The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #257 - Dr. Molly Maloof

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I am about to have. It is a long time coming. So the backstory on today's show, it's actually kind of funny. I think this is the first time this has happened on this show. So a while ago now, I mean, I think it was over, it might've been almost two years ago, my friend James Clement, who I have had on the show once or twice, he's a dear friend. And he introduced me to Dr. Molly Maloof. And this was before, I think she had a book that was, the book was not in the stage of like being pitched and coming out at that moment that we were introduced. And so I was so excited to meet her. I booked her for the show. And then a few months later, I got pitched her book through, I'm guessing probably her publicist or publisher. And I didn't realize it was the same person. And I was like, Oh, yes, of course I would love to book this person. And then I realized she was already booked for the show, which is just really telling when you have multiple people sending, you know, awesome people your way in this sphere of biohacking and health and wellness and all the things. And so the book, I was so excited, it was called The Spark Factor, the secret to supercharging energy, becoming resilient and feeling better than ever. And it does have a forward by Dave Asprey, who I've also had on the show multiple times. And friends, oh my goodness, if you are interested in the keywords that I just used, although we might redefine them in today's conversation, but biohacking, longevity, health, all the things you've got to give this book, it is such a comprehensive overview. And in particular, if you are a female or a woman, although it really applies to everybody, the things that you can learn, but if you are a woman, Dr. Maloof really tailors it towards women's hormones and how women in particular need to approach everything that they're doing when it comes to stress and fertility and diet and sleep and, you know, being over committed in life to things and the role, even the role of beauty in today's culture. I mean, it's all in there. There are so many topics. I have so many questions. I mean, there's so many topics that I actually just made a list of, like the really specific things that I had actually never heard in any other book before. And I read a lot of books. So I feel like there are so many different directions that we could take this. Dr. Maloof, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So like I said, I have so many questions for you. Would you like to tell listeners a little bit about your personal story? I loved hearing about your childhood and how precocious you were and everything that you did when you were little. I was like, that's what I would do. Like you being like a little self entrepreneur and things. I did like the exact same things. No way. At Halloween, I would go buy the candy like after Halloween when it was really, really discounted, like the big bags. And then I had these vending machines in my room and I would get the candy, put it in the vending machine, sell it to my siblings. Oh my God, that is amazing. Yeah, I know you did stuff with American girl doll stuff.

Molly Maloof:
Yeah, I used to make American Girl doll clothes, I would make paper boxes that I would decorate, I would make little purses, and I would sell them at school, and then I got sent to the principal's office. And I remember thinking, what am I doing wrong here? I thought this was a cool thing I was doing, and I was making money, and I was really excited about it. And it really, like, it's kind of funny and sad, because nowadays, like, they put kids in special schools for entrepreneurship, and so I actually decided to become a doctor in around the same time. And so most of my career has been dedicated to becoming a physician. And then once I got there, I was like, oh my god, this system that we're working in is pretty problematic in a lot of ways. And I just had this desire to innovate and to focus on the first principles of health and not just disease states. So that really led me to, you know, Andrew Weil, Integrative Medicine, Lifestyle Medicine, I built a course on lifestyle medicine as a medical student in my medical school, got it approved and part of it added to the curriculum. I also taught at Stanford for three years on a course on health span extension. So I've always been an educator, I've always been an entrepreneur, I've worked with over 50 companies in digital health, wearable tech, biotech, CPG, food, supplements, you name it. And I've just had an incredible experience being able to explore personal health technologies from a very early age. I was like maybe 29, 30 when I first broke into the tech space in Silicon Valley. And that's when I started my medical practice around age 30. And so it's been such an incredible journey over the last decade of discovering really what I believe are the biggest drivers of health and disease. And in the last three years, I actually took a left turn and started really focusing on human connection because it was missing from medicine. And it turns out that it was the greatest factor in longevity and happiness that I was totally overlooking. And loneliness is also worse for your health than smoking, drinking, sedentary behavior and obesity. So I feel like I hit the holy grail after I figured out that there's a lot we can do for health that we're not even looking at. I was so focused on metabolism and energy and food and exercise and sleep and stress. And I was really overlooking the things that are clearly driving a lot of these behaviors. And so everyone's always asking me, like, what's your specialty? And it's really, I'm a very broad generalist and I'm a first principles thinker and I'm obsessed with health as a science and not as like just in the wellness industry. But I really wanted to understand what is health? How do you measure it? How do you improve it? And so I've just been on a voracious path of discovery for the last decade. And it's really led me to this belief system that health is actually a physics problem. Physics is the core programming of existence. And if you really look at biology and you look at energy metabolism, you will find that if you optimize energy metabolism, you optimize mitochondrial health. And mitochondrial health are the batteries of your cells. So first and foremost, you have to have enough energy to survive. It's like you're in a video game and you need literal energy to get to the next level. And then there's also the importance of human connection. So you can't just have a bunch of energy. You have to direct it towards something. And that might, you know, your relationships are a source of energy or a source of stress and are a source of energy drain. So who you surround yourself with and the kind of people you work with and the kind of family that you have and the kind of ways that you interact with your community will definitely either make or break your health. And then there's the last question, sort of three pillars that I stand for. And the third one is self -realization or meaning and purpose. What are you using this energy and connection for? Are you building a family? Are you making art? Are you building companies? Are you helping the environment? Are you working for a nonprofit? Whatever it is that you spend your time doing in a purposeful way is literally how you're directing that energy, how you're actually, what's the reason for your living? What's the reason for waking up in the morning? And if you don't have that, it turns out, you know, you can really suffer. So I really think that people make health ought to be way more complicated than it needs to be. And I'm actually leaning towards a much more simplified version of health. But in my medical practice, I optimize health for executives, investors, and entrepreneurs. And I do take a very data -driven approach, but I also have a company called Adamo Bioscience, and it's focused on building products and services around the science of love. And right now, we've actually just finished our first clinical study on a new therapy designed for optimizing sexual satisfaction and emotional closeness and intimacy between partners. So we actually have, according to our research, probably the best sex therapy on the market now. And we're opening up our second cohort in June, and also actively investigating psychedelic medicine for sexual dysfunction. So I'm really interested in metabolism, blood sugar monitoring, wearable technology for monitoring health, laboratory testing, as well as on top of metabolism, human connection medicine. So that's what I'm about.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness. See, I think listeners can understand now. I am so excited about this conversation. The psychedelics that you use for the sexual therapy, that was something that I read about in your book that I was not familiar with. Is that the empathogens or entactogens?

Molly Maloof:
Yeah, so we have not as where we are today is we have not started using psychedelics in clinical studies yet. The first thing we did for our company was realize that the psychedelic space is going to take 10 to 20 to 30 years to mature. And so because it's going to take so long, we wanted to build a company that had the capacity to generate revenue independent of psychedelic medicine. So we started with developing a sex therapy that could be delivered online. So the vision was how do we create something that anybody can do with their partner at home with or without a therapist, ideally working with a therapist, you'll have much better outcomes. But we are also working on an AI sex therapy bot that is going to be able to answer questions as people are having challenges during their program. And the first version of the AI is actually pretty effective, which is quite surprising, because literally is giving me the same answers that the therapists are giving me, which is pretty cool. And the second thing is, is that we believe that there is a lot of psychosomatic sexual dysfunction secondary to relationship problems, mood disorders and trauma. And these are big, big problems that psychedelics are being studied for. So psychedelics have already been shown to have improvements in relationship quality. And in sexuality, Imperial College ran two studies recently that were observational in nature, but basically demonstrated there was actually one interventional basically showing that in comparison to SSRIs, psilocybin improve sexual function and improve sexual satisfaction. And then in general, people who use psychedelics seem to have improved sexual function than the general population. So there's a lot of like, new research coming out around this. And we decided to partner with these researchers to just run a study on our digital platform, digital health platform first to see if we can develop a great sex therapy. And honestly, I wasn't expecting the results to be particularly good, because we were literally building the platform, editing the videos, editing the study, getting the IRB approval all as we were about to launch. So it was like literally the airplane and building your parachute on the way down. And so when we actually got our clinical study results back, I was like, there's no way we got these results. This is not even possible. So I was just like kind of blown away. Like, how did we do it? And then I was like, wait, what happens if we improve our platform? So that's why our second cohort is all about just fixing some of the bugs in the design of the therapy. The first four weeks were too fast, or sorry, were too slow for people. And the last four weeks were too fast. So we're basically changing the pace. And then the thing is, is that we believe that psychedelics can improve sexual function. So the question is, is how do you bring those to market? So for people with trauma, MDMA therapy is being studied for PTSD. The biggest cause of PTSD is sexual trauma. We believe that our therapy worked as an integration tool alongside MDMA is going to be great for sexual dysfunction secondary to trauma. But MAPS is still not approved. They're hopefully getting MDMA rescheduled in the next six months. But we still have some time before we can wait to see where that's going to go. And then there's depression, right? So psilocybin is being studied for depression. We know depression is being treated with SSRIs right now. SSRIs are a huge problem for sexual function. So if and when psilocybin gets approved for treatment -resistant depression, we should be able to see an improvement of sexual function alongside our therapy if we were to combine these two things. Then there's ketamine -assisted therapy. We're a lot of physicians, and I'm actually talking to physicians and clinics who are using ketamine for sexual dysfunction. Sorry, for relationship dysfunctions, right? And so we wanna partner with some of these online ketamine dispensaries and find out can we build a protocol for couples to use ketamine therapeutically at home, not for improving necessarily sex, but actually improving intimacy and breaking down the barriers to connection, which we know if you're more connected, you're gonna have better sex. And so that's one of the things that we're kind of doing right now, but we are also very interested in the development of products that can work alongside our therapy that could be commercialized as an aphrodisiac for sexual dysfunction. So I'm really interested in that, and I think that's the big opportunity because there isn't a biographer for women yet, and I have some suspicions and hypotheses that I can't really share today that we may have an idea of a experience or formula and program and protocol that could really enhance sexual function in millions of women, which I don't know if people realize this, but 40% of women have sexual dysfunction and 30% of men do. And we're interested in really the long game. And so right now it's like, obviously we need to stay alive as a company and make revenue, build a brand, build a platform, but we also are thinking very long -term in terms of the opportunity for reaching a broader population.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness, this is so fascinating and so exciting. Okay, I have some questions. With the ketamine assisted therapy and helping people connect more and having that help their sexual relations, is there the concern or the possibility at all? Because I know we know with like birth control, for example, that it can make women be attracted to people. They like a different type of person that they normally wouldn't be attracted to when they're on birth control. Would there be the concern and I mean that maybe you're not supposed to be with this person and then you do the ketamine and you're, you know.

Molly Maloof:
Yeah, so basically, I of all the medicines, I really seriously don't think that I don't think ketamine is as powerful as MDMA in terms of the capacity to bond people together. So let me just give you a little bit of an overview of sexual, basically, the science of human love. So there's the sex drive, there's the romantic love drive, and there's the drive to attach. And this is our most core programming of existence. Because without this programming, we would not survive as a species. And as it turns out, having more love in your life is linked to longevity. So having healthy sexual relationships with your partner having healthy romantic love with your partner having healthy attachment with your parents, having healthy familial bonds and having healthy community bonds is highly linked to longevity. So I believe that healthy relationships are like an important area of biohacking that most of us are overlooking. And everyone's looking at circadian rhythms and nutrition. And it's like, hey, those are really important. But if you don't have a tribe around you of people that you love and trust, you're not going to be thriving. So when we are trying to optimize love, we have to look at every single drive. So if you're going through hormone deficiency for menopause or andropause, optimizing your hormones can be a really important tool to get to a place of having a normal sex life. But then there's the romantic love drive, right? And that's driven by dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. And dopamine is the feeling of like, I think this person is so important to me, this person is so meaning this relationship is so meaningful, I get so much pleasure from being with them, I'm really, I'm really interested in them. You know, I have a drive to be with them. And then serotonin is this feeling of happiness and joy and feeling connected and feeling at home and feeling just like a general sense of well being with somebody. And then norepinephrine is like, I can't, I can't sleep, I can't eat, I'm so I'm just like, I'm so into this person, I just can't stop thinking about them, I'm obsessed. And then when you have enough serotonin release, which MDMA is a serotonin releasing agent, as well as a norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitor, what you end up with is you end up with a large amount of catecholamines, you know, and you also end up with basically more oxytocin because oxytocin gets released when large amounts of serotonin get released. So oxytocin is this is the bonding hormone. oxytocin and vasopressin are really important for social bonds and community bonds. And men are more vasopressin dominant, women are more oxytocin dominant. So men are really designed for protection, defense and aggression. So protecting the tribe ensuring that the you know, women and children are safe, and going out to war if necessary to defend one's, you know, resources. And then oxytocin is about safety, trust and love and social bonds. And these bonds between parent and child is bond between parent to parent, these bonds between families, these bonds between communities, we need oxytocin, because it helps us maintain these bonds. So when you take drugs with somebody that you may not know very well, you might find yourself saying, oh my god, I love you, you're so amazing, right? Oh my god, I just like, you know, you can find yourself literally bonded to someone prematurely. And those premature bonds can be problematic, because you might end up in a relationship that you shouldn't be in. And if and also if you take these medicines with someone that you're having conflicts with, who may not be best for you in life, let's say they're an abusive partner, they're emotionally abusive or physically abusive, you could bond a person that's abusing you. And so there's a lot of ethical conundrums with love drugs. And there's a great book on the topic called love drugs, the chemical future of relationships. And I actually presented in Oxford University for this Oxford Hopkins ethics consortium. And I definitely had the room spinning a little bit because I was like, I don't think anybody here really acknowledging the fact that these are love drugs, aside from the guy who wrote the book on them. And even after this session with these people, the advisor of the company that I had working for me who wrote the book on love drugs, literally said, you know what, I don't even know if it's ethically sound for me to advise your company since you're a commercial entity. And I was like, wow, so there's a lot of ethical issues in psychedelics for sexuality that I am actively investigating. And I have I have, you know, I am, I've actually stopped commercializing a certain drug that I was working on, because I felt it was ethically questionable. I felt that a drug that could make people fall in love might be problematic. Because what happens if you fall in love with the wrong person, you know, that's why I'm much more interested in aphrodisiacs than I am in having like massive doses of medicine with partners because I think it is a very ethical gray area.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness. This is crazy. It's pretty wild. I mean, people talk about like love potions and love jugs for, you know, millennia. And now it's like possibly actually a thing. And like you said, the implications of that though, just ethically is, I mean, insane.

Molly Maloof:
is 100% not a holy grail concept like these things exist. So the question now is, with this power, what do you do with it, right? Because now you're playing with human biological programming. And so a lot of these AI products that are friends or partners and relationships are highly ethically questionable. Because now you're falling in love with a technology, you're literally getting and getting love hormones from an app, which I think is really risky, because it could mean that people will stop having sex with people will start having sex with, you know, their robots and their apps. And that's a problem.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, doesn't this generation have less sex than prior generations?

Molly Maloof:
looking like that. You know, one of my friends is a Gen Z. And what she said was, well, we're the first generation that's been through me too. And the first generation that has recognized the consequences of sexual impropriety. And because there's real consequences now for people who screw up, literally, he said that there's like, there's a lot less pressure on people to have sex because there's a lot more caution. And I think that's really, really fascinating and curious. But I also think there's a lot of there's a lot of fertility problems. There's a massive there's lots and lots of hormone disruptors in the environment. So people's health seems to be declining at mass in our country. And like, if your health is not great, you're not going to be like I was in a challenging relationship in the last year. And my health really declined in like the course of a couple months. And I noticed, and it wasn't bad, it wasn't like horribly unwell. But I mean, my testosterone went down, my cortisol went down, my pregnenol went down, I was burning out from stress. And it was a combination of many things. But I was really surprised at how, you know, even I, a person who knows all this stuff could be subject to relationships affecting my health, you know. And so I think a lot of people forget that, like, the stress of our culture and the food system, the chemicals or environment are literally putting a lot of metabolic stress on people. And a lot of people just lack vitality. And at a baseline, if you're unhealthy, you're not going to want to have sex. Like, metabolic syndrome is highly linked to sexual dysfunction and younger and younger people are getting metabolically ill. So I'm not sure it's only due to like social reasons. I think it's partially due to biologics.

Melanie Avalon:
That completely makes sense. I'd be really curious. I should look up the official stats because I was also hearing that like kids are getting their driver's licenses way later and just like just engaging in the real world. And it makes sense that there would be all these all these factors societal and the energy and the health condition of everybody today. By the way, just thank you for the work that you're doing with that because this is so cool. And it's kind of goes ties back to something we were talking about offline. So listeners have not heard this yet. But I feel like there's this dichotomy in the world where this world of quote biohacking is seen as a it's seen as separate from the conventional medical system or fighting the conventional medical system and that it's maybe not taken as seriously by the conventional system. And so what I was telling you before this is last week, actually, I was interviewing who I realized is now a mutual friend, Nathan Price and Leroy Hood for their new book, The Age of Scientific Wellness and everything they're doing because Leroy Hood literally invented some of the technology, which is the reason that we have things like the human genome project and genetic testing that we do today and everything they're doing with like testing and self quantification and AI and wearables and all the things. I mean, it sounds like biohacking, but when it comes from them, it sounds more quote legit because it's from like this, you know, renowned, you know, science researcher and, you know, the CSO at Thorn and you were talking with me about, you know, how you're contemplating your rebranding in this whole world of health and biohacking. And I know you say in the book that when you were at Stanford, your colleagues were like, don't be a biohacker. So that was a long winded way of coming to this question of what does this all look like for like people listening like the biohackers out there? Is this all a legit science? Is it going to become conventional medicine and science? Are they at odds? What do you want to do with your branding? That was a big question, but what are your thoughts?

Molly Maloof:
I have been really curious. I mean, it really wasn't Stanford. It was actually a long time ago. I was working for a company called Genesol. And it was a company that was using laboratory testing for blood labs and genetics and an expert system to create a really a health optimization program for people with hormones and supplements and lifestyle changes. Honestly, it was a fantastic product. It was really effective at helping people, you know, especially older people in their forties and fifties and sixties really maintain that vitality and youth for longer. At the same time, the thing that was really interesting was the CEO at the time was like, Molly, you don't want to brand yourself as a biohacker because now you're talking about going around the system rather than actually using the system to optimize health. And I was like, well, the system doesn't look like full disclosure today. You know, I had my labs drawn and I have ways of getting labs done that other people don't because I'm a doctor and because I have friends that have companies that can, you know, order labs. And so it's like, there's just a lot of things that I can do that other people can't do, but everyone should get to do, by the way. Everybody should get to be able to order labs, whatever they want, whichever labs they want, whenever, why, why ever they want. But the difference is, is that you shouldn't have to have insurance pay for everything necessarily, right? Like insurance is really designed for catastrophic illness and disease. So if you're trying to get labs to optimize health, you can go online to life extension, you can order them yourself, but they are going to be expensive because they're going to have, it's a service business. It's like the service of you being able to have access to things that should be covered by health insurance means that someone's going to have to like do the work to get these things, you know, ordered and fulfilled, but they shouldn't be nearly as expensive as they are online. They should be, the labs are not expensive to produce and to do. And so I actually have always wondered why someone doesn't start a company that just isn't trying to gather everyone's data and gives labs to people at cost and like literally like we'll do your genetics, we'll do all your labs at cost and we'll just charge you for the interpretation. Whereas like a lot of the companies right now, like even function health, you know, they're charging four to $500 a year for labs. And like these labs do not cost that much, but they have to make a profit. Right. And I'm just curious, like where people are going to be able to reap the profit from this industry that's emerging, which is really an industry of consumer health technology and consumer health optimization. So it's basically this like consumer driven cash -based system that is being built outside of modern medicine because there's a demand for it. There's demand for people who want to optimize their health, but insurance doesn't care about your longevity because most insurance companies only care about the next 10 years of your life, five years of your life, because that's about as long as you're going to be spending with them. Now Medicare and Medicaid have, it has a different story. So, you know, public healthcare means there's certain things that they want to cover, but like, you know, preventive services are obviously covered by all insurance, generally speaking. But it's funny that like the general healthcare system and the general design of the system is so oriented around disease that it's really just isn't thinking about health. It's just not, it's not thinking about health long -term. It's not a healthcare system. It's a disease care system. And it really wants you to stay in the system and stay sick and stay prescribed drugs for as long as possible. So it doesn't have incentives for health, but capitalism does. So now I will argue that there are also countries like Germany and Singapore and Scandinavian countries that are extraordinarily effective, but they have much smaller populations, but they are health span oriented. These are companies, countries that like are oriented around building healthcare that actually produces health. And so it can be done in socialist countries and we probably could do it in America, but it would have to be a decision the country makes through massive leadership changes. And I don't know if it's possible because it would, it would require such a paradigm shift, but I've been part of that paradigm shift for the last decade. I've saw, I saw this, this new system coming. I put this on my website. I literally had like the old system versus the new system. And I work for and advise many companies that are part of this new ecosystem. And I'm also, you know, really reorienting my brand around not just helping the super wealthy, but how do I actually translate the things that I do for people that are wealthy into many products that I can sell online? So basically I'm just kind of working on trying to figure out how to create more scalable ways to teach people how to biohack their health in real time. And really it's about bio optimization. So it's not about hacking. It's about optimizing, optimizing your biology and figuring, and personally, it's, it's in my personal brand is not just about biology. I'm a very holistic doctor. I really believe in optimizing your biology, your psychology, and your spirituality, and I've been working on all three of these for a decade. And I'm 40 years old. I feel younger, fitter, faster, smarter, richer, happier, and healthier than I've ever felt. And it's absolutely astonishing. And I really do believe that like, I, part of the reason why I want to be more of a public figure around this stuff is because there's just not that many authentic public figures that are really do like living, like walking the walk, you know, and I feel like I do it pretty effectively.

Melanie Avalon:
I've thought the same thing. I've partnered with a few companies that do that offer, you know, direct to consumer blood testing, genetic testing, all the things. I've been very intrigued by the pricing structure of it and how it's not more affordable. Like how all the companies seem to be at this certain level of price. Like there's not the service you were speaking of that would just offer it at cost. Have you thought about doing something like that? Have you thought about offering just

Molly Maloof:
It's like labs that cost to people.

Melanie Avalon:
you know, this dream system where labs are affordable and you're collecting data.

Molly Maloof:
I mean, yeah, it would be more of like a question. It's a really big question of like, where's the business model. So my dream, and I actually brought this to Northwestern mutual. And it was like, how do you create lifespan insurance, like longevity insurance, and how do you create like a life insurance product that you invest in, through donating your data to the insurance company on a regular basis, not just at the beginning when you get the policy, but also throughout, so that you get benefits for taking care of yourself. And then the money you invest in the life insurance gets put into investment vehicles that can grow. Ideally, there would be a way for you to get perks and benefits for being healthy. That would encourage your longevity. And they just kind of dropped the project that they were working on. Because honestly, they're just everyone is in it. We're in an economic place right now, as a country where everyone's tightening their belts, and they just don't want to invest in innovation. Like there's a lot of people that are just pausing on a lot of spends that seem extraneous. And it's kind of sad, because I think this is going to exist. I really, really do. I don't think this is a crazy concept. But I think for a lot of people, the question is, is how do you create a business model out of it? How do you create a model? Like, I don't see any point investing in life insurance right now, because I don't have kids. But what if I did have a reason to invest? What if it was an investment vehicle? And what if sharing my data meant this company could give me advice to keep me healthier for longer? It would actually be a win -win for everybody.

Melanie Avalon:
That's super amazing, yeah.

Molly Maloof:
I don't have time to build everything I want to build.

Melanie Avalon:
I know, I hear you. I'm always like, I want to do like just all the things. Actually, the very first sponsor, podcast sponsor I think we ever had, probably like six or seven years ago, very briefly though, but it was HealthIQ, which was a brand that they offered insurance based on your health biomarkers. There was a connection there. So I feel like it was kind of like an early adopter of something that hopefully will be something in the future. I do think there's a lot of potential. Not to go backwards, but one more question about when you were talking about the AI work that you're doing with the Sexual Health and Wellness Company. I'm really intrigued by the role of AI, especially, I mean, hearing about it in a more of like a therapist type situation. Are you concerned about it giving, you know, it's because it's like dealing with people's mental health and wellness. Are you concerned about it giving bad advice or like leading people the wrong way? I'm assuming it has ruling tends guardrails.

Molly Maloof:
So really importantly is when you think about training in AI, you have to think about bringing it through college and grad school, right? So you really need to like feed it the right information. You can't just go ask, I wouldn't recommend just asking Chad GPT anything. I would recommend like if you're gonna work with an AI for a specific medical purpose. And by the way, we can't even call it a sex therapist. We really have to call it like a sex coach. It's like, you need to know what you're dealing with. This is a coaching bot. This is not a actual licensed clinical therapist. This is it for entertainment purposes only. And you have to think about how you're using it and also your audience for it, right? So it's probably going to cater to people that are more interested in analytical perspectives and are interested in like having like ideas to work off of but you shouldn't be taking the advice as like though it's an accurate replacement for a therapist. Like the best, but even then like a therapist, what's really interesting about a therapist is like they could be having a bad day, having their own relationship issues and having a lot of transference or counter transference occurring between you and the therapist because of this. And as a result, like there's a lot of human error that happens and you know, I've heard people tell me stories of what their therapist told them. And I was just like, are you fucking kidding me? Like really, they told you that? Like there was a couple that was pregnant and this guy had a high sex drive and his wife was pregnant and she didn't feel like having sex as much. And the therapist told them to just open the relationship and let them go have sex with other people. And I was just like, that seems totally absurd. Like, I'm sorry, that's just not the advice I would give a human being who's like pregnant with a child. Like, come on. And so I felt really like, I feel like there's a lot of error in general in human relationships with therapy. And I'm not saying that all, like the truth is, is that there's not even enough sex therapists in the world. There's less than 2000 in America. So one of the biggest issues we have is just lack of good people. And so what we're doing when we're training these therapists, this bot is we're literally treating it as though how would we train it to have the best education and have read every single one of the best books and textbooks on the topic that they are meant to learn and understand. And so imagine that you're talking to a thing that has like a perfect memory, that has perfect recall, that has great contextual programming and multiple thoughts and opinions of different types of therapy modalities and has read multiple books. So we're literally feeding it books, right? We're feeding it textbooks and books and courses and like all sorts of things. And by doing so, we think we're going to end up with a much better product than even a typical therapist is. So I don't know, but here's the thing, like you still have to think about things like, for example, let's say you come up with like a solution to your problem in your relationship, but you bring it to your partner at the wrong time. You may have had the best answer that you could have gotten from either a therapist or a bot, but you didn't use tact to actually approach the problem appropriately. So there's also a lot of personal responsibility in relationships and conflict resolution, and knowing your audience. And sometimes people are just not compatible because they just don't have the same kind of mental frameworks of how they see the world. Or maybe they come from totally different backgrounds. Maybe they have completely different upbringings, and maybe they just can't relate. So yeah, I think the real question is, how do you not only... I mean, this is actually just coming to me. I love having podcasts because so many ideas come to me and podcasts that I would never have thought about. But how do you also give the bot the context of your relationship with this person? And would feeding... Okay, this is going to sound even wilder. So I just started talking to somebody recently, and I found this guy's chart really interesting, his astrological chart. And it might be funny if we were able to listen to a doctor talk about astrology, but I literally took his chart and took my chart and I asked chat GPT, what does sun and Aquarius in the... Hold on, what does my house... The 11th house mean, right? Or whatever. So what does... I was asking all these questions, but it was basically like, what does sun and Aquarius in the 5th house mean? What does... I sent it in Libra in the 1st house mean. And I went through every single house and planet for my chart and his chart. I've never done this before. I fed it into chat GPT one by one, and I compiled it and I sent it to this friend of mine. I go, how accurate is this for you? And he was like, oh my God, this is absurd. What the hell is this? And it was just basic astrology, right? And yet, I do think that if you fed chat GPT the basic astrological frameworks of people, you could actually give them something to work off of, to even just give some contextualization to who these people are. And at the end of the day, I'm just fascinated by how can people get along better? How can people relate better? And I mean, relationships are about relating, right? So how do we relate better? And it's like, well, where do you begin? Where do we start with? And I think it starts with trying to first and foremost understand the person that you're dealing with in front of you and trying to put yourself in their shoes, trying to be empathetic, trying to really ask yourself, who is this person? What would be best for this person? And how can I actually accommodate to make their lives better and happier?

Melanie Avalon:
I agree about that. That's a really good point about how you could have a bad experience with a therapist or they could give bad advice. I adore my therapist and I've been seeing her for years, but like finding a therapist is so, I mean, for me, it was, I had to interview a lot of therapists. I had some really, I mean, honestly, I would consider them traumatic things that some therapists said to me, multiple therapists said to me in like the interview sessions like in the first session, like things that I think about today. And I'm like, oh, wow. Because you're, you're going into this space, you know, where it's really important to feel safe and you have to open up to get to know this person. It's like a first date type situation. And you know, that's a lot of, they're like holding a lot of your, your emotional vulnerability. I love my therapist now though. Going back to that chat GPT or the AI understanding the person, it kind of reminds me of, I mentioned reading Nathan and Lee's book and they were talking about AI and they, they talked about, I think it was a study, I don't remember if it was playing chess or playing Go, but it was one of those games. The AI program was obviously amazing at it, but then whatever study they were talking about, they actually found that the AI program paired with a human was even better because the humans knew, so the AI just knew the rules and how to like, you know, come up with the perfect moves, but the humans knew how to break the rules. Like when you needed to not live within that system. And so I feel like that's like the missing piece of like this, you know, sex therapy or sex coach AI situation where, you know, how will it know when it needs to break the rules when these people aren't compatible and how will it know people's stories and how will it be in the room with them? Like how will it feel that? So yeah, I'm fascinated by it.

Molly Maloof:
Yeah, I totally get that. And also, how do you make sure it doesn't hallucinate answers that are... Oh, don't even get me...

Melanie Avalon:
started on hallucinations.

Molly Maloof:
I think it's so, so, so important, though, if you're going to train an AI that you use it consistently yourself and start like, and correcting it, you know, like, you have to teach it, you have to correct it, you have to like, you know, give it some discipline.

Melanie Avalon:
I need to actually have one that I've trained and because I do what you said not to do, which is I just go in and I just ask you questions and then I inevitably, this happens more nights than not of the week, I get upset because I feel like it's gaslighting me or I feel like it's hallucinating and I try to call it out on that and then the crazy thing and I've said this before on the show but it kind of feels like talking to a psychopath sometimes because it'll just lie to you or hallucinate and if you point out it's like, oh, okay. You know, it's like, you just can't work.

Molly Maloof:
Well, sometimes I really just can't do certain things you're asking it to do as well. And one of the biggest challenges of building an AI sex therapist is that it gets censored a lot. And it's like, stop censoring me. I'm talking about like a clinical product here. And I have like, I'm literally friends with the founders of open AI, and they can't even help me because they're like, sorry, we can't just like lift this censorship for you.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow, that's so intriguing. I find it really interesting how we censor. I was talking about this. I recently had Jaya on the show. We were talking about how our culture censors sex so much, but doesn't censor violence. Like on TV, you can show people literally killing each other, and that's fine, but you can't show people making love. It doesn't make much sense. The information that you have found for yourself, this is a whole new world of people getting their genetic data and their blood testing and all of this information that can be learned from this blood work and genetic data and the lifestyle choices that you can make from it. I'm curious how, because you mentioned in the book, for example, that you have one copy of the APOE4 variant. So maybe that's an example. When you found that out, how did you feel and how does that work for your life?

Molly Maloof:
As someone who loves red meat, cheese, and coconut, it was really hard to accept the fact that I really shouldn't be eating large quantities of saturated fat. When I did start cutting back on the saturated fat, I did see my lipoprotein profile improve quite a lot and my lipids improve, which was cool. And then I also have to be much more careful with blood sugar than the average person. So the things that are most tasty in life are also can be really problematic, like with metabolic health. So I don't not consume these things, but I've definitely moved my diet towards a lot more lean protein, a lot less refined carbohydrates. And in the last week I've been traveling, definitely had more sugar in the last week than I should have. And I specifically ran my labs today after having a massive feast last night, just to remind myself, here's what happens if you screw up. Go look at your labs. And I think people underestimate how they can actually make a pretty big difference in their metabolic health quite quickly. But you have to keep tabs on your metabolic health. So you need to get your APOE4 checked. You need to get your lipids checked. You need to get your blood sugar checked. You need to keep tabs on these things because they will change over time. And in the last year, it might have been really improving quite a lot from a bunch of different changes that I made. And so I'm just, I think we have a culture that's been promoting this concept of carnivore -ism and veganism. And I'm just trying to be the voice of reason in the world because we're the best and healthiest person can adapt and thrive on different diets. And even though I didn't thrive per se on a vegetarian diet, mostly because it was super low protein, I wasn't consuming enough protein on the diet, I was eating for about four months. But if I had just fixed the protein problem, I don't think I would have nearly experienced as many problems that I had. I've also been low carbon, ancestral and paleo and definitely done more of a animal -based diet. And I was able to thrive on that. So I just think that we're gonna be able to tune and help people tune their diet using, this is what I do in my practice, but I actually tune people's diet using genetics. I use the website MyGeneFood and I use the genetics to help people hone the best diet for their body. And then I also use laboratory testing because you can literally see people's labs change by what they eat. So one of my clients was eating too low carb and I added back more carbohydrates. I started cutting back the saturated fats and his labs changed dramatically in the course of a month.

Melanie Avalon:
It was so refreshing reading the diet section of your book because especially on this show, I mean, I have people on literally both sides of the spectrum. So I have really intense vegan people and then really intense carnivore people. I mean, I love all the different perspectives, but normally what's presented is we're shown a picture of the beneficial blood work. It's like when you follow keto, when you follow low -carb or on the flip side, when you follow veganism and you literally put in the book, you're like, in my patients, and I'm paraphrasing, but you're basically like people who do a high -carb, low -fat approach tend to get this profile more. I mean, it's individual obviously, but people on the low -carb might have more of this profile. It felt very enlightening and unbiased and eye -opening for people who feel like it has to be one way or the other. So yeah, I really appreciate that.

Molly Maloof:
learn a lot about yourself with labs and I think I need to start making a lot more content around labs for people because I feel like it's really not it's like kind of missing from the from them like it's missing from like Instagram like people are like even a lot of these like Huberman and and even Peter O 'Tee had toughly talks about labs but he goes almost so deep that it's hard for people to even understand what he's saying. People need simple answers and you know Ron Patrick's great but like she's just got a genetics reader like I think people need tactical advice not just you know not just like practical eat this or that but like okay how do I do this for me for my body.

Melanie Avalon:
I agree so much. While we're in the foods here, you mentioned something I had never heard before and I talk about protein and keto and stuff all the time. You mentioned there's actually glycolytic versus ketogenic proteins. I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on that. I just never read that before.

Molly Maloof:
Yeah, basically, if you eat a bunch of protein, it's going to go into what it's going to go into different pathways of metabolism. So if you eat a bunch of extra protein, what do you do with it after you've used it, right? Well, sometimes it's going to get stored as fat because you just have extra, you know, you just have to extra calories around. And it can be broken, it can be or let's say you need to you're using it in the real time, you can use it to make glucose, you're going to use it to make fat. And protein is pretty cool in that way. And I'm actually a big fan of protein. But what's really funny is that when I was being vegetarian, people thought I looked younger than ever, and I was eating the least amount of protein I've ever eaten. And but, you know, me and my friend Nadia were talking about this. And like, I think a solid six month period of time where you eat high protein and lift weights, that will change your body composition. So dramatically that you may not need to be doing as hardcore high protein and weight training thereafter, like you can really change your body composition. And like, you know, I lost a fair amount of protein from eating vegetarian and low protein for four months, but I'm in the process of putting back on and I still have a pretty good amount of protein, like of muscle mass still. So I'm kind of more interested in phases of weight training versus like, constantly always doing weight training and high protein. I think we need to look at nature more for our habits and behaviors of what it's required to thrive. And nature goes through periods of fasting, too. Nature goes through winter. Nature goes through periods of abundance. Nature goes through periods of high carbs and low carbs. And it's like, it's just we're not looking at nature enough. We're kind of just, you know, like when I look at these elk in the winter time, they're eating like little buds off of trees and they're like pretty lean. And in the summertime, they get all fattened up and then we go shoot them in the fall. And you know, I just kind of feel like there's not a lot of people prescribing health practices that are in alignment with nature. And I think people are moving towards that now, but the one size fits all one season forever is not realistic. Like we're constantly adapting and changing and growing depending on where we're living and where we're at and what our goals are.

Melanie Avalon:
You also talked in the book about, in the largest women's study, they found a lot of the benefits of exercise, but they found that the women who were exercising every day, it was detrimental for their, I think for their heart health. So you know, the extremes on either side seemed to be a problem. And I just love this idea of fluidity and adapting and nature and speaking of nature. So you live in Wyoming.

Molly Maloof:
Yeah. I moved to Wyoming, and I fell in love with the lifestyle of being outdoors. There was something that really clicked with me. Every few years, I get this major discovery. I definitely discovered early on that sleep was really important for me. Then I discovered that nutrition had to change and gut health had to optimize gut health. Then I got into exercise, and then I got into moving away from a city because city life was starting to feel toxic. Then I realized that I really needed people during the pandemic. I needed social connection. After all of these discoveries and getting healthier and healthier and healthier, one of the things that I learned was obviously that relationships can make or break your health. Well, I moved in with a guy prematurely and then moved out, but I found myself in a community in Jackson that really took me in and loved me and made me feel at home. I stayed, but in the process of staying, in the last four months, I also put a lot of work into my spirituality and also into my fitness. I discovered really the importance of spirituality and health in the last four months, but also the discovery that being outdoors makes me feel so healthy. I feel so good being outside, and I was starting to study Jack Cruz's work and a lot of the quantum biology people. It's pretty simple. We're designed to adapt to different weather patterns and different temperature patterns. I can handle cold and heat better than I ever could when I was younger. When I was in my late 20s, I could not handle cold or heat. Everything was either too hot or too cold. Now, you can put me in 120 -degree weather, and I'm fine, and you can put me in negative zero weather, and I'm fine. That's a huge, huge health adaptation. Even more than that, it's just getting sunlight. Seeing the sunrise and the sunset has been a big thing for me, living in Wyoming. Then also, just moving away from animals from confined animal operations and moving into eating wild animals has been another big upgrade, a really, really big upgrade. Elk is one of the leanest and tastiest meats in the world, and so I'm getting into elk hunting. I become friends with elk hunters. It's really hard to kill animals and everything, but they're delicious. They're going to nourish me, and I can't wait to make bone broth out of elk bones. Then the other thing is that they're eating wild plants, and so they're just healthier animals. Then I'm also really into foraging, and when you eat wild plants, you get this thing called xenohormesis, where wild plants have the capacity to make you stronger. It's because they literally enhance your stress response. Being in nature just makes you stronger. Being in pine forests just gives you better well -being because of the volatile, organic compounds that come from the trees. Then there's the fish, and cold water fish in lakes can be extraordinarily healthy to consume. I'm really oriented myself towards how do I eat as many fruits and vegetables as possible and wild game and wild fish. I feel like that plus some nuts and seeds and fruits and whatnot. I can imagine the next decade I'm going to be extraordinarily healthy on top of just being outside and doing winter sports. I mean, cross -country skiing, downhill skiing, skinning up the mountain. All of these things require cardio. I really didn't have great cardiovascular health. It wasn't bad. It just wasn't as good as my anaerobic health. I was really good at weight training, but I don't think my heart health was as good as it is now because I've gotten into outdoor sports. I also learned Hatha yoga training in the last six months. The Hatha plus the skiing plus being outside plus the wild game. I'm just glowing and thriving out there. I'm not telling everyone to move to Wyoming. It's a secret. Nobody should know about it. It's literally great, but it's just about housing. I got really lucky in finding great housing very quickly. If you're looking to buy a house or something, it's just out of the spot to buy. It's just like there's nothing available. There's not a lot of good stuff available, but I'm there for now. I'm starting my practice and I'm starting to build a life.

Melanie Avalon:
Is it a city like your other stores nearby? Or are you like out in the boondocks?

Molly Maloof:
Yeah, out of the city. Victoria, Disneyland, Albertsons and Whole Foods and stuff like that. Like, most of what I buy my money on is like outdoor gear now. Wow, how do you ever hunt it before? I have gone quill hunting with my dad.

Melanie Avalon:
That is so cool. One of the things that you talk about in the book was really understanding the role of putting in boundaries and honoring your sleep and, you know, taking time off and women today I think especially can just get so overstressed and inundated with everything that they're doing and even we've talked on this call about all the things that you want to do. So how in your daily life, we didn't even talk about the like the main thesis of the book, which is all about the mitochondria and energy generation and, you know, how problems with health set in when our energy production is less than 50%. But bringing that back to the question. So in your daily life, how do you and how do you advise women to do everything we want to do and also respect our health and our boundaries? How do those live together in harmony?

Molly Maloof:
Oh, well, as somebody who went on a rampage of achievement for the last few years, I learned the hard way that you really can't do it all because you can almost break your health. And so I definitely started noticing some health issues that I've fixed in like literally a month or two. But it was really scary because I was like, I'm a five horse race car, I just need to take pit stops and like, fix everything. And like, I'm like, wait, Molly, why are you always fixing things? Why can't you just like be be so that's when the spiritual path really kind of was really important, even though the relationship was in a lot of ways really unhealthy. There was a lot of really good things that came from it. And one of the things that came from it was he really helped introduce me to the work of Sadhguru. And I'm not a guru follower, I'm not a worshipper of a guru, but Sadhguru's practices have brought me a level of well being and fulfillment that I didn't even know. How do I be of greatest service to humanity? And how do I find a partner and build a family? And like, I do think that you have to acknowledge that there are limitations and just get really clear about what it is that you want to do with your life and how do you want to live and how much money do you want to make? And like, you know, know yourself, really get to know yourself, really figure out what makes you come alive. And if you find fulfillment independent of your achievements and independent of the work that you do and independent of your family and your relationship, then like, that's pretty phenomenal. But if you find fulfillment outside of yourself, you're going to be disappointed for the rest of your life. So my recommendation is like, find fulfillment internally and then find purposeful work that makes you come alive and jump out of bed every morning.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. Everybody needs to get the book and read the section on... Well, read the whole book, but the chapters on purpose and love and oxytocin and all of this is just mind -blowing and eye -opening. One random question you mentioned, potentially having kids in the future. Do you have thoughts on the age that a woman has children and how that might affect their lifespan just from a perspective of, I've wondered if waiting to have kids, then is your body kind of keeping, since you haven't had kids yet, like you haven't fulfilled that genetic goal, does your body act differently than if you have kids earlier as far as protective mechanisms in the body and anti -aging and all of that?

Molly Maloof:
I just posted something yesterday that there was some evidence that the older woman is when she has a kid the longer she lives. So the question I'm trying to figure out is like, Oh, really? Yeah, but it's like, it's all a balance, right? Like, you got to make sure that person you have kids with has healthy sperm, you got to make sure that you are healthy before you have the child, you got to make sure that you do not end up with postpartum depletion afterwards. Because like that can totally mess up your neurobiology and your mood and your, you know, there's so much that you can do. God, I wish the whole world had the knowledge that I have, because I feel like if people understood how to keep their body running properly, then it wouldn't break down so much. And they would be able to do things like have kids later in life. Like my AMH level is great. I think I'm going to be fine having kids. I might have to do IVF big deal. But you know, it's I think kids give you a reason to live kids and children.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. Well, I can't believe you posted about that the other day. That was perfect timing. Yeah. Well, I can't thank you enough for everything that you're doing. And I mean, cause you talk in the book about how, and again, going back to this word biohacking, but how it's very, it was started well, technically started in Silicon Valley with being male dominated and tailored towards male physiology. And you just really put a flashlight on the woman's approach to that. And I mean, you even make the argument that or the case that birth control is like the original biohacking in a way, like women practicing birth control, which I thought was really interesting. And you, and you made an interesting comment. I definitely never read before about transsexual people and how that's a form of biohacking in a way. So yeah, I just really can't thank you enough for everything that you're doing. Um, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on from the book or your work?

Molly Maloof:
Well, one thing I would like to say is that we at Adamo really believe that we've created the first clinical protocol around the science of love. And literally, our therapy is designed to help couples reignite the passion and the relationship to reinvigorate their sexual satisfaction, to improve sexual communication, to give people longer sexual sessions, because literally, it's been shown that people are having sex for longer, and also to give people more emotional closeness. Like, we literally have scientific evidence that we can bring people closer together. And we are getting this peer reviewed, we're writing a paper on the topic. But if there are people out there that are really curious about improving their sexual lives with their committed relationship that they're in, maybe things have gotten stale, maybe things are kind of getting boring, and they want to make things even more pleasurable. You know, we've created this phenomenal sex therapy that's really designed for couples. And we're recruiting people to our next cohort, you know, you can go to www.livingadamo.com. And you can go to at livingadamo, or you can go to drmolly.co. @drmolly.co on Instagram is the best place to contact me.

Melanie Avalon:
This is so amazing. We'll put links to that in the show notes. Yeah, I remember it was kind of like a curveball reading your book because when I got to the, you know, I read, oh, and by the way, we didn't even remotely touch on everything in the book. It goes deep into all the biohacking things, you know, hyperbarics and red light and cryo and, you know, labs and diet and all these things. But when I got to the love chapter, you basically say that, you know, if people, if there's one thing people don't ignore in the book, it's, I haven't written down. You said the one single biohack to work on, it would be to love yourself and that everything in life will get easier. That's true. Yeah, it's amazing. I was like, oh, wow, curveball. So I and then it went deep into the science and everything, which I just love. Like I didn't know, for example, that oxytocin is linked independently of food intake to all of these different things like fat burning and visceral fat loss. And I mean, it's just fascinating. Yeah. Point being, thank you so much for all that you're doing. And the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it is for this reason that I just realize more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Molly Maloof:
Oh my gosh, literally all day long, every day, I'm constantly saying, God, thank you for this blessing. And I just do it all the time. I do it all, it's like I've made it a brain habit. So like everywhere I go, every person I talk to, everything that I put in my body, every single thing that I purchase, all of the calls that I have, I'm just like, God, thank you for this blessing. When I wake up in the morning, I get into the shower. I'm like, fuck, I have warm water. God, thank you for this blessing. And so literally, I think that the secret to happiness is one of the biggest secrets is just gratitude and appreciation. Because you're literally producing the neurochemicals of love when you do that. And so I feel really, I really believe it. I just think it makes a major difference in my health.

Melanie Avalon:
I believe it's so much too. I do the same thing. I was doing this yesterday. I was just like sitting there and having a gratitude moment. And then I was just like watching myself have it. And I was reflecting on how it literally, you just get these happy feelings. Like, I was like, it's like you literally can create, you know, it's like your brain is your own pharmacist in a way. It's just really, really incredible. So well, I love hearing that. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was such a joy and a pleasure. I'm so happy we could connect. I'm really excited to see the future of everything that you're working on. So hopefully we can talk more in the future. Thank you so much. Okay, have a great day. Bye. You too. Bye.