Maximising Your Human Potential with Dr Molly Maloof (EP#47)

Mason: 
All right everybody, joined by Molly Maloof, my new mate, who I met in Arizona earlier this year. Thanks for coming on the pod.

Molly: 
Thank you for inviting me.

Mason: 
Absolute pleasure. I really, really enjoyed your talk. There were a lot of interesting talks at that weekend event at Revitalize. I think the trippiest and weirdest, that left me just like, "Huh," and I got it in a good way from a couple of them. But the Whole Foods CEO, founder guy.

Molly: 
I loved his talk.

Mason: 
Yeah, that was a very interesting one. He's a, yeah, interesting guy. I kind of was a little put off by his, like how when Whole Foods saw Amazon it was love at first sight and they were swept off their feet. I was like, "What?"

Molly: 
And the funniest thing about the technology and the tech scene is just how many parallels there are to modern dating. And the best VC firms really court that 1% of startups that they really, really care about, but they ignore everyone else. There's literally so many parallels to how you date and how companies are founded and formed. It's like everything in life's relationships at the end of the day, you know?

Mason: 
I'm just trying to get my head around that, because I just didn't grow up in that world. Even when I was doing my international business degree, I just didn't listen and studied herbalism. I'm not... SuperFeast ... I'm just never, SuperFeast just isn't going to date anyone. It might have relationships. I might have a couple of little flings here and there, but because I'm not in that world it was so interesting.

Mason: 
Anyway, your talk was really cool. You guys, like you were on that panel talking about psychedelics.

Molly: 
Oh man. I mean I'm fully out of the psychedelic closet by now, and what's cool is that I was just at Burning Man and I saw some amazing, amazing talks by founders of MAPS. Rick Doblin spoke about being after this movement for 40 years. He has been working for 40 years to get psychedelics approved, and we are really close. Well, you know, mushrooms have been decriminalized in Oakland, and people don't know this, but they're selling mushroom chocolates in Oakland. Dispensaries are selling mushrooms. I think that's actually positive as long as people are safe with their dosing. But we're going to see I think the same kind of movement around the medicalization of these, as well as the-

Mason: 
Recreational.

Molly: 
Recreational use of these happening in America. I think both are needed and both are valuable experiences, but the important thing is safety. That's one thing I really wanted to get across on stage at the conference, was whether or not these are legal or not legal right now, whether or not you use them in ceremony or recreationally. Whether or not they are used for medicinal purposes or spiritual purposes, the whole goal of this is that no one gets hurt.

Molly: 
They can be dangerous drugs. If you're not prepared, if you're not in the right situation, right environment, right headspace, right part of your life span, they can be really damaging. So I was really happy that there was a place to talk about them with some pretty forward thinking people and some people who've also suffered from addiction. So it was important to have the balanced perspective, but at the end of the day I think the end conclusion was that there's definitely a place for these in wellness.

Mason: 
Where are you using them? Like is it clinical, is it just waving the flag? I feel like there's a because, because recreational came up, and I like your take. I think a lot of people keep it very clinical when they have these conversations, and of course it's not because we need to be having many types of conversations. We don't want them institutionalized as well, but almost you can start looking at the perceived social value and then the need somewhat of a structure. I mean you have the complete kind of somewhat like, say, left view that it's just open doors and it's just like whatever. Everyone goes nuts. Then there's that right view, which is a little bit more of that like, "Create a full solid structure and get the pharmaceuticals involved."

Mason: 
Then there's that middle ground, and a lot of the time, especially if you're going to be in a clinical setting, I can see how some things might be standardized and it can become under those regulatory bodies. But then almost it's the outside of that, when you go more recreational, it's like having the maturity as a society to create that somewhat of structure, for lack of a better word, rules that keeps everyone healthy and keeps everyone understanding it and not just separating it within society. So yeah, where are you falling with it? Why are you talking about it?

Molly: 
I mean I talk about it because I use them for spiritual purposes. I use them for social purposes, and I use them for medicinal purposes. I do refer people to healers who administer them ceremoniously in an environment of safety and security and careful dosing. It's not legal for me to currently administer them myself as a doctor, so I just make referrals to people. I just connect people and say, "Hey. This person I trust. You can trust them. They're good people. They're not going to harm you in any way." But it sucks, because they aren't legal yet I can't fully prescribe them, but I have prescribed ketamine for medicinal purposes. You can do that in America legally right now. They are psychedelic. It is the only legal psychedelic right now.

Mason: 
Is the research of ketamine around PTSD mostly, or what's going-

Molly: 
Actually it's depression and suicidality, which are frankly killing a lot of people right now. America is suffering from a lot of despair deaths is what they're calling them, which is deaths due to homicide, suicide, or self harm. That could be addiction or other means. So for me, I see a lot of that in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of misery, and it sucks because it's a place of so much abundance. You're like, "Geez, if this is the future, we're not heading into a good direction right now." But also a lot of panic.

Molly: 
People are definitely panicking in a lot of ways in America, for good reason. I mean there's like a mass shooting every week. A lot of people don't feel safe going into public spaces. A lot of people don't feel safe walking around San Francisco. A lot of people suffer from anxiety disorders, so people are turning to these medicines for panic and to feel ... For the tryptamine, they want to feel held and loved. For the ketamine, they want to feel like they can disassociate from reality because it's too much for them to handle at the moment.

Molly: 
So that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean it's not necessarily a good thing that we have an environment and society that's suffering so badly that people have to disassociate from it in order to maintain their sanity. But it's definitely a better option than taking opioids and dying from an overdose, which are killing a ton of people. Purdue Pharma basically said that they were going to be paying out something around the number of like $11 billion to 2,000 people for this class action lawsuit against them for especially misleading people about the addictive nature of Oxycontin and other Purdue Pharma opioids.

Molly: 
So shit's hitting the fan in America, and things are not good. So what I'm really interested in and fascinated by, and I just did a tour of New York, LA, and San Francisco, I live here, is just the number of people that are coming together in community and experiencing psychedelics in a space of ceremony. Which is really the traditional format of psychedelic use, in most indigenous communities and societies, is using them in the context of connecting with community. Frankly I think that's really a healthy and safe way, as long as the Shaman that's administering these knows what they're doing.

Molly: 
It could be transformative, but it could be problematic if people don't have a resource for integration or if they take the wrong dose in this environment. Which I recently saw happen, and I know a person who experienced a psychotic breakdown. So I think it's always important when we talk about these medicines to recognize the benefits and the risks, because they definitely go both ways. At the same time, I would say that largely what I'm seeing is 99% of people who are using these that I know personally, are using them in positive and healthy, fruitful ways. About 1% of times you're seeing casualties and you're seeing damage and you're seeing problems.

Molly: 
So I think they're largely carefully dosed and administered very safe, but if they're not, they can be really damaging. So it's important to mention that 1%, because that's what everyone sees in the news. But I just read a great article in Vice about how if everybody were to take psychedelics and think about the environment, we wouldn't be in this huge problem we're in right now, which is people not thinking about the effects of their actions on the environment. What's happening in Brazil is a great example of a lack of awakening in a large population of people.

Mason: 
Yeah. I think it's really important to remember just how low impact and low risk these psychedelics are, but that's in comparison to the gnarliness of the pharmaceutical industry of course. I think that's pretty evident at this point. It's not paranoid. I mean there was, just released in a journal was a study just on Paracetamol here in Australia for the 10 years, I think ending in like 2017. I'll have to look it up and see if I can find it, but I don't know exactly what the numbers were, but it was in that ballpark of like 400% up in heavy liver damage and deaths massively on the rise, and that was studying hospital administered levels. So that's happening here in Australia.

Mason: 
I think that kind of stuff hitting the news a little bit more is great, but then if we start looking at upgrading towards the use of psychedelics in many fabrics of society, I think the duty of care, I like that you mentioned that 1% because the medicine is in the dose and the medicine is in the efficacy, in the style of dosing. Whether it's going to be in a hospital setting hopefully eventually, but then outside when we're looking to psychologically center ourselves, most of the time people in a proper dosage and a proper environment are going to be able to find that. But I quite regularly ... It's been awhile since I've been in that world, since I've been in the Amazon experiencing [inaudible 00:10:48] up in the hills of the Andes and so on, so forth.

Mason: 
I've heavily integrated them, but I just think ... I don't know whether I've just got that, people have the memory of me doing that, but I still quite regularly get people writing to me who have gone way too far down the rabbit hole and essentially end themselves disassociating from reality. Which I definitely felt, I wasn't excessive, but I definitely felt myself having a disassociation from reality and just essentially flying with the condor most of the time.

Molly: 
Right, but you can see the same thing in meditation and-

Mason: 
Oh, for sure.

Molly: 
Any type of spiritual pursuit-

Mason: 
Dude, when you mentioned it on stage, I don't know if you heard, I was the one that cheered. [crosstalk 00:11:36]

Molly: 
Oh my God, I [inaudible 00:11:37] that was you.

Mason: 
We know people that have got into vipassana...

Molly: 
I'm in this whole place right now where I'm really on this spiritual path and I'm experiencing some really profound spiritual experiences, but I'm also aware that I need to keep one foot in reality. I've got a life to live, I've got patients to cover. I've got a book to write. I've got goals to achieve. So I think the real dance of this modern sort of enlightenment movement is figuring out how to be in the state of enlightenment and an effective person in real life. I'm like, "That's my goal," is I'm having these breakthroughs and I'm also getting back into my email and I'm getting back into my life. I have all this work to do, and it's like I want the work that I do in my spiritual life to benefit my actual life, and I want them to be integrated.

Molly: 
This word integration keeps coming up a lot, and I think it's this concept of psychological and spiritual balance, with what's happening internally and what's happening externally. That's the way that I would describe it, and I just made that up on the spot. But there's definitely a desire for spiritual pursuits in a world that's feeling really uncertain. Frankly, everyone's turning to astrology apps because they're all so confused about religion and who to trust and which institutions to talk to and what-

Mason: 
Yeah. What should I do with my life, there's an app for that.

Molly: 
Yeah. Exactly. And should we even reproduce in a world that doesn't seem like it's going to be around in 20 to 50 years. There's a lot of real serious scary questions happening right now in reality, and I think there's a desire for ... There's kind of two types of people. There's people who are going to seek answers, and there's people who are going to be like, "Whatever. I don't know if I'm ever going to find them. I'm just going to try to live my life as it is." Whatever way is fine for you to live.

Molly: 
I dated a guy who was the latter, and I'm more of the former. I think former's first and latter's second, right?

Mason: 
Yeah. I mean that's something interesting as well because I'm really, again, I don't know why I found myself doing that 1% as you are, trying to do that duty of care without trying to come across as a stickler. So I love the ability to seek, but then this is where I think people enter into that spiritual world, and I'm going to be very general here, I do love both of these realms where you're seeking spiritual growth and possibly heading into that psychedelic space. Again, the medicine is in the dose. How much seeking you're doing verse how much are you ... Even outside of hardcore, gnarly, long term mindfulness meditation camps, outside psychedelic world, how much are you doing your chop wood, carry water every day.

Mason: 
This has been something I kind of have struggled with is having my practice somewhat daily, that solid space where I'm consistently learning to come back to my center. What is my center, coming back to a state where I can possibly be parasympathetic when I'm activated, yet my muscles are calm. This is something I'm personally working on at the moment with my friend who mentors me in movement and everything that comes with it, and really expanding that capacity to not be permeated by all these external opinions and really find a place that's tangible and palpable you can sink your teeth into making those decisions.

Mason: 
Will I have another child, you know, and feel comfortable with those decisions. Because that incessive seeking, you know going to the app, going to astrology, what everyone is doing is just trying to scrape off the top without going right down to the source. Where is this, what the fuck is this philosophy? What does it mean?

Molly: 
Right, yeah. Right. They've got to take a lot more work to do that.

Mason: 
A lot of work, and it's not Instagram-able a lot of the time if you're going that deep, and there lies the problem.

Molly: 
I mean I'm going on a meditation retreat in two weeks, and I'm basically going to meditate for five hours a day. I'm not going to have a phone or a journal, and I'm going to have to deal with all of the desires that I have to write and to think and to produce and to integrate and to analyze, and all the things that drive me on a daily basis. I have to confront those and basically be like, "Molly, you just can't. You're just going to have to sit here. This is what you're supposed to do. This is a challenge, and it's going to be probably one of the hardest challenges."

Molly: 
I'm not fully prepared for it, but I'm also the kind of person who just likes to do things that she's not fully prepared for, see what happens.

Mason: 
Yes. Oh I love it. I'm like, "Can't wait to hear about it." Before we-

Molly: 
Hopefully I don't lose my mind, but I'm pretty sure I won't have one.

Mason: 
Maybe lose it just for a little bit. That's okay.

Molly: 
Usually what happens is I end up in a blissed out state and I'm just like ... Everyone's struggling and I'm like, "Ah." But I think this might be harder. I think this might be really hard, so we'll see.

Mason: 
I do love it. I like the integrated approach, to use the I word. Again, I'll just quickly leave, because since we talked about that psychedelic community, I absolutely love, don't get me wrong, I feel ... I don't know, I can speak for myself anyway when I was deep in it. There is somewhat maybe a subtle that, you know, we found the superior healing method. So whatever you seek, we will seek it in this world with the medicines that we drink. The plants will heal us. I guess you can sometimes maybe see a bit of disdain for any other healing modality kind of come up, that it might be supplementary but it won't be the biggest thing.

Mason: 
I think something as simple as therapy can be ... In meditative work, yogic work where you start really un-rustling everything, your plant medicine work, and if it really comes up, this work where I think it's going to take time to integrate that. I think for a lot of people, I think finding a nice level therapist or some other modalities to really bring you back off that arm of development that is the beautiful teachings of the plants and come back to your center.

Molly: 
Yeah.

Mason: 
Anyway, just wanted to kind of touch on that because I feel ... Yeah, I've had increasingly recently a lot of people are honestly on a soul retrieval journey after going down the rabbit hole.

Molly: 
Yeah.

Mason: 
So this kind of is all coming into a wider breadth of work that you do.

Molly: 
Sure, yeah.

Mason: 
You're an MD. I was talking to you about how your style of work ... Well, you mentioned it's really old school.

Molly: 
Yeah.

Mason: 
It's an old school kind of doctor. So you have a select amount of patients. You have a few patients as well you said who you've taken on special cases.

Molly: 
Yeah. I mean I basically have two types of patients. I have the personalized medical research on one end. These are like the weird cases that I just get paid to figure them out and figure out why they're sick and why they haven't been fixed yet by the healthcare system. Usually it's complex chronic disease, so it's got its roots usually in a severe health breakdown that was proceeded by usually some psychological stress that really damaged their immune system.

Molly: 
Usually when someone's under a significant amount of stress and physical threat or psychological threat, if it gets to a certain level, your mitochondria get damaged to a point where they can't defend you anymore. So your immune system is downstream over your mitochondrial function. It essentially just throws off your energy production systems. It throws off your immunity, and infections get in. Then they can further damage your body.

Molly: 
So usually it's always this horrible stress, massive infection, and then they were never the same after. So now you have to sort of reverse engineer their bodies to get back into a state of balance and health. It's a lot of work, but it's like the most satisfying work to do, because you're dealing with somebody who may have been sick for years. You're like, "Okay. I'm going to fix this." Or somebody who's got something that no one's figured out. You're like, "All right, we're going to figure this out together and we're going to get you better."

Molly: 
So I love those cases, but then I also have cases of people who ... Frankly, everyone in America wants more energy, okay? So I figured ... Funnily enough I was trying to study health over the last 10 years, like what is health, how do you define it, how do you measure it. In the process of studying health, I discovered that health is about capacity, and capacity is about capacitives. Capacitives is literally making and storing a charge in your cellular membranes, in your mitochondria, that is an electrochemical gradient generated by the food you eat and the way that you live your life.

Molly: 
It literally charges your cells with energy. That capacity enables you to do work, to run your genetic functions, to express your genes, to produce proteins, to do anything else that your body needs to do, like make hormones. So I've kind of just been going back and back and back and back ... First principles, like what is health, what is energy, what is capacity, and how does that relate to our daily life and our daily function. What are the things that damage that function?

Molly: 
So that's really where my research has come into play and why I started teaching at Stanford, because they were like, "Hey, our students are some of the most talented in the world, but they're also the most stressed out. So how can we give them a course that could actually help them produce more capacity to do greater and better work?" So I had a class of about 23 people, and it ended up being 20 hours of lectures. I read in I think the last two years I read about 1200 papers. So I've been digging deep into understanding how is energy made, how is it used, how are your energy systems destroyed, and really trying to marry this Eastern ancient philosophy of Chinese medicine and Qi, and then marry that with Western science and come up with my own beliefs around what I call and what's known in the literature as health span.

Molly: 
Which is how do you extend life as long as possible without disease. To me, it's all about understanding what are the major causes of disease, what are you most likely to get, and what are the things that you can do in your daily life now to avoid these things from happening. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I test everything on myself first. So I've learned about what it means to make a lot of energy, which is essentially making money in your body, but I've also learned how to spend a lot of energy and burn yourself out.

Molly: 
So I have had multiple rounds of burnout in my life. I had a pretty close call this summer where I was really overdoing it, and I had to take a step back and say, "Oh shit. I'm not living the example right now. I'm really doing too much." Funnily enough, the biggest signal to me this summer was actually the people I was working with were not feeding my energy, they were draining my energy. The thing that people mostly don't realise about health and life is that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. So if your relationships suck, then your life is going to suck and you're going to die young. If your relationships are healthy, you're actually going to live a longer life.

Molly: 
So it's so fundamental to aging well, is like surrounding yourself with people that nourish you and doing work that makes you come alive, you know?

Mason: 
So yeah, hell yeah first of all.

Molly: 
Yeah, thanks.

Mason: 
I'm keen to dive a little bit into it. You know, well health span I like. I like that you bring that up. I mean that's something that everyone just looks at life in a block term. I don't know when I started hearing that term, maybe in the tellomere books, when that was getting really trendy. It was at the end of that term of life for the [inaudible 00:23:48] when you no longer can reproduce cells a lot of the time, along with other degenerative diseases, you enter into the death span. That's for the last however many decades of your life that the medical system can keep you alive. You're in the death span. So I like that, that's a very tangible goal, to keep yourself in that health span. So we'll get into those principles, but in terms of your work, I mean you work for like year long blocks, like a lot of-

Molly: 
Six months to a year minimum usually. It's because you need that amount of time to change someone's life. You need that amount of time to take someone around the corner, because behavior change is hard.

Mason: 
And you go to their homes and work, right?

Molly: 
Yeah. I go to them. I go to their offices. I email them every week. I talk to the client that is sickest on the phone every week. I just literally created a nine page report on the fly for a client who had like 10 questions for me. She's fairly healthy, but she just wanted some answers and she wanted to understand Ayurvedic doshas, and she wanted to understand ... I was like, "Well here, let's talk about why Ayurvedas might be useful. Let's talk about why it may not apply to a Western body, and why there's some major issues in some of the nutritional recommendations that they have. Also let's talk about how, no offense to India, but they're not doing so well in health." So if this worldview is so effective, why do I see so many sick Indians? I'm just not convinced that tons of grains and tons of dairy is the answer to health.

Mason: 
Well especially like it's not going to be raw dairy, right? It's not going to be raw fermented dairy.

Molly: 
No. We're not getting raw fermented dairy. We're not getting non GMO grains anymore. We're getting all this garbage food, so you can't always apply these ancient technologies to modern life unless you can actually have ancient traditional food preparation. And you need to soak and sprout those grains too, and people aren't doing that. So I should've mentioned that in that report, but yeah. It takes a lot of work to do. I'm not against it, and I actually think that the doshas are really valuable for fitness recommendations, because the endomorph, ectomorph, mesomorph is very similar to the ... The ectomorph is very similar to the ... I have to-

Mason: 
Kapha, Pitta, Alpha.

Molly: 
Yeah, exactly. So you can actually look at these types and you can-

Mason: 
Is it, no, not alpha, vata. Kapha, Pitta, Vata.

Molly: 
Yeah, Pitta is more like mesomorph. Kapha I believe is more like ectomorph, and endomorph is like the last one. Point is that there's body types, and there's those skinny people who have these amazing metabolisms who could literally just crush carbs and they're fine. Then there's the people who are like they even look at a carb, they gain weight, right? Those people legitimately have slower metabolisms than the person who's got the faster metabolism. Then there's people like me who are in the middle, where if I eat carbs I gain weight, if I cut the carbs I lose weight like that. So it's literally I'm lucky. If I lift weights, I get muscular. If I don't lift weights, I get lean. If I do cardio, I get lean.

Molly: 
So it's all about this balancing of your energy and your metabolism with these patterns that we're seeing with people, that can change by the way, depending on your genetics and your location where you're living in and what you're eating. But anyway, so yeah. So there you go.

Mason: 
Well I like that you're working ... So you're obviously working, because you've got executives and tech people and kind of high flying CEO kind of clients as well, so it's a nice balance. But obviously they're going to be dealing some of the time with something debilitating. But as well, like if they're not going to-

Molly: 
Oh yeah, sometimes they just want to be really healthy. So I was writing this book called The Hour Between the Dog and Wolf. It's about the biology of trading, and I am working with a hedge fund founder who is kind of like a character off of Billions, except for a lot nicer. So he was having a bad year, and when you lose, you have high cortisol levels and you're in a fear based state and your testosterone levels tank.

Molly: 
When you win, your testosterone levels go up and it's like, "Boom." So there's this effect on your body and your biology that can literally change your performance, and your performance can change your biology. So I was trying to get this guy back into a state of high testosterone. So I was like, "Look. Your testosterone sucks. You've had a bad year. We want to get you back into a place where you're winning again."

Molly: 
So I got him to start weight lifting. I got him on a different type of dietary style. I got him to start doing certain things with his supplements, and low and behold, his testosterone doubled and he's in a much better place right now. So it's cool when you can teach a person about what's going on inside their body, give them certain behaviors to do, have them implement those behaviors, see the labs change, and then the person's like, "Oh my God. This is fucking awesome." Now this [inaudible 00:28:45]

Mason: 
So with the initial testing, because I think it's like a lot of people ... As we talked about before, I like that you're offering somewhat of a bridge, but a legitimate bridge. Not just like a, "I'm a health coach," bridge-

Molly: 
I'm a data driven ... I mean I am looking at the body as a very complex machine that needs multiple ways of attacking different problems and balancing different energies. Some of the energies by the way are not always physical. Sometimes this stuff is spiritual, and I have a questionnaire to identify where in your health do you have the biggest problems. Sometimes a person's health is actually, it's a spiritual problem. They really have had some sort of awful life event that has just set them on a course of really bad luck and bad experiences, and they need to focus on that and not on biology. But a lot of what I do and what my bread and butter is is biological health optimization.

Molly: 
So looking at the body from a molecular perspective and saying, "Okay. This is your lipid panel. This is what your LDL particle numbers look like. This is what your diet looks like and this is why your diet has changed these numbers. This is what your carbohydrate metabolism looks like. This is what your amino acid metabolism looks like. This is why you have an imbalance in amino acids. This is why you need this one specifically versus that one. This is why your cortisol levels are off and you're completely exhausted and you need some Jing herbs to revitalize yourself because you're literally burned out."

Molly: 
Or maybe a person needs detoxification because they've gotten super high mercury levels from eating way too much sushi, which was me last year in Japan. Then sometimes I'm looking at the microbiome and saying, "Okay, we need to get you on some personalized probiotics because your microbiome is totally imbalanced and we need to get you back to a better state. If you don't get into a better state, you're gonna develop inflammatory bowel disease because you have early markers of that." So it's a lot about prediction.

Molly: 
This concept of P4 medicine, which I really like, that Leroy Hood coined, and it's personalized-

Mason: 
What's this called? P-

Molly: 
P4. Personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory. I really like it because it's a framework of thinking about medicine before things become full blown disease. Full blown disease is hard to reverse. I mean you are dealing with pathology on a molecular level that is like a broken building. It's a lot harder to fix that than a building that's got a water main leak that you're like, "Oh shit. We got to fix that water main leak, but if we fix it it's not going to completely collapse." Or like a building that has, like you're in the kitchen and there's a grease fire. You got to put that out now, because if you don't that's going to set this whole thing on fire.

Molly: 
It's really about ... Or maybe the building just has some ice and you're like, "Okay look, this building needs some upkeep. It needs some better cleaning." Just go fast, fast more often. Clean out the garbage and you won't have all this crap growing that shouldn't be growing. So I really look at the body as architecture, and I look at the architecture as like are you building your body out of marble and really good quality steel or crappy materials that are going to break down once a big storm hits. It's about looking at the parallels between nature and your own physiology, because you are a microcosm. You are in yourself a living, breathing organism that is basically changing constantly.

Molly: 
If you're not doing regular tuneups, you're not going to know when things are not working out well. So I did my own labs this summer because it'd been about six months since I'd done them. I was like, "Ah shit, my microbiome has been definitely affected by my stress levels and my diet. I need to increase my protein. I need to decrease my saturated fat. I need to change my probiotic regimen and I need to detox." So I started doing that about a month ago, and I'm already feeling like holy shit, so much better in one month. It's astonishing how just knowing what to fix and going after those areas is so much more effective than throwing darts at a wall and hoping something sticks.

Mason: 
Well I like that you're providing that service that's that bridge between you taking it on yourself and understanding the patterns of your body and being able to affect it, and basically get on top of little symptomatic responses and grease fires that come up. But the other side of that is where most people are trying to bridge between, is like the practitioner office, whether it's a naturopathic office or even possibly with a GP. Is MD just like, or is it GP? I don't know if you have GPs.

Molly: 
General practitioner. I'm a general practitioner.

Mason: 
Oh you are? Okay.

Molly: 
I'm the most general of practitioners, because I literally do so many things. I'm super broad.

Mason: 
Yeah. I think GP is that 15 minute stint in the office [crosstalk 00:33:44]

Molly: 
A primary doctor for the most part, but also anybody who's not board certified in one area is a GP for the most part. So I'm not a primary doctor. I'm not the doctor you call when you've got the flu. I am the doctor that you deal with when you want to improve your health or dig real deep into why you are so sick.

Mason: 
Well that is something I think a lot of people, yeah, you're providing that ... The amount of data that you go into, that bridge to go, "Right, you don't want to end up in any of these clinics or offices. You want to be taking complete understanding and responsibility for the patterns of your health." So you take people essentially through that program, and then when they come out the other side, from the sounds of it, they're incredibly informed about the way their body works. So I think-

Molly: 
Yeah. It's a lot of education.

Mason: 
Yeah. So you're using a lot of testing, which I really like. I think perhaps people listening ... I think it's something that is quite available. I think DNA testing, microbiome, and you're doing hormone panels, is that right?

Molly: 
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Hormone panels, microbiome testing, nutritional testing is probably the most valuable thing I do is literally just testing the body for vitamins and minerals and neurotransmitters and carbohydrate metabolism, fat metabolism, markers of dysbiosis, markers of oxidative stress. Like looking under the hood. Then just basic labs, like organ system function, anemia, hormones via blood and urine, and the whole hormone cascade. Then looking at certain specialty labs if necessary, like immune system function. What else am I doing?

Molly: 
I do some panels of infectious agents, just because viral infections are pretty common and yet overlooked by a lot of doctors. They just did not teach us to test for viruses when we were in medical school, even though they're super common.

Mason: 
Well I think that body of work is coming up in the literature. It's like there's been a lot on stealth infections recently.

Molly: 
Oh yeah.

Mason: 
The amount of times that it is going to be a stealth viral infection-

Molly: 
Oh yeah, or intracellular bacteria. Like syphilis, Lyme Disease, mycoplasma, those are nasty.

Mason: 
Well and I think what's happening a lot of the time for people who ... I was speaking to a practitioner over here, and she kind of solidified the idea that you start getting better on one front and you start feeling fantastic because you've gone after perhaps the spirochetes involved in Lyme, but then you've had a viral infection that's been sitting there dormant waiting for the health of a cell to get to a particular point that it can use it to reproduce its agenda. Then all of a sudden you start going down again. So that's for a lot of-

Molly: 
These things are nasty. You got to get their whole life cycle. You've got to look at the life cycle and be like, "Okay, how can I interrupt this? How can I interrupt this?" That's why antivirals concurrently with Lymes treatments are really important, because as your body starts activating and your genes start getting expressed, those viruses get into your genes. They get into your own genetic code, those assholes.

Mason: 
Yeah. Yeah, they are. They're opportunistic.

Molly: 
They're so smart.

Mason: 
That's why I think even with Lyme, it's like Astragalus, Japanese knotweed, Cat's Claw, that's why they're constantly being thrown out there. They have that cross section where they can be such effective antivirals. Even just having-

Molly: 
That's amazing.

Mason: 
It's just like even having that in your lifestyle, speaking of getting to understanding symptoms and understanding-

Molly: 
What are those called? Which ones did you mention?

Mason: 
Astragalus or astragalus.

Molly: 
Yeah, astragalus and-

Mason: 
And Cat's Claw.

Molly: 
Cat's Claw. I didn't realise Cat's Claw was an antiviral, but I think that makes sense.

Mason: 
Yeah, big time. I mean you can think like especially in the Amazon, if you're going to need an antifungal in your diet because you're going to have fungus bringing you down. So that's the Pau D'Arco. Then you combine that with the amount of viral activity that's going on there within that sopping wet jungle, that's where the Cat's Claw is probably ... It's one of the primary medicines if you get in there, especially one of the primary clinical medicines, but also for me it's one of the primary preventative medicines that I just kind of keep on rotation.

Molly: 
Amazing.

Mason: 
It's like I had to take it off SuperFeast, and this was-

Molly: 
Why?

Mason: 
It's just really hard to get a good source at the moment. Yeah, the quality's just getting a bit crap. I've now found someone that's working with some small tribes who are basically doing Cat's Claw in that Di Dao (Di Tao) style. That's how we source herbs, Dì Dào (地道). It just means getting it from their spiritual homeland and crafting it in a way that leaves the environment better than when you found it, and also just like-

Molly: 
How do you pronounce that? What is that thing you said?

Mason: 
D-I, Di.

Molly: 
D-I.

Mason: 
And then Tao is T-A-O.

Molly: 
Tao.

Mason: 
Yeah, Dì Dào (地道).

Molly: 
Oh wow. That is the greatest thing.

Mason: 
Well I mean it's just a sourcing philosophy, I mean just being able to get the wild thing and procure it yourself, that's like if you're doing that yourself then that's essentially the most ... That's Dì Dào (地道) to the absolute extreme. You don't need to label it Dì Dào (地道), that's just you getting your herbs. But in trying to describe to people how, like say we're sourcing Chinese tonic herbs, Dì Dào (地道) it's kind of more of this living and breathing sourcing philosophy that's ever moving. It's not like organic is static. You tick boxes and then you can put a stamp on.

Mason: 
Dì Dào (地道), you're in constantly trying to get the growing or sourcing, whether it's foraging wild or growing it in a farm, closer to its original state. You're ensuring that you're not using irrigation, definitely not using anything like a pesticide or external soils or anything like that. But has a lot to do with making sure that you're in regions, whether they're mountainous or valleys or whatever it is, to atmospherically just make sure, and temperature wise to make sure that you're going to get a herb that has the most punch. Basically ensure that the herb has the Jing, Qi, or Shen within it. Then you constantly go down to make sure that you have the full spectrum extraction of the herb that just keeps it all together.

Molly: 
Amazing.

Mason: 
That's kind of like Dì Dào (地道). So yeah, hopefully we'll have a Cat's Claw soon, because we found someone basically doing it in that style over in Ecuador, which is like [crosstalk 00:40:29]

Molly: 
I mean, so I just got into Chinese herbs a couple years ago because I went to Erewhon Market in LA, and I was having a really exhausted week. I was just so tired, and I saw these elixirs. They were selling them for like $16.00, and I was like, "All right, well I'm in town. It's a fun thing to buy, an elixir from Erewhon, so we're just going to-

Mason: 
It's the funnest way to break the bank when you're in LA.

Molly: 
It's so great. You just drop $100 easy, like no problem. All the prepared stuff they make, that's the best by the way. They bake the best kale chips in the world. But the point is I had this elixir, and I remember just being revived, like totally revived. I was just like, "This is absolutely astonishing how good I feel right now." So I ended up buying all the separate ingredients of this elixir because I was just like, "I'm just going to have to make this regularly to get my Jing back." It was all about Jing herbs. I remember just feeling like, "This is the answer." Like as somebody who has the tendency to ... When I make energy, I just want to go and spend it. I mean my sister said, "Molly, if you're not working, you're partying." I don't party that hard anymore, but I have had a tendency to just burn the candle on both ends because I really enjoy life and I really want to feel alive.

Molly: 
I try to simmer down a little bit, but then I end up going back and doing stuff. But man these Jing herbs, it just revived me. I remember thinking, "This is so incredible that I just discovered this whole new world of medicine." There's apparently 50 Chinese herbs that are like the traditional-

Mason: 
The tonics.

Molly: 
Yeah.

Mason: 
A few more but there's like [crosstalk 00:42:09] It depends. There's a few official stories and things people have picked up and run with. Tonic herbalism and superior herbalism, it's wider than just like, "These are the top 50." It's a system. There are herbs which are considered superior that are there to basically ... That's about nourishing life, but some of them aren't the absolute top. Some of them are just somewhat supporting and bolstering to those and make it possible in that tonic herbal system. But basically, yeah. [crosstalk 00:42:41] Yeah, coming from that world of like Truth Calkins put together that Erewhon tonic bar. He worked with Ron Teeguarden. So yeah, that's like I definitely know that well.

Molly: 
Yeah. But I mean the hard part was, is actually I couldn't get ... For this tonic I couldn't get deer antler velvet. I was just like ... This is how I found out about your company, as I was like, "I can't get any deer antler velvet. There's literally no one in the world that I can get this from." Then I was like, "SuperFeast." I remember when a friend of mine from Byron Bay told me about your company. So I went online and I bought it and had it shipped. I was just like, "What is this magic?" I don't know the shelf life of it. Do you know the shelf life of it? Is it pretty decent?

Mason: 
Two years.

Molly: 
Okay, cool. I can still use it then. But yeah, it was this magical ingredient that I wanted to find. Then I saw you guys at the conference and I was just like, "Oh my God. His mushrooms are here for free. There was this whole room of free swag." I was just like, "Mason's Mushrooms are free? Like how come he is giving these away. This is so valuable. This is the most valuable thing in this room." I took like three bottles.

Mason: 
Yeah, good. I was hoping you would. I'm glad you got the deer antler.

Molly: 
I have a story for you.

Mason: 
Oh yeah?

Molly: 
I had a girlfriend who had not had her period in like a year because her husband is dealing with cancer and she was in a really serious stress state. She started taking your mushrooms and she got her period in a month.

Mason: 
So good. I love those stories. It almost brings a tear to your eye.

Molly: 
I know.

Mason: 
Because when you understand the repercussions of that that actually means-

Molly: 
Yeah. I was just like, "She needs adaptogens. She's in way too much stress. She's not in a state where her body can reproduce and she needs to get into a state of calm again." Honestly I saw her in a few weeks after she started the supplements I gave her, and she was like a totally different looking person. It was amazing. People don't realise that the stressed state, the body will always prioritize survival over reproduction. So there's a lot of women complaining of not being able to reproduce and having all sorts of hormonal dysfunctions, and you ask them about their lives and they're like, "Well I'm not stressed." It's like everyone is so complicit with the level of stress that we have that no one believes they're stressed anymore.

Mason: 
Yeah, that's it.

Molly: 
It's like, "I'm super high stress." Even I was in the state of denial even six months ago. Because I was doing a startup, I was working as a doctor and I was teaching at Stanford, and I was just like, "Yeah I'm not going to lower my stress anytime soon because this is what I do. I'm a top performer." There was a point where the world, the universe, my body was just like, "Oh just wait. Just wait. Give yourself a couple more months of this." I got around to the summer and I remember looking in the mirror being like, "You have exhausted yourself. You look exhausted, and it's time for you to take a step back and start recalibrating this stuff you're doing because you just performed a lot, but you just ran a marathon. You need to chill."

Mason: 
Yeah. You can never stop recalibrating and reading those patterns man.

Molly: 
You have to keep listening and listening.

Mason: 
There's so much clinically about stealth infections, stealth inflammation. Stealth stress isn't something, and you exactly said it, and I kind of sometimes just ... There's so much going on and I'll just run at a million miles an hour, and I know I have had the capacity to do that in the past, and especially when I've had my practices in place that I've been able to maintain that level, and at the moment ... I'm really reevaluating at the moment, especially I'm at the back of three weeks just with Aiya while Tahns is over studying in the States. Just with that, little things just get lost within the personal practice, and yet I don't take ... I just allow them to be eliminated and just, as you did as well, just a million miles an hour and all your projects and everything, and bit by bit that stealth stress starts to creep in. You go, "You know what? I'm okay. I'm actually not that bad."

Mason: 
Then the accumulation that starts to occur within your nervous system, within the endocrine system, and then if you have a high standard, which is what I like about your work in teaching this, understanding that optimal general high standard that you have for yourself, and that reading these subtle symptoms and then knowing that you have the ability to utterly change the flow of your lifestyle, that's where it lies in the begining.

Molly: 
This is the power of, and this is really the whole aim, is recognizing that there is no magical day where you're going to be optimally healthy. There's this constant rhythm of life which is always changing, and there's going to be times where you're going to be pushing it hard, and there's going to be times where you have to recover. If you don't, it's like athletes. I told everyone, "Look everyone, I'm on an off season right now." My off season involves writing a book proposal, traveling, speaking abroad, running my practice, but frankly, and I'm going to incorporate a company and get it started, but I'm not going to be overextending myself during this two month period.

Molly: 
This is about restoration. This is about recalibration. This is about reconnection with my community and my family, but it's not about always being go, go, go, go, go. It's about recognizing everybody can take a break. You can take a week long vacation once a quarter. You can take a day off once a week. You have to give yourself time to recover. That is the natural style of life. Life is not constantly always stormy. There's times of calm and there's times of stress, and if you don't follow those patterns and you're always in the storm, then how are you ever going to recover?

Molly: 
You're going to use up all your resources. This is really the core of health. It's about recognizing that you're going to build capacity and you're going to spend it. You're going to build it and you're going to spend it. It's like having money in the bank. But your major goal should always be, "How am I making compounding interest decisions that lead to better and bigger capacity so I can handle more and so I can actually do more without breaking?" This is how you level up in your life. It's like you don't push yourself and waste your energy completely, you reserve some of it in the back and you invest that energy in things that are going to build you up. Those adaptogens, the food ... They're not cheap, but they're worth investing in.

Molly: 
The food you eat, like I spend double what most people spend on food, and I also fast more often than most people do, so I probably spend about the same. But I'm doing these practices to build my capacity, and I'm doing these things that I know are going to lead to better health long term. So that's really the main message of what I'm trying to teach people. It's really about what is the minimum number of healthy things you can do to optimize your health so that you have this constant state of, "I'm still in the process of moving in the right direction of health," even though you're not always going to be at the highest performance state.

Mason: 
I completely agree. I always, again, whenever I talk about this ... It's absolutely true, and it doesn't matter how many times people hear this simple message, and I feel like you've put it quite a bit differently. But I always, I hear within myself the not possible-ness. I've worked with a lot of mums especially over the years, and you're feeling that's like ... If anyone's feeling that, it's not just mums of course, it's everyone, but that bogged down. For me it was a young man wanting to not grow a business but go and create the best educational resource.

Mason: 
I realised for me what was making it not possible, which was I feel like most people needed to kind of have on the side as an acknowledgement, when they hear this ability that you need to be able to maybe take a day off, do these kinds of things to keep you at optimal, is that you really need to go in and do some work to see where your societal or family programming has really put in some values that aren't actually yours. Because that's where, like the moment me and Tahns really realised that just, or for myself as well, I was just set to maximum velocity. Just in the business for example, I'm just like, "It's not possible to just slow down." It's just like there's so many things to do. It's just like, "Well how about we just don't do them as fast."

Mason: 
It's like with expanding to America, this is ... Tahns is like the GM of the company. She's copping that burden essentially if we go really quick, and for us to get to the point with a bunch of other decisions, we've over the last years realised, "Why are we trying to go so fast? We're not compromising our sourcing or anything like that, but why don't we just slow the fuck down? Why don't we just learn the real why of why we actually want to do these things?" I immediately just realised that that programming from the current entrepreneurial scene that I'd decided to take on myself, and it's-

Molly: 
Totally. It is. And everyone's miserable and they act like, "Oh look at me on my Instagram how fucking awesome my life is." Everyone's so unhappy underneath it all. You're like, "Actually the people I want to spend my time with are those entrepreneurs that are content, those entrepreneurs that are saying 'I do this because I love the work,' those entrepreneurs who basically inspire me to continue to grow in every direction and not be ..." The thing that really sucks about the entrepreneurship sort of mentality is that there's a lot of people who are just dopamine and novelty driven. So there's a sense of like it's never enough, and if you let that permeate your life of it's never enough, then you'll never be happy with your partner. You'll never be happy with any company you've built. You'll never be happy with your cofounder, and you'll always find a reason to find something wrong with your reality.

Molly: 
Frankly, no matter how big of a success you can have, you'll never be happy with that level of success either. So like when I finished teaching at Stanford this year, I thought, "Okay. The next obvious thing I should do is just found a tech company, because that's what you do in the Valley. You just found tech companies." I immediately-

Mason: 
That's so wild to me.

Molly: 
Oh totally, right? I was like, "Okay universe, I need this type of cofounder. Give it to me. I need literally someone to do this and this for me," and the next couple days I found these guys. They actually contacted me and they were like, "Hey we're looking for a doctor like you to work with." I'm like, "Well funny, I'm looking for co founders like you." You've got to be really careful with how you ask for things, because you may get them, and then when you get them you may not actually like them. You can end up ... I just think that there's this super fast mentality of everything has to go so fast, everything has to be so so quickly found. A lot of things in life take slow and tender caring and nurturing to build.

Molly: 
There is this desire I have of building something slowly and methodically, carefully, and not being chained to venture capital money, which I think is part of the reason why everything is so ... People think that they have to grow so fast, and they're so unhappy. There's frankly an unhappy relationship with venture capital. But at the same time, I think there's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, so I'm not telling people not to do it, but I think the thing that I've learned from watching people is seeing who's doing it right and then who's maybe not doing it so right. Maybe who's doing it in a way that just isn't actually bringing them life satisfaction, you know?

Mason: 
Yeah. I like to think of it like who's doing it unique, because of course everyone's going to be [inaudible 00:54:48]

Molly: 
I love that, because I mean there's definitely enough people doing it in a way that's like, "Drain your energy. Drain your capacity. You'll deal with it when you exit." There's a lot of that.

Mason: 
I love it. Hey, since I've got a bunch of other things I want to talk about, but I know we're probably like-

Molly: 
Part two?

Mason: 
Yeah, maybe like ... We'll do a part two for sure. I've never done like this before, but how about like a fire found? Is that what they're called?

Molly: 
Oh yeah, sure.

Mason: 
All right. So everyone just know that these are huge topics and probably maybe on another podcast we'll get a little bit further into it, but I just want to get fire round recommendations and takes on first bone and teeth health.

Molly: 
Oh yeah, okay. Your bone and teeth health has everything to do with your diet, so if your diet is high in sugar, you're going to decay your mouth because you're going to grow the wrong bacteria in your oral microbiome and they're going to produce acid. That acid's going to break down the enamel, and that's how you're going to get cavities. So cut the sugar out of your diet. If someone hasn't told you to stop drinking soda by now, give me a fucking break. I'm sorry for cussing, but soda does not belong in the American diet or the Australian diet or any diet of human anywhere in the world, period, end of story. Okay, off that rant.

Molly: 
Minerals are really important. You get them from usually high quality sources of water. You get them from fruits and vegetables. You get them from meats. You get them from healthy foods. You need minerals. Shilajit's a cool source of minerals that I started taking, just be careful with the dose because if you have too much Shilajit you will get way too energized. [crosstalk 00:56:23]

Mason: 
Yeah, I mean it's a weird industry as well. It's getting pretty unsustainable that one as well. There's a couple of good ones, I think like Omica. But yeah.

Molly: 
Does Shilajit go bad, because I feel like it looks like it never goes bad like honey.

Mason: 
Yeah. I mean it's kind of like that. If you have the tar, then it's got like a long shelf life.

Molly: 
I don't think it goes bad. I feel like it's got to have years. Okay, other teeth things. People don't floss. Flossing is the key to good teeth. If you don't floss your teeth, you're going to have basically a large amount of surface area that's never been touched. So that's like not brushing your teeth. That's gross, so gross. I love oral health. I could talk about it for hours, but the quality of your diet will determine the quality of your teeth.

Mason: 
I love it. I saw on your Instagram that you're just making up a nice juicy broth for yourself, always going to help as well.

Molly: 
Yeah. Broth is so good because you need those minerals from the bones.

Mason: 
Well let's look really quickly, let's just like ... I wanted to talk about this a little bit more, but one of the things I really love about your, especially your Instagram, is your focus on food preparation. I assume it's something that you focus a lot in the work that you do.

Molly: 
Yeah. Food is everything, food prep. I mean sourcing, I source like a chef because chefs know where good food is made and sourced. So people don't understand that there's markets everywhere. Go to the market, get your best food, and then keep your plants alive. Plants want to live. Certain plants want to live outside the fridge, certain plants want to live in the fridge. Most plants that have stalks want to be in water, so you should put them into water and then put them in the fridge, because they want to stay alive.

Molly: 
Other plants like leaves want to be in like a greenhouse, so you put them in a bag with a piece of paper towel, and it'll keep them alive in a way that won't let them die. Make some sprouts. Sprout your own sprouts. They're super easy to do. Ferment your own foods.

Mason: 
Just get in there, yeah.

Molly: 
Just get into your community and get into local eating. Local produce is the highest quality nutrient value for your buck, and eat organic. Frankly it's just better for you. It doesn't have as many pesticides. But if you can't eat organic, still eat fruits and vegetables because it's still better for you than not. Just avoid the dirty dozen in America. Then with meat it's all about the sourcing. It's all about the quality. Grass fed, pasture raised, grass finished. Do not eat grain finished meat. Wild fish, know your fishmonger. Talk about where the fish comes from.

Molly: 
Choose sustainable fishes and don't over consume. We can all fast more. We don't need to eat every day, turns out. Humans don't have to eat every day. You can cut your grocery bill just by not eating as much. Nuts and seeds generally like to be soaked and sprouted, just be aware that you're going to get a lot of anti-nutrients. I overdo the nuts and seeds. This is a known problem. If somebody out there wants to give me advice on how to stop doing this, I don't know how ... I don't have the answer because it's my biggest issue right now and I still consume lots of nuts and seeds, and my Omega 6s are too high because of that, so that's a problem.

Mason: 
A lot of almonds in there?

Molly: 
Too many almonds.

Mason: 
Almonds, I think it's a thousand to one ratio of Omega 6s to 3s.

Molly: 
All right, I'm just going to cut out almonds. I'm going to cut out the almonds. That's the key is the almonds.

Mason: 
Yeah, just try the almonds and then see how you go. I love it. I mean I hit that message every time. Here everyone's integrating, like listening to the SuperFeast podcast, a lot of people are integrating tonic herbs into their kitchen. But what I like is for them to ... It needs somewhere to land within the kitchen. It needs a real culture. Just on, like crossing over to even psychedelics and Michael Pollan. His later book kind of rocked the world to change your mind, but he's a food journalist. I think we spoke about him. Are you a fan of his work?

Molly: 
I know him. Yeah, he's awesome.

Mason: 
You know him?

Molly: 
Yeah.

Mason: 
He's the legend, right? He's such a-

Molly: 
He's a legend.

Mason: 
After everything that he's researched, his whole thing comes down to just prepare your own food and know where it comes from.

Molly: 
And eat mostly plants and a little bit of meat if you want some meat.

Mason: 
But yeah, eat real food. Not too much, mostly plants. Right? I think that's it, unless ... Yeah, I mean I know there's a lot of contention in the diet scene no matter what, but that personal food preparation you can never come away from it.

Molly: 
The key is learning these basic techniques, like basic techniques. Get a blender, blending ... Everyone likes baby food, I don't care what you say. Purees make everything delicious. Broth plus vegetables equals magic. Just make baby food, just make it. You'll love it, I promise you. Just make purees.

Mason: 
I got to use my blender for something but hot chocolates one of these days.

Molly: 
Right? Make your own cacao. Make your own ... I don't know, just make your own stuff. It's not hard to make. Just learn to use a blender, learn to boil water, learn to roast, learn to saute. These are basic techniques.

Mason: 
Learn to slow cook.

Molly: 
Slow cooker. Oh yeah, slow cooker's got to be the easiest thing in the world.

Mason: 
Got to be the easiest thing.

Molly: 
Honestly just follow a recipe. Once a week learn a new recipe. Just teach yourself. Then make salads. Salads are dumb, I mean you just got to chop shit and make a dressing.

Mason: 
I love it. Look, final question before we bring this home. If people are going to start getting to understanding the patterns of their body, the symptoms of their body, I know you work with a lot beyond that. You look at emotional reactivity. There's a lot here for people when taking sovereign control of their own health to get on top of.

Molly: 
Yes, sovereign control of your health.

Mason: 
We've talked about the testing which people can go and find a practitioner. I know I'm kind of like back ... Need to kind of get on top of that, it's been a while since-

Molly: 
Try to find Genova Diagnostics. They're my favorite company. They're a global company. They're easier to find in England. They may be in Australia, but you-

Mason: 
How do you spell it, Genoa?

Molly: 
G-E-N-O-V-A. Genova.

Mason: 
Oh, Genova.

Molly: 
They offer a great stool study. They offer a great nutritional analysis. They offer methylation panels. They offer hormone panels. You name it, they offer it. If you want to analyze your health, they are not cheap, but they are worth every penny.

Mason: 
Okay, cool.

Molly: 
Frankly, you know what? The thing about your body is more people put more money into their cars than they do into their health. So spend more money on your health and your car. Sell your car and invest in your health. You don't need it.

Mason: 
I love it. Well, and speaking of that final thing in terms of investing in your health, you've got kind of like ... Your glucose monitoring is what came up when we were chatting in Arizona. It's like one of the key things that you do to allow someone to get in real in control of their health-

Molly: 
Totally.

Mason: 
Okay, so I asked you for the name. [crosstalk 01:03:25]

Molly: 
Abbott Freestyle Libre.

Mason: 
How was it?

Molly: 
A-B-B-O-T-T F-R-E-E-S-T-Y-L-E L-I-B-R-E, Abbott Freestyle Libre. It's the cheapest one you can find, mostly over the counter outside of America. It's a prescription in America, but the great thing about this is that you can see your patterns. The biggest thing you want to see is Where's my fasting glucose in the morning and where is my post meal glucose going. If you're spiking above 110, 120, 140, you're insulin resistant, period. You just are. Or your diet sucks and you're eating too much sugar and too many refined carbs. So your goal should be to cut those things out and up the fiber, up the protein, up the fat. Be careful with the kinds of fats and fibers and proteins.

Molly: 
I'm actually in a interesting place right now where my labs are telling me that even though I really like ketosis, I've got too much saturated fat and I've got too much Omega 6. What does that leave? That pretty much leaves Omega 3s. Basically my labs are telling me that I should probably shift into more fasting and more vegetables and lean meats and some carbs, right? Your labs can tell you what you need, but you got to check. So get an Omega 3, Omega 6 panel. Get your lipids checked, your LDLs checked. If your LDLs even hover above 200, just cut back on saturated fat. You should drop that.

Mason: 
I think as you said, I think that's kind of coming out in the wash at the moment is, again, the medicines ... The difference between a medicine and a poison is going to be the dose. It's the same in ketosis. I think what's going to come out soon with the microbiome testing ... My friend who's on the podcast quite a lot, Dan Sipple, talks a lot about with that excessive fat consumption that you see most of the time in ketosis, you see particular off gassing and the particular overgrowth of bacteria, especially in the small intestine.

Molly: 
Yeah. That happened to me.

Mason: 
That happened to you? Yeah.

Molly: 
That happened to me, yeah.

Mason: 
I think we all go extreme.

Molly: 
You can get into ketosis with fasting, so it's like just fast more. [crosstalk 01:05:32]

Mason: 
That's it. That's like water fasting, Stephen Harrod Buhner's got a really great book about the process of ketosis, especially through-

Molly: 
What's his book?

Mason: 
I think it's just called-

Molly: 
What's the name?

Mason: 
Stephen Harrod, H-A-R-R-O-D, Buhner, B-U-H-N-E-R.

Molly: 
Yeah, got you.

Mason: 
The Transformational Art of Fasting, or Fasting for Transformation or something like that. It's one of the better ones. He's just such a beautiful earth poet.

Molly: 
Cool. I'm totally going to read his book.

Mason: 
But he dives pretty deep into the data as well. I've never seen anyone been able to hold those too. His other books are great as well. It's worth going into a deep dive into his [inaudible 01:06:18] I love it. All right, well I think we've kind of scratched the surface. Next time we can maybe dive into some more of the intricacies of what you'd like to particularly see in someone and particular ways to make sure you can really measure your optimal output factors. I don't know if that's the right word there, but-

Molly: 
Sure, sure. Yeah.

Mason: 
But I think there's a lot to do. I think there's a lot to talk about. But hey, best place I think I really do recommend everyone go and follow you on Instagram, because it's always inspiring. Can I like [crosstalk 01:06:52]

Molly: 
Oh yes, drmolly.co.

Mason: 
Drmolly.co, and then websites?

Molly: 
By the way, it's spelled D-R-M-O-L-L-Y.C-O. Same website, that's the name. So you can contact me through either of those channels, and then LinkedIn, Molly Maloof, MD. Twitter, MollyMaloofMD. I just started using Twitter again because everyone else seems to be doing it, but whatever. It's just a thing.

Mason: 
I don't know if it's existent here in Australia. Still I don't know anyone that uses it, but America, you froth on it.

Molly: 
Some countries it's everywhere. Like Japan really likes it.

Mason: 
Really? Okay. Well maybe we'll get there eventually. Hey, this has been really, really rad.

Molly: 
Totally.

Mason: 
What are you up to? You got your meditation thing coming up, anything else on the horizon?

Molly: 
I'm going to LA to hang out, and then I'm going to go ... What I'm really going to do is I'm going to finish my taxes. I'm going to finish my ... I've got a bunch of meetings tomorrow. I'm going to finish my book proposal, well my book vision, next week. Then I'm going to finish all my logistics for a bunch of travel I've got coming up. I'm going to Bahamas to speak. I'm going to Finland to speak. I'm going to Palo Alto to speak, and I'm going to Seattle in the next two months. So there's going to be a lot of speaking.

Mason: 
Make sure you get that quality rest. Don't allow any of that stealth stress to seep in.

Molly: 
I sleep eight hours a night and it is such good quality. I dream every night.

Mason: 
Oh yeah, I love it. Well, happy dreaming.

Molly: 
Thanks.

Mason: 
See you next time.

Molly: 
All right, bye hun.