Bonus Rantz: Your Phone Is HIJACKING Your Brain's Fear Center

Your amygdala was built to fire under six conditions that could kill you. Now it's firing every time you pick up your phone, and Dr. Dave Rabin says that's the root of the modern mental health crisis.

I sat down with Dr. Dave Rabin at the Beyond Biohacking conference in Austin to talk through what's actually happening in your nervous system. Rabin, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who developed the Apollo wearable out of his PTSD research at the University of Pittsburgh, breaks down how trauma is a fear-learning disorder, why numbing symptoms fails 80% of people, and how the body has to relearn safety to extinguish fear. We get into the smartphone problem too: thirty minutes of scrolling feeds your brain as many social cues as a person took in over a full week in the 1950s, which tricks the fear center into thinking you're under threat when you're not.

From there it goes deeper into the science of the vagus nerve, how the Apollo device uses sound-wave vibrations to add real sleep back each night, and the case for psychedelic medicines like ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin as tools that amplify safety in a therapeutic setting and let people remake meaning around past trauma. If you're interested in mental health, trauma recovery, vagus nerve stimulation, biohacking, or the neuroscience behind why we feel so wired, this one delivers.

0:00 Meet Dr. Dave Rabin and what Apollo actually is 
0:18 PTSD research origins and why numbing symptoms fails
1:59 Is the mental health crisis tied to fear and safety
2:12 How the amygdala evolved and what your phone does to it
4:40 How long it takes to retrain your nervous system
5:54 Letting your inner child roam free
7:26 The stigma around trauma and mental health
9:09 What reliably brings joy 9:59 How psychedelics are used to heal trauma

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Jason Rantz is Seattle’s fresh, contemporary conservative voice. Young and urban, passionate and bold, Rantz is outnumbered by the Progressive chorus, yet refuses to ignore the conservative principles at the core of America’s greatness. Prolific on-air and online, Rantz knows he’s outnumbered in Seattle, but he’s never shy to be outspoken about it.