Justin first joined the Apollo Neuro team in 2020 with a unique perspective on prioritizing health to deal with gut health issues, sleep struggles, and mental performance challenges. Justin is a leader on the Customer Service team in processes and strategies, and is excited to embark on leading the new Apollo Labs™ Community. Thanks for sharing your story, Justin!
How did you discover Apollo?
I was helping run operations at the premier Health Optimization Summit in London, UK, in 2019, a conference that brought together nearly 1500 biohackers, health enthusiasts, and experts in advanced medicine and new wellness technologies.
Dr. David Rabin (Apollo ® co-founder and Chief Medical Officer) was speaking at the conference, and Apollo Neuro was exhibiting in the technology hall. I was very fortunate to meet Kathryn and Dr. Dave, co-founders of Apollo, and borrowed an Apollo wearable to help get me through the conference. I immediately felt a difference in my mood and performance and was committed to exploring the technology further.
Like most of our Apollo team, you’re passionate about health. Can you share a bit about your own personal health journey?
From 2012 to 2018, I had the good fortune and privilege of helping build the Bulletproof Executive blog, product line, and lifestyle brand, now known as Bulletproof. Working 1-on-1 with Dave Asprey, the most well-known biohacker on the globe, was a blessing. I learned more about optimizing health, personalized medicine, and nutrition than some doctors learn at university. Not discounting the hard work, research, and discoveries that professional doctors make everyday, but the information I had access to through Bulletproof and Dave Asprey, and the multitude of professionals, experts, doctors, and scientists of medicine I was able to meet and build relationships with over the years has given me a completely different perspective on personalized medicine, taking care of my own health, and relationship to care services.
Exposure to this information has afforded me so many opportunities at resolving personal health issues. I grew up addicted to food for managing my stress, I was hardly physically active, and I was borderline obese all throughout childhood. As I matured, I began to “do the work” and undo these old patterns and take better care of myself. But it was the material I gleaned from working in the “industry of biohacking” that unlocked so many of my health riddles - from resolving complex issues with my gut health, sleep issues, mental performance challenges, and figuring out my nutrition and activity that actually enabled me to become a strong human being. I consider proper stress management to be my greatest accomplishment, as my access and adoption of meditation practices and technologies empowered me to perform at my best and resolve various traumas and behavioral patterns that were detrimental to my health. The struggle always persists, but I’m getting better everyday - adding Apollo Neuro to my routine has certainly been a win in this regard.
What current practices do you incorporate into your daily life to keep yourself feeling well?
Daily meditation is a non-negotiable for me, even if just for 10 minutes, but I typically practice for 30 to 60 minutes daily, sometimes broken into 2 mini sessions. In addition to using Apollo with each session, I also listen to various audio tracks designed with binaural beats and other sub-perceptual frequencies designed to influence brain function and support exiting fight-or-flight. NuCalm is my go-to audio tracks, but Brain.FM is also excellent. My “brain” responds very well to sounds - I’m a pretty hardcore audiophile.
Other than this, I’m actually quite simple in my approach to maintaining health. I rarely take supplements, I exercise as much as I feel like I want, and I don’t count calories. People always ask me, given my experience with so many various tools, technologies, and supplements, “what are my top 3 recommendations for improving health?”
- Wake up and watch the sun rise everyday.
- Eat the food you want, with as few ingredients (or labels) as possible.
- Try to walk at least 5,000 steps a day, preferably outside.
It’s very exciting that you’ll be leading the new Apollo Labs Community. What are you most looking forward to when it comes to this new aspect of your role at Apollo?
‘Community’ has always been a strong value of my personal life and the work that I strive to do - I am really excited to be developing the community for Apollo Labs.
My ultimate goal is to have this become so much more than simply “an online community”. With Apollo Neuro originating from the science and therapeutic effects of human connection and physical touch, I want the experiences within our community to translate and foster the same effects.
This isn’t just a space for customer service, product promotions, or product feedback. We want every member of Apollo Labs to feel like they are connected to each other and are a part something greater than the sum of its members.
Yes, we will ask for member feedback, and learn so much more about how we can improve our products and services. But the goal is to bring new and revolutionary technologies to the masses that create real, significant, and positive change. We can support people’s resilience to stress, we can help the world sleep more, and we can improve people’s health.
We can only accomplish this swiftly if we work together, and the only reason anyone in Apollo Labs would even want to work with other members is if they feel an honest and truthful connection with them as neighbors. Therefore, nearly 100% of my and my team’s effort is on supporting everyone that participates in developing friendships, social activities, and genuine interpersonal connection. We’re planning community-wide opportunities to share our experiences, learn from each other, teach and coach each other, and help lift everyone up around us.
If you’re not looking forward to seeing what’s new and going on in the Apollo Labs Community every day, then we’re doing something wrong. We don’t simply want your ‘like’ on a social network - we want you to be satisfied, delighted, fulfilled, and connected to others around the world.
Although the Apollo Labs Community is just starting, you’ve worked with our customers for many years. What have been some of the most inspiring customer experiences you’ve heard during your time on the team?
Developing the Customer Success team since the launch of Apollo has been one of the most challenging endeavors I’ve ever faced; it all culminated at the absolute worst (or best?) possible time. Right after shipping the first 1,000 Apollo devices in March of 2020, the Covid pandemic kicked off in full-force. This resulted in countless and unimaginable delays in delivery, manufacturing, and communications with customers. Everything that could go wrong with operating an online wearable tech company, did. So much was out of our control at the time: manufacturing delays because our warehouse was closed due to strict Covid regulations, our shipping carriers taking up to six months to deliver to our international customers, and packages and deliveries simply disappearing every day. If it wasn’t for the incredible team I was able to build for Apollo that year, I would have crashed.
Genuinely, the thing that kept me going and motivated our team to face this overwhelming challenge were the positive testimonials we were receiving from our customers. Never in my entire career have I seen a product impact people’s lives so positively. Customers would write multiple paragraphs to us, even essays, about how much better they felt since using their Apollo. During one of the most stressful periods of modern human history, reports poured in about how people were coping better with the weight of it all, maintaining and improving their sleep, staying better-connected to their friends and family, and even improving symptoms of chronic health conditions that I can’t even describe here for legal reasons.
I never imagined such a small and unassuming tool could help so many people manage their stress, improve their resilience in the face of a global tragedy, and help so many overcome such a wide array of ailments.
What is your favorite Vibe and why?
Calm. It’s my default setting when I meditate. I find it helps bring awareness to my pace and depth of breathing and helps me get lost in a trance more quickly. I typically set the intensity between 30-60% (depending on how I feel in the moment), and I wear it with the Apollo clip on the collar of my shirt, so it vibrates against my clavicle bone.
What are your future health goals?
For my next chapter, I’m focusing on work-life balance, and practicing with alternative medicines for mental and spiritual development. I’m fortunate to be working with yet another team and leadership on the cutting edge of psychedelic science and therapies and my few experiences in this space have brought tremendous benefit and balance to my mental health and wellbeing.
With happiness and contentment as a goal (without willfully ignoring emotions across the spectrum), I find this lifetime becoming much more rewarding, fulfilling, and fruitful in service to others as I aim my awareness towards letting things be as they are.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” - Hamlet by William Shakespeare
