#138 Why You're NOT Having the Best Sex of Your Life (And How to Fix It) | Dr. Molly

0 (0s): I struggle with finding porn that reflects the kind of sex that I want to see, which is 1 (7s): A lot of guys are scared of that region. Yeah. Like they're, it's so unknown. Like, how's it gonna behave? What's it gonna smell like? You 0 (14s): Know what? I accidentally healed my sexual dysfunction with drugs and I feel like I could help other women do that. These drugs can make people fall in love. These drugs can make people bonded to each other. These drugs can turn you on and make you sexual. 1 (28s): There's probably a lot of shitty therapists that take advantage of patients already. 0 (32s): I've already heard of this. Penetration has not been properly taught to us, so we learn about it through porn. 1 (36s): Most men want the woman to climax. They really wanna get you there. Like 0 (40s): A lot of people use drugs during sex for a reason because they're struggling with dropping their shame and struggling with being confident. The question is, is how do we actually get to a place where you don't need the drugs? Right. I did a focus group with a bunch of gay guys where I was like, well, what turns you guys on? Like, what's the most, what's the biggest turn on for you? And they were like, what turns us on is, 1 (1m 2s): Well, Dr Molly, thank you for coming on the podcast. I'm so excited. We just met, but I already wanna get to know you so much and all of the work that you're, that you're doing. So thank you so much for giving me your time today. Oh my God, 0 (1m 14s): It's an honor to be here. I'm so impressed by your podcast. Thank you. And I'm so excited to talk to your audience. 1 (1m 19s): Okay. So where do we even start? Because you are a woman that wears many hats and has many specialties. Yeah. So I'm gonna like let you introduce 0 (1m 28s): Yourself. Explain like who I 1 (1m 29s): Am and what I do exactly. Yeah. And normally I don't do that 'cause it's like no one wants to listen to that, but it's so complex. So we need to roadmap it a little bit. 0 (1m 36s): I mean, I'm basically a pretty serious polymath auto diac, if you know what that means. I'm, I'm, I'm like a Renaissance woman, I guess you would say. I am a medical doctor by training, but I left mainstream medicine and I started my own medical practice about a decade ago. 'cause I was really interested in how to optimize health and not just fixed sickness. And I did actually start working with clients as like a private physician doing like investigative medicine. I was doing personalized medical research. And then the biohacking movement really started blowing up. And I started working with startups about a decade ago as well. And I've worked with over 50 companies in the personalized health technology space, biotech, digital health supplements, wearables, food, you name it. And so I had a really amazing ride. I wrote the book called The Spark Factor. 0 (2m 18s): I sort of built my practice around health span medicine and I, I actually designed a course on health span, how to live better longer and extend your lifespan through, through this, the University of Stanford. So I taught at Stanford for three years. That was really informative. That actually really informed my book. But when I was teaching at Stanford, you know, I'd sent basically the last decade on metabolic health and insulin resistance. And everyone's listening to all these, like influencers talk about how our food system is poisoning us and how, you know, insulin resistance is driving cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and dementia. And everyone's talking about this. I was working in that for a decade trying to convince people that like everyone should put blood sugar monitors on their arms. So I was one of the first doctors to use continuous glucose monitors in clinical practice for not just sick people, but healthy people. 0 (3m 2s): And now it's actually the first year we're gonna be seeing CGMs available for everyone through over the counter Walgreens and CVS. But when I was teaching at Stanford, the thing that really hit me in my course, the thing that I'd been missing in my practice was fundamentally an understanding of human relationships and health. And I had no idea how big of an elephant in the room that was just standing there for my entire practice. And I was like missing this really important puzzle. And that led me to researching the science of love and wanting to understand like, what is the neurobiology of love? What is love? Why do we have it as a human species? And why is this significant? Right? And so that led me to Helen Fisher's work and basically studying love as three motivational drives, the sex drive, the romantic love drive, and the drive to attach. 0 (3m 47s): And I was like, you know what? I feel like I need to start a company in this space. And this was the moment that the psychedelic revolution was upon us. And there was almost no female CEOs in psychedelics. So I started at Adamo because I was like, you know what? I accidentally healed my sexual dysfunction with drugs and I feel like I could help other women do that. And maybe men. And it was a really, it was definitely a very, very visionary concept at the time. Kind of insane. But we were commercialized. So we started as a biotech company. We were, we were commercializing love drugs. And I was like so fascinated by how drugs could transform the way we think about partners and ourselves. 0 (4m 27s): How we could drop shame, how we could heal from trauma. And frankly, a lot of psychedelics at low doses are aphrodisiacs. So I was super interested in that. But unfortunately, as you probably experienced in your field of work, there's a lot of people who are haters. And as a medical doctor, I started getting a lot of criticism from people and frankly, threats to my career for working in the psychedelic space. And so it wasn't, that wasn't the main reason I pivoted, but I paused on the drug development to really focus on developing a drug agnostic sex therapy. Because I was like, well we, we know that policy is not really backing MDMA right now. Like F FDA is not approving MDMA anytime soon. And they have a lot more research to do. 0 (5m 7s): Well what are you feel 1 (5m 8s): Like, what are your feelings on that? 0 (5m 11s): I think that, okay, so I presented at Oxford University in this Johns Hopkins, Oxford Psychedelic Ethics consortium. And I, I presented on the concept of psychedelic sexual ethics. And one of the things that I complained a lot about to my friends who worked at maps was like, you guys don't have a strong ethical education for your practitioners. These drugs can make people fall in love. These drugs can make people bonded to each other. Mm. These drugs can turn you on and make you sexual. It's almost like everyone was ignoring the fact that these drugs can drive people towards each other literally activating these motivational drives, which are, by the way, love is one of the most healing experiences of human existence. There's a reason why MDMA can help heal. 0 (5m 52s): It actually activates the same neurobiology as love. But love is not necessarily safe. Like I learned that there's safe love, there's healthy love and unhealthy love. And as you've probably experienced with stalkers, that's a form of unhealthy love. It's when people become obsessed with people that are not obsessed with them. Right? Right. Like one facet of romantic love is, is obsession. One facet of it is, is addiction one. And, and this can lead to people becoming physiologically attached to partners that are unhealthy for them. Or driving a therapist and a client together who, if you're already sexually traumatized, which is the number one cause of PTSD in MDMA studies, now you're adding love drugs to a population of people who've already had sexual trauma. 0 (6m 33s): Sexual trauma can create hypersexuality or hypersexuality, it can create PTSD in a lot of cases. And I just think that maps was not thinking clearly about how they were trying to train these therapists. Like we do not do a good enough job training doctors and therapists about ethics. And so when you're throwing a really powerful drug into a therapeutic context, you're bound to have problems come up. And that's the thing that kept them from getting approved. Yeah. The methodological research was poor. 1 (7m 4s): See? Yeah. When I heard that I, my knee jerk reaction was that it was kind of bullshit. 0 (7m 9s): It is kind of bullshit, 1 (7m 10s): But because 0 (7m 11s): It was kind of, it was at the time it seemed consensual. Right? But the question is, is can you actually grant consent if you're under the influence of a drug? 1 (7m 20s): So I guess here's my thought on this is, is two things. One, in, when you're in that dynamic, it's already intimate by nature. So I feel like that there's probably a lot of shitty therapists that take advantage of patients already. I've 0 (7m 32s): Already heard of this. Yeah. 1 (7m 33s): With or without the drugs, right? Yeah. It's just, it's the dynamic, it's the trust, it's the vulnerability. 0 (7m 37s): It's already happening in mainstream 1 (7m 38s): Medicine, mainstream psychiatry. Right. It's already happening. So if you're saying like, this is the reasonable, it's already happening. Right. And then I, I understand it's just my anecdotal experience, but when I did M MDM MDMA in a facilitated situation, the last thing I wanted to do was like get physical. I and I, I know it's probably an abnormal response, but I was like, I don't know how this is enjoyable for anyone. That it was very difficult. It was very hard. And if I were to ever do it again, it would take a lot of it coaching myself. It sounds like you had 0 (8m 4s): A pretty paradoxical reaction to MDMA. Most people feel enormous amounts of love, connection and tenderness. And it sounds like your experience, from what you told me yesterday, it was like I, I have seen people have these paradoxical responses where instead of it being activating and, and like generating feelings of deep love and connection, it's more like stimulating or it's, it can be actually depressing. Yeah. I, and make you feel really disoriented. Right. But the thing is, is that keep in mind when people are going through MDMA therapy, they're doing like 40 hours of preparation and integration sessions, not just the MDMA session. Right? Right. So there's already a preexisting very deep bond being built between these practitioners and these patients. And look, I still think MDMA should be approved because, you know, veterans have double the rate of suicide than the average population and there are not that many options. 0 (8m 52s): And we should be at least doing compassionate use for veterans. Right? 1 (8m 57s): Absolutely. 0 (8m 57s): 'cause these people are suffering. 1 (8m 59s): Absolutely. 0 (8m 59s): But I think we need to really reevaluate the psychedelic space, especially in the medical arena. Like how do we encourage ethics and safety in these environments? And like, like I've seen so much unethical psychedelic practice in the underground and I've seen a lot of great things happen with, with very ethical practice practitioners. So it's like what I tell people is like, psychedelics are transformative. But if you use them improperly, if you have the wrong guide, if you're not in the right setting, if they're not in the right mindset and if you aren't really sure of like how to use them properly, they can be a double-edged sword. They're a catch 22, they can be really positive or they can be really risky. 1 (9m 37s): No, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. So the tie between sexual health and biohacking Yeah. I think is fascinating. I was listening to a podcast, I think it was Peter Att and he was saying ovarian health and fertility is one of like the biggest indicators for a woman's lifespan and healthspan, which was really interesting to me. Yeah. So we think fertility and we think, oh is whether or not you wanna have babies? And it's like, no, you wanna actually try to figure out how to extend your fertile years as long as possible because that actually keeps you young and healthy. 0 (10m 5s): It's funny you mentioned this because I literally had just given a presentation in the last week on actually last, I've given like two presentations in the last month on female longevity. So like, even though I'm the CEO of the Adamo, I also still run a medical practice and I do focus on longevity and health span. And I'm also actively investigating. I I just for fun due diligence on all these companies. 'cause I'm like fascinated by this space and there is so much stuff happening happening in regenerative medicine. Like I've seen miracles through new modalities and technologies that I'd never thought were possible. And so I am very interested in, first of all, mitochondrial research and mitochondrial health is one of my fortes. It's like one of the main things that I've studied. And the ovaries are one of the most concentrated places in the body of mitochondria. 0 (10m 49s): And the sad thing about being a female is that we are our ovaries age faster than all of our other organs. Whoa. Which is super unfair because we're basically, this is part of the reason why women go through perimenopause and start experiencing the effects of aging faster than men. Why men age so well is because they get testosterone for longer. And unfortunately there's been this women's health initiative that's basically made hormones seem like defin definitively going to give you cancer. And that's actually the opposite. There's a, there's a lot of research coming out on bioidentical hormones actually potentially preventing cancer. Right? 1 (11m 25s): Right. Because it wasn't the application incorrect. So back in the nineties when they were doing it, and they had this study that has been debunked that was saying that it does increase 0 (11m 31s): It would health initiative, 1 (11m 32s): It was because they had an IMB I of testosterone and progesterone, like they were just giving you women one or the other. They, 0 (11m 37s): So they were just giving, they were giving women per like this form of progesterone that was synthetic and that was not, I mean actually was derived from horse urine. And so most of what is being given to women these days, if you're have a really good doctor and you're lucky and you know what they're, they know what they're doing. And by the way, hormones are not like, you have to actually do a lot of education as a doctor to start understanding hormones. And I'm still learning about how to use them. And I'm still, and I've been, and I've been working with them for years. But we as like the millennial generation is entering perimenopause and we are decidedly not going to age like our parents. We are going to be using hormones earlier. Everyone is buying these home testing kits like Ova and Myra to be able to actually see your hormones changing. 0 (12m 21s): 'cause every month the thing about perimenopause is your hormones are changing and fluctuating. So some months you might feel estrogen dominance. Some months you might feel progesterone deficiency, which feels like estrogen dominance. And then some months you might feel like estrogen deficiency as you get older. And the problem with this is that most doctors aren't running, like full panels of labs aren't, aren't even paying attention to the monthly fluctuations. And frankly, right now, the way that, I mean, I'm not saying this is the problem, but the way that hormones are dosed right now is all symptoms based. But you, that means you as a patient need to learn about what these symptoms look like. And so I think there's gonna be a huge wave of just perimenopause companies, and I'm already talking to like five right now because we wanna partner with these companies that are prescribing hormones. 0 (13m 3s): 'cause hormones can be one of the greatest biohacks for female sexuality. Like vaginal estrogen, topical estrogen, oral progesterone, sublingual progesterone, topical testosterone. Like all of these things will rejuvenate your body and you can run, if you're really that scared of cancer, you can run Cancer Check labs, which is a company that I'm starting to advise that's a blood testing company for cancer. And it's really advanced way better company than Grail. And I even had, I send patients to go get pvo scans, which are really great too. And, and that there's a lot we can do to catch cancer early if you're that concerned about it. And obviously if you have a family history of breast cancer or ovarian cancer, you have to be much more careful. 0 (13m 43s): But I think we're entering a really exciting moment in female like health, in investing in female longevity. And so going back to this concept of ovarian aging, there's companies like O Vva, the CEO Daisy Robinson is investigating malarian inhibiting substance. And this is a hormone in the body that regulates the release of eggs. And what they're aiming to do is figure out can we keep, can we give you, can we, can we allow you to keep your eggs for longer and what's the best way to do that? And can we ex, can we actually extend the number of years of fertility because that could potentially extend health significantly. Right. On top of that, a lot of women are, are picking up on this concept of rapamycin. 0 (14m 23s): Right? So rapamycin, that reason, this vibrant study just came out and basically demonstrated that they could potentially give women five extra years, years five extra years of fertility with rapamycin, which is like bananas. And I'm actually about to start it because I'm like, shit, I need to, so what is rapamycin? Rapamycin is an mTOR inhibitor. Peter ATT is, you know, Peter att and I have very similar practices. I work one-on-one and I do a lot of health coaching, but he has an entire team of people that work with clients. But both of us are focused on how do we help predict and prevent chronic illnesses. Right? And so rapamycin is this IOR inhibitor and in, in in animal models it can extend the life of animals dramatically like 30%. 0 (15m 4s): Whoa. Which is crazy. So he takes it, Amy Killen takes it, and a lot of, a lot of the people that I admire really take it. Is it a prescription? It's a prescription. Okay. You can get it from the company Joy, JOI. And yes, I know I talk about a lot of companies, but I'm an entrepreneur and, and also I advise a lot of companies, and I frankly am fascinated by the people on the bleeding edge of technology because they are typically tend to 15 years ahead of the curve. And you wanna listen to those people because they usually look, I mean the, the key, the trick is if you're gonna try to follow a health longevity guru, do they look young? Yes. Do they obviously Yes. I, it's so funny. I was like on the airplane on the way here and I was crying over a breakup and I was like, I was like, I had literally rolled outta bed at six o'clock, my flight left at seven. 0 (15m 48s): Somehow I got on the flight and I'm sitting there outside moping and this woman comes up to me and she's like, you're so beautiful. I'm like, what are you talking about? I've been crying for a half an hour. And she's like, you're, you just look so young and youthful. And I was like, I'm 40. And she's like, how are you 40? I'm like, I didn't believe you. Yeah. I was like, how thing, it's funny because like I, I know people think it looks, it's crazy, but I, I committed my life to optimizing health. And so when you spend a decade of your life, more than a decade, I started educating medical students as a medical student. I developed a course on evidence-based lifestyle medicine when I was a medical student. 'cause I saw it was missing from our education. So I've always been oriented, not just around sickness, but how do you measure and optimize health? 0 (16m 33s): And that means how do you measure and optimize metabolic health? How do you measure and optimize environmental health? How do you measure and optimize fitness? How do you measure and optimize sexual health? And my company Adamo developed a sex therapy specifically oriented around how do we measure and optimize our intimacy and our, our sexuality. And really, I wanted to optimize love, like the comp, the name Adamo means to fall in love in Latin. So I was like, I, there must be a science to love. And I, I can hack this. Holy shit. Did I discover that love is a Pandora's box? It's like both magical and amazing, but filled with so many challenges. Like first of all, working in the sexual health space is like really tough to market products because the internet basically thinks that like, there's like, the internet doesn't really understand sex. 0 (17m 20s): It's like, it's like this weird wasteland of weird, like it's like there's good stuff out there and then there's bad stuff out there and there's like, and there's like high quality porn and there's low quality porn and there's like, you know, there's, there's trustable. Like there's companies that you can trust and there's products that work and products that don't. And it's just kind of like a mess. It's all lumped together. It's all lumped together. Right. Yeah. And like the good, they're very different things. And the good stuff is lumped in with everything else, you know? And look, I'm like, I'm like trying to figure, figure out right now, I was talking to my friend Lily. I'm like, Lily, we need to figure out how to tape our method, our sex therapy as like actual people having suction based sex. Because this is what we're teaching in our method. We're teaching how we're actually teaching penetration. 0 (18m 2s): Right. Penetration has not been properly taught to us. So we learn about it through porn. And like some porn is great. I've actually like sought out, like I have like watched porn and I'm not gonna deny I've been watching porn since I was in sixth grade. And so I'm happy to admit that I am a porn watcher, but I have a struggle with finding porn that reflects the kind of sex that I want to see, which is I wanna see women in profound ecstasy. Right? I wanna see a woman having a 30 minute long full body orgasm. And I do see some porn that does show me that. But it's really hard to find because most of what I'm seeing is like a, you know, there's like, it's 1 (18m 38s): A male product. 0 (18m 38s): It's a male product from a male gaze. And so like the problem with that is that it's very performative and, and men are very performant performance oriented. Right? Yeah. But that's not real life. And men in normal sex will get hard and get soft and they will, it'll wax and wane. Women will get lubricated and they won't. And like women will get engorged and then they won't. And like full vaginal engorgement is not fully seen in a lot of porn. And I don't know why. 1 (19m 5s): Well, some people do. It's definitely a kink. So they'll do, there's some things that'll focus on doing like the vacuums or the suctions. I seen that. To see how puffy it can get. Right. And some people are super into that. Yeah. And I think a lot of it too is a lot of guys are scared of that region. Yeah. Like they're, it's so unknown. Like how's it gonna behave? What's it gonna smell like? What's it going to like sound like? All like all of these things. Yeah. And I think part of that's an immaturity and it's a lack of education. Yeah. But I don't know, I feel like, so there's a lot of critiques when it comes to how porn is shot and they think that it's very like dehumanizing to the woman. But where I always challenge that is if you watch gay porn, it's shot exactly the same. 0 (19m 42s): Oh my God. Okay. So I, it's just 1 (19m 44s): What men are into it has nothing to do with degrading the other person. I 0 (19m 47s): Know because I did see a gay porn. Okay. So I did a focus group with a bunch of gay guys. 'cause I was like, I need to understand your culture. And they were, I was like, well what turns you guys on? Like, what's the most, what's the biggest turn on for you? And they, they were like, well, the biggest turn on for us, and this is like a group of well-to-do Gramercy Park men who are very attractive, successful dudes, right. There should be, there should like literally be like a reality show based on these guys. 'cause they were so adorable and there, and they, I just feel like I got an understanding of what turns these guys on. And they were like, what turns us on is porn that is about a man's first time with a man. Mm. And so I went and I searched for that. 1 (20m 23s): They love that. They love getting the straight guy. 0 (20m 25s): But I saw it as this, like the first one I came across was this really sweet love story. And I was like, this is so romantic and this is hot. And I was like, whoa. Like why am how am I, how am I turned on based on this? And it was like, to me, I do, I think that does exist in, in, in the art, like the mainstream porn world. But I do feel like, I don't know, does porn hub have algorithms? 'cause I feel like I'm getting set the wrong 1 (20m 51s): Stuff stuff. There is, there's definitely, there definitely is an algorithm and, and there's a huge gradient. So with both hetero and gay porn, there's gonna be the romantic artsy Yeah. Story is important. But if you look at the meat of it, like what sells the most, what gets the most eyeballs for something that is made for a man, whether they're straight, it's a little bit more aggressive, it's invasive, it's aggressive. It's like very testosterone driven. Yes. Right. And that, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's just what they like. I 0 (21m 15s): Mean, look, that turns me on. Yeah. Like, I'm not gonna deny the fact that I get turned on by that kind of sex, but I also get turned on. The key that I wanna teach people through the abdominal method is that you should have range as a lover. Yes. Yes. Right. Like there is a time and a place for animalistic raw kind of BDSM kinky sex. And I love that. And, and I'm very much a shapeshifter according to the erotic blueprint. But I also love energetic sex and I also love sensual slow sex. And I also love just fucking in an afternoon with a quickie. Right. And then there's the, you know, there's the BDSM piece. And I haven't done as much of that lately, but there's a time and a place for that. And I think the thing that I think a lot of people get stuck in is they get stuck in a rut, in a routine with their partner. 0 (21m 59s): And a lot of people even get stuck in a rut in a routine with their porn that they watch. Right. And it's because, you know, we, we live busy lives. We've got things going on. Sex is not always a priority. But the one thing I've discovered in the last like five years of optimizing my own sexuality is that like I thought I was a phenomenal lover five years ago. I thought I was like top 95th percentile. And then I realized I was still dealing with sexual pain and I was still dealing with discomfort. I was still dealing with like not getting fully aroused. And part of it was I wasn't communicating properly with my partners. And I was kind of still, still in a bit of the performative place. Even though I was getting better. I wasn't dissociating anymore, thank God. 0 (22m 39s): But I definitely felt like the last five years, especially the last three years of starting this company, I've learned that there's ways that like, I, I basically, there's ways that I can be using my, my genitals in my mind that I didn't get taught through watching most porn. Right. Right. I couldn't, I never saw the things that we learned in the NMA method anywhere in pornography. And that was what's interesting to me is like, there's a lot, I think I did see one porn once, but it was like a man, this woman was using a vagina to basically suck the man's cock into her. And he, and she was basically milking his cock with the suction of her vagina. Whoa. It was so hot. And I was like, how is she doing that? 0 (23m 20s): And the funny thing is, is like I got taught by these two world class sex educators. Aaron, Aaron Michael and Aaron Michael Eisley and Saya Desole and se Desley's work was really largely oriented around erotic individuation and embodiment. Like how do you become more embodied lover? And how do you actually learn about your erotic individuality? And, and then also recognize that you're, you have to be sovereign as a, as an individual. Like your body and your physicality is sovereign. And like you need to understand your boundaries and how to communicate them. Yes. I did not know how to do that. 'cause I had my boundaries violated. So I kind of got, frankly a little bit experience. I mean, a lot of women do experience and a lot of men, I've had boyfriends that have, that have been sexually assaulted. 0 (24m 2s): So it happens to men and women. Same. But like, when your boundaries have been violated, you learn that that's in a lot of ways, like a lot of people are just like, well that just happens. Right. When I spoke to this group of gay guys, they were like, they really don't see sexual trauma the way that straight women do because they, it's almost emasculating for them to admit that they've had these experiences, but it can lead to dysfunctional sexual patterns. Right. Which is one of the reasons why we try to teach embodied consent, which is how do you communicate consent in a bi like with your body language and what does an open accepting receiving body look like? And what does a closed off frozen like crunched over body look like? Right. And how do you learn to read your partner and how they're responding with their bodies to what you're doing? 0 (24m 46s): I didn't know how to do that. And I wish I would be, I wish I would've known that because I think there, there were times that where I, I asked a guy like, are did you really wanna do this? You know, and sometimes men will be ma macho and m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And it's like, I'm like, I don't think you do. Or like you don't look like you do. And and I think if we had that language for consent at a younger and younger age, we could avoid so much assault and trauma because, so what people forget is that a lot of sexual assault happens in a consensual context that was verbally consensual. But things can become non-consensual. And this is the thing about psychedelics, right? I'm a big fan of psychedelics for sexuality. I think they could be used as a phenomenal aphrodisiac. 0 (25m 27s): So which one's in particular for that? So I've, so we were developing a psychedelic assisted sex therapy. So we developed a protocol that has both the psychosomatic sex therapy piece, which is the online program. But we have like a yet to be released protocol on how would you use ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA as medicine. Okay. So I'd already developed like a 50 page sublingual ketamine protocol for clinical practice, which actually my friend Ryan commercialized into an entire company. So I've been working with psychedelics clinically and legally for like since 20 20 20, actually 2018 is when I first started prescribing ketamine. 0 (26m 7s): And basically I've been looking at research around conjoint therapy and like how MD MA is used clinically right now. And there have been studies on conjoint therapy. But really what they're doing is they're giving people MDMA and they're having them lay at separate parts of a room and have their own solo sessions in the same context. Mm. Which is not what I'm trying to actually explain to people as possible. So there's basically three different dosing ranges and ketamine and MDMA and psilocybin can be dosed in these different ranges. But typically you don't see MDMA microdosing, you don't see ketamine microdosing. You do see psilocybin microdosing and sometimes acid microdosing. I've had friends of mine come to me anecdotally and tell me, yeah, I started microdosing and my libido came back. 0 (26m 48s): So I've seen that happen anecdotally. It's not commercial. No one's, no one's getting that approved. But there has been a study by mind med and they discovered that LSD, one of the side effects of their studies on LSD for generalized anxiety disorder was improved sexual function. And this guy, Tomaso Barba, is one of our chief investigators. He's one of the world's experts in psychedelics for sexuality as well as Alexander Winger who's studying microdosing for sexuality. And both of these people are running studies in England with Imperial College. So these are like the cutting edge of young researchers. They're amazing, amazing, brilliant, brilliant young kids. And I call 'em kids 'cause they're so young and they're so smart. 0 (27m 31s): But they, so tomaso discovered with psilocybin that when people were taking it for depression, and this is large doses, they discovered improvements in their sexual function. Mm. But their question now is, is it the lifting of depression and anxiety? Right. That creates the improvements in sexual function? Probably. But I know plenty of people, and I mean Timothy Leary himself said LSD is the best essiac. Right. So I, I was curious like, so MDMA is also being used to study PTSD and one of the biggest drivers of PTSD is sexual trauma. So there's a lot of research that suggests a little bit of research actually that suggests that about 30% of people who experience sexual trauma developed PTSD. 0 (28m 12s): But 60 to 80% will develop sexual dysfunction. And so I'm really curious about that population, right? Because I think that's a major opportunity to help heal people who don't have healthy, normal normally functioning nervous systems. So I do think there is a role for high dose MDMA and ingen specifically for healing sexual dysfunction secondary to a trauma that isn't P-T-S-D-D-D like diagnosis. That's one thing that you can think about. Those are the high doses. But then I've had clients who were using intranasal ketamine clinically for dysthymia and anxiety and just overall, you know, mild depression. And they were like, you know, I noticed that my relationship with my wife is improving. 0 (28m 54s): And I'm like, well what are you doing with the, the, you know, intranasal And by the way, I've, I've since paused on prescribing ketamine. 'cause you don't actually know what people are gonna be doing with these things at home. Yeah. But anecdotally, one of my clients specifically said that he would use a lower dose than I had prescribed to him for just opening up to his partner. And so I started doing research and discovered, there's actually a whole bunch of doctors that are prescribing ketamine for couples therapy. And they're working with couples therapists and they're using what are called psycholytic doses, which is a dose where you're still coherent and you're still awake and aware, but you're not, and you haven't lost your faculties and you're kind of using it as a way to, ketamine is just dissociative. So sometimes it's really helpful to get outside of your ego identity in order to connect with your partner, to get outside of your delusion, of your separate self to really sit with your partner and open up to your partner about challenges you're dealing with. 0 (29m 45s): That's pretty cool. And then there's the aphrodisiac doses, right? So I'm really interested in, you know, how would we create a meso dose, which would be an aphrodisiac dose, which is above a microdose but below a hero dose. Mm. And it's like enough to get a physical biological sensation but not enough to cause you to trip. And this is the tricky thing. It's really about dosing. But I believe that the meso dose is really ideal for people who struggle with body image and shame and just dropping into their bodies, being able to actually connect with themselves. And you know, I did build a prototype at one point and one of my friends was outta the country and had tried a dose and it was a, it was a, you know, it was a test in Mexico and basically was like, you know, I had, I had this medicine and had like a four hour long orgasm my, with my partner. 0 (30m 47s): And I was like, what? I was like, did you take more than one? And she's like, I took two. I was like, okay. Okay. So the thing is is that like a d CXS are not new and psychedelics are not new. These are thousands of years old. This is like the first time that we're starting to like wake up to the reality that like these could be actual clinical pharmaceuticals, but they have, they've been around forever. And it's just, the problem is, is that the challenge is, is creating the, I mean like I still may do, I still may go do this 'cause I've like, I got a little disenchanted, but I'm a get little, I'm a little bit re re like re-motivated because I do think that there is a way to take these things safely. 'cause so many people are at home. Like people are taking Xyrem, which is GB, which is the date rape drug. 0 (31m 29s): Oh, why, 1 (31m 31s): Why are they do 0 (31m 31s): That for? For narcolepsy with cataplexy. And then a bunch of Silicon Valley executives are taking it off label for sleep and they're about to try to get approved for sleep. Now this is the date rape drug. If we can prescribe that for home use, I think we can prescribe an aphrodisiac. 1 (31m 46s): Well we have this weird aversion for pleasure. I know. So if it's enjoyable, there's like this weird puritanical shame where if you don't work for it, you don't get it. So you can't just take this pill because you have to work for your pleasure. So I think that might be part of it. You know, like a subconscious level. It's 0 (32m 0s): Just, look, I think, I think it's a really sad world where there's like 20 drugs approved for male sexual dysfunction and like two approved for female. 1 (32m 11s): Do you think it's because it can't be what is not trademarked? Patented? 0 (32m 16s): There's ways to patent You can, so Xyrem is not a, it's a natural substance like GHB is made in your body. So you can't actually patent a natural substance. Right? Right. But you can patent a delivery system, you can patent a manufacturing protocol, you can patent a, you can, you can patent a lot of stuff around what you, what these companies do is they create a patent moat around a concept and idea. And like, don't get me wrong, Xyrem or jazz pharma, I, I did research on them for a VC many years ago and I was like, whoa, this company is brilliant but they're gonna get, they're getting sued a lot but still they're making like billions of dollars because it's a really expensive drug to buy GHB. But what they did, so GHB typically converts to GBL and GBL is a byproduct of G hb. 0 (33m 1s): So most of what people are getting when they buy GHP on the street is actually not GHB 'cause it degrades very quickly. So they patented the whole process of manufacturing that keeps it from degrading. So that's their patent. Right. So biotech is actually really cool. And like I used to be like, everyone in bio dog is evil. And actually I'm like, no, there's some new stuff coming out from biotech that is like fundamentally going to reverse degenerative disc disease. Like you can actually see complete reversal of aging on cts and MRIs. And I met this doctor at this conference, Jason Williams and I was like, who are you and how did you do this? And how do I learn from you and what is it how he's like, it's all about the immune system. 0 (33m 42s): And I was like, man, I thought it was all about the mitochondria. And he is like, no, it's all about the immune system. If you can fix the immune system, you can fix anything. And I was like, wow. 'cause in my course at Stanford I did realize that the thing that sucks about aging is like even if you optimize your metabolic health, even if you work out, even if you optimize your hormones, your immune system, every time you get a cold, every time you get covid, every time you get the flu your immune system wears down and your thymus gets degraded over time. Right. Like your thymus actually it like, it's called evolution. And so we lose this important immune organ as we age. And so I was like, whoa. That's why people are, I mean that's one of the reasons why people, like if you don't have a strong functioning immune system, that is part of the reason why you'll end up with cancer. 0 (34m 25s): So cancer can be driven by a few things, right. But one is like insulin resistance is a big problem. But another big problem is people's immune systems failing them from repairing the broken DNA as they get older. So now I'm like, hmm, build a biotech company to build the aphrodisiac for the masses. Or maybe do maybe go, maybe I'll go to regenerative medicine, maybe I'll do both. Maybe I'll just build a clinic around and like learn from this guy and then build this drug on the side. 'cause he's actually like, this guy's actually, he's kind of interested in it. And I don't know, biotech's hard. Like I don't think I've done a lot of different startups. I've worked with a lot of companies and I don't think people realize just how hard biotech is. 0 (35m 6s): It's like, it's like a puzzle that is unending pieces. Like just 'cause you got like the pieces put together means that you might have missed an entire section of the puzzle. It's like, it's really fascinating. It's really lucrative, but it's really risky, you know? 1 (35m 19s): Right. And then you have all of these new procedures and pills and potions that are coming out and some of them are wildly expensive. Yes. And then you have some people that are financially in like vested, but they might not disclose that. Yeah. So how does the lay person know what to invest in? Like if you are a, where's a good starting point? Let's say you're trying to do both Nancy, 0 (35m 37s): Nancy Pelosi follow her actually she, she mostly invests in tech. But if you actually look at like that's true her portfolio, stunning portfolio. It's like, I'm like, I think I'm just gonna build my own little ETF of Nancy Pelosi's investments because she seems to know things 1 (35m 51s): More than Warren Buffet somehow. How is she, 0 (35m 53s): I mean, how is she getting away with this? I don't 1 (35m 55s): Know. It's disgusting. And then we put people in jail for insider training. I know. Training, but what is that Barbara Stewart, she's owed an apology. She's 0 (36m 3s): Owed an apology. 1 (36m 3s): Yes. 0 (36m 4s): Come on. But I don't know Martha's mom, did you hear about the people who made an e, an ETF of all of the CEOs of publicly traded companies who lift weights? No. Yeah. It's actually performs really well. 1 (36m 16s): Oh my gosh. 0 (36m 16s): You know, like it, it, to me it's like you, the key, I think the key with investment is investing in what you understand and what you know. And my biggest burns of investing have been when I didn't invest in the things that I knew. So, you know, that's, that's probably the secret is like educate your, if become obsessed with some field and then invest in what you believe is gonna make a big deal. You know, a big, a big breakthrough. 1 (36m 39s): So with your work on sexual function, do you deal with a lot of ed? Is that something that comes up in, in 0 (36m 45s): The work? I mean, so I think Ed is a really interesting and complex problem that is multifactorial. Okay. And a lot of it is driven by, I mean the two biggest drivers I would say are probably, well three is one is just aging. And then another one is just blood vessel health and vascular health, which is largely driven by metabolic health. And so a lot of people are just not metabolically healthy. And so they're not producing enough nitric oxide and they don't have healthy vascular system. And so that's part of what drives dysfunction. But then there's the people, like, there's an interesting story about Viagra where about like, you know, after three years most people stop using it. And the question is, is why. And my theory is that a lot of this is driven by psychosomatic dysfunction. 0 (37m 27s): I think a lot of erectile dysfunction. I've actually met young men that have had really traumatic experiences with sex. And they are now really like, like one of, like for example, one of my, one of my patients had got, got a woman pregnant and then she ended up losing the child. But he thought she, he thought he was going to have to bring this child into the world. And he is plagued by this fear that he is gonna impregnate a woman. Right. And he really struggles with sexual function. Second person I know was given a testosterone inhibitor by a doctor and it chemically castrated him. Why? And it was for a medical reason. Okay. And he lost his ability to maintain a normal erection. 0 (38m 9s): So now he feels still psychologically, chemically rated even though his body functions. Hmm. So there's a lot of problem. Like this is where I think like psychedelic assisted sex therapy can really help because you have to create a neuroplastic state, which is what psychedelics do. So not only are they pleasurable and they're like a super placebo 'cause they're giving you this experience that seems like you're, something's working. Right. But they're also creating a neuroplastic state where you're able to reformat memories and reformat experiences in the mind, especially taking traumatic things from that feel like the present still and moving that into the past memory, which is really powerful. And reregulating, the oxytocin and vaso oppressant systems as well. With MDMA as they've shown in research with veterans where veterans come back from war, their vasopressin levels are sky high, they're highly traumatized and that means that they're in a constant state of hypervigilance protection defense. 0 (39m 3s): And their oxytocin levels are super low. So I wanna run a study on veterans where we actually measure oxytocin and vasopressin to see what happens after they take MDMA. 'cause it's a oxytocin releasing agent, right. And oxytocin is the hormone of safety, trust, and love. And orgasm is also a potent form of oxytocin. So my theory is, is that if we could really commercialize an aphrodisiac dose of psychedelics that would be non perceptual perceptual, but non hallucinogenic, but just perceptual enough to give people a body high and, and like some pleasure and create a, a, a neuroplastic state during the active intercourse. 'cause I specifically wanna create drugs for sex. Like let's, let's get real, like we all know that these things go together. 0 (39m 43s): Sounds fun. Yeah. Chocolate milk and like cookies and milk. Like, like we know that drugs and sex are fun. But the thing I've learned is that like a lot of people use drugs during sex for a reason. It's because they're str and alcohol by the way. Because they're struggling with dropping their shame. They're struggling with being confident, they're struggling with feeling safe, they're struggling with dealing with their trauma and they're using drugs to get to a place where they can normally function. The question is, is how do we actually get to a place where you don't need the drugs? Right now, I have used plenty of psychedelics in my life, and I'm honestly at a point where I don't really use a lot of substances because I'm at a point where I can have full body orgasms without touch and I don't really need them anymore. 0 (40m 23s): But I do think that I wouldn't be at this place if I hadn't have developed these, these new neural pathways in my brain where I can now do this stuff without drugs. Like that's the thing that's the world I want to see is like, these are healing tools, but these are not things that people depend on. The problem that I've seen in, in ketamine is so many people are dependent on ketamine now to socialize. They're dependent on it to communicate with a partner to feel normal. And like there's a lot of addiction out there that's psychological addiction. People are dissociating. Well, ketamine's also physically addictive, correct? Well, technically it's not considered to be, but I have seen people very much dependent. Same. So dependency is different than addiction. Okay. The addiction is like when you're addicted to a opioid or alcohol where if you go off of the drug, you can die. 0 (41m 8s): Like you can have like serious delirium, remin if you go off of alcohol, right? That is. And like, or if you go off of it, you have horrible withdrawals. There are withdrawals with ketamine obviously, because people have become habituated to it. But I've seen it really destroy people's physiology. It can ruin your bladder. I mean these, there's no free lunch when it comes to biology. You cannot get away with habitual use of substances just like alcohol. Like these should be used as tools. And arguably the indigenous people, that's how they use them in tribal cultures. We've gotten to the point in America, we're just so excessive. We're so dopamine driven and we have no ability to regulate ourselves that people are just like constantly over overusing these things. 0 (41m 50s): And I've lost friends to ketamine. I've lost friends to, I mean, horrible things have happened to people I know from alcohol and, and honestly like our country's in a crisis right now of diseases, of despair, of suicide, of addiction. And I don't wanna promote a world where everyone's like, everyone needs to have sex on drugs. But I do wanna promote a world where people could use these as tools to heal and preferably not abuse these things. And so if I were to commercialize a drug, it would be a highly controlled substance. Like you'd have to go to a doctor, you'd have like to get Xyrem right now. It is extremely expensive and time consuming. You have to go to a doctor, they have to fill out a ton of paperwork. It comes from a central pharmacy. 0 (42m 30s): It's highly controlled with these REM system, which is risk evaluation and mitigation strategies. And all of those have to be in like audited by the FDA on a regular basis. But you could build a multi-billion dollar business and save a lot of people from having terrible sex lives. So it's like there's part of me that's like driven to do this and there's part of me that's like, this is really hard. 1 (42m 51s): No, I mean, I feel like the wave is here. Yeah. I think, I don't know that it's, I think it's kind of the perfect timing. It's the beginning of it, right? Because I feel the overindulgence we're kind of at the tail end of that where everyone is doing it all of the time and comparing notes of who's done the most, right? Yeah. Because you would win some kind of badge. And I think the conversation now is how do we actually use this responsibly? Yes. Set and setting. And then also the biggest part is to not rely on them permanently. Yeah. So use it as a, a way to almost see your ideal scenario, whatever that might be. Whether that's just existing in life where you're not in a depressed state. Sure. Or being able to achieve certain levels of like connection and ecstasy. 0 (43m 29s): Well, think about this, right? Like I know about four or five couples that live in Marin and they credit psychedelics for saving their marriages and keeping them bonded together. And like Justin Mayers is a really talented entrepreneur and thought leader. And he's like, I believe in using psychedelics quarterly with my partner in order to get any resentment out of the like under that's under the surface discussed. I wanna enhance my bond to her. I wanna create a deeper connection to her. I want to openly talk about things that are uncomfortable with her. And he put this all in his substack. And so like, these are pretty important people that I know that are very successful, that are using these medicines to maintain the bonds of the relationship. 0 (44m 9s): And I think that we may need medicine for love because we're living in a very weird time where people are getting more and more disconnected. There's a lot of divorce. I mean, you've been married for like 15 years, that is amazing. But that's not as common anymore. And a lot of my friends, they get to the seven year itch, they get into 10 years and once they hit the decade, it's like they can't do this anymore. There's a lot of gray divorces happening. And I think that's partially if you, you look at the Gottman's work, there's, and, and even a mago work, right? Like there's a lot of research on relationships and how important it is not to let the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse enter your relationship. That's resentment, right? That's these, these like defensiveness, right? Like these are common things that people experience that we don't necessarily know how to work through. 0 (44m 53s): And I think a lot of people are kinda resistant to go to therapy and wouldn't there be way more fun if you could have a drug? 1 (44m 58s): I'm not a big fan of couples therapy. I think it actually, in my experience and just what I've seen, I think it does more harm than good. Most people leave in a worse off place 0 (45m 7s): Cognitive oriented. 1 (45m 8s): Yeah. And then also it, it helps women more than it helps men, right? Like women wanna talk process feelings. Men want something actionable. Exactly. So it's not, it's not conducive to both people. And then we're pretending that we're the same thing. We're like very different things where if you're doing something that's like facilitated or you're using psychedelics, there's a lot more wiggle room and to kind of utilize it how you, how you want. I 0 (45m 30s): Mean, I really do believe that there's, there is a safe way to use psychedelics in a sexual context. Yeah. 1 (45m 35s): But 0 (45m 35s): You have to have strong consent, strong understanding of your boundaries, strong agreements on what it is that you're going, you're going to do. And mostly what I would recommend people, and I can't even recommend, this is not even recommendations, this is like most of what I hypothesize is that if people were to use psychedelics in a sexual context, they should actually focus more on sensuality and more, and go a little bit more into the masters and Johnson kind of framework during the experience itself. So Masters and Johnson believed in mindfulness space, sensual touch. And I think that there's a lot of value in that, in in building connection to your partner. And sex can be very weird and disorienting under psychedelics, but if you feel the desire to have penetration, that's something that you should discuss prior and during and check in regularly. 0 (46m 23s): But not everybody wants to experience penetration on psychedelics. Some people just wanna stay centrally connected. Some people just wanna focus on, you know, manual touch and out outer sex. Right? And all of that's safer arguably than, you know, I was listening to this, this psych really cool psychologist talk about the challenges of like even uneducated BDSM people, right? People doing BD SM practices. And it's like, if you don't educate people properly on what they're about to go into, that's how you're going to end up with poor outcomes. So one of the things that I would, I will, I do hope I can legally do in the next decade is figure out how to teach people how to use these things as sacred sacraments and aphrodisiacs and not just haphazardly taking drugs and having sex. 0 (47m 9s): Because like if you, if you really do treat this experience as a sacred act, it's something that you are very much preparing for and experiencing with intention and integrating your experience and embodying consent and slowing down the process of penetration so that there's full consent through the process. And maybe even not even having penetration during sex with, during on psychedelics, you can create a like deeply connected, transformative experience that can really open up your relationship in, in communication patterns. That maybe couldn't be done. But the thing I will say is that right now that's not available. I can't actually recommend that. That's not legal. 0 (47m 48s): And it's like definitely not something that I can say is prescribable. But I can tell you that our psychedelic protocol, or sorry, our sex therapy protocol, the abdominal method, was shown in a clinical study to reduce sexual shame, improve sexual confidence, improve lasting time in men from like five to 15 minutes, which is a big deal, improve sexual frequency so people are having sex more often, improve orgasm quality, improve orgasm frequency, improve lu ation, improve arousal and also improve sexual communication, intimacy, passion and emotional closeness, which are all surrogate markers of love and mad, like massively improved sexual satisfaction. 0 (48m 36s): So our protocol works without drugs. Like you don't actually need sexual dollars. Incredible. Yeah, I mean it was a big deal. We ran 80, it was 80, 81. Couples and people, they were, these were committed couples who'd been together for years and at least minimum of six months. But most people were like committed couples that had been married for a while and the people who completed the method had so many positive things to say about it. But it does require some commitment to actually doing, you're basically learning a new dance. Like we all know what friction based sex looks like and feels like 'cause we see it important, but we don't all know what suction based sex looks like and what does it, what does it mean to actually bring a partner into you? Right. How do you learn to do pelvic floor breathing? 0 (49m 17s): How do you learn to use your pelvic floor properly? And actually how do you like learn sexual anatomy and pleasure anatomy? We actually teach all of that. Amazing. So a lot of men are like afraid of like, what is this area? We didn't even have the clitoris fully mapped properly anatomically until 2000, 2005. So men should not feel insecure about not understanding female anatomy. We didn't even understand our own anatomy. I 1 (49m 40s): Say most women don't 0 (49m 41s): Either. I didn't even understand the G-spot wasn't an actual organ. Right. You know, like, 1 (49m 45s): Wait, there's not a button. There's like not actually a spot. You're 0 (49m 48s): Like, no, it's an entire area. Exactly. So yeah, I do hope that people who are listening check out the ADO method. Check me out on on Dr Molly dot co. Follow me on Instagram, come to our, our Instagram as well, living Adamo. And yeah, I know that this is like a largely male audience, but I do think that becoming a really phenomenal lover is really important to women as they age, right? Like there's this huge pleasure gap. Like 68% of women, heterosexual women experience an orgasm every time they have sex. Whereas 95% of men do. And we believe that we can close that gap. And that's an important opportunity for women because I think if women wanted, I think if women were more satisfied, they'd be wanting to have sex more consistently. 0 (50m 32s): You know? 1 (50m 33s): For sure. Absolutely. And if it wasn't so much work and the success rate was higher, and most men want the woman to climax. Oh yeah. Like if you talk to them, that is the biggest turn on to them. Totally. They really wanna get you there. So it's not for a lack of effort or wanting. Yeah. It's just they don't have the resources. So an amazing resource. I'm gonna be signing up. I hope you guys sign up. I'm so excited after hearing all of those stats and I'm like, I just wanna learn more and increase my increase. My pleasure. Totally. Yeah. But well, thank you. Thank you so much for being here again. We are going to be doing a part two. Oh yes, of course. So look out for part two. You are incredible. You're so intelligent. Thank you. And I love the work that you're doing. I love that you're on the fringes. It's where I live, so. Aw, thank you so much. Yeah, beautiful work. Thanks. 1 (51m 14s): Bye everybody.