do you think they call it spelling? Right?

Skippy Mesirow: 20:14

Because casting

Dr. David Rabin: 20:15

a spell. Yeah. Because you're casting a spell with your words.

Skippy Mesirow: 20:18

Yeah.

Dr. David Rabin: 20:19

And you wanna make sure you're casting the right one, and so you need to spell it and say it properly, which goes back to what we were talking about a second ago with your Torah portion singing. Right? It's crazy.

Skippy Mesirow: 20:29

Totally. I mean, I think of I had 2 thoughts pop up in my head, 1 dark and one not so dark, but MLK's I have a dream speech. Right? That's not written on the page, but he shows up and there's supposedly a 1000000 people there. We still are under that spell in a beautiful way.

Skippy Mesirow: 20:46

I think about I watched a recreation, a colored recreation of World War 2, and I watched Adolf Hitler on that podium. That man is casting a spell. He didn't trick anyone. Right? They were with him, and that was really scary, but our words really can elicit a mass response.

Skippy Mesirow: 21:04

And the other thing you're talking about perception versus reality, what is reality in some ways? Consensus reality. What we agree is generally true is the only thing that matters for functioning, but it doesn't necessarily mirror what's happening in the world. We know, for instance, that roughly 97% of the known universe is dark matter and dark energy, things that we can't see or directly interact with outside of the forces of gravity. We know that we can now measure that effect, but we have no idea what's there.

Skippy Mesirow: 21:36

We hold hands with a loved one and derive so much pleasure from that touch. And yet if you were really to go down, we're never actually touching. There's always distance physically between the cells. And so I think it's it's super, super fascinating. And you have seemingly wiggled your way into just about every area of exploration around this.

Skippy Mesirow: 22:04

And I want to start by understanding how. So just as a little recap, and I'm not gonna get all of this, but I have a rather large piece of paper with some of the things across section that you are working on. As we know from the intro, right, MD, PhD, board certified physician, neuroscientist, You're a practicing psychiatrist, and you're working specifically with people who are treatment resistant, so really hard cases. You've been trained in MDMA assisted psychotherapy, Ketamine assisted psychotherapy. I believe you're practicing in those as part of your practice.

Skippy Mesirow: 22:38

You are Just Ketamine. Just Ketamine. K.

Dr. David Rabin: 22:40

MDMA is not legal yet.

Skippy Mesirow: 22:41

Did you participate during studies, though?

Dr. David Rabin: 22:44

I actually received training to be able to kick off some of the mechanistic studies and how MDMA therapy works to induce some of its changes, which we published in February of 23, but I wasn't actually in connect groups.

Skippy Mesirow: 22:58

Got it. Okay. Nonetheless, has the skill set. The tool is in the toolbox. Exactly.

Skippy Mesirow: 23:04

Medical officer and cofounder of Apollo Neuro. It's a wearable device. I see you got the clip on you right now. Right? The first evidence based device to alter mood and energy through the experience of touch.

Skippy Mesirow: 23:16

You're actively involved in research on noninvasive treatments for things like PTSD, substance abuse, executive director of the board of medicine. I'm out of breath working on studying epigenetics. You work with veterans through the Semplify Odyssey program, and then also being a venture fund partner, the Noetic Fund. Now what I find interesting about this is many of the people listening, it's probably the only audience where many of the people listening are gonna be wearing the same number of hats. They're on 20 community boards and commissions.

Skippy Mesirow: 23:49

They're serving in office. They are on multiple nonprofit boards. They have a regular job from within their roles, whether they're elected or staff. They're working on 15 different projects that could fundamentally change their universe. And what many of us, myself included, have struggled with is how to organize our lives in such a way to do that effectively.

Skippy Mesirow: 24:12

And you seem to have significantly decoded the ring. So I'm curious if you could share how are you actually splitting your time? What are the tools or partners or approaches that you are using to be so effective seemingly effective? And maybe maybe there's other areas where it's a challenge, but I'd love to learn how that all works.

Dr. David Rabin: 24:34

Yeah. It's actually not as complicated as it sounds. I mean, I think the it comes down to really and I appreciate your kind words. I am just an extremely passionate person. I love to do this kind of stuff.

Dr. David Rabin: 24:45

All the things you mentioned are really fun for me. And so when I'm working with good people, this stuff feels natural, and I get energy from it. And I get energy from it because it's engaging and it's fun and it's intellectually stimulating to me, and it and I'm, like, doing good for the world, and I'm seeing, like, people actually feel better as a result of the work that I'm doing or learn new information. It helps their patients feel better. And so I think that combination of just enjoying the process, like, it's not a means to an end all the time.

Dr. David Rabin: 25:15

Yeah. It's the means itself. It's the process itself that is so important. And because I'm I've really tried to focus on enjoying the process, and I do, that by being present with it, that I'm constantly learning and I'm constantly developing myself as a human. And even when things are really hard, which they are right now and, you know, and they have been and they have been on and off for a long time, sometimes things are just really freaking hard.

Dr. David Rabin: 25:39

And you just have to remember that we're on a journey, and it's not always gonna be hard. It's just sometimes shit happens. Right? You remember the shit happens, sir, from when we were growing up?

Skippy Mesirow: 25:50

Oh, yeah.

Dr. David Rabin: 25:50

Right? Every religion every single religion has their own way of describing what they say when shit happens to them. Right? And that's just life. So, you know, it's always harder for everyone goes without saying.

Dr. David Rabin: 26:03

Right? But it's always harder. We should say it anyway and acknowledge that it's always harder for us sometimes when things are challenging and that's okay. And it's okay to have to struggle sometimes. But as I've learned to try to juggle so many different things that are all in large part interrelated, but majorly different pieces of the same puzzle and certainly a huge time commitment, I've realized that being present with the process, mentally speaking, as a cognitive exercise is one of the single most important things that we can all do for our day to day lives.

Dr. David Rabin: 26:38

Because then when we're present, we have access to a 100% of our cognitive abilities. And when we're not present, we have access to only the amount that's present. Being present is like a best resource allocation tool, and there are lots of things that help with that. Like, I use Apollo because I never learned how to breathe properly. So Apollo has been a huge help for me to train my attention.

Skippy Mesirow: 26:56

If I were to just, like, to make this visual for people who, like, hear the word presence on an ad Yeah. In there, but I don't know what you're talking about. And tell me if this is how you would think about it, but I'm sitting at a computer. I've got a large panel LED. It's designed as a flood.

Skippy Mesirow: 27:10

It's supposed to, like, illuminate the whole room. Let's imagine the luminous capacity of that is our total opportunity for attention. Right now, it's very diffuse. The opportunity to presence it would be to shroud that light down to something that is more akin to a laser and then focus it on one specific thing. That is that a fair representation?

Dr. David Rabin: 27:32

Yeah. Exactly. And it can be as simple as saying, I'm going to you can say it out loud right now. I'm going to intentionally direct all of my attention to the feeling of my breath coming into my nose right now.

Skippy Mesirow: 27:45

Oh, I'm gonna try it. Right. I'm going to intentionally direct all my attention to doctor Dave Rabin right now.

Dr. David Rabin: 27:53

You're already doing that, though.

Skippy Mesirow: 27:54

That's cheating. I just wanted to double check.

Dr. David Rabin: 27:56

Point of an interview. But the point is you can change your attention by just saying by, like, that's the spell. Right? It's the acknowledgment of I am going to put my attention on the following right now. This boring ass work that I really don't wanna do, my taxes, whatever, I am going to sit down, I'm gonna do it, and I'm gonna verbally commit to myself that I am in control of my attention always.

Dr. David Rabin: 28:18

Right? I'm always in control of my attention. Nobody can take that away from me. They always try, but nobody can take that away from me. And I can bring that back to my breath and center myself in this moment.

Dr. David Rabin: 28:28

And as soon as you take command of your attention, that means you can take command of your presence. You're bringing yourself back to the moment. You're centering your mind back into your body. And that's called, like, somatic awareness or restoring your sense of embodiment. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 28:43

Mind in body. Body's always present. So we can always bring ourselves back. And we can do it with soothing touch, giving ourselves hugs, getting hugs from others. We can do it with listening.

Dr. David Rabin: 28:52

We can do it with singing. We can do it with breathing. You can do it by wiggling your arms around. Whatever it is, movement, intentional movement. But it's the intention intentional attention capture that is critical.

Dr. David Rabin: 29:04

And I think as you train yourself to do that, because most of us never learned to do that, I never learned to do that. That's why we developed Apollo. But the point is you can teach yourself how to do this naturally through breath or through other techniques, meditation, mindfulness, or you can use tools. And the more you do that, the easier it gets to be able to do lots of things because you start to be able to gain cognitive capacity, like you're restoring your core resource of attention back to yourself. And then you could say, oh, okay.

Dr. David Rabin: 29:32

I I need to make a list. Right? That's where it starts. I need to make a list of all the shit I need to do. So then you go and you make a list, and then you say, okay.

Dr. David Rabin: 29:38

Well, I can't do all that in one day, so let's spread that out over x amount of time. What's reasonable? Okay. Well, it would take me 40 years to get all this work done myself, so I need to hire, like, 30 employees. Right.

Dr. David Rabin: 29:48

And then these are all the people that I need to do all of the following things. And if you don't know, you go ask somebody, then you just try to hire really good people or find friends who are really awesome, who share the same vision as you, and then you just go at it. And the more good people you have around, the more cool stuff you can get done.

Skippy Mesirow: 30:05

Yeah. Yes. Sounds easier than it is, but it's really it's one of those things that's, like, simple but hard.

Dr. David Rabin: 30:12

You have to want it. Right? You have to know it first to get anything. What is what is manifestation? Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 30:19

Manifestation is having your attention set on something that you want for your life or yourself, identifying the steps to get to that thing, and then actually doing the steps to get to that thing, and then actually receiving the thing. And you can fuck that up at every single step of the way. Every single step of the way. You can even do all of the things. You can have the vision.

Dr. David Rabin: 30:42

You can see what you want. You can know exactly what it is. You can picture it in your mind's eye, and you can picture you enjoying it with your friends and family. You can plan it out every step of the way. You can even get every step of the way by completing every action you get to the last point, and then you hit what's called the upper limit problem.

Skippy Mesirow: 30:59

Mhmm.

Dr. David Rabin: 30:59

Where you get right to the threshold of getting that thing that you have spent years years doing all the hard work to get, and you do something to screw it up right at the last second. Right? And that happens to people too. And so it's really about having that crystal clear vision, mission, energy, mood, action, behavior, alignment. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 31:24

Where you're saying, I am going to make this happen, and then you actually go and make it so as would say.

Skippy Mesirow: 31:32

Okay. I wanna follow-up with a number of questions that tease out some stuff that I think I and others have struggled with in that process, but I'll just embellish a little bit on that higher limit problem because this is something I see as a coach a lot, and and it speaks to what's real versus what's, quote, unquote, not real, what's conscious versus unconscious, but just an example of a client who a woman who wanted to excel in her career did all those steps. Right? Had the goal, had the visualization, did the training, put the steps in on and on and on for a long time and finally got to the place where that door was open and the job was hers. And all of a sudden found herself in a position of, I don't think this is for me.

Skippy Mesirow: 32:14

Not sure why, but, like, oh, maybe I don't wanna step through the door. And what we found in unpacking that is her parents were happily married when she was younger. They got divorced at some point that was traumatic for her and her experience. And right before that divorce, mom got a big job. And unconsciously, the fear that wasn't aware of is, oh, if I do this, my relationship, my family will crumble.

Skippy Mesirow: 32:41

And sometimes it takes getting under the hood and finding that. And then once you have awareness, it's not like the fear disappears, but you recognize that's old programming. And all of a sudden, you can step through, like you say, with attention, with clarity. You can have the conversations with other people. Hey.

Skippy Mesirow: 32:57

This is a fear that I have. Are we aligned in this, right, to set the stage for that? How are we gonna support each other in this as we move through? What do we do if something doesn't go well, but it becomes a conscious thing that actually became an opportunity for the family to come tighter together in support of that shared goal? But it just takes time, you know, and it's not what we were trained to do to your point.

Dr. David Rabin: 33:20

At least not most of us. At least not most.

Skippy Mesirow: 33:23

Certainly not me.

Dr. David Rabin: 33:24

Yeah. Not me. Not a lot of the western world people that I know, but I think the point is well taken.

Skippy Mesirow: 33:29

Yeah. I mean, in some ways and if you're suggesting that, and tell me if you're not, but that other cultures have more of an emphasis on that. I think that's true. I've seen that. It tends to be cultures who don't have access to a lot of the shortcuts we've built.

Skippy Mesirow: 33:44

And I think with access to technology, to the Internet, whatever, we atrophy the other muscle because we tell ourselves it doesn't matter, but it's not actually true. It takes both.

Dr. David Rabin: 33:53

Right.

Skippy Mesirow: 33:53

Yeah.

Dr. David Rabin: 33:54

And both is, like, superpower level unlocking. Right? One alone, like, like, controlling your attention to have the ability, like, a monk has of, like, years or decades of meditation training, attention control training. Like, that is a superpower in and of itself. You combine folks like that with the ability for technology to enhance our access to those features, and you start to get, like, superhuman abilities.

Dr. David Rabin: 34:18

Right? Like, to me, that is actually where I think cyborg cyborg, I say in quotes, but, like, human machine augmentation is actually can take us in a reasonable amount of time where we could actually not just be able to control a phone with our brains because of a neural implant. You could be able to control your entire computer and your phone and your car and a whole bunch of other stuff with tactile or worn augmentations. So the ability to, like, not necessarily who wants to have something put in your brain if you don't have to have something put in your brain? Like, the risk is so high of neurosurgery.

Dr. David Rabin: 34:54

Like, so high. We don't talk about that enough, but, you know, I think that's really important to note. And there's so many things now that we can do where we can start to use technology thoughtfully and intentionally just like our breath to augment our lives, to help us be more meditative more of the time, have more access to more of our attention more of the time, able to physically recover faster. Think about those kinds of simple things, and then think about how much of an impact that could have on the average American's life. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 35:23

Impact that's unseen in some case or unpredictable in some cases because it affects decision making. Right?

Skippy Mesirow: 35:30

Yes. I was thinking the best way to understand what it could be going forward is to look at the ways that we don't pay attention to it happening going back. I'm wearing a sweater right now. Like, sweaters were not something that humans knew how to do when we came out of East Africa. Right?

Skippy Mesirow: 35:44

I don't know when we started making sweaters, but it was it was a ways after that. We didn't need them. It was really warm. It was a good climate. But because I have this sweater, I have access to the entire landmass of the country.

Skippy Mesirow: 35:54

I have access to the resources in it. And if I don't, someone else does, which is part of why I even have an iPhone that works in the first place because someone was able to go mind that, and they were able to do so because they had the knowledge to do it because they lived past 30, which is something we didn't have before we had food safety and hand soap. I mean, there's so many ways that we have extended our experience that are largely invisible to us. And if we imagine the next step is coming from the physical form where our physicality is safe, and in some ways, that's now created a condition where our minds are sick or in disease. And now we are going to apply that to the cognitive and to the collective, to the connection between us.

Skippy Mesirow: 36:33

And I think, you know, you can get pretty wild and excited about what is possible. It's a great observation.

Dr. David Rabin: 36:40

Well, yeah, I mean, I think this is the most exciting, I think, frontier of discovery. Right? And it's paradigm shifting. It's like paradigm shifting for the field. Like when you think about some of the recent studies that have come out, let's take mental illness as an example where for many years, maybe it was, like, 4 decades or more, we have been taught biological psychiatry, which was a huge deviation from what you might call psychological psychiatry, which is what came before, where you had Freudian analysis and Freudian techniques.

Skippy Mesirow: 37:16

Could you explain, like, just a little bit for people who are not familiar with those terms, what those things mean and where we're shifting from and to?

Dr. David Rabin: 37:23

Yeah. So as of, like, the early 1900 with Sigmund Freud and then later Carl Jung and many other famous psychiatrists and psychologists, this is how our current field today of psychiatry and psychology was founded through this theory of mind. And it was a way to talk to somebody and ask them certain kinds of questions, ideally in a nonjudgmental way to learn about them so that we can understand how to interpret what it is they're experiencing. Like, to your point, how to know that there is a past difficult situation you were in that's preventing you from getting to your goals in your current situation. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 38:02

Like the woman you just described earlier with the returning down the job at the best job she's wanted at the last second. Right? Because of a past experience. Like, if you know this is because of something that happened to you in the past and you're not under threat anymore and you're safe enough to make the right decision with a clear head, then you're gonna make the decision that's best for you not run away. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 38:22

And think about how life changing that can be for somebody. It's, like, absolutely life changing. And it can be the difference between being mentally ill or physically ill and a huge tremendous success and contributor to society in your community. Right? And happy, joyful every day.

Dr. David Rabin: 38:38

It can be that degree of difference. So what Freudian psychology the origins of psychology, which is like psychotherapy, it's talking to each other, started to get replaced in the 19 eighties late eighties nineties with biological psychiatry, which was this idea that that mental health, mental illness is due to imbalances of neurochemicals in the brain. And the reason for that was because with the discovery of LSD, believe it or not, by Albert Hoffman in 19 forties, there became this huge modern understanding of serotonin and the neurochemical environments in the brain. And so because of the discovery of LSD, which a lot of people don't know, we learned so much about the serotonin system that we were able to discover almost every modern mental health medicine. LSD contributed.

Dr. David Rabin: 39:24

So that's like the Prozac, the Zoloft, the antidepressant SNRI drugs, the antipsychotic drugs. Like, all of those drugs are all working in large part or in some way through a lot of the receptor systems that were discovered through the study of LSD.

Skippy Mesirow: 39:38

In some ways, that's the Hubble Telescope goes up above the atmosphere for the first time and opens our eyes to an entirely different world. Many things in other experiments that had nothing directly to do with Hubble happened thereafter, but Hubble's eye on those things, bringing them into our awareness was required as a precedent. Exactly.

Dr. David Rabin: 39:57

Yeah. Yes. LSD was kind of like the It's

Skippy Mesirow: 39:59

the Hubble.

Dr. David Rabin: 40:00

The telescope. Right? It's a telescope that let us see all these different other things that were going on underneath the surface, And that's a great analogy. And then from there though, we kind of slipped up and made a mistake that was a misinterpretation of the findings of the impact of drugs on some of these folks with mental illness, which was that if a drug like Prozac or Zoloft, which increases the amount of serotonin in the synaptic cleft in between your brain synapses and helps you feel less depressed in certain cases or in many cases. In this case, it's, like, probably 50 to 60% of the time.

Dr. David Rabin: 40:38

It helps certain people with depression or anxiety. Does that mean that you have been born with a genetic imbalance in your serotonin where you have too little serotonin and you require the drug to fix it? Or is it possible that you have learned to think about yourself and the world in a certain way that has made you not feel good, and then certain parts of your brain involved in not feeling good are reflecting the way you're feeling, and then the medicine is correcting that. Right? Is it chicken or is it the egg?

Dr. David Rabin: 41:08

What's actually happening? And so there was a misinterpretation that happened there when we started to accidentally make the assumption that your genetics predetermine your mental health and that your mental health wants to identify as being ill, requires medication treatment to make you better, and there's no cure, and you're sick for life. And that was a big issue that is now kind of being turned around.

Skippy Mesirow: 41:32

To offer very weird analogy, but just roll with me here. You know, you have a resort on ocean or a large lake, and there's a particular level the water's at that's really good for the people who come there, and they really like to see that water level on the beach. All of a sudden, you go out for a snapshot in time, like, a second, and you notice that the water level is lower. And you freak out and think, oh my god. Something's wrong.

Skippy Mesirow: 41:56

We need to refill the ocean and continue to pump water in all the time. And it's maybe, but also maybe you're in the middle of a tide, and that's a natural ebb and flow that will come back. Or maybe you're in a different season where the water is frozen and has created an ice dam offshore until the water is not coming in, and there's an ability to naturally correct. And if you rush to or you overascribe one particular cause to that scenario, in some instances, you'll solve the problem, which happens for many people, and that's great. It's amazing to have that tool.

Skippy Mesirow: 42:33

But in others, you're actually creating another problem and a long term problem by misapplying the solution that doesn't feel that condition. Am I getting that right?

Dr. David Rabin: 42:43

Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. I think that's a I think that's a great way to think about it. Another example of when this has happened in human history is with infection and handwashing since you mentioned handwashing earlier.

Dr. David Rabin: 42:53

Right?

Skippy Mesirow: 42:54

Saved more lives than any invention ever. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 42:56

But when it was discovered Vilified. Yeah. It was not believed that germs were passed down for many years, probably centuries. It was not accepted that germ theory existed, that there were germs that could be passed down from, like, my hands to your body. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 43:13

That was not something that was understood or that could be seized.

Skippy Mesirow: 43:16

Responsible for your sickness. Get out of here.

Dr. David Rabin: 43:18

Right. But I think this is a really important story because it gives us a sense of how far we've come and yet how not far we've come. Right? So prior to, like, 190 8 or in, like, in the 19 twenties when antibiotics were first invented or discovered by Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin, we didn't really have germ theory. And so what doctor Ignatius Semmelweis, who's a famous, I think, Austrian physician, decided to do an experiment in 18 eighties, 18 nineties.

Dr. David Rabin: 43:47

And he said, at that time, doctors were doing autopsies and then going and delivering babies and not washing their hands. And the maternal and infant mortality rate was, like, high. Like, 40%, 50% of women or babies would die in a given labor. And he said, what if I just use some antiseptic stuff between when I go in to deliver these babies? Wonder what would happen.

Dr. David Rabin: 44:15

So he did it. And he did it on, like, a 100 women, and he reduced mortality rate for infants and mothers by a very significant percent, like, mid 2 digits percentage, like maybe 40% reduction or something like that. And then he went and presented this at the medical meeting. And, of course, back in the 18 nineties, all the other doctors were men, and there were no female doctors. And so he presented this at the meeting of of all the doctors at the medical sciences convention of that time.

Dr. David Rabin: 44:42

And he had actual evidence that he was saving lives of women and babies, and they booed him off stage, and they institutionalized him for that discovery Yeah. Where he was then beaten and likely died of infections that were caused by people beating him without washed hands and restraining him. And the reason why, which is the best part of the story, because none of the rest of the party's story is good, really, but it's a good lesson. The best part of the story is the reason why they boot him off stage, which was because the man's hands at the time were thought to be infallible, incapable of doing wrong. That was the medical rationale.

Dr. David Rabin: 45:20

The scientific medical rationale was that the man's hands are incapable of fallibility, incapable of doing wrong. Right? And at that time, infections were thought to be life sentences, forever a death sentence if you could not treat it quickly, and often resulted in amputation and significant shortening of life. All of a sudden, antibiotics were discovered. Ignaz is vilified.

Dr. David Rabin: 45:45

Even though he he died, like, 20 years before and institutionalized an asylum, he's vilified because all of a sudden, handwashing becomes the most important discovery or one of the most important discoveries ever next to antibiotics, which proves that we can now kill bugs and prevent transmission, which extended human life decades in one generation, and turn something like infection, which was thought to be incurable and often a life sentence of death, terminal illness, turn that into something that could be cured in 5 to 7 days with penicillin. That changed everything, and that is where we're at now with mental illness. And that's what I think is so important for people to understand because we are at the phase of mental illness where mental illness is considered uncurable. We are taught to not use the cure word with our patients because it's not known that there is one. And yet, on the surface of what's happening with psychedelic assisted therapy, with MDMA assisted therapy, finished trials, and at the FDA's desk with technology that is actually treating illnesses in in a major way for mental health, we are at the verge of actually in the next 5 years starting to have publicly available antibiotic equivalents for mental illness.

Dr. David Rabin: 46:58

It's probably not gonna be 5 to 7 days, but it might be, like, 3 months, and then you're cured at a very high rate from an illness you might have been struggling with for decades, and nothing could be more exciting to me than that.

Skippy Mesirow: 47:12

So I wanna get into that, but I wanna just highlight something for our audience because it can be so easy to look back at others, in this case, those who demonized and vilified doctor Fleming and be like, how stupid were they? I would never do something like that. Well, just to point out, that's what everybody thought then too. And as someone in a decision making role, a question you could ask yourself is what was something I heard recently that I dismissed out of hand? What was something that before I considered it, I wrote the person off because of the party, the association, the clothing they wore, the flag or non flag on their lapel pin.

Skippy Mesirow: 48:00

What have you written off, and what would it look like for you to not repeat that mistake by genuinely listening and questioning your own thoughts? And what you might find is you're right, and that's great. And if you do, then more evidence, more ability for you to go out and make a case that's gonna strengthen what you're doing. But if you're not, you don't want to end up being the person who delayed the next antibiotic or the next hand washing. And so I just I just really wanna highlight that point.

Skippy Mesirow: 48:31

Such a salient story.

Dr. David Rabin: 48:34

I appreciate that.

Skippy Mesirow: 48:35

Yeah.

Dr. David Rabin: 48:35

I mean, there's so much we can learn from this stuff. I think the tendency is to say, I'm ashamed of that human behavior, and I'm just gonna ignore it. I'm gonna shut it down or repress it. But the opportunity is to really dive head first into it and face the shame and say, hey, what do you have to teach me? And the shame is gonna be like, don't be a dummy.

Dr. David Rabin: 48:54

Right?

Skippy Mesirow: 48:55

Well, I mean, if you think about the mechanism behind the thought process of that, it's the exact same thought process that led that person to denounce or distance from Fleming. Because I was joking earlier, but I wasn't joking. I can't hurt someone. It's like the ego doesn't wanna be responsible for your death. And so unconsciously, it says that's a bullshit theory.

Skippy Mesirow: 49:14

But, actually, all you're doing is protecting the self rather than supporting the higher truth. And in this situation of you now, by discrediting those people who wrote them off, you're doing the same thing where you're saying, oh, I would never do that. I'm not like that dumb person. Right? You're again protecting your own ego thinking you have a higher degree of cognitive processing or process, and yet you're repeating the same mistake in that process.

Skippy Mesirow: 49:39

And so just that recognition.

Dr. David Rabin: 49:41

I get what you're saying. Yeah. So I didn't mean to sound like that. What I was trying to emphasize

Skippy Mesirow: 49:47

was sounding like that. I'm saying, hey. Just be aware.

Dr. David Rabin: 49:50

Do it.

Skippy Mesirow: 49:51

I do that. Yes. Speak for Dave. We all do it. I do.

Skippy Mesirow: 49:54

No.

Dr. David Rabin: 49:54

No. We all do it. Yes. But we all do it.

Skippy Mesirow: 49:57

Responsibility and opportunity to check ourselves in leadership and not do it, not continue that pattern. And when we do catch ourselves, give some compassion,

Dr. David Rabin: 50:05

do a better next

Skippy Mesirow: 50:07

day. And now a quick break from our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is supported by Gold Level Elected Leaders Collective Foundation Funders. Thank you, guys. The Ken and Galla White Family Foundation.

Skippy Mesirow: 50:23

Shout out Corey. Shout out Kenny. Shout out to Kristen and the whole crew as well as Tom and Darla Feldman. Thank you for your contribution. We could not do this without you.

Skippy Mesirow: 50:34

And if you want to see more of this content, you too can join Tom, Ken, and Gala in giving by going to electedleaderscollective.com and clicking the donate button. The Healing Hour Politics podcast is brought to you by the Elected Leaders Collective, the first leading and most highly recognized name in mental health, well-being, and performance coaching for elected leaders and public servants designed specifically for you. Now don't be fooled by the name. The Elected Leaders Collective is not just for elected leaders. It is for all public servants.

Skippy Mesirow: 51:14

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Skippy Mesirow: 52:35

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Dr. David Rabin: 53:05

Right. That's exactly right. Because we all do it. I've done it. We've all done it.

Dr. David Rabin: 53:09

And I think that's the key is it's not personal.

Skippy Mesirow: 53:12

Yes.

Dr. David Rabin: 53:12

Right? It's just part of being human. That's the neuroscience piece I wanted to emphasize, which is that this is about the neuroscience of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Right? Think about how we evolve as organisms on this earth.

Dr. David Rabin: 53:27

We evolved to fear things and reject things that are unfamiliar to us, unless they are clearly safe and provide benefit. Just by default, we automatically have fear or rejection of things that are unfamiliar to us because unfamiliarity poses at least a tiny amount of uncertainty, which poses a at least a potential tiny amount of threat. And so for us to be able to safely, keyword, experience diversity, unfamiliarity, newness, the unknown, we have to feel safe enough to allow our guard to come down physiologically speaking, meaning it looks like our heart rate coming down, our breath rate coming down, our blood pressure coming down, feeling your thoughts start to slow down, feeling safe enough in your own body to be able to take in that new information and actually interpret it properly. Give it the credit that it deserves and ask yourself the question, hey. Is it possible that what I was taught might not be telling me the full story about this specific thing?

Dr. David Rabin: 54:32

Maybe I should try to learn more. Nobody's asking you for a definitive lifelong decision right now. This is just about discovery. Discovery is an active lifelong process. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 54:41

You don't have to convict every single time you make a decision to believe something. It's really about just exploration and understanding that what we know now could be completely disproven by what we know in 5 seconds from now, and that's just how life is.

Skippy Mesirow: 54:57

Yes. And so I'm gonna come back to the tools, techniques, approaches to cultivate that inner security, the psychological safety, to help in cultivating environments where others can find that. But before we do, I would really like to dig into kind of the neuroscience of this. You've talked around a handful of things, the MDMA assisted studies for treatment resistant PTSD. You've mentioned another number in passing, but can you help us understand sort of the mechanistic basis for what's really happening in these states, how it differs from normal processing, and help us understand what's happening?

Skippy Mesirow: 55:37

Because it's probably very weird and new to a lot of people.

Dr. David Rabin: 55:40

I can break this down fairly simply. It's one of my favorite things to do, but talking to you in this conversation gave me a new way to think about it myself. Always learning. Right? So when you have a really amazing conversation with somebody that makes you wanna tell them all the things about you, and they clearly wanna learn about you, and you just wanna tell them and be completely candid and honest with this person.

Dr. David Rabin: 56:08

Name any features of that person that make you wanna do that.

Skippy Mesirow: 56:11

It's a great question. And, honestly, it's a hard one for me because I present as very open, and I would say I'm 90%, several standard deviations more open than the average person, new experiences, ideas. But there's 10% of stuff that I still have a lot of guilt or shame around that I really don't wanna tell anybody.

Dr. David Rabin: 56:29

Right.

Skippy Mesirow: 56:29

So I'm imagining who would I wanna share that 10% with. I would want to have complete confidentiality to know it's not going to be broadcast to others in a way that I perceive real or true to be able to hurt me. I would wanna feel really held and loved by that person. I would want to know that whatever I share would not change their opinion of me, that they were truly there just with my best interest in mind. And I would also want it to be in a safe space, and I know that's a charge word.

Skippy Mesirow: 57:07

I don't mean it in a way of, like, we don't have differing opinions. That's not how I mean it. I mean, a place that's comfortable, warm

Dr. David Rabin: 57:14

Physically.

Skippy Mesirow: 57:15

Welcoming physically. That actually feels like an important piece of it to me.

Dr. David Rabin: 57:19

So let's run through that list again real quick. So starting we can start from the back of the front or any order. Right? So the last one you said, physical safety. Safe space.

Dr. David Rabin: 57:27

We'll call that physical safety. Then the first one you said was confidentiality. Right? So safety of information. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 57:34

Safety of privacy. What were what were some of the other ones that you knowing that the person isn't gonna change their opinion of you based on what you tell them. Safety from judgment.

Skippy Mesirow: 57:44

Yeah.

Dr. David Rabin: 57:45

Judgment free zone. Right? What else?

Skippy Mesirow: 57:48

Like loving presence or warmth.

Dr. David Rabin: 57:50

Right. Safety of connection, feeling a genuine, authentic connection from this person where they're not doing this because they want to get something from you. They're doing it just to be there for you because they love you. Yeah. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 58:01

Unconditional love and affection, connection, safety. Yeah. Right? So even that is enough to emphasize my point, which is that it is those things that you just described and probably a couple other things, but that's really the core of it that helps people even without drugs involved at all, just in the basic original psychotherapy talk therapy model that helps people feel safe enough to talk to us and expose vulnerability. And vulnerability, the places where we feel ashamed, guilty, weak, in pain, emotionally, mentally, physically in pain, those places are the places where healing occurs.

Dr. David Rabin: 58:48

And if those parts of ourselves are too ashamed or too guilty or too afraid to come up to the surface in a conversation for healing, then it's really hard to heal them. And the whole core of the healing experience in general, but specifically important for mental health, is to create that safe space, all encompassing physical, mental, emotional, legal, and financial safety. Create that safe space where people can comfortably be safe enough to be vulnerable. And then when they're safe enough to be vulnerable, the wound is exposed. We can clean it out just like a physical wound in the ER.

Dr. David Rabin: 59:29

If you get a cut, we can clean it out. We can wash it out, and then we can bring the edges together, and we can sew it up so you don't have a scar or infection afterwards. Right? And that's what we're doing when we're doing really great, normal face to face talk therapy. And what psychedelic medicines do is they amplify that process by amplifying neural signaling and pathways that are involved in, at least they do a lot of things, but this is one of the major things they do, is that they amplify those safety pathways, especially MDMA, to help people feel safe enough to go back and remake meaning around extremely traumatic experiences and things that they never want to remember or may have told themselves that they will never remember.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:00:17

It helps them go back and remake meaning around those things and those experiences from a position of safety. And when you do that, what you do is you're able to rewrite your own story from a perspective of safety and strength, not from a perspective of weakness and victimization. Does that make sense?

Skippy Mesirow: 01:00:35

It does. And I'm wondering if I am a veteran in one of the studies that you're talking about, I'm treatment resistant, which means I've I've had these other elements that are not pharmacologically induced, and that hasn't worked because it's treatment resistant. Right? So I'm still having symptoms. I'm still having these issues.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:00:52

Now I go in and I have this MDMA assisted treatment. What's happening differently in my brain?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:00:59

So the emotional cortex, what we call the limbic system, and the limbic system includes whole bunch of stuff. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that's happening, by the way, so I'm just gonna try to break this down as simple as

Skippy Mesirow: 01:01:09

you can. Go ahead and be nerdy as you want. I'll bring it back, but I'm quite curious. We don't often have someone with the requisite knowledge as a neuroscientist to get into this, and someone's gonna be interested in it. I'm one of those someone's, so bring it on.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:01:22

Yeah. I love this stuff. But basically, this emotional cortex of the brain is similar to all the other sensory cortices of the brain, the parts that sense the physical feeling of touch and temperature, the parts that sense sound, the parts that sense smell, the physical parts of that. And then there's the part of our brains, the limbic system that senses the emotional component of every experience. So why did this thing that I just tasted make me sad or happy or angry, or why does the smell of my mom's chicken soup make me feel so good?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:01:52

All of those kinds of emotional parts of an experience that go hand in hand with experience is centered in this emotional cortex, and the insulate cortex is a very important part of that. And it's in a network between 3 different parts of the brain that connect to our stress response system, which is called the HPA axis or the hypothalamopituitary axis. This governs all the stress response and recovery response in the whole body, and then that along with the vagus nerve, which calms everything down.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:02:22

Can you say what the vagus nerve is and how it functions? Because I hear this term all the time and I honestly don't know.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:02:28

So the vagus nerve is cranial nerve 10. It's a nerve that is also known as the wandering nerve because it innervates almost every single part, if not every single part of our entire bodies. It comes out of the, brain stem, and it is innervating all the parts of our bodies because it tells the blood vessels and the organ systems that are involved in rest and recovery, like digestion, reproduction, immunity, metabolism, storing of energy, or spending of energy, sleep and recovery systems, all of those systems, we want to be active when we're at rest and not running from a bear or a lion in the jungle are governed by the vagus

Skippy Mesirow: 01:03:07

nerve. Got it. So if it's Christmas and your brain is an Amazon distribution center, the vagus nerve is the biggest superhighway in the country that can most quickly get those packages out to kids all over the place.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:03:19

Yeah. And then there are other superhighway and then there are well, well, even the caveat of that there are other superhighways that also lead directly to those kids that bring those kids coal just as quickly, if not more quickly.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:03:33

Than basic process. This is the good kid highway. Well There's a separate bad kid highway?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:03:37

Yeah. There's 2 highways that go to exactly the same places. Oh, okay.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:03:40

What's the bad kid highway?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:03:42

That's the sympathetic nervous system. That's the stress response system.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:03:44

Okay. So this is call

Dr. David Rabin: 01:03:46

the fight or flight system. Right? So these two systems are in balance together. They coregulate where blood goes. So think about that.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:03:54

So the vagus nerve says when you're calm and safe and in a comfortable environment, the vagus nerve says, okay, dilate all the blood vessels. And you can experience this right now, by the way, if you do a minute of 6 deep breaths where each breath is 5 seconds in and 5 seconds out with like tiny hold at the top and the bottom, you will activate your vagus nerve. You can also just rub the side of your neck very gently on one side and you'll activate your vagus nerve. You can hold your breath. There are different things you can do that rapidly activate your vagus nerve.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:04:25

But what happens when you do that is it dilates blood flow to all of the parts of the body that we want to get resources when we are recovering. So your digestive system can now break down and absorb food properly and nutrients. Have you ever wondered why your stomachs upset all the time when you're stressed out? Because there's no resources or blood going to your digestive systems, your digestive systems. I think I'm running for a bear.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:04:46

We should shut down. You don't need me right now. Let's just take everything we can as quickly as possible without using as much energy and let go of the rest. Right? That's stress belly.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:04:55

Right. So digestion, reproduction, the single biggest cause of infertility and erectile dysfunction and anorgasmia in women is stress and anxiety. Right. Think about that. Right.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:05:07

What else? Immunity. Single biggest, most common reason for getting sick. Working too hard. Single biggest reason for gaining weight, working too hard.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:05:15

Overeating, working too hard. Burnout, depression, anxiety. Right? This is no mystery. And the reason why that is is because the vagus nerve governs those parts of our bodies.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:05:27

So but the superhighway for fight or flight nervous system, the stress response system also does, and it says when you're stressed out all the time, take blood squeeze the blood vessels to all the organ systems that or recovery systems that aren't required for immediate survival right now, fight, flight, or freezing, and send all those resources, that blood, to skeletal muscles, heart, lungs, motor cortex of the brain, fear center of the brain. We're getting the f out of here. The getting the f out of here is the systems that need to be activated when we perceive actual or perceived threat. So too many emails, too much news, too many responsibilities, too many rainy days in a row. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:06:07

Too little sleep. You name it. This all tricks our bodies into being in that fear response all the time, which then takes energy away from recovery systems like the vagus nerve governs, then we get sick over time. That's how sickness effectively exists and manifests. And so the emotional brain is a core part of that because the insulate cortex that governs empathy, feeling what other people feel, introspection, self reflection, feeling what we feel, and interoception, awareness and feeling of our bodies is all deprioritized when we're under stress or threat because blood flow gets taken away because none of those things are all that important when you're running from a lion.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:06:48

Yeah. You actually very much need and want both of those systems. It's about having them responding in a normal range at the times when they're desired as opposed to the times when they're not desired and they're triggered by something that isn't actually relevant to the physical environment, even though psychologically we might think that it is.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:07:09

Exactly. And they're in balance together, so we want them to be balanced. We wanna have equal access to them. But if you don't learn as a child how to train your breath, or you don't learn as an adult how to train your breath and control your attention, then you don't actually learn how to control these systems. Like, these systems we were taught run-in the background, and you don't need to worry about it until you get sick.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:07:29

That doesn't make any sense. The if we have control over the systems, why would we not teach people how to control the system? Why would you not show people show the pilot all the knobs on the plane and what they do? Right?

Skippy Mesirow: 01:07:41

Well, we believed we didn't have to. Right? And conservation of energy is a thing in the nice way. Laziness in a not nice way is a thing. And I we're having this conversation this morning about navigation.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:07:53

Right? Like, literally, like, how do I get around my world? And I was saying how I feel very lucky to have just been young enough that my first solo international trips, I had to use a paper map, I had to have conversations with people in other languages, I had to learn how to geolocate myself. And although I don't exercise that much because my phone or my car just does it for me, I can go back to it if I need to. But for people who are 5 years younger or didn't have the the privilege to travel at a younger age, that has been atrophied since birth because I just assume my GPS is gonna be there.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:08:27

And so I can understand, even though retrospectively, it seems like a bad call, I can understand how we thought, oh, well, scientists are saying all this stuff is taken care of. If I have a problem, I'm gonna pick a pill, so why would I bother spending my time on that? Right? I mean, I can understand how we got here.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:08:42

Yep. Nailed it.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:08:44

Okay. So going back to the veteran PTSD trial example, here's how I'm understanding it, and you tell me if this sounds correct. When in the theater of combat, in actual physical violence, the highway of response, right, the parasympathetic, we needed that, and that turned on strongly, and that's what got us out of that building. It got us out of that firefight.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:09:07

Sympathetic.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:09:08

Sorry. Sympathetic. Apologies. Got us out of that building, got us out of that firefight, and that was a really helpful thing. We're super glad we had that symptom or system.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:09:18

Then we get home and imagine, like, in that environment, I was in a small room and somebody burst through the door. Right? And so the fear memory is somebody bursting through the door. And in response, my sympathetic system fortified itself. It put metal on the outside of that door so somebody couldn't shoot through it.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:09:35

But every time I hear somebody knock on the door, I just go right back into that place. That's super scary. My defenses go up, and that's my nervous system protecting me from something that it's learned is a threat. In a normal, I shouldn't say normal, but in a more average on the bell curve presentation, simply creating that environment you talked about with a therapist, the physical safety, the safety from judgment, the safety of connection, the unconditional love, that might be sufficient to go back into that, but when my sympathetic nervous system is so heightened, even just a little tap on that door, I hear like a cannon and I shut down in fear and I'm unable to go into and process that. And the pharmacological intervention on top of that, in this case, the addition of MDMA goes in and puts like a large mattress topper on the back of that door so that when someone does go to tap or even to knock, I don't hear the loud bang and it doesn't trigger that response, and now I'm able to go in and process those things.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:10:37

Is that kind of a fair analogy?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:10:40

I would say it's more than a large mattress topper, though. It's like putting on goggles onto that person that allow them to see and feel themselves the way they saw and felt the world as an innocent child, which is why we sometimes call it child's eyes. So if you think about that's a lot more than a mattress topper. That's like being able to go back and reexperience your life in different meaningful ways, like see how different situations of your life impacted you in the past with the warm, loving hug of your mother the entire time or your whole family. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:11:23

The warm, loving hug of your entire family hugging you while you're going back and watching these incredibly challenging situations that you had to face in the past. And so you then what that affords you the ability to do is to reappraise the meaning around those experiences from the standpoint of gratitude for the awareness of how this happened and you recovered from it, and gratitude for the support of anyone there was that was supporting you through it, and gratitude for your own ability to be resilient and overcome it. And then forgiving yourself, finding forgiveness in yourself for the challenges and mistakes you might have made along the way, and then being compassionate for yourself and then loving yourself. And so it invites that radical safety that's enhanced by the molecular action of the medicine, like in the case of MDMA, is the lighter fluid that you throw on top of the coals to, like, really get them going before you actually cook the food. That's what it's doing.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:12:24

And it's just like safety. And then the person's like, oh, that doesn't mean shit about me. That's just some shit that happened to me. Bad shit happens to everybody. Fuck.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:12:35

And you're it's not my fault. And you're like, oh, it's not my fault. Oh, wow. I never thought about it that way before. Maybe it's actually not my fault.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:12:44

Right? Maybe this is just shit that happened. Oh, wow. Is that possible? Yeah, that's possible.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:12:49

Okay. Well, if that's possible, then maybe a lot of these things are just stuff that happened. It doesn't actually mean that I'm a bad person that this happened to me. Right? And then all of a sudden, your new thought pattern start to be formed around safe, positive reference towards self under times of stress rather than negative reference towards self and others around times of stress.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:13:13

And there's a experience that I've had, and I've talked to others who had described the same of the distinction between an intellectual versus an embodied knowing. I'll give an example of myself from one of those healing spaces. I had struggled with weight on and off, lost 70 pounds at one point for really since my childhood. I think distress eating was a symptom for sure, but I had known how to eat healthy for a long time. I had known when I treated my body well and I made particular choices, I was fitter, I was happier, I was physically more able, I was more socially accepted.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:13:48

Like, I knew what that was. I'd been there and then I'd fallen off. I'd been there and I'd fallen off. But in that container, all of a sudden, and I don't know how to describe this other than what was intellectual all of a sudden in a snap became so unquestionably, evidently true at seemingly a cellular level. Like, all of a sudden, it was just something that I knew rather than I know.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:14:14

And I wonder if we understand how that happens.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:14:20

I don't think we understand how that happens yet. We know it happens. We know there's a difference between intellectual knowing and embodied knowing. I can't say that we fully understand how that happens. What I will say is that from the experiences and the data we're seeing from some of these MDMA studies where people who have severe PTSD go from a state at time point 0 where they don't believe that they can ever feel better to time point 12 weeks later with 3 doses of MDMA and 42 hours of therapy to being over 60% in remission and fully believing, Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:15:00

Experiencing, living, believing health, and knowing that it is achievable by them and full embodied knowing. Right? And I think that what we do see is that there is a modification to the actual code that sits on top of our DNA, which is called our epigenetic code. And this is a layer of code that governs how much our genes turn up or turn down. And this impacts every single gene in our body, stress response genes, like skin color genes, hair genes, everything, digestion related genes.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:15:38

Every single gene is regulated by epigenetics, and that's how our cells and our skin know to be skin and our brain cells know to be brain because they all have the same DNA code. Same in every cell in the body, in case you didn't know. The same DNA except in sperm and egg, which have 50%. Every single other cell has the same. It's just like a computer.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:15:56

How does a computer know how to run 8 different mobile applications in the same iOS? Right? It could be that there is another layer of code that says, hey, you're in this kind of phone. You're not in a Google Pixel. You're running Android in a Samsung phone.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:16:13

So I need to now adapt my entire experience of this app for your Google Pixel instead of your Samsung phone because the entire hardware is different, and so there needs to be another layer of code that says, alright, that software needs to be adapted. It's in a different hardware. It's in a skin cell. It's in a brain cell. This needs to function differently.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:16:33

We don't want brain cells growing on the skin and skin cells growing in the brain. That's what we call a teratoma. These are very, very highly conserved over 100 of 1000000 of years layers of code that regulate what does what and how we respond to stress, and it can change, and it's modifiable by the environment. So to get back to your question earlier, we showed that we know through the work of many people, including doctor Rachel Yehuda, that trauma gets encoded on DNA in the epigenetic code around cortisol receptor functioning. So, if you experience trauma and you get diagnosed with PTSD, you will more likely not have a change in the epigenetic code on your cortisol receptor genes, which changes the way your cortisol receptors function.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:17:18

MDMA assisted therapy, since our publication in February, has shown that we can actually reverse and repair that, that the cortisol receptor seems to be functioning better because the epigenetic code has been modified based on having this 12 week experience with 3 doses of MDMA, and people continue to get better long term. It's not just that they're better and then they get worse again. It's that they continue to get better after treatment has stopped with no additional treatments, which is fascinating. People are learning to heal themselves again is one of the ways we can think about interpreting that data. And so that could be, we don't know for sure, but that could be the biological link to what you're talking about, which is embodied knowing.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:18:04

Right? It's that the body cells have now learned some information that is being stored in the epigenetic memory, and that memory gets passed down across generations just like DNA.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:18:17

Interesting. If anyone's not familiar with the work of Rachel Yehuda, please go check it out. She's remarkable human, remarkable researcher doing some really amazing work. That's fascinating. And so what I'm hearing from that is just as a bit of a recap is our current condition is not predestined.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:18:36

It's not unchangeable. If we are in a place of challenge or trauma, or I should say the presentation of trauma or fear, Those are mutable, changeable conditions. They require application and work on our behalf, sometimes directly, sometimes with another person, sometimes with a pharmacological intervention. All of those or one of those may apply to you. And when you do that work, when you apply the effort and techniques of healing, you can not only improve your own existence, experience, effectiveness, but you can also rewrite the genetic code that will be passed down to your children and their children.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:19:22

You can literally perform generational healing that is heritable or at least that's what the evidence is beginning to suggest.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:19:30

Yeah. You can literally stop the cycle in any moment. Every single human has the ability to stop the cycle of hurt, and it starts by just choosing what you put your attention on to take it full circle. In every moment, there exists fear and love and everything in between. And you can choose in any moment from what perspective you want to approach the world.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:19:54

Do I want to approach the world from a perspective of being afraid all the time in everything that I do, or do I want to think about the world from perspective of love when I'm not under threat, when I'm not actually facing a survival situation? We have that choice. And so choose the lens. Be intentional about choosing the frame of reference from which you are referencing the world because that effectively steers all of the meaning that you get from the world and everything that you do. And that single choice has a huge impact on all of it, all the way down to the biology.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:20:28

Yes. And I wanna start with the recognition that we are all dealt a different hand in life, that chance has a lot to do with it, that before we can make that conscious choice, the world imposes its own evidence on us.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:20:44

For sure.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:20:45

You know, you work in some really tough cases. So for someone who's listening, who has very bravely taken their challenge and decided to be in a place of leadership or policy work or service as a police officer or teacher, like, they're doing their best, but they're listening and thinking, yeah, Doctor. Dave, fuck you, right? I grew up without parents in a violent environment. We were robbed by the time I was 3.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:21:10

I didn't get to go to the school. Other people did, we didn't have a teacher or books in the school. Who who are you to tell me to love, right? I'm obviously being, you know, big about it, but just like how someone like that steps into your office or into a study, how do you meet that person and what's available to them that might be approachable coming from that place of understandable and justified fear?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:21:35

I mean, it's all understandable and justified fear, right? It's learned behavior. It's a learned way to think about the world. I don't take it personally when people tell me they don't get it or I think this is bullshit or whatever. That's the way they learned about the world.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:21:50

I have my things too. Right? It's not personal, though. And so when we can take the personalness out of it or the trick where we start to think that there's a personal notion to it, we would step aside from that and just watch, just step into what we call in therapy observer mind. So it's nonjudgmental listening, just watching, observing what our thoughts and feelings are doing.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:22:15

And what we realize is that it's just about listening and meeting you where you are and meeting whoever it is where they are, and everybody is in a different place, and that's okay. But the point is it's not your fault, and there's nothing inherently wrong with you that got you there or that resulted in you feeling like a victim for a lot of your life, which a lot of people do, which is avoidable also. It's learned behavior, and it's not personal. Right? I go back to these indigenous traditions, like the four agreements and all these things, because I think they're really important traditions about helping people understand that to not take it personally and to always do your best, and that shit happens to all of us.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:22:58

Every human being has had really hard times in one way or another. And it's about understanding that and understanding that we actually have more control over our reality than we think we do as soon as we start to learn the practices and the techniques that allow us to restore and remember how to control our reality. So when I actually work with clients who are struggling with this kind of stuff, which is most, I would say that a lot of it comes from a motivational approach, which is this is an interview, so it's a little different. I don't tell my patients what to think or what to do ever, and I rarely give them my opinion. But I think that in the patient setting, I'm asking them questions to understand what they want out of life and what their motivations are to get what they want out of life and what they care about, and then I help them find their own path.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:23:48

I help them draw the dotted line from I'm here and I'm unhappy to I wanna be there and be happy, so what do I have to do? Okay. What are the kinds of things that are making me unhappy? Let's talk about that. And then we talk about that and we're like, okay, are there any of those things that you don't need to do, but you're still doing them?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:24:05

And like, oh, yeah. Getting rip roaring drunk on weeknights and yelling at my wife probably isn't something I should be.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:24:11

I help them a whole bunch.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:24:12

Yeah. Maybe that's actually making it worse. Never really thought about that way, doc. Maybe that's something I could cut back. You're like, do you think cutting that back would increase your ability to access some of your goals?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:24:24

And they're like, I don't know, but I'm willing to find out.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:24:27

Right. Let me try. Let me ask the question in a slightly different way because I I recognize the importance of self determination in this process as a coach would do the same thing. Right? You don't give advice and you rarely give or ever give direction.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:24:40

If you were to isolate so if there's a spectrum from 100% fear to a 100% love, right, and no one's really at either of those poles, but you're pulling from the lower quartile. Right? So people who are are still locked in a fear perspective, What are the techniques or approaches that they have self determined that you have found or observed to be most successful frequently?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:25:06

We talked about some of them. I would say the two most important ones there's actually 3 most important ones probably, but probably don't have time to go into all of them in detail, but it really starts with gratitude. And gratitude is a word that we are not taught to use properly, but it is an incredibly important word, and it represents the emotional muscle of grace and graciousness, which is a dual feeding system. So when I express thanks to you and you feel good about doing something nice for me, then I feel good about making you feel good, and then you feel good about making me feel good. And then we have a mutual feel good relationship, right, which is the way human relationships were meant to be.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:25:51

We're supposed to synergistically mutually collaborate to improve each other's lives. We even have entire parts of the brain devoted to collaborative adaptation. Mhmm. It's that feedback loop around gratitude that is really important and to make that really actionable for people. The way to think about that is it's very, very hard to be grateful for bad stuff that happens to us.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:26:11

So don't do that. Be grateful for yourself for getting through it. Find things about yourself to be grateful for doing good things for yourself, for doing things that have helped you survive, to help you overcome stress. Right? And even if they're simple things, I'm grateful that I got out of bed today.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:26:30

Right? Most people don't say that. Most people don't care about that shit. That's the same shit we do every day. But if you take a moment to say, I'm grateful for getting out of bed today and having energy to do that, I'm grateful for making myself a delicious breakfast.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:26:42

I'm grateful for the sun on my skin and the feeling of warmth. I'm grateful for these comfy clothes. Whatever it is, I'm grateful for being able to take a breath right now because I chose to. All of those things are like strengthening your biceps in the gym When you're working out, it's literally pumping gratitude iron, and you're strengthening neural networks in your brain around. I associate going about my day with being grateful for things that are happening in my day and for myself, most importantly.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:27:15

And then you start to train that muscle and that literally shifts your mindset from, wow, I have to get up today again. Why me? Why do I have to do all this annoying shit today? Why me? What's wrong with me that I have to feel so miserable all the time?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:27:30

Right? It's not just you. It's everyone has these thoughts. Right? So we need to normalize that part and then help people understand that it's okay that you've had these thoughts.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:27:39

We're all taught to have these thoughts and think about the world in this kind of why me outlook way, but why me is a fear response. Right? Expressing gratitude is a love response. It's a love muscle. And so if we train the love muscle or start to by practicing gratitude and just trying to discover things in our lives, in us, every moment of the day that we can be grateful for, then we live a life of grace.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:28:07

And that is a really powerful initial way for people to very actionably, very simply start to get through this. You don't have to be grateful for the bad stuff that happened to you, but you can be grateful for your awareness of the lessons you've learned from the mistakes we've made. Right? Failure is the best teacher. So don't necessarily be grateful for the pain.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:28:28

Be grateful for what you learned from the pain.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:28:30

Yeah. And just to make it specific, and there's a number of ways to do this, a simple journaling practice in the morning or the evening before bed, capturing 5 things that you are genuinely truly grateful for. And as Dave said, focusing on the easy ones. I have a client right now who struggles with being self critical, something that I can certainly relate to, and their work right now is to each day, at the end of the day, 5 genuine compliments to themselves. And so there's a number of ways that you can get at that.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:29:03

Other things other than a gratitude practice that would be great first steps, maybe if there's one more that you think would be a particularly helpful first step for someone who's still very much in that fear place. I I

Dr. David Rabin: 01:29:13

mean, the simplest ones are, like, get and give yourself more hugs. Right? Just like do this.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:29:19

They're hugging himself, if you're wondering.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:29:21

Yeah. Hugging yourself is really important. It's not weird. We should be doing it more. We're supposed to get lots of hugs every day.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:29:27

Hugs are really important. And breathing. So, like, doing breathing and actually intentionally directing your attention to your breath is a way to restore a sense of control to yourself instantaneously. And anxiety and stress come from more than anything else feeling out of control. So if we direct our attention to things we have control over, like giving ourselves a hug or moving around or taking a breath, where our attention goes, then you're automatically restoring a sense of control, which makes you feel less anxious and stressed because you're spending less time thinking about things you don't have control over.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:30:02

So starting to understand all of this stuff is extremely empowering of us to be able to actually make the changes we need to make for ourselves. And it's a day to day, moment to moment thing that doesn't actually require a lot of work. It just requires the diligence to continue to remind yourself nonjudgmentally to do it because everybody slips up and everybody forgets. So it's about, oh, I slipped up. I was nasty to that person and expressed fear, and I actually had a fear.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:30:30

It's okay. I made a mistake. Let's learn from that experience. I'm grateful for the awareness that I made that mistake. Let's learn from the experience.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:30:38

And so you can see this cycle that comes back to between thought questioning, breath, and gratitude that starts to feed this loop of self healing, which is really building these emotional muscles. And then from gratitude, there's forgiveness, self forgiveness, and self compassion, and self love. And those are some of the things that come out of indigenous Chapivo Medicine in South America that are really interesting, other emotional muscles that we can train to be more healthy and sustainably so mentally, emotionally, physically, and to start to little by little kick us out of these difficult places that many of us get in. It affects everybody. So the I use these practices literally every single day.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:31:21

I kid you not every single day, and they have changed my life and made me so much more of a healthy person throughout.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:31:30

Yeah. And just to highlight something you said earlier in the specific around the breathing practice, 1 minute. So take out your iPhone. Let's be honest. It's with you.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:31:38

Maybe you're an Android, but you got a phone on you. Set an alarm for 1 minute from when you said it, close your eyes, breathe in for a count of 5, hold in the breath for a count of 2, out for a count of 5, I think that's what you said earlier, and do that until the bell rings. And within that minute, when you open your eyes, you will find you open them to the same room but a totally different environment than you went into. It's really true.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:32:02

And if you do it for longer, it works even better. Totally. And you can do it on the go. Right? I think you don't have to sit there and do it.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:32:08

You can do it on a walk. You can do these breathing techniques when you're moving around. And if anybody hasn't tried Apollo who's listening, you can download the Apollo Neuro app on your iPhone, and it will actually guide you through that breath work through feeling. And so there are lots of different ways that you can experience these states.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:32:26

Yeah. Definitely go check that out. A lot of good stuff there. The last thing I wanna touch on, so we've talked about the internal regulation. Most of the people listening to this are gonna be in a position where they also have the opportunity to help or aid externally regulate their environment.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:32:41

You could imagine being in a city council meeting, for instance, and there's just livid angry people and comment. You've got colleagues who you know or at least you have the story are coming at something from a different perspective. There's a ton of fear of loss, fear of things going the wrong way, fear of outcomes, and the result is a dynamic where it's very hard to see each other as people and speak as people. And as you said, in that place, the higher functioning doesn't work great, and we do a poor job of having dynamic creative discussion, which is what actually is necessary to solve complex problems. And we end up with subpar or no policy on issues that are really necessary.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:33:27

We end up in gridlock. And if you were sitting in one of those chairs and you were having that hard time, because we all do and we all have an outcome that we want, What might you do to help in some way lower the temperature in the room, shift from that place of fear to love and help even if it's in a small way to create or cultivate the conditions for a more respectful, generative dialogue?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:33:57

I think the most important thing is to remember first and foremost that we're all human first before we're anything else, before you're black, white, brown, before you're male, female, before you're anything other. In addition to being human, we're all human first. And as humans, we all have the same core needs, wants, and desires. We need food. We need shelter.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:34:25

We need safety, physical safety. We need air, and we need water. And we need love and affection and connection, physical love and intimacy, and emotional love and connection and intimacy and community. We all need these things. This is not special to any one group of humans despite what we have been taught and what we might have taught others.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:34:46

All humans need this stuff to have good, healthy, happy lives. We also need other things. We need a sense of autonomy. We need a sense of mastery. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:34:55

We need a sense of being able to feel like we can take charge of something that is special to us, like our special skill. We need the opportunity to learn how to self discover ourselves. And these are all not complicated things, but they are things that are critical needs for healthy, happy human existence. We need breaks. Think about how simple some of these things are.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:35:17

And yet, we do not afford every human these things. We approach the conversation that what I represent and my constituents are more important than what you represent and your constituents. For whatever reason, I am going to make a decision that's gonna result in getting what I want over getting what you want without the option for reasonable compromise. And I think that's where there's a real struggle because without the requirement for compromise, then stuff just gets gridlocked, and then we don't actually make any change or the change becomes so expensive to make that it just never ends up happening. And over the time it happens, it's just a huge mess.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:35:57

It doesn't actually do what it was supposed to do, which happens all the time in in government. And we see it all the time in the US government. And so I think a lot of what we really need to be focused on is rooting the conversation in the core human needs first, which is what we all need, and then have that set up as the foundation from which we make all other decisions. And if we have a major decision that negatively impacts one of those core needs, then that should be at the top of list of things that we're discussing and coming to consensus agreement around to fix immediate. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:36:30

This is basic human existence. And if you wanna take it another level, we with the earth are all alive before we are anything else. We all share aliveness, and we need the earth to stay alive as humans. So if we don't use that empathy cortex of our brains to think about what other humans and what ourselves and what the earth wants moving forward in this relationship, that is a two way relationship together, the earth could very quickly become inhospitable to all of us. And if it does, then we're fucked.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:37:06

Majorly fucked. There is no other place for us to live as humans other than the earth right now. And we are probably at least a decade away from having any kind of reasonable habitable colonization of any other planet, and it's going to suck compared to the Earth. So, let's just be real here for a second about what we all need to do, which is recognize not just on an individual human political level, but on a worldwide level, We are all life. And unless you're not like me, we all wanna stay alive and have a vested interest in staying alive.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:37:38

So we need to recognize that and center around that and then make our decisions based on that, staying alive together. And that should be governing all of our decisions. Once we start making decisions based on that, it don't matter what color or shape or size or look you are or where you came from or your background. All of that stuff doesn't matter anymore at all. Right?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:38:02

It's totally trivial.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:38:03

Yeah. And just to recap that from the perspective of, say, a mayor who's running a meeting in a municipality or a staffer on Capitol Hill is putting together an agenda for a policy discussion, The first thing I heard is recognize the reality of the human experience. You have the opportunity to put in a break. You don't have to have a 5 hour meeting without a bathroom break, without the opportunity to stretch or relieve stress if it's a difficult conversation, you can put that in. You can lead people in a breath or 2.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:38:38

You can recenter people when they are triggered. You can bring them back to the present moment to the room, offer them a glass of water, ask them a question to see if they're present, if they can come back. And when you're in discussion, you have the opportunity to validate others' perspective, to demonstrate your understanding of where they're coming from. Doesn't mean you have to agree with it. Doesn't mean you have to vote for it.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:39:05

But just to recognize their humanity and that you understand and see them opens the door for a more meaningful conversation that's more likely to result in a good outcome for everyone. Those are the key takeaways that I heard in there that I think are very actionable. Would you agree with those?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:39:21

Yeah. Gotta find the common ground. Everything's about finding common ground. That's how we get to solutions. So find the common ground.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:39:27

It's right there. We're all stepping on it.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:39:29

Yeah. The job is the solutions, not the fight. And we forget that when we are in that place in our minds, but we have now some of the tools to get out of that as well. And so that's our responsibility before we come into the room and after we leave the room. I I would love to do this for about 2 more hours, but in respecting our biological needs and calendars, I wanna kinda start to wrap us up, and I wanna just ask where do people find you, your work, Apollo, neuro, anything else that you would want to point people to for anything?

Skippy Mesirow: 01:40:01

What are some of those resources for them?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:40:03

You can find me on socials at doctor David Rabin on Instagram and Twitter. You can find me on my website at doctor dave.io or my clinic, apollo.clinic. And you can also find apollo neuro@apoll0neuro.com. That's apollo neuro.com. And you can also go to wearable hugs.com, which is what the kids call it.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:40:27

I love it. And if you wanna learn more about my work in consciousness and psychedelic medicine and the rest of what's going on in that world, I have 2 shows on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 1, the consciousness show is called Your Brain Explained, and the psychedelic news show is called the psychedelic report, which is a biweekly show where we cover the latest news and goings on in the psychedelic space. And I look forward to seeing you all out there.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:40:56

Told you there was more things that I didn't mention earlier. They just keep coming out of the woodwork. It's pretty amazing. Final question, same for every guest. Our audience are not passive observers.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:41:06

These are the proverbial humans in the arena. If you were to leave them with just one thing, a thought, a practice, an inspirational quote, anything at all that would best resource them to be a vector for healing our politics, what would you leave them with?

Dr. David Rabin: 01:41:21

I think the millennial old temple at Delphi does it much better than I do. It's a temple of Apollo. The temple of Apollo has many different things inscribed on it, but 3 of the main points that are inscribed on the top of the temple are very famous and very much forgotten in our society, and they are number 1, know thyself. Know who you are, figure out who you are, discover who you are without guilt, without shame, without judgment, figure out yourself. That's the lifelong journey that we're all on.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:41:55

Learn who we are and learn what we're capable of and dive into that unknown. Number 2 is something to the effect of gluttony brings ruin. Don't be greedy. Don't take more than you need. Number 3 is don't have hubris, like approach the world with humility.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:42:18

Don't act overconfident in the face of what you don't know. It's one thing to dive head first into what you don't know with the goal of trying to learn, and it's another thing to dive in thinking that you already know everything and that you have nothing to learn and that you're the teacher. We're teachers in certain contexts, but in general, we are the students of nature and the universe. And it's really, really important for us to always remember that. It's surety brings ruin.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:42:45

Approach the world from a place of modesty and humility. Open to what's out there. Don't be overconfident. Don't have hubris. And nothing to access, don't be greedy, and know thyself.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:42:56

I didn't think those are still, if not still true today, as true as they were when they were first inscribed.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:43:02

Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time and your work and for being here with us today and being in my life as well. And you are an incredibly positive force everywhere you go. I'm so grateful to know you.

Dr. David Rabin: 01:43:13

Oh, thanks so much, Skippy. I really appreciate it, and likewise grateful to know you. Thanks for having me.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:43:21

Thank you so much for joining us today. If you wanna put what you've heard here today into practice, sign up for our newsletter, the leader's handbook, where each month you'll receive just one email with a curated selection of the most useful tools and practices discussed on this podcast today and over the course of the last month. Delivered in simple how to worksheets, videos, and audio guides so you and your teams can try and test these out in your own life and see what best serves you. And lastly, if you wanna be a vector for healing our politics, if you wanna do your part, take out your phone right now and share this podcast with 5 colleagues you care about. Send a simple text, drop a line, and leave the ball in their court.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:44:08

Because the truth is the more those around you do their work, the better it will show up in your life, in your community, and in your world. Have a beautiful day. The Healing Our Politics podcast is brought to you by the Elected Leaders Collective, the first leading and most highly recognized name in mental health, well-being, and performance coaching for elected leaders and public servants designed specifically for you. Now don't be fooled by the name. The Elected Leaders Collective is not just for elected leaders.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:44:52

It is for all public servants, staffers, volunteers, government, nonprofit, whole organizations. This is for you. If you are filled with passion for improving your community and world but are tired as I am of the anger, stress, and betrayal, if you find yourself banging your head against that same wall, struggling with the incoming criticism and threats, arguing with colleagues who are supposed to be on your team and questioning if it's even worth it any more than the elected leaders collective programing is specifically for you. With the Elected Leaders Collective, you will learn to become a hashtag political healer, building the authentic unshakable confidence and courage to stay true to yourself through the anger and pressure while cultivating the open empathetic mind to meet others with the curiosity, compassion, and kindness necessary to respond to threats, improve challenging relationships, deescalate conflict, and bring people in your community together to solve real problems and get shit done. You'll reduce stress, anxiety, and overwhelm and become a more effective leader while having time for your family, yourself, your health, and your wealth, sleeping well at night, and showing others they can too.

Skippy Mesirow: 01:46:16

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