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Performance coach, detail-loving educator, big-thinking entrepreneur, podcaster, mama, passionate adventurer, and health optimization activist here to help people transform their lives, and reach their highest potential! All rolled into one.

The Longevity & Lifestyle Podcast

Love & Longevity, MDMA, Oxytocin, And Building Stronger Connection In A Changing World

Today’s guest is Dr. Molly Maloof. Dr. Molly has been shaping the future of healthcare in her pioneering Silicon Valley medical practice and is on the frontier of personalized medicine, medical technology, health optimization, and scientifically-based wellness endeavors.

Since 2012, Dr. Molly has also worked as an advisor or consultant to more than 40 companies in the digital health, consumer health, and biotechnology industries needing help with clinical strategy, product development, clinical research, and scientific marketing.

In her concierge practice, Dr. Molly provides health optimization and personalized medicine to high-achieving entrepreneurs, investors, and technology executives in San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, as well as, award-winning Hollywood actors and musicians. Unveiling the future of patient care with actionable insights on adopting the latest practices in personalized medicine, Dr. Molly challenges healthcare practitioners as well as industry influencers to re-think health and healthcare in order to reduce costs, improve patient outcomes, and improve the human condition.

Today we did into:
  • How to build a stronger and healthier social connection,
  • Why relationships should also be considered as a health area to optimize,
  • Solving traumas with psychedelics like MDMA,
  • How oxytocin is linked to childhood trauma,
  • Role of relationships in metabolism,
  • How to build connection in a constantly changing world,
  • And much more!

Please Enjoy!

About the episode & our guest

‘The quality of our relationships really determines the quality of our life.’

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Dr Molly Maloof

Episode 69

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- Dr Molly Maloof, Founder of Adamo Bioscience

SHOW NOTES - Coming Soon !




‘The quality of our relationships really determines the quality of our life.’

‘MDMA can reopen this critical period of social reward learning and enable people with trauma, from whatever part of their life to potentially reprogram that trauma, not as fearful, but as just another life story that they have.’

‘People who have to work multiple jobs, people who don't have strong social connections, people who have dysfunctional family systems, people who are exposed to violence, drug addiction, alcohol alcoholism - their nervous systems are at a state of hyper vigilance and a baseline. So they're not really gonna be able to have a normal metabolism because they're not actually able to relax.’

‘Enlightenment is a verb. You have to practice it daily. The more that you behave in an enlightened manner, the more you are enlightened. Some people can be like that all the time. I have friends that literally are just in a state of fundamental wellbeing 24/7 and they are genuinely unshakable. They are phenomenal people to talk to, but for the rest of us, enlightenment is a verb.’

‘If you understand that life is about survival and reproduction and your biology does not care about your job, your biology only really cares about you staying alive and you making another person. That doesn't mean that our minds believe the same thing, because obviously I care about all sorts of stuff. That's not related to survival and reproduction, but our biology running the show under the surface all the time. When this programming gets disrupted, all hell breaks loose.’

‘We have to spend our time working up the ladder of consciousness, trying to be in a place of love, trying to move past just reason, trying to be in a state of love and peace. If we, as women, can band together and really try to lift society up in this way. I think we could actually save our own country. And that's part of the reason why I'm on this mission.’

‘There's always a spiritual component to healing…like rewriting your narrative is really key.’

‘So if you can diffuse conflict, if you can have the energy to meet your demands, your life just changes because you actually believe you have more resources to go. If you think about mitochondria function, like making money, all these health habits that you create and all these relationship habits that you develop when you can diffuse tension and not spend a whole day in anger - you've saved yourself a ton of emotion, like a bun of cellular money. ATP is cellular money.’

MORE GREAT QUOTES 

Claudia: Welcome to the Women for Longevity Club. We are talking about love and longevity today, which I'm really excited about with Dr. Molly Maloof, such a beautiful, amazing topic.

Claudia: Dr. Molly Maloof, maybe you can give a quick introduction to yourself and then we can kick.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Sure. So I'm a medical doctor by training. I spent about 10 years in Silicon valley in San Francisco, working with executives, investors, and entrepreneurs, helping them to optimize their health. I have also worked with over 50 companies in the startup space as well as a few big brands.

Legal Disclaimer: Please note, to avoid any unnecessary headaches, Longevity & Lifestyle LLC owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Longevity & Lifestyle Podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as the right of publicity. You are welcome to share parts of the transcript (up to 500 words) in other media (such as press articles, blogs, social media accounts, etc.) for non-commercial use which must also include attribution to “The Longevity & Lifestyle Podcast” with a link back to the longevity-and-lifestyle.com/podcast URL. It is prohibited to use any portion of the podcast content, names or images for any commercial purposes in digital or non-digital outlets to promote you or another’s products or services.

PODCAST EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Molly Maloof: Helping with product development, clinical strategy, scientific marketing clinical research. And I'm currently writing a book with Harper wave publishing. It's a book on biohacking for women that comes out January 2023. And I started a company. I'm not entrepreneur, so I've started a few companies, but the most current one it started out as a pharmaceutical company aiming to work on an MDA alternative, but what we've shifted to. To build a education in a CPG company. And so we're building a platform dedicated to educating the world about the biological imperative. So essentially energy metabolism and then relationships and social connection.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And the there's quite a lot of interrelationships between the two, which a lot of people don't realize. And so we're building this education platform around that. And we're also building CPG products, including a legal version of a legal experience, similar to MDMA, so legal Molly and as well as food products.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So that's what I'm up to and I'm happy to be here today. 

Dr. Molly Maloof: I've been studying health span for quite a long time. And I taught a course at Stanford on how to live better, longer extending health span for a longer lifespan. And one of the things that kind of surprised me when I was creating a course, which was largely about metabolism, movement, mastering stress, and maintaining connection to like your environment to yourself, your family members started teaching a lecture on relationships. 

Dr. Molly Maloof: And I started to feel like I had been missing something in my practice for a long time. And I really wasn't emphasizing relationships as, a area of optimization. Because as a medical doctor, you really just are tasked to focus on the biological and not the psychological or the spiritual. 

Dr. Molly Maloof: But I was studying mitochondria and. The weird thing about mitochondria that most people don't realize is that they are also not only the powerhouse of the cell. Not only do they act as signal transducers, deciding where the energy goes, whether it goes to survival or reproduction, they also control the immune system.

Dr. Molly Maloof: They actually have a major role in the inflammatory response. But on top of that, they actually are social organelles. So they behave similarly to humans. They actually have similar And team Bacardi is actually one of my companies. He's coming out as an advisor for my company.

Dr. Molly Maloof: He wrote some papers that really blew me away. And it was all about how mitochondria are basically integrating our stress response. And a big part of our stress response. It is our relationships. But they do this thing where they come together and they fuse and it's called fusion and vision.

Dr. Molly Maloof: They come together, they share information, they share energy and then they break apart. And they are these incredible organelles that we just don't pay attention to because we think that all their job Is to focus on metabolism. So when I really got obsessed with mitochondria, I started really asking myself like, if, energy deficiency is the root of most chronic disease, then what is the root of energy deficiency?

Dr. Molly Maloof: And I realized that our relationship quality is it has a massive influence on how much energy we have. Because if we have struggles in our relationships, the quality of our relationships really determines the quality of our life. And there's actually really great research. That's all about how different psychosocial stressors, including average child experiences, caregiving, stress, divorce, grief, loss all deeply affect the body on a cellular level.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And I wanted to understand this because I was trying to figure out why is it that when I was putting glucose monitors on people and I was seeing that people were getting this information about their body. And I was one of the pioneers in blood sugar monitoring. I was one of the first doctors to put these unhealthy people in 2014.

Dr. Molly Maloof: I, didn't understand why some people, you put the glucose monitor on them and you give them the direct information of what they're eating is damaging their body. And they still reach for the cookie and the donut, and they still reach for the. And there was something else going on in their body that was pushing them to eat emotionally and to choose the things that they know are damaging to their health.

Dr. Molly Maloof: I was like what's this all about? So, I started really under trying to understand the role of trauma in health. And so last year when I started my company, initially I was working on how do we solve trauma with psychedelics? And so the multidisciplinary association of psychedelic studies has basically shown.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Molly, MDMA can play a major role in helping reset this early social reward learning in the brain to actually open up the capacity to like reframe traumatic memories as not traumatic. They can actually help people diminish the valence that these, memories have on hold on that specifically at PTSD.

Dr. Molly Maloof: I wanted to understand why does MDMA work, and why do adaptogens work, why do these love drugs actually make you feel love, and why did they help heal trauma? 

Dr. Molly Maloof: What's actually going on a cellular level? And so that took me down this rabbit hole of meeting these advisors. Including Helen Fisher who's one of the world's experts on love.

Dr. Molly Maloof: She is mash dot com's resident scientist. She's written multiple books on love. And so I talked to her quite a lot about the role of dopamine and love the role of, all these different neurotransmitters. And then I met Sue Carter and Sue Carter is an absolutely legendary scientist and woman who I'm actually meeting with this, week at San Francisco.

Dr. Molly Maloof: She discovered pair bonding and Prairie bowls. And she's been one of the world's foremost leaders on understanding Oxytocin. So I spent a lot of time getting to know Sue her. Husband's actually Steven Vargas who developed polyvagal theory. So it was through talking to Sue and Steven that I really started to shape my beliefs around love and why loving relationships are so incredibly helpful for health and why toxic relationships are so incredibly detrimental to health.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It turns out that social connection is a bigger driver of health and happiness than any other factor that we. According to this longevity study on men specifically. 

Dr. Molly Maloof: Basically at the end of men's lives, they did an 80, 80 year study. They basically showed that close personal relationships are what brought health, happiness and, satisfaction of life.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Social disconnection on the other hand is actually potentially a bigger driver of disease than smoking, drinking, sanitary behavior, and obesity. So when I started looking at this data and these numbers. 

Dr. Molly Maloof: What is social connection and how do we improve it? How do we build it? How do we make it stronger? Basically one of the problems that we have right now is there's quite a lot of death of despair, because we're not dying from as many infectious diseases, although COVID has certainly killed a lot of people prior to COVID, we were mostly dying for chronic disease.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And, then as we started to prolong life, we actually started to see more and more deaths of despair developed. So death's due to isolation. Death's due to social conflict, social rejection and exclusion. And I was wondering so why, is this happening? If you actually look at the history of Oxytocin ,and you look at the history of humanity.

Dr. Molly Maloof: We evolved alongside a bunch of other hominids, but we won out of all the other hominids. So like we succeeded, like we were the ones homosapiens won, and it's thought that part of the reason why we succeeded is our ability to create social bonds. Because essentially this is the kicker love and social relationships.

Dr. Molly Maloof: If you think about love itself, like what is love, right? Like we always we know it. We feel love, we have love, but what is love? So I was obsessed with love last year and I studied the science of love. And I discovered that love is a motivational force, similar to hunger or thirst. It actually drives people towards one another.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And we get this dopamine from connection, but oxytocin is what creates these bonds and love is driven by a bunch of different neurotransmitters, but dopamine and oxytocin play a pretty big role and love is this motivational force that drives us together because proximity closeness actually increases the chances of information sharing and energy sharing.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So we share resources and information and resources and information are what helped us survive? Now love also increases the chances of reproduction, right? So if we have close social ties, we're more likely to connect with people of the opposite sex and/ or the same sex, but have children.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And so when you look at love as this absolute fundamental facet of biology, that is so important to survival, just as important as hunger or thirst, just as important as food, you understand why lack of love and lack of social connection is so unbelievably detrimental to human. That's, one of the things that I started trying to figure out.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So communal support is actually really, important for people to flourish, right? Because we need to share information and resources and we need to maintain proximity to reproduce and life basically evolved oxytocin signaling for a reason. And this is the coolest thing about being a woman, because women are basically oxytocin, dominant.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So we are literally the keepers of life. We create it and we propagate it. We nurture it. Men are all about the protectors of life. They make sure that they're more vasopressor dominant. So they are more likely to be aggressive. They're more likely to defend. They're more likely to protect.

Dr. Molly Maloof: This is life's basic design for a reason. Before I go into oxytocin, I wanna back up to like evolutionary biology. So it the, endosymbiotic hypothesis suggests that we engulfed bacteria, single cell organisms, the original form of life found on earth engulfed bacteria in order to harness energy from the environment which enabled evolution.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So this pattern of energy gathering. and information sharing, sensing, and integrating and reproducing. This goes back to the very earliest forms of life. And so this is why I'm so obsessed with biological comperative as a foundational way to teach health. because if you understand that life is about survival and reproduction and your biology does not care about your job, your biology only really cares about you staying alive and you making another person.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And that doesn't mean that our minds believe the same thing, because obviously I care about all sorts of stuff. That's not related to survival and reproduction, but our biology is this programming is running the show under the surface all the time. And when this programming gets disrupt, All hell breaks loose. And I'll give you a few examples of this later.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Let's talk a little bit of oxytocin. We evolved oxytocin signaling for a reason, right? It creates this felt sense of safety and trust, it facilitates birth, you cannot have a baby without oxytocin. This is why people get Pitocin to induce labor.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It facilitates lactation, it facilitates trial rearing and maternal behavior. It facilitates the growth of the Neocortex in babies, it facilitates nurturing necessary for intellectual development. It facilitates social sensitivity and attunement necessary for human sociality and pro-social behaviors, which is also made by dopamine.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It facilitates sexual behavior and orgasm, it facilitates partner preference. It facilitates pair bonds and familial. So like literally this hormone is like, what ties us together. And that's why when, I met Sue, she's really hammering this into me. Initially I was like why do you care so much about oxytocin?

Dr. Molly Maloof: But the cool thing about MDMA is that it releases a ton of oxytocin. And it's thought that basically Oxytocin is, an important target and mediator of experience. Experience dependent learning in early. And it affects adulthood because the early environment. Programs adult levels of oxytocin and oxytocin receptor activity.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And so early life experiences can change the methylation status and set you up lifetime functioning up oxytocin system, which is, this is part of the reason why average childhood experiences are so fundamentally detrimental to long-term health, because they will lit like childhood trauma.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Can actually contribute to methylation of the oxytocin receptor and, especially in kids with autism, there's actually evidence that in autistic kids, they have extra methylation of the oxytocin receptor. And it's thought that this receptor being open for business, able to be touched by the oxytocin.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It's basically thought that's what medias the ability for us to feel these connections and this, the safety and this feeling. Being connected to our, family and our friends and our, parents. So the thought is, that MDMA can reopen this critical period of social reward learning and enable people with trauma, from whatever path part, of their life to potentially reprogram that trauma, not as fearful, but as just another life story that they have.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So this get, let's get a little bit into into the role of, relationships in metabolism, right? Turns out that there's evidence and people with obesity that actually, if you actually talk to Bessel Banderol and read his books, one of his first work, he's a he's. He wrote the book, the body keeps the store score.

Dr. Molly Maloof: One of the first things he discovered before opening his own trauma clinics was when he was working in an obesity clinic that almost every adult with major obesity had some sort of trauma that was unresolved. And so it's thought. Early life, trauma, midlife, trauma all, of this, all these like really challenging experiences contributes to the body, going into a response of trying to protect itself.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Okay. So the body's always trying to protect itself. You have to look at all maladaptive behaviors as a physiological protection me mechanism. When you see the body this way, it makes everything in life. Make more. So obesity, first of all, we live in a very biogenic environment, but we also live in a fairly traumatic world because America is filled with all sorts of stupid dangers.

Dr. Molly Maloof: We shouldn't have, we shouldn't fear for our lives going to school. We shouldn't fear for our lives, walking down the street. Like we li we live in a very strange world where the media is sending us tons of fear based messages. And and honestly, a lot of our social networks are, like, are dissolving, which is a huge problem.

Dr. Molly Maloof: We need these social connections, because we need these, this feeling of safety and comfort in order to be able to let go and, relax into our lives. But if someone is under chronic stress or if someone has a history of trauma, what happens is their body and their mitochondria actually go into a different function.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Okay. So there's this concept of sort of peace time and war time metabolism. And there's this thing called the cell danger. And when I discovered the cell indoor response, I was like, oh my God, this makes so much sense. So basically when you are under threat, your MI metabolism says I'm not really gonna focus on like rebuilding the house and like doing these upgrades.

Dr. Molly Maloof: I'm gonna focus on like turning alarm system on and protecting the, house so that it doesn't end up falling apart. So it's if you're in a H. You're not gonna bring in contractors to go install a new bathroom, right? You're gonna have someone try to keep the doors closed and the house protected.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So this is part of the reason why when people are under correct threat, people have a history of trauma which by the way, trauma creates a threat based state at, hyper vigilance at baseline. So for a lot of people, with a lot of people under chronic stress, a lot of people were impoverished.

Dr. Molly Maloof: People who have to work multiple jobs, people who don't have strong social. People who have dysfunctional family systems, people who have who are exposed to violence, drug addiction, alcohol alcoholism, their nervous systems are at a state of hyper vigilance and a baseline. And so they're, not really gonna be able to have a normal metabolism because they're not actually able to relax.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And so when you look at this. You actually understand why people are constantly feeding their fear with food because food is the most accessible addiction that we can find. And hyper processed foods, as we know, are designed to be addictive, they're designed to hijack the brain's reward systems. They're designed to hit the bliss point.

Dr. Molly Maloof: They're designed to release a lot of dopamine. They're designed to make people feel that they need these things because of these advertisements that they're getting right after watching fear based news on, television. But the interesting thing about oxytocin in my own personal experience, I'll give you a little.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So 2020 sucked I'm sure you all knew that I ended up gain like 10 pounds and honestly, I looked great, but I didn't feel great in my body. I just didn't feel good having 10 extra pounds on my body, but I couldn't lose it. I could not lose 10 pounds for the life of me. And I was extremely disconnected from my family.

Dr. Molly Maloof: My, for my friends and even my family, cuz my. We're staying in a different house. And I was like working remotely alone from a house in Florida, teaching at Stanford. And I remember the isolation really screwing with my mind and I ended up getting very burned out and just feeling like nothing's working physically.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Like none of my traditional biohacking things were working for me. So two months go by. I decide I'm gonna leave the Midwest and go back to California and start visiting my friends in different cities. And as I started, as I got vaccinated and I started traveling again, it was it the, feeling of connection that I had with my friends was like the greatest, hi, I've ever felt in my entire life.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Cuz I was like, oh my God I, my people, again, these are my friends, this is my community. I need these people. And the weight just started coming off. Like without even trying, it was just. The moment that my nervous system felt safe and my no and, as my nervous system started to feel connected again.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And as I started to travel to different communities of mine in different cities, and I felt so much more connected, my nervous system started to relax and my, metabolism shifted and my metabolism just went back to normal. And what I learned is that oxytocin is an anti-inflammatory. It's an antioxidant and it's MI protective.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So it actually protects the mitochondria. And the mitochondria, as I'm telling you are like, they're like basically telling your metabolism, they were responsible for whether your metabolism is, like peace time or war time. And so oxytocin is really interesting because it influences mitochondrial function.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And and so it's, very cardioprotective as well. So it increases a and PK signaling, which increases a to. It increases insulin sensitivity. It increases VCP two, which decreases reactive oxygen species and decreases inflammation. It increases PGE two, which decreases sarcopenia increases wound healing increases repair of damaged myocardium and damaged cells increases PPA or gamma, which decreases inflammation and decreases plaques and lipids and glucose home.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It improves lip, glucose and lipid homeo. And it increases a and P which decreases blood pressure and it increases vagal tone, which also decreases blood pressure. So I decided, okay, where am I gonna move? Because I wanna like the world's only gonna get crazier. And, things are probably not gonna get necessarily better before it's probably gonna be a little worse where they get.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So I found myself moving to Austin because it was one place in the country where I felt a deep sense of connection to a community. And it felt like this sense of joy of, being with people was so palpable that even though the weather isn't crazy, hot, I feel healthier there because I feel more connected to people.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And now what I'm doing with my company is basically trying to take this knowledge. I just taught all of you and turn it into a. That teaches people, fundamentals, mitochondrial health, and energy metabolism, and then social connection, sexuality, love and attachment. Because I believe that if we can teach people how, to survive and how to properly build these social relationships then and, whether you wanna rehab kids or not.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It's like really not the point. The point is, that we are here to connect. We are here to live in a connected state. We're not designed to live alone. We're not designed to be. The isolation of the pandemic was one of the biggest social experiments ever done. And it had massive ramifications for society.

Dr. Molly Maloof: We've had record numbers of suicides, record number, record numbers of, drug overdoses. And there was an interesting article I read today in time about how in the Philippines. There's essentially very, there's a lot of guns of Philippines, but they have no mass shootings. And the reason why they believe that they don't have mass shootings in Philippines is because of the they, really believed in social connection and social relationships are really valued and families are very valued.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And the idea of bringing honor disarm, dishonor to a family is that they, just people are super, super connected. They talk to each other and they would catch someone before they would end up causing a mass shooting. So it's really interesting to think about how we have a problem with mass shooting.

Dr. Molly Maloof: One of the things that these kids have in common is they come typically from a broken home from violence, from drug addiction, from abuse, neglect, lack of love, and they're not being paid attention to. And to me, if you look at some of the biggest problems of. If we could really look at this problem of, disconnection as like a, as a thing that we can actually address, we could potentially improve life for millions of people downstream.

Dr. Molly Maloof: We could really change the, quality of life for many, people for a lot longer. Thank you.

Claudia: So exciting Molly, and thank you so much for sharing that. And I love the structure of walking through from the mitochondria to love and connection for the whole world, the meta view as well. I wanna open two questions. 

Claudia: Molly. I'd love to ask you as well. Just exactly you, it is a, course you're creating?

Dr. Molly Maloof: Yeah, so the course is basically going to be taught to people and that anyone who takes the course, it can teach the course. And if you teach the course to get paid, to teach the course, so it's designed.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Actually, interestingly, the company's kind of designed with the same principles of mitochondrial function. So people come together share information and resources, and then they break apart and they go off into their communities and share information and resources. And the idea is, we want to create a health platform.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It's different than a lot of what we see in the world because I was not taught sexuality love or attachment in medical school or college. I was not taught about energy metabolism from the perspective. Like the relationship of our, of our, human relationships to our metabolism.

Dr. Molly Maloof: I wasn't really taught about MI mitochondrial health, almost everything that I learned. I learned after medical school after, residency. And I'm actually working with Harvard students to write a white paper on this theory. And to to I'm working with Princeton students to develop new questionnaires for social connection.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So we can actually put on the website a way to evaluate how connected you are. And we are gonna be teaching people about psychedelics. We are going to give people knowledge on how psychedelics have been used historically to enhance social connection through ritual. And so the way I see it, like psychedelics are used currently today and the pharmaceutical medicinals realm and the spiritual realm, a lot of people are building psychedelic churches.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And then recreational of course, companies like delic are all about party, which is great. I actually think there's a role of health partying and health, but what we're really Emmy to do is figure out how do we bring people an understanding of how to create deeper connections in their communities with, or without psychedelic.

Dr. Molly Maloof: We're really teaching the most interesting thing I'm learning is like, when you start learning some of the most basic communication skills that are, that can enhance relationships, even things that are designed for couples can totally translate to friendships. So like for example, a Mago therapy by horrible Hendrix.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It's so simple. It's literally the most simple thing. Like it's all about mirroring, validating and empathizing. Okay. It's not rocket science. And yet I've started to use this in my conflicts with friends or co. And I cannot believe there are the outcomes that I'm getting with people there's it, literally diffuses conflict, so quickly because the other person feels seen and heard so we're basically trying to give people we're, summarizing 50 books right now, and I already have this whole course that's been designed for Stanford. So we're breaking down the Stanford course into all the most actionable things. And then we're and I'm also launching the course. As is right now, cuz I had a waiting list about 400 people.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So we're launching the Stanford course just as is because we're trying to get feedback to summer on what works, what doesn't work, what do people like, what are they not like? And then and then the, I got about 20 people working with me on this course. So there's this incredible website called handshake.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So we recruited like topnotch students from all over like, undergraduates grad students in, in graduate. From all over the country and world, and we've got 20 people working with us to really comb through the best research, summarize the best literature and create this course. That will be like, it's basically human 101.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It's like, how do you prepare for your life? And, that's where the brand is gonna be based off of. It's all, it's gonna be very much based on love, connection, energy metabolism, cause who doesn't want more energy and more love. I. All the energy and all the love. And so given the fact that I have more energy now at 38 than I did at 28 I'm like a walking Testament that this stuff works.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And the coolest thing about when you hack your energy metabolism, and you hack your relationships. It's like everything in life just gets easier. Cuz you have more capacity to meet your demands. So mitochondrial function is all about capacitance, right? You're building literally capacitors, flex capacitors and batteries.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And so when you teach your body to take care of these two, these really, important organelles, your body has more capacity to meet your demands. Now, right now this month, I'll be honest. My capacity is about here. My demands are out here. And so I've been. Overstressed to tad because of moving, finishing a book, finish launching a course and advising companies and hiring for my company.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So it's been beyond crazy, but surprisingly like. I, actually like I'm, I've, haven't gotten sick. I've been like healthy. I've been working out. Like I definitely have partied probably a little too much in the last three weeks cuz Austin had a bunch of live music shows. So I've been doing a lot of mu like live music lately.

Dr. Molly Maloof: But I feel like I these, tenants of health, they give you super powers. So if you can diffuse conflict, if you can have the energy to meet your demands, like your life just changes because you actually believe like you just have more resources to go. So it's all, it's like, if you think about mitochondria function, like making money, like all these health habits that you, create and all these relationship habits that you develop, when you can diffuse tension and not spend a whole day in an anger, angry or emotional state, you've saved yourself a ton of emotional, like a bun of cellular money, like ATP is cellular money.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And if you build a lot of money, like cellular money ATP in your cells through, these compounding interests of these health habit, Before it, you just have like, you can actually handle the level of crap that, that I'm doing right now because you're, like I, saved up all.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Cellular cash. Now I'm spending it now I'm at the point where I'm like, not Broca, but I definitely am like, okay, the bank, account's still beginning right now. I need to go back. So once I've finished moving, I've like really, I just joined the phenomenal gym and I like, you kinda have to rebuild your health.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So health is this dynamic thing that doesn't just, you don't just have health. it's like health is a constant dynamic state of you and your environment. So it takes lots of care and attention atunement to build health into your body. But the more health that you create for yourself, the more you can get hit with a major stressor like COVID, and you can bounce back because you have enough capacity that if you get knocked out a little bit, you still aren't do knocked out here.

Dr. Molly Maloof: But the problem with the most Americans is when. When they got hit with COVID their capacity and their demands were about equal. And so they just got knocked down. Here. And that's when the body starts to break. When your energy capacity drops down and your demands are this high, you can't have enough energy to maintain the integrity of the structure.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So life is very simple. It's energy, less information, less structure, the mind, even simpler. Energy and information. So when you look at life in the mind, very simply this, you can understand how physical health and mental health are super dependent on energy. And that's why I've basically committed my life to understanding Mitochondria because they are responsible for creating energy.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So that's, part 

Dr. Molly Maloof: of the reason why I'm obsessed with them. 

Claudia: It sounds amazing. I like that. I wanna touch on trauma Molly, because obviously this is like the blueprint for like how to be a good person, assuming that there's no trauma things as well.

Claudia: But I think what are some of strategies and tools you recommend around trauma for reducing it? You've obviously talked about MDMA and doing therapy there, but what are some other power you've seen for helping people to release trauma? 

Dr. Molly Maloof: I'm a really big believer in somatic experience. Somatic type therapies.

Dr. Molly Maloof: There's, a bunch of different kinds and a lot of it's trial and error, but I was, I worked with a guy who was like his own. He did it, he created his own version of trauma healing and it really involves just shaking a lot. Like it's almost like animals in interestingly animals in the wild often.

Dr. Molly Maloof: When they get attacked by another animal, they survive. They, will shake a. and some animals even go as far as to recreate the entire sequence of being chased. And, then they go into this process of, they, they actually will reexperience the whole thing over again, and then they will and they do, they'll play it out potentially with par with with other, their other animals almost as though they're trying to like, re-experience a thing, but not make it as threatening, not make it threatening.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So there's. There's a bunch of different things that I think are fairly effective, but I think anything that can get you into your body and help you really almost move the physical trauma out of your body, that's really key. And then the narrative, I think the narrative work is really important.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So being able to create a coherent narrative around the trauma and be able to revisit that narrative and slowly not have it if, you're basically finding. Having an emotional response to a traumatic experience, you haven't resolved the trauma So that's really, important to understand, like for me in the last year of just starting a company where I was like really studying sexual trauma and I was able to just start talking about it to people, very nonchalantly.

Dr. Molly Maloof: I was surprised at how just talking about it in a place of not reacting was extraordinarily healing for me, cuz I did because I really love the book power versus forest by David Hawkins. And in that book, there's a scale of consciousness and in the consciousness scale, the very bottom of its shame and midway through his courage.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And then, you get to like reason, love, peace, joy, enlightenment. And I love this scale because even my friends who are scientists can actually grasp this. Yeah. When I lifted all the shame away from any of the experience that I had, I was like, oh my God. I feel like I have just this burden that's off me because I don't have any shame left.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Like, why should I feel ashamed about this? It wasn't my fault. Yeah. And then and so I really think that there's always a spiritual component to healing and and so like rewriting your narrative is really key. I think also Like some people try EMDR. I haven't done it myself, but EMDR is like aiming to use eye movement desensitization.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It's almost using your brain's nervous system to reformat the memories. I think MDM a is important, but it's also extraordinarily one important thing you should know about MDM a is that if you do not feel safe with the therapist that you're with. You will potentially this is really important when you have MDMA experiences and you get extremely anxious or unsafe in the middle of the experience, your body has a natural kill switch where it will not let you hit the oxytocin receptor it'll block the receptor and it'll activate base suppression, and it will do this to get you out of danger.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So you want to really create the. Unbelievably safe container for all psychedelic uses. You wanna know the people that you're with. You want to really know the therapist that you're doing work with. You want to be properly prepared for the trip. You want to be properly, go through the trip and integrate from it.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And I know women who'd gone through MDMA experiences with therapists that they didn't trust, and they ended up more traumatized after the experience because they were feeling anxious the entire time. So very important to just. Not attempt these medicines, not like a nonchalant way, making sure that you, properly prepare yourself for them.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And yeah there's a we're obviously like we're reading a bunch of books right now on the top of a trauma, so there's a lot more to do there, but 

Dr. Molly Maloof: Have you tried EFT tapping? What's your view on that tap? 

Dr. Molly Maloof: I find tapping personally to be very useful, but I but I do think that.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Here's an, here's a very interesting thing. So a lot of tools that we don't have necessarily, like we don't necessarily have like hardcore science on, which I don't know if there's tapping science or not. I don't know if the public literature is sure, but one of the most interesting things I discovered is that the placebo response is also likely mediated through oxytocin.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So the placebo response is all about expectation of improvement of health. And blue placebo response is also highly dependent on. The therapist and the trust you have for the clinician. And it's also highly dependent on the experience around the healing of the actual healing experience. So if you think about it this way, like a lot of the research on compassion in medicine is like actually demonst and, a lot of the research on placebo.

Dr. Molly Maloof: The research suggests that like, compassion the placebo and even gratitude, the underlying neurobiology of why this stuff works is oxytocin. So the theory is, that oxytocin is, nature's medicine. This is Sue Carter's paper. I highly recommend reading the papers by Sue Carter's, oxytocin nature's medicine and then love and longevity.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Those two papers are particularly good because if you can understand A lot of these things that may or may not have good science can act, but they can activate the oxytocin in the body and make you feel safe. That's lifting the stress on the body, enabling the, mitochondria and the nervous system to relax and enabling you to be able to start to heal.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So I think like most importantly is you, surround yourself with people that you can love and trust and you find really good. One of the biggest factors in outcomes in healthcare and psychology. Is the relationship you have the trust that you have with the person, right? So it's like the, therapist or the doctor.

Dr. Molly Maloof: So why is that so important? The hormone of trust is oxytocin and oxytocin is very healing to mitochondrial function and enables the body to drop into a state of, lowered hyper vigilance and enables your body to start to do the repairs it needs to do. So this is my sort of grand unified theory of health.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Whether or not, I can prove it. I think I can, I think direct experience is all you need and to me but we are gonna be doing research on our company. We're gonna try to do a study with Stanford. And I think the more we align ourselves with these like top institutions and we create this consumer brand, but we back it up with the good science, the more we're gonna be able to Propagate.

Dr. Molly Maloof: We can teach people that human decency and love and connection and kindness is the way to healing our communities and our society. And don't think there's enough doctors like this doctor. And enough therapists out there to be able to offer the kind of care that people need. So it's gonna have to be through grassroots effort.

Dr. Molly Maloof: It's gonna have to be through galvanizing community leaders and getting people to realize that they can be responsible for helping their communities heal and their friends and family heal. And like it was really studying love and, realizing that this one doc Dr. David Hawkins he, basically had a near death experience and. He almost died.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And then he like saw the white light, came back to. and since then basically had a spiritual awakening and he had insane outcomes as a psychiatrist. Like he had incredibly, profound outcomes and he barely prescribed any medication. And it was thought that, in his books. His belief is that love is medicine and that his love is actually what led to the healing.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And this goes back to Jesus, right? Like it's very possible. That like the scientific underpinning of love being about safety, being about helping mitochondrial function better, being about helping the nervous system, relax, being cardio protective, Mito protective. It's very possible that we can literally feel love from people, right?

Dr. Molly Maloof: Like we can feel it when someone loves us and that is healing. And so if we can get people to raise their consciousness towards love, Which is really hard by the way, cuz we're all tired. We're stressed out. There are days where I'm rude to people and I don't wanna be because I'm just tired. and it's a daily practice though.

Dr. Molly Maloof: Like one of my best friends and I'll just kinda leave you with, this is there's very little spirituality in medicine, but like I have a few friends that are like genuinely enlightened, but one of 'em I ask him like, what do you think enlightenment is? And he's, enlightenment is a verb.

Dr. Molly Maloof: You have to practice it daily. The more that you behave in an enlightened manner, the more you are enlightened. Some people can be like that all the time. I have friends that like literally are just in a state of fundamental wellbeing. 24/ 7. And they are genuinely like unshakable. Like they are phenomenal people to talk to, but for the rest of us, enlightenment is a verb.

Dr. Molly Maloof: We have to spend our time working up the ladder of consciousness, trying to be in a place of love, trying to move past just reason, trying to be in a, state of love and peace. And if we as women. Can like band together and like really try to lift society up in this way. I think we could actually save our own country.

Dr. Molly Maloof: And that's part of the reason why I'm on this mission. 

Claudia: Wonderful Molly, thank you so much. Such a pleasure. Let's spread some more love today!

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