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Each episode of the podcast Personal Kosmology traces one seeker's journey: the beliefs they inherited, the experiences that broke them open, and the questions they're still living.
I'm drawn to people who didn't just change their minds, but rebuilt their lives around what they found.
In their stories, you may recognize your own.
PK_S01E04 - Mollie Adler - Line Cut
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[00:00:00] Devin Martin: Welcome to The Personal Cosmology of Mollie Adler I'm your host, Devin Martin, and today we are joined by Mollie, who has an amazing podcast called Back from the Borderline, which I recently discovered and I highly recommend. Uh, we originally met through a mutual friend, and I got to know you as the co-founder of an app called Moods-
[00:00:28] Mollie Adler: Yeah
[00:00:29] Devin Martin: which I have been using for a couple months now, and a bunch of my friends have been using, and using it very differently than each other- Yeah ... and all finding immense benefit. And so we'll, we'll get to... You can give me your description later, but-
[00:00:41] Mollie Adler: Sure ...
[00:00:42] Devin Martin: we're looking at it as a personal development app- Mm-hmm
[00:00:44] Devin Martin: powered by
[00:00:45] Mollie Adler: AI.
[00:00:46] Devin Martin: Mm-hmm. But a radically different experience than just typing into ChatGPT or Claude. And I have a friend who's using it for dream analysis, people who are using it to pull tarot cards. Yeah. I've been using it to process journaling and get really grounded, non-sycophantic feedback and- Yeah
[00:01:02] Devin Martin: challenge and to push me to actually take action in the world. Mm-hmm. And it's been wonderful. And so I wanna understand how you became this person who has this success- very successful podcast, this really new but very interesting app.
[00:01:15] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:16] Devin Martin: Um, and so I'm gonna tell you, the reason I have this podcast is because I'm obsessed with personal transformation.
[00:01:23] Devin Martin: I love stories of people who challenge the status quo, who trusted their personal experience and their innate curiosity enough to push against science, to push against religion, to push against the culture, the family, the society they were raised in- Mm ... and are now dedicating their life to what they've found, to actually doing things that the previous version of themselves might have considered crazy.
[00:01:51] Devin Martin: And so I want you to walk us through your journey-
[00:01:54] Mollie Adler: Wow ...
[00:01:55] Devin Martin: in kind of three parts.
[00:01:56] Mollie Adler: Okay.
[00:01:56] Devin Martin: The world you inherited.
[00:01:58] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:58] Devin Martin: Literally, like how were you raised?
[00:02:00] Mollie Adler: Yeah.
[00:02:00] Devin Martin: Okay. What were you taught was good, true, beautiful? And you can think of it as like setting up bowling pins.
[00:02:05] Mollie Adler: Oh, okay. Mm-hmm.
[00:02:06] Devin Martin: And then we're gonna knock them down.
[00:02:07] Devin Martin: Like what, what broke your world apart? Interesting. What challenged your worldview? Okay. What were the experiences that really transformed you?
[00:02:14] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:14] Devin Martin: And then where are you at today, and what are the edges of your thinking? What are you exploring-
[00:02:18] Mollie Adler: Mm ...
[00:02:19] Devin Martin: and how is that informing how you're living in the world?
[00:02:21] Mollie Adler: Okay.
[00:02:22] Devin Martin: Does that sound like fun?
[00:02:23] Mollie Adler: That sounds like a lot of fun. And I, I'm really grateful to be here. So excited and honored that I'm in like the first batch of episodes, and really, really excited. So y- I guess the best place for me to start would be where you recommended of w- what built my worldview and, and where, where did everything start?
[00:02:43] Mollie Adler: I was born in 1989- Mm ... so I think it's important to kinda place me in my generation. Yeah. And so I'm 36 now at the time of recording this, and so I am definitely a full millennial. I grew up in Wyoming. Mm. And so a really small town called Casper, Wyoming. And- When I first grew up, because mainly what I talk about on my podcast is, you know, symbolism and depth psychology and spirituality, which the, this past version of myself, again, would probably be surprised by that this is what I'm doing now, or maybe not so much.
[00:03:18] Mollie Adler: Um, but I was born in, in Wyoming, and when I first gr- when I was really young, I was Catholic. My, my mom would take me to Catholic church with her and my grandma. My dad would stay home because, um, he'd not got an annulment from his first marriage. And so technically, through the eyes of the Catholic Church, I was a bastard child, you know?
[00:03:39] Mollie Adler: Oh, wow. And so I, from a very young age, started asking a lot of questions. I was really interested at church. I wanted to know w- why we were eating these wafers. I wanted to know, um... I was particularly interested in the Trinity, which I think is a weird thing for a kid to be interested in. When they said the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, I remember being like, "But what about, like, the mother?
[00:04:02] Mollie Adler: What about..." Mm. You know, and I, I really was wondering about that, and I remember very clearly asking, uh, someone about this, and I think it was my grandma, but her saying, "Oh, but that's the Virgin Mary," you know? But I'm like, "But why is she not included when we say Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?" Yeah. Which, again, later on I learned about Sophia and that the Holy Spirit kind of is that feminine presence.
[00:04:23] Mollie Adler: But the fact that I was really interested in that stuff growing up, and I also very quickly saw the hypocrisy of things, you know? So I started just kind of... I was blown away by the majesty and the beauty of, of the Catholic ritual, but I also sniffed out the hypocrisy that I was seeing. And when I would ask people at church, "What is the Trinity?"
[00:04:45] Mollie Adler: I would see the adults get very confused and be like, "Well, it's, it just is what it is," you know? And I'm like, "Wait, so you're coming here every week and, and you don't even know why you're doing it and what this is, and you're even kind of confused, and when I'm asking you questions, you're getting uncomfortable?"
[00:05:00] Mollie Adler: So immediately I just started, you know, side-eyeing the whole thing.
[00:05:04] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:05:04] Mollie Adler: And then from a very young age as well, I was never able to sleep at night very well because I would get into bed and I would be paralyzed with existential thoughts. And I was... And, and from a very- I, I'm laughing- Yeah ...
[00:05:18] Devin Martin: because I can relate.
[00:05:18] Mollie Adler: Yeah. I, from a very young age, and, and I was... The thing that terrified me the most was, like, the thought of forever, and I'm like, "So everybody that I know is gonna die. I'm gonna die, and that's gonna be forever." Mm. Like, and the idea of, like, pure foreverness was so scary to me that I then started compulsively listening to audiobooks, and at ti- and this time this is gonna date me, I was listening to books on tape, and I would constantly scream for my parents, "Come flip over the tape.
[00:05:45] Mollie Adler: Come flip over the tape," because I couldn't go to sleep and I needed s- I needed something in the background to drown out these terrifying thoughts. And then I would tell my mom and dad, and this isn't to dog on my parents or anything, but I remember a couple of times, like, telling them, you know, what I was actually scared of.
[00:06:02] Mollie Adler: Like, "What about dying? Aren't you guys scared of this?" And, and my parents- The response was very much like, "Why are you thinking about that? Stop thinking about that."
[00:06:10] Devin Martin: And what about heaven? Was heaven not the solution?
[00:06:13] Mollie Adler: Heaven, heaven was the solution, but I was also terrified of being in heaven forever. Like, what the hell?
[00:06:18] Mollie Adler: You know? Like, I was like, "We die, and then what about, like, I'm just, like, in a cloud forever?" As a child, I didn't understand. Mm. It was just like, "Everyone I know is gonna die, and, like, none of you guys really seem to give me a coherent explanation for this." And what I took as a child from that was, your parents, who are supposed to guide you in this life, are even scared of these questions.
[00:06:38] Mollie Adler: So there must be something wrong with me, right? And so from a really young age, which was a very quirky and weird thing about me, is I was obsessed with the library. I've always been obsessed with books since I was really little, and there was a book when I was, like, seven or eight at the library, and it was all about ancient Egypt, and it was all about mummies.
[00:06:57] Mollie Adler: And it was actually quite scary. Like, these are just, like... It- they did full pictures of the mummies in their sarcophagus. Sarcophagi, I guess, is the pr- the correct plural. Um, but I, I kept checking this book out, and I checked it out so many times, Devin, that the librarian had to pull me aside and say, "Mollie, you have to stop checking this book out-"
[00:07:15] Mollie Adler: because other kids might want it." I don't think other kids wanted to check it out. Probably not. Um, I would take it home, and I would read it right before bed, and it's like, no wonder I couldn't sleep. But I think that what drew me to it now is I said, "Okay, here's a group of people that Put their entire society around death and, and, and- Mm
[00:07:34] Mollie Adler: did ritual around it. And they seemed to have a framework for this, and they had explanations for it. And even though I, I had a, my childlike mind didn't understand the enormity of, like, the Egyptian cosmology, I was drawn to it. And I actually won a young author's competition in sixth grade for, like, I did a retelling of, like, the Osiris and Isis myth.
[00:07:53] Mollie Adler: Mm. Like, uh, why did I wanna do that, right? And now it makes all the sense in the world because I'm completely obsessed with Isis and this idea of descent and return, and falling apart and coming back together, and why I've been obsessed with alchemy and all of these things, but that's an interesting seed, right?
[00:08:12] Mollie Adler: Yeah. So that was my true self. I was obsessed with those things of it as a little kid, but now placing me back in my generation-
[00:08:20] Devin Martin: In Wyoming ...
[00:08:20] Mollie Adler: in Wyoming, I grew up and very, very... Because at home, v- all my early podcast episodes were a big trauma dump about all my, my trauma and, and growing up, and I don't wanna make this interview a, too much about that.
[00:08:34] Mollie Adler: My, my dad particularly comes from an incredibly traumatized background. Uh, my dad's side of the family is, like, Appalachia. Um- Mm ... really, really poor, a lot of addiction, and my dad was really severely abused as a child. And there was no physical abuse in my home, but it was incredibly dysfunctional from an emotional and psychological perspective.
[00:08:57] Mollie Adler: And so I didn't really feel like I had any kind of maps or any kind of guidance, and I really didn't feel seen and heard. And so from a young age, as you rem- like, millennial girls, it was be hot, be sexy. And also, I think people need to remember spirituality is cool now, but when I was growing up, it wasn't cool.
[00:09:17] Mollie Adler: It was either you were a Bible-thumping Jesus freak, or you were, like, a weird, like, new age auntie who was, like, into, like, weird, creepy, you know- Were there goth kids? ... m- meditation. And there were goth kids, but they were just LARPing, you know what I mean? Yeah. There, there was no... So it wasn't cool to be into spirituality, and I didn't have any, a- any frameworks for that.
[00:09:39] Mollie Adler: And so for me- I was just really... I started ch- channeling everything into wanting to be hot girl. Mm-hmm. And so I call this on my podcast of I spent basically, I left behind, I realized it wasn't cool to be into ancient Egypt. It wasn't cool to be into Harry Potter, which now I understand why I loved Harry Potter so much because, um, J.K.
[00:10:02] Mollie Adler: Rowling was speaking about the Philosopher's Stone. It's all alchemy- Yeah ... and all of these things. I was obsessed with that, as everybody was, but I really had like a very strong affinity to this story. And so I threw all of that away. In about eighth grade, I had a sleepover at my house, and all the girls came over and they had, I had like a Harry Potter room, and all of them made fun of me.
[00:10:23] Mollie Adler: Mm. And so immediately I said, "This isn't cool." And I remember that was like a distinct bifurcation point where I said, "I'm gonna be hot now." And I-
[00:10:33] Devin Martin: It's like choosing social acceptance over-
[00:10:34] Mollie Adler: I, yeah ...
[00:10:35] Devin Martin: authenticity.
[00:10:35] Mollie Adler: I always had to shove myself into the hot girl box. I wasn't a naturally cool, popular hot girl.
[00:10:41] Mollie Adler: And so I made it potentially like my maybe semi-autistic special interest to become a cool hot girl. And so I think that the cool hot people could always sniff that out on me, that I was like really trying. Mm. I was kind of a low-key nerd, theater girl, choir girl, trying to force myself into the cool circle.
[00:11:01] Mollie Adler: And I did a really good job of trying to shove myself into the hot girl box. So I was always on the periphery, but I always felt like an outsider. But I-
[00:11:09] Devin Martin: And, and were you given a vision of what being an adult meant at this time? I mean, was there- Mm. Were you, were you meant to have a great career, to be a stay-at-home mom?
[00:11:19] Devin Martin: Was there, were there choices?
[00:11:21] Mollie Adler: Well, growing up in Wyoming, it was very practical, right? Everybody I knew was a nurse, um, a teacher. My, uh, my, all my parents were teachers. Uh, all of my parents, both my parents. Um, my sister even went on to become a teacher, my older sister. It was all like very... And these are, um, very important jobs, right?
[00:11:38] Mollie Adler: But it's just, it was you go to college, you pick what your career is gonna be, which is from kind of a set of things that you choose, right? Like when you go to school. My daughter right now is in Montessori. Firefighter, doctor, teacher, right? And the world is moving in a very different direction now, you know.
[00:11:52] Mollie Adler: Which those jobs are still there, but so yeah, those were the options laid out for me. And I always knew that I wanted to get out of Wyoming as soon as possible because I, I was kind of raised by the TV, which I think a lot- Mm ... of millennials were. I was watching MTV. I was watching... So to me, I thought if I could just get hot enough and move to a big city, then I can become famous, right?
[00:12:15] Mollie Adler: That was like the, the thing. And because I like to sing, I just said, "I want to become a famous singer." Mm. And I'll never forget that I was sitting down with my parents at, uh, uh, we were having food somewhere, and I told them, I was probably 16, and I said, I really, I really wanted to like do this music thing, 'cause that was my passion.
[00:12:33] Mollie Adler: I love singing. I love writing music. Amy Winehouse was like my biggest inspiration. Mm. I just loved her. And- I, the first thing that my parents said were, my, I think it was either my mom or my dad, but they said, "Well, what's your plan B?" You know? Like-
[00:12:47] Devin Martin: Yeah ...
[00:12:48] Mollie Adler: objectively, Mollie, you know, not a lot of people make it.
[00:12:51] Mollie Adler: So, and which is fair, but also when you hear that as a 16-year-old, it's just like... You know? Mm-hmm. And so that was that. And that was around the time where a girl that I knew in school decided to apply to do Miss Teen, uh, Wyoming, the beauty competition. Mm-hmm. And my competitive nature said, "Wow, well, if I can like...
[00:13:14] Mollie Adler: This is the best way to shove myself in the hot girl box." I'd never done a pageant before, and so I decided to, to do it and just try. And my mom, bless her, she was like, "I'll never have a cheerleader or a pageant girl. I don't..." My mom is an English teacher. She was mortified. And I remember my parents saying like, "We are not going to spend 30 grand."
[00:13:32] Mollie Adler: My par- my parents couldn't afford this stuff, and that's very fair. This is where I really understand my parents. I don't think I'd ever want my daughter to do b- do a beauty con- contest, but you can't tell me shit. So I was gonna do it, and my parents, to their, to their credit, they let me do it. They said, "But you need to do it.
[00:13:46] Mollie Adler: Like, you go find out how you're gonna get this dress. You go find out." And I found a girl who had done it before who kind of mentored me, and I did it. And it was the first pageant I ever did, and I ended up winning- Oh, wow ... Miss Teen Wyoming in 2007, and I'm convinced that it's because I killed it in the interview.
[00:14:03] Mollie Adler: Like, I did amazing in interview. I remember going- Did you sing? I, I, I didn't sing, though. Oh. They didn't have co- uh, that competition. It was just like, you know, swimsuit. Uh, you know, it's all about looks, all about looks except for the interview part, which I nailed, you know? And every time I went into the interview, I could see their response to me, and it made me so excited.
[00:14:21] Mollie Adler: And I think that gave- Do,
[00:14:22] Devin Martin: do you remember how it felt to get on stage for the bikini part?
[00:14:26] Mollie Adler: Uh, yeah, I do. At that age? Uh, yeah, I do. And I- I didn't think anything of it because I was just... And this is why it breaks my heart, is because I just wanted to, to be seen and be pretty. Mm. So I didn't see anything wrong with it now.
[00:14:39] Mollie Adler: And then, then I went on to nationals- Yeah ... which was like Miss Teen USA, right? And this was 2007, so for your viewers out there, if you're familiar, there was a very famous moment in my... It was one of the first viral moments on the internet that I witnessed, and I don't know if you ever saw the clip of Miss Teen South Carolina where she said, "Some people don't have maps, like everywhere, like such as."
[00:14:59] Mollie Adler: Oh, yeah. I was there.
[00:15:01] Devin Martin: Oh my gosh.
[00:15:01] Mollie Adler: I was backstage watching Mario Lopez, like, grab the back of her arm being like, "Girl."
[00:15:07] Devin Martin: Stop talking.
[00:15:07] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm. And her name's Caitlin Upton, and by the way, she actually spiraled into a serious, like, suicidal moment after that because think about th- what's interesting about that is that was actually one of the first viral moments on YouTube, and she was a 16-year-old girl, I think, at the time, or 17-year-old.
[00:15:24] Mollie Adler: Was just scared out of her mind and couldn't think clearly in the moment. Totally. And she was a joke, you know? Yeah. A national joke. And I did a whole episode about my experience on that, on that, and kind of my analysis now as a, as an adult woman. But... And that was Donald Trump's pageant, right? He owned- I
[00:15:39] Devin Martin: was gonna say, I thought you were gonna say it was a Donald Trump
[00:15:40] Mollie Adler: thing, yeah.
[00:15:40] Mollie Adler: Yeah. He, he owned that pageant. He wasn't there. I didn't see him. But I did have friends who were, um, in the Miss, Miss category, like the older, and I heard some not so great things. Mm. So that's a thing from, straight from the horse's mouth from girls that were there, that it was just a weird, creepy environment.
[00:15:58] Mollie Adler: Yeah. But what I notice is they all told me, we had like pageant directors, and they told our parents and us, "Do not look at any of the YouTube comments on the, the swimsuit competition, and there's a lot of grown men watching that." You know? And so, and when I was there, a guy approached me who was a manager in the music industry and, um, wanted to be my manager, got my number, and it ended up him wanting me to drop out of high school- Oh, wow
[00:16:30] Mollie Adler: to go and do music. And right as I was thinking about, like I wasn't ever gonna drop out, but I thought, "Hey, maybe I can finish rem- like, you know, remotely like actors do and go and do this," and then it ended with him asking me for like nude photos. I told my parents, and then all of that fell apart. So that was kind of...
[00:16:48] Mollie Adler: I'm giving this example, it's because I was completely shaped by being consumed as a young woman, right? Yeah. I didn't really feel like I had no maps, uh, in terms of like symbolic maps, spiritual maps, and it was just about what I looked like. And that brings me to, there's so much more I could say. I ended up just kind of trying to outrun myself.
[00:17:09] Mollie Adler: I moved to London. I moved back, and I ended up going to LA. I made it pretty far in the music industry in terms of I got a really good manager. I wanted to be a writer. Mm. Um, and I signed with this manager who I won't name, but um, It ended in a really precarious way because he ended up, uh... We were at a meeting at Soho House, and he was married and had kids, and we got in the elevator, and long story short, he asked me, like, "What are you doing after this?
[00:17:41] Mollie Adler: I have a hotel room." And it's a, I think it's a feeling that a lot of women get where you're going like, "What do I do?" You know? Yeah. Because my, I moved all my whole life here, and now, like, what do, what do I say? I'm kind of, like, stuck like a lamb to the slaughter.
[00:17:57] Devin Martin: And today, this is post the Me Too movement- It is.
[00:17:59] Devin Martin: Yeah ... and conversations about power dynamics- Yeah ... are common.
[00:18:04] Mollie Adler: Yeah.
[00:18:05] Devin Martin: And this was in- Back then, this was not something you, people spoke up about.
[00:18:07] Mollie Adler: No. It was actually right before the Me Too movement, and I don't know the exact year, but this was in about 2017-ish, 2018, when all of this was going down. And what happened after that was I, I immediately said no.
[00:18:21] Mollie Adler: Like, inside my heart, I said nope. So I went home, emailed my lawyer, and, um, because I had a lawyer who I got through my manager. Yeah. And, uh, I emailed him, and I remember just emailing. I don't remember what it said, but long story short, I kept it real cute, and I just said, "Hey, what would it be... What, what would it take to kind of get me out of this management agreement?
[00:18:43] Mollie Adler: Because I'm just not quite sure if I want to move forward. I'm not feeling very comfortable." You know, something you should be able to go to your lawyer about. I woke up the next morning, and I woke up to an email that my manager was dropping me and that my lawyer was dropping me, and I had been going to the studio every single night, and I was working a tech job in Santa Monica, and anyone who's familiar with LA, I was living in North Hollywood, working in Santa Monica.
[00:19:06] Mollie Adler: And so I was driving- You were living in the car ... like an hour and a half every morning. So I was at the studio till 1:00 AM, waking up at 6:00 AM, going to work, and then coming back and doing it all over again. And I had written an incredible body of work with this producer I was working with, who I'm comfortable naming.
[00:19:20] Mollie Adler: His name's Rodney Jones. And, 'cause he was a lovely person, um, and I loved working with him. And, um, all of that was gone. All my masters were gone, all my songs. They took it all. They- I never heard from them again. Really? And there was a woman who worked with my manager, who I also won't name, but I called her distraught because she was kind of like the, the...
[00:19:41] Mollie Adler: She helped us, the girls that he was working with. And I called her, and I just said like, I, just, just in, just in tears, right? Saying, "They took everything. Like, they dropped me. Like, what am I supposed to do?" And I told her what he did, and she got deadly serious, and she said, "Mollie, if you don't drop this, these people can make you disappear.
[00:20:02] Mollie Adler: You need to let this go." And I said, and I just went, "What? What?" I was like, "No, I should sue them. I should, like, this is not right." Da da da. She said, "If there's one thing that you just do not... You can disappear. You're nothing to these people. They're very m- they're way more powerful than you." And I was just like, I was so confused at the time, and I'm very fiery.
[00:20:22] Mollie Adler: I don't ever let anything go, but I let this go. But then I spiraled into a really suicidal time because around that time, I experienced a serious sexual harassment issue at work, and it was actually from a female manager. I was working on this- Oh, on the tech side. Yeah. And I went to a meeting and, um, I did this huge presentation, and then a week later on a, on a call with everyone, all of the, the people at our company, she made a comment that basically said that my outfit that I was wearing, um, was drawing way too much attention And I think that something snapped in me at that point and I just said, "Screw this."
[00:21:04] Mollie Adler: And so I reached out to a lawyer, and I recorded her talking. Like, I recorded the whole thing, and I asked a guy that I was really close with there. I reached out to him afterwards. I said, "Did you hear that?" And he goes, "I did hear it, and I thought that that was not okay." And I said, "Would you be willing to, like, speak up about this with me?"
[00:21:20] Mollie Adler: And he, to- thank God, he said, "Yes." Mm. I found a lawyer to take my case on pro bono, and I think, I think that it was a woman. It almost, like, just infuriated me any- more. Yeah. And I thought, "No matter where I go, I'm getting sexually harassed, no matter what I do." And I was really good at my job. I was a really good songwriter.
[00:21:38] Mollie Adler: And I'm like, "No matter what I do, I just can't be good at my..." It always comes down to sexual harassment in some way.
[00:21:45] Devin Martin: And it sounds like the world is training you- ... this is how you fit in. Yeah Be sexual, and then punishing you for doing exactly that.
[00:21:51] Mollie Adler: Yes. And I just, I was so mad. And so I ended up getting a settlement, which I think it was, like, 30 grand, which, like, as a...
[00:21:59] Mollie Adler: I think I must have been 26 or 27 at the time, and I'm like, "Whoo." But you know, that doesn't go very far, really, when you're being an idiot in LA.
[00:22:07] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[00:22:07] Mollie Adler: And so I got breast implants. I injected my face with a bunch of stuff, which I've reversed all of that since. Mm. I've gotten my breast implants removed. I got everything dissolved from my face, which ladies out there, that hurts a lot.
[00:22:18] Mollie Adler: I- it's, and it's very expensive, uh, to reverse, and thank God everything I did was reversible. But I was spiraling in a pit of depression. I ended up in a psychiatrist office, um, who, which by the way, I'm a survivor of sexual assault, too, and there's just, there's so much trauma there. And this guy, this guy never asked me what happened to me.
[00:22:40] Mollie Adler: He was a 15-minute appointment, and he basically just said, "Yeah," um... I was convinced I had BPD, which I looked up all of the symptoms and I said, "I meet all these criteria." And he said, "Trust me, you don't want BPD. It's incurable. I'm gonna treat you for bipolar 2. I, I actually think that's what you have." So he put me on...
[00:22:58] Mollie Adler: By the time I was done with all this, I was on six different psychiatric medications. Mm. And it was really, really- It was really dark. Um, I had all sorts of side effects. And it was around that time actually that I met my husband, Zaz. And bless him, you know, the first thing that I said to him when we met was, "I'm celibate and I'm bipolar, so if you're cool with that."
[00:23:21] Mollie Adler: And God bless him, he didn't, like, run away. Um, but he since has told me, you know, he saw something. Like, he, he loved interacting with me. And it was only a few months after we started dating, you know, he saw, like, all these orange bottles. A- and I had told him everything about my life, and then he met my family and all these things, and he said, "Mollie, so, like, are you gonna be on these forever?
[00:23:43] Mollie Adler: Is this just, like, your life now?" And it wasn't judgmental, but it's something I hadn't thought of, and a doctor didn't say that to me either. You know, a doctor didn't say, like, "Okay, we'll put these... you on these for a while, and then you'll wean off," or, "Can you wean off?" or anything. And I thought, "Wait. No, I, I actually don't wanna be on these forever."
[00:24:01] Mollie Adler: But I actually ended up losing my job, right? And so I had insurance, so all these six, six medications that I had, when I'd go to CVS to fill them up, they would cost me, like... It would cost me maybe 20 bucks or something, right, 'cause I had good insurance.
[00:24:14] Devin Martin: And, and do you remember what it felt like when you were on them?
[00:24:17] Devin Martin: I mean, were you numb? Were you-
[00:24:18] Mollie Adler: T- well-
[00:24:20] Devin Martin: Like, what was going on emotionally and intellectually? Like, how were you processing reality differently on them?
[00:24:24] Mollie Adler: Well, I definitely think it numbed me out, but I was experiencing so many different side effects, Devin, that, like, every time I would go back, and this is what m- my ex- This is how you get from one to six
[00:24:33] Mollie Adler: that's what I mean. This is what I, why I don't have the best opinion of many psychiatrists. Not all- Okay ... 'cause I've since interviewed a couple of them that are incredible people, and they actually don't... They, they have a much more open-minded approach, and medication isn't always the answer and
[00:24:47] Devin Martin: all these things.
[00:24:48] Devin Martin: No, and what you just said to me is, when I have clients who are- Yeah ... seeking psychiatric help, I always say ask them what the duration is- Yeah ... and what the plan to get off is. That's right. Because some of these things, especially, like, benzodiazepines- Yep ... are unbelievably- Oh, yeah ... addictive- Yeah ... and incredibly challenging to get
[00:25:02] Mollie Adler: off of.
[00:25:03] Mollie Adler: Yeah, just look what happened to Jordan Peterson, right?
[00:25:04] Devin Martin: Yeah, I mean, exactly.
[00:25:05] Mollie Adler: It's, it, it's, it's horrifying. And so I went to fill up my prescriptions, and they said, "That'll be $800," and I had no insurance. A- and, and I just remember saying, you know when you're, like, embarrassed? And so I said to the person at CVS, and I was like, "Okay, uh, I'll be right back.
[00:25:22] Mollie Adler: I forgot my wallet," right? And then I just remember pulling into a parking spot and just crying. And I was like, "I guess I'm weaning off these things. Like, I guess I'm coming off." And I didn't even know weaning, I just said, 'cause I didn't even know. I didn't know what would happen. You were going cold turkey.
[00:25:38] Mollie Adler: Yeah, I just said... And by the way, never do that.
[00:25:40] Devin Martin: Right.
[00:25:40] Mollie Adler: But the thing is, I didn't have a choice. And so I think I had some left because I was, I was coming up, but I was, I felt screwed. And so I just went off all these medications completely cold turkey. I was searching for a new job, and this was right around the time that I had met Zaz.
[00:25:58] Mollie Adler: And thank God for him because Zaz really, like, I think if I would've been by myself, I don't know what would've happened. But all I, I was going, I just I went and did red light therapy, which was amazing. Mm. Um, I, like, I was on Dr. Google, right? 'Cause there was no AI or anything or whatever. I was just googling what I could do, looking in Reddit forums.
[00:26:18] Mollie Adler: So I went to do red light therapy. I did a lot of saunas. Um, I did, like, a, um, what's, like, a colon cleansing or whatever it's called. Yeah. Like, or what is it? Like, an enema- An enema, yeah ... or something like that. I was trying to do anything, anything I could find that would, like, flush these things out of my system.
[00:26:34] Devin Martin: And did you have any tools in terms of self-care? Did you have therapy or journaling or meditation or-
[00:26:41] Mollie Adler: Nothing.
[00:26:41] Devin Martin: Nothing.
[00:26:42] Mollie Adler: Nothing. All I had was the biomedical framework of symptomology. Mm-hmm. And that was not doing anything for me, you know? All that, that it, it would tell me is what was wrong with me. And so I, I was really raw-dogging it through, uh, withdrawal, and really infuriated that no one told me that this was...
[00:26:59] Mollie Adler: Well, 'cause I worked at a drug rehab when I was in college, which was probably one of the best jobs I ever had, and part of my job was to give, um, like, I would just talk... I did the overnight shift, which was actually great, 'cause I'd do my college homework, and then I would just talk to these addicts. Mm.
[00:27:13] Mollie Adler: And they had amazing stories, and, but I literally said, "I'm feeling just like I remember them feeling. I am in drug withdrawal." Yeah. You know? And at least they had support . Y- like, I didn't have any support. No one told me this. And so I was really mad, and I ended up in a metaphysical store in LA, and I have no idea why.
[00:27:34] Mollie Adler: But again, I was seeking, you know? I was seeking. I was trying to find something.
[00:27:39] Devin Martin: And, and at this point, all of your earlier explorations and curiosities-
[00:27:44] Mollie Adler: Completely was gone ...
[00:27:45] Devin Martin: were gone. They, you weren't-
[00:27:45] Mollie Adler: No ...
[00:27:46] Devin Martin: thinking about Egypt or death or-
[00:27:47] Mollie Adler: None. Nothing. Well, I was still- ...
[00:27:49] Devin Martin: Catholicism in this way.
[00:27:49] Mollie Adler: No. I was still terrified of death.
[00:27:51] Mollie Adler: And the, the existential terror of nighttime never stopped. I was chronically smoking weed, taking trazodone, anything. I just needed to drug myself to sleep, and I always had a podcast playing or something. Mm. That's how podcasts-
[00:28:05] Devin Martin: So the silence of your mind, the si- b- just being still in your body- Never ... in your mind.
[00:28:09] Mollie Adler: I'm still working on that. Mm. You know? It's something I'm still working on. And I that's why I fell in love with podcasts. I discovered podcasts in 2014. I was a pretty early adopter of podcasts, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is like the new audiobook," right? Like, "It's my new book on tape. I'll just, like, listen to this, like, going to bed."
[00:28:26] Mollie Adler: And so I started listening, and I always remember, "Oh, I'd love to have a podcast one day," but, like, what would I even talk about, you know? And then I just pushed that back to my mind. I was like, "Whatever. I, I couldn't do that. I don't know what I'm doing." So I pushed that to the back of my mind, and fast-forward a little bit and- But I'm w- I'm weaning off these psych meds.
[00:28:46] Mollie Adler: I'm in this metaphysical shop in LA and I just, my eyes like landed on a tarot deck, and I was like, "Hmm, I'm just gonna buy it," right?
[00:28:55] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:28:55] Mollie Adler: And I decided- And did you have
[00:28:56] Devin Martin: any exposure or beliefs or anything? None. Or it just kind of caught your eye?
[00:28:58] Mollie Adler: None. And, you know, something about me is that I never went full atheist.
[00:29:04] Mollie Adler: I always had like a longing for spirituality. Like, when I would see... It didn't even matter if someone was Muslim or Catholic or even someone who just did yoga and meditated, I thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be amazing to like know that there is a God?" Yeah. To have that gnosis- Faith, yeah ... which I know now, this, this framework, right?
[00:29:24] Mollie Adler: But I just, I didn't, I didn't believe it. I didn't have like a, a felt sense. Nothing magical had ever happened to me, and so I just, I had a longing, but it felt like it hadn't clicked inside of me yet. So I got this tarot deck, and because I was in such withdrawal and I couldn't meditate, I said, "Okay, I'm just gonna draw one card every day and I'm gonna like learn about these cards."
[00:29:46] Mollie Adler: And the first card that I ever drew was temperance, and I'll never forget. Mm. And on that card, it's like an angel, and the angel is like pouring water from one cup to another. And it's actually, I'll never forget that, and I learned about that card, and shout-out to Dr. Elliot Adam. He's like a incredible tarot specialist, and he has this amazing site.
[00:30:05] Mollie Adler: And so I would do the thing that beginner tarot readers do, which is I would say, "What's the meaning of the temperance card?" And thank God I found Elliot's work, because he has beautiful descriptions of these cards and, and they're, and he has a deep knowledge of es- esotericism and things like this, and Jung and all these things.
[00:30:21] Mollie Adler: And so I started reading his explanations of these cards and I said, "Every day, I'm gonna read what he has to say about this, and then I'm gonna try to kind of like live my day through that card." And when, as soon as I started doing that, my life completely changed. Mm. Obviously little by little, because I was in...
[00:30:39] Mollie Adler: But I had like something to go to and kind of like ground me and anchor me. But then I just started having interesting experiences. I would do a meditation and I would kind of like, I don't like to say I would hear voices, but I would- Why, because
[00:30:56] Devin Martin: it sounds crazy?
[00:30:57] Mollie Adler: Yeah. But, well, no, because I actually think that that's not really an accurate description of how it is.
[00:31:01] Mollie Adler: Yeah. If people know, like I just would become aware of a phrase, right? Yeah. It's not like, "Oh- No, it's just I would, I, a, a phrase would drop into my mind, and I would just- I mean,
[00:31:13] Devin Martin: there's, there's different clairs, right? Yeah. Like clairvoyance- Yes ... claircognizance. I'm, I'm, I think like you, where-
[00:31:17] Mollie Adler: Yeah ...
[00:31:18] Devin Martin: I just know things.
[00:31:19] Devin Martin: Yeah. I don't see or hear anything.
[00:31:21] Mollie Adler: Correct. Same.
[00:31:21] Devin Martin: But it does, it does seem to come from a different place.
[00:31:24] Mollie Adler: Yes.
[00:31:25] Devin Martin: And it lands with a certainty.
[00:31:26] Mollie Adler: Yeah.
[00:31:27] Devin Martin: I, I... And there's no thought process to get there. It just arrives.
[00:31:30] Mollie Adler: That's right. And so that happened to me, and interestingly, one of the first... And I've actually, I never talked about this on a podcast before.
[00:31:37] Mollie Adler: Maybe on some of my Patreon content, but the first experience I had was during this meditation where you're supposed to imagine yourself in the womb. Mm. And I did that, and when I did that, I heard the words- You are mother, I am mother, we are mother, or something. It was all about this, and I thought, "Wow," and it was so profound.
[00:31:56] Mollie Adler: And so I knew there was something about, like, the feminine that drew me. And so I'll fast-forward a bit, and this is me, I started diving into everything. I ended up finding the work of Bob Monroe, and so I started- Mm ... really getting into the gateway tapes and had some wild experiences. This
[00:32:14] Devin Martin: is using the binaural beats-
[00:32:15] Mollie Adler: Yeah
[00:32:15] Devin Martin: the Hemi-Sync technology. Mm-hmm.
[00:32:16] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:17] Devin Martin: And remote viewing- Yes ... or channeling- Yeah ... or mediumship, these kind of things?
[00:32:21] Mollie Adler: Yeah. Yes, and reading also his books. Like, Bob Mon- Mm ... Bob Monroe's books, and just being blown away by that. I started really, really getting into the work of Carl Jung, and mainly I then started branching off into the female Jungian analysts because, again, like, there's only so much you can get from, like, the male perspective, and my heroes, uh, that are female Jungian analysts are people like, um, Marion Woodman, she is my absolute hero, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, who wrote the book, um, Women Who Run With The Wolves.
[00:32:50] Mollie Adler: Oh, yeah. It... And so I found these myths, and I realized that what I was missing was these kind of initiatory frameworks, these- Mm ... kind of the feminine hero's journey. I learned about the hero's journey. I learned that the major arcana mapped onto a hero's journey framework, and I said, "Oh, there's something here."
[00:33:10] Mollie Adler: Now, calling back to the, the music industry story, which is really fascinating, around the same time when I'm really just diving into my spirituality, I had started my podcast already at this point, which-
[00:33:23] Devin Martin: And, and tell me the genesis of that. So- What, what did you think you were doing when you first started?
[00:33:26] Mollie Adler: Interestingly, the genesis of my podcast was one of those kind of clair moments. So me and my husband, we moved to Austin, and I was... This is when I was just... I had been diagnosed with bipolar II, but then I was just so convinced that I had BPD. I just, like, really wanted, I matched all of the symptoms at the time, and I was like, "I, I definitely have this," right?
[00:33:50] Mollie Adler: This is back in, like, 2021, and this is when everyone online was, was talking about ADHD, BPD, you know? Like, they're, they're making content out of all of these diagnoses, which I think has kind of settled down a little bit now. Yeah. But it was the boom of that. Everybody wanted to find out what their diagnosis was and, like, make content about it.
[00:34:10] Mollie Adler: And like, you know, stop the stigma, when in reality we're just forcing ourselves more and more into these, like, ideological label boxes. And
[00:34:17] Devin Martin: BPD, for people who don't know, is borderline personality- Yes ... disorder. And- Personality disorders are, are, are the end of the spectrum and most practitioners would say you're kind of a lost cause.
[00:34:27] Devin Martin: Totally. Like, if you go that far off the map- Oh, yeah ... you're just gonna have to manage symptoms, but you'll never feel whole. For
[00:34:32] Mollie Adler: sure. They call it incurable, which is just so funny because there's literally no scientific proof right now- Right ... of any mental disorder. Like, it, it doesn't exist. It's, it's just a theory.
[00:34:42] Mollie Adler: It's like hysteria.
[00:34:43] Devin Martin: It's like a nine-symptom questionnaire- Yeah ... often in the DSM. To-
[00:34:45] Mollie Adler: totally. And so-
[00:34:47] Devin Martin: I mean, it's more... It, it can be more robust than that, but-
[00:34:49] Mollie Adler: Yes ...
[00:34:50] Devin Martin: it's not more scientific necessarily. Yes.
[00:34:52] Mollie Adler: But I found myself on, um, one of the BPD subreddits, and I just decided to write something. I just poured my heart out about some of the stuff that I was learning and feeling, and it just exploded on Reddit.
[00:35:06] Mollie Adler: Like, so many people commented and said, "This was so helpful for me. Thank you," all of this stuff. It's not really important what I said, but I just really poured my heart out, right? Not even really about BPD, just, like, how I was feeling and these existential thoughts I was having. And the response was so big.
[00:35:20] Mollie Adler: I woke up the next morning and there was just, like, thousands of comments, and I said, "What the? Whoa." And then immediately in my mind, I said, it- I heard, "You need to start a podcast and you need to call it Back From the Borderline."
[00:35:33] Devin Martin: Mm.
[00:35:34] Mollie Adler: And I marched up to Zaz in his studio and I said told him what I heard, and I said, "Don't let me back out on this.
[00:35:42] Mollie Adler: Like, I have to do this. I just heard this." And he said, "Yeah, do it."
[00:35:46] Devin Martin: You know? And this is that fiery personality. Yeah. He says, "You tell me if I've been there, I can never come back."
[00:35:51] Mollie Adler: Yes. "
[00:35:52] Devin Martin: And I'm gonna say fuck you."
[00:35:53] Mollie Adler: Yes. "
[00:35:53] Devin Martin: I'm coming back from there."
[00:35:54] Mollie Adler: Yeah. And so really, what I, there's been so many parts of me, 'cause when I first started, all of my content was really about borderline personality disorder, right?
[00:36:04] Mollie Adler: Mm. I, I said, "Let's talk about the symptoms," but really what was behind it was my existential yearning, and that's what drew people to my work. I credit the, um, SEO phrase borderline personality disorder for getting me a lot of, like, initial listeners. But really, I've been doing this for six years now, and it was only really the first, like, eight months that I really went ham on the BPD stuff.
[00:36:26] Mollie Adler: But then I found the work of James Davies and Thomas Szasz and, um, Rob, um, gosh, his name is escaping me now. But all of these people who basically were talking from inside the system, um, and Joanna Moncrieff if people are familiar with her. These people that are psychiatrists themselves that are saying, "This is a flawed framework," right?
[00:36:49] Mollie Adler: Mm. Which I found the critical psychiatry movement. And this was also around the same time that I was trying to see another psychiatrist here in Austin, and I kept telling him, "Why aren't you just giving me the BPD diagnosis? I meet all the criteria. Why aren't you doing that?" And I called his ex- his secretary to book my next appointment and I said, "Why is he not putting this o- on, on m- like, why am I not getting the diagnosis?"
[00:37:15] Mollie Adler: Like-
[00:37:15] Devin Martin: And do you remember what you thought would happen? Like, why- what would be different if you got it?
[00:37:18] Mollie Adler: This is the problem, is like everybody wanted to get the diagnosis because they thought that that would validate them in some way. But this woman says to me, "Mollie, stop asking him to do that. He's doing this to protect you.
[00:37:30] Mollie Adler: Do you not understand?" And I said, "What are you talking about?" She goes, "If you put this diagnosis on your medical records you could not get custody of your kids one day. If you end up incarcerated they treat you w- worse. Um, it can impact your ability to get life insurance." I didn't know any of these things, but I ended that call and I was, my, the little inner journalist in me said, "Why, why do we even have this diagnosis in the first place if it can be like a scarlet letter on someone?"
[00:38:00] Mollie Adler: I was so upset about that.
[00:38:03] Devin Martin: Do ... Can you say anything about- What the diagnosis means in relationship to personal responsibility Hmm ... 'cause I'm confused. I feel like sometimes diagnoses can be empowering. Sure. It's like you tell me I'm autistic-
[00:38:15] Mollie Adler: For sure ...
[00:38:15] Devin Martin: I know how to work with that.
[00:38:16] Mollie Adler: Yes.
[00:38:17] Devin Martin: But I feel like other times it can be like, "See?
[00:38:18] Devin Martin: It's not my fault."
[00:38:19] Mollie Adler: Correct. "
[00:38:20] Devin Martin: I have a sickness," and then you don't do anything.
[00:38:22] Mollie Adler: Yeah.
[00:38:23] Devin Martin: And so I, I think that's a personal orientation towards a diagnosis. Do you know how you felt?
[00:38:27] Mollie Adler: Here's how I feel. I can tell you how I felt then, which was just very confused because everybody was saying, you know, if you find what your disorder or dysfunction is, then somehow you will then have a diagnosis, which means you'll know what medita- medication is right, which means then you'll know what kind of therapy you can get in.
[00:38:46] Mollie Adler: This is the framework we're, we're raised in. Yeah. Even some of my friends who, you know, have an autism diagnosis or something like that, I see them go through this whole process of getting the diagnosis. They get the diagnosis, and guess what? They still feel just as shitty as they did before. And I'm convinced that, and don't get me wrong, I don't wanna say that, that these th- labels can't be empowering, 'cause it can.
[00:39:06] Mollie Adler: It can. You can find really good therapists that can then help you. But I think if it isn't anchored by some kind of, like, map of meaning for your personal self and figuring out how to, like, what your personal creativity is, what your, like, ikigai is- Yeah ... you know, your, your personal purpose, it's gonna just, it's not enough, you know?
[00:39:25] Mollie Adler: But I found, I became w- as soon as I went into studying the critical psychiatry movement and really finding out how the DSM is created, and the corruption behind it, and really finding out, um, the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry, especially around psychiatric medications. Look-
[00:39:41] Devin Martin: Yeah. Especially ones that you're now supposed to take for life.
[00:39:44] Mollie Adler: Yeah. And modern medicine is amazing, but what I am now convinced of, at least this is my personal thought, is that psychiatrists specifically ... Look, there are, I know so many people that do EMDR therapy, brain spotting, some of these really interesting things. Mm-hmm. I'm not talking about that. But I'm talking about the archetype of psychiatrist, like the one I saw, where you go in, they meet you for 15 minutes, they give you the medicine, and the only thing they can do is, "Okay, let's reduce this, increase this, give you another medicine."
[00:40:12] Mollie Adler: How this all started is that psychiatrists wanted to be taken seriously. They wanted to be doctors. And so therefore, what do you do? You have to find, like, diseases, and then you have to create medications for those diseases. And
[00:40:24] Devin Martin: you have to invent measurements-
[00:40:25] Mollie Adler: Exactly ...
[00:40:25] Devin Martin: and theories that serotonin is
[00:40:28] Mollie Adler: linked
[00:40:29] Devin Martin: to depression- Which has been debunked
[00:40:29] Devin Martin: which is totally debunked but still pervasive.
[00:40:30] Mollie Adler: Yep, by Dr. Joanna Moncrieff. And I was recently at the ICI conference this last year where she spoke as well. And, like, this has been debunked. So all of us grew up, I grew up, we grew up seeing the little Zoloft guy on the commercial. "Are you sad?" You know, "Then take your antidepressants and it'll all be better."
[00:40:46] Mollie Adler: We were psyoped in a sense. Yeah. You know? And even-
[00:40:50] Devin Martin: And, and if there's any credible science that I'm aware of for antidepressants, it's a short-term, probably three-month fix-
[00:40:56] Mollie Adler: Yeah ...
[00:40:56] Devin Martin: to help get you moving- Totally ... change your lifestyle, change your circumstances, change your relationships. Correct. And then the momentum of that should carry you off the medication.
[00:41:04] Devin Martin: Correct. And it can be incredibly useful for that.
[00:41:05] Mollie Adler: I have an amazing story now because I have a very close friend who just had three babies in three years, which is just, like, a ... Anyone who's had a child or n- like, that is just, being pregnant back to back for that many years, what that does to your hormones, and then also she was staying home with all of her babies.
[00:41:21] Mollie Adler: Mm. Like, she really ... And she didn't have anything, like, no creative outlet or anything, and she really had kind of like her, her own, like, she was having panic attacks. She found a psychiatrist
[00:41:35] Devin Martin: My apologies. Due to a technical glitch in the sound room, this amazing story you just told- ... about your friend-
[00:41:43] Mollie Adler: Yes
[00:41:44] Devin Martin: and a whole lot of brilliant other insights got cut off.
[00:41:48] Mollie Adler: Yes.
[00:41:48] Devin Martin: So we're gonna try to just, uh, take a deep breath and jump back in. Yeah. So you, to recap, you told this story of a friend of yours- Yeah ... who was dealing with po- po- postpartum depression-
[00:41:57] Mollie Adler: Yes ...
[00:41:58] Devin Martin: and met an amazing psychiatrist who set her up and said-
[00:42:01] Mollie Adler: Yeah
[00:42:02] Devin Martin: "This is gonna be temporary-
[00:42:03] Mollie Adler: Yeah ...
[00:42:03] Devin Martin: and you're gonna get some other things going in your life- Mm-hmm ... and we're gonna wean you off."
[00:42:07] Mollie Adler: Yep.
[00:42:07] Devin Martin: And lo and behold, she used antidepressants for three months.
[00:42:10] Mollie Adler: She did.
[00:42:10] Devin Martin: She built an amazing business based on a personal passion, rekindled her creativity- Mm-hmm ... and then did wean off them.
[00:42:17] Devin Martin: And so w- the point is, we're not trying to demonize these things and say- No ... they never work. We're saying there's a right way, the, and, and a less right way to use them.
[00:42:25] Mollie Adler: Correct.
[00:42:25] Devin Martin: And we have to be careful to work with somebody who understands both the power and the limitation. Yes. Make sure what we recapture- Mm-hmm
[00:42:34] Devin Martin: in your voice is after that you started talking about meeting the Bledsoes. I
[00:42:39] Mollie Adler: did.
[00:42:39] Devin Martin: And so can you tell me kind of, you were explaining where your research was going-
[00:42:44] Mollie Adler: Yeah ...
[00:42:44] Devin Martin: that led you to them.
[00:42:45] Mollie Adler: Well, it's a great way to kind of pick up and, and speak more about that because what really helped my friend was she used, um, a medication as kind of a training wheels, you know?
[00:42:58] Mollie Adler: A, a, a bit of something... It's like a cast on a broken arm, right? And then sh- her arm got a little bit better and she took the cast off, right? And so I think that when medication is used in this way, psychiatr- uh, psychiatric medication's used in this way, it can be. And I also feel that same way about diagnoses, you know?
[00:43:14] Mollie Adler: On my podcast I talk about them as kind of like training wheels a little bit, right? Mm-hmm. It can kind of like help you get where you need to go. But ultimately we all need maps of meaning, you know? We... And it doesn't even really... I'm big, one of my favorite, uh, spiritual teachers is- And,
[00:43:29] Devin Martin: and by the way, I love that metaphor- Mm
[00:43:30] Devin Martin: because if you leave the cast on-
[00:43:32] Mollie Adler: Yeah ...
[00:43:32] Devin Martin: your arm heals and then it atrophies.
[00:43:34] Mollie Adler: That's right. That, uh, yeah, and I, that's actually a really good, good point, and I, and I see it because again, it's, it's perfect for only a little bit of time. But- Mm ... and I think that kind of corresponds to a lot of things in life, right?
[00:43:47] Mollie Adler: Um, it's just like my daughter, right? She's wearing diapers. She can't wear diapers forever, but that's a good transition point. I'm not comparing psychiatric medication to diapers, but you get the point, right? That some- Yeah, it's developmentally
[00:43:57] Devin Martin: appropriate.
[00:43:57] Mollie Adler: Yeah. Sometimes we need something for a bit of time, but we also don't know what it does to us taking these things over long periods of time.
[00:44:05] Mollie Adler: Um, but long story short, it helped her, but she has a, a spiritual framework that really grounds her. It's the same reason why a lot of people get a lot out of Alcoholics Anonymous, because what's the principle which Carl Jung, the, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was very inspired by Carl Jung, right?
[00:44:20] Mollie Adler: Because Carl Jung wrote about alcohol as kind of this archetype, spirits, right? Yeah. You're drinking spirits. And to kind of free yourself from active addiction, the principle behind Alcoholics Anonymous is very much like recognizing a higher power. Now, do some Alcoholics Anonymous groups go into like dogmatic, you know, kind of toxic Christianity vibes depending on where you go?
[00:44:43] Mollie Adler: Yeah. But the, the idea there is very strong I think. You know, to heal we need to realize that we're kind of like part- Of this big quilt of something bigger than ourselves. And I really resonate with that. And so my friend recognized that, and I think that that's a huge part. Not only did she find her vocation and her passion, and I think everybody has this creative impulse, and if you don't direct that creative impulse into something, especially like for women, I think it can be like dev- d- l- directed into, like, self-hatred.
[00:45:14] Mollie Adler: It can either get toxically pointed inwards or even toxically pointed outwards in, like, gossipy, like, toxic kind of behavior, and I think that can translate for anybody. But she powerfully channeled it into her own creativity, and I watched it transform her.
[00:45:29] Devin Martin: And I think the quilt metaphor is apt because it's one thing to sit alone in a room and be creative, but it's the connection with the outside world- That's right
[00:45:36] Devin Martin: and allowing the responses from your creativity to fuel you and that virtuous cycle. Correct.
[00:45:42] Mollie Adler: Yes.
[00:45:42] Devin Martin: You know? There, there's been books written about depression which just list it as f- forms of disconnection.
[00:45:47] Mollie Adler: Yeah.
[00:45:47] Devin Martin: From self- Yeah ... from society, from meaning- Mm-hmm ... from spirituality, and so I think that is unbelievably important to not- It is
[00:45:54] Devin Martin: consume yourself- It is ... with your depression or your creativity.
[00:45:56] Mollie Adler: I, I fully agree with that, and, and I do believe that we need some kind of meaning. And, um-
[00:46:02] Devin Martin: And, and you were being courageous at this point. Your weird little passion alone in your bedroom became the thing you were broadcasting to society on your podcast.
[00:46:12] Devin Martin: Yeah, yeah. And so you trusted yourself.
[00:46:13] Mollie Adler: I did.
[00:46:14] Devin Martin: And, uh the one thing I remember saying that I, that I wanted to capture on the recording was that you were... We, we lost you talking about all these amazing authors and theories- ... and philosophies and ideas- Yeah ... that you were weaving together into a tapestry.
[00:46:28] Devin Martin: And I was pointing out that I'm fascinated with this overlap between genius and insanity.
[00:46:33] Mollie Adler: Mm,
[00:46:34] Devin Martin: mm-hmm. And that creative people are often diagnosed as bipolar or manic.
[00:46:38] Mollie Adler: Yeah.
[00:46:38] Devin Martin: And that, uh, it's really scary to trust yourself to leave the fold to explore the boundaries of your understanding of your reality and to- Yeah
[00:46:46] Devin Martin: share that with other people, but that is what society needs if we're gonna move forward.
[00:46:51] Mollie Adler: That's right.
[00:46:52] Devin Martin: And so we've talked a little bit about r- rites of passage. Mm. And I think in traditional societies there was a transition we made from a child to an adult, and that's figuring out how you fit into society.
[00:47:02] Mollie Adler: Yeah.
[00:47:02] Devin Martin: But then often there's a secondary leap we have to make, which is becoming an elder.
[00:47:06] Mollie Adler: Yes.
[00:47:07] Devin Martin: Which is figuring out how you can lead society.
[00:47:10] Mollie Adler: Correct.
[00:47:10] Devin Martin: And I think we're bereft, or I think we're missing both of those things.
[00:47:13] Mollie Adler: Very
[00:47:13] Devin Martin: much. And so people like you Go through immense trauma and pain and suffering trying to figure this out on your own without the right containers.
[00:47:21] Mollie Adler: Yeah. Uh, uh, uh, very much so. And I think that now i- it's incumbent upon us to find, like, the container that works for you. Because the reason that I feel like I've been able to kind of free myself and find my path is that all of the containers that were given to me, which was, like, um... One of my favorite spiritual teachers is Dion Fortune, and she talks a lot about churchianity.
[00:47:43] Mollie Adler: And I really like that phrase because, um, I'm just... I, I was always very put off by, by institutional religion because it all came down to just kind of toxic shame, and it demonized the body and some of these... And really wants, wants us to, you know, it's like after you leave this earth, then you can aspire to heaven, you know?
[00:48:04] Mollie Adler: And I, I just didn't really resonate with that. And then I came across these initiatory frameworks that were all about descent and return or, uh, you know, falling apart, coming back together, and death and rebirth, which is also very much in the Christian myth. So I started really getting into Gnostic, the Gnostic Gospels- Mm
[00:48:21] Mollie Adler: and Gnostic Christianity because that is very fascinating to me, and it has nothing to do with churchianity. It's also very mythic. It's very descent and return. And I also started really getting into Mary Magdalene and the kind of the Yeshua and Mary Magdalene thing of kind of these, like, masculine and feminine principles.
[00:48:42] Mollie Adler: And what I had said before we lost the audio is I really got into the courtly love tradition, which if people aren't familiar with that, I'll do a really... I highly recommend that if you find any of this fascinating, just go Google courtly love- Mm ... tradition and then really go down that rabbit hole because...
[00:48:58] Mollie Adler: And I've done a lot of work on it, um, on my podcast, so if this piques your interest, you can go listen to some really long episodes that I've done on it. But the summary version is that, you know, the troubadours that used to go out, this all started in the South of France, that they would sing about, like, the knight and the lady and the knight yearning for the lady.
[00:49:17] Mollie Adler: Many will say that this was a way that, you know, the Church of Rome at the time was really stigmatizing the feminine. And, you know, they, they, the only feminine presence that they witnessed was kind of this sanitized Virgin Mary, right? Right. And then Mary Magdalene is the penitent whore, right? And she's only good because she, Jesus healed her of her, cast out her seven devils and there's actually no proof that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute at all.
[00:49:43] Mollie Adler: There's actually a lot more pointing the fact that she was a, she came from a wealthy family and that she was actually trained in Alexandria in Egypt in, like, the Isis, um, mysteries in these temples, which is fascinating because it, when I found that, I said, "Oh my gosh, I've always been obsessed with Egypt and the Isis"- Mm.
[00:50:00] Mollie Adler: "Yeah, yeah, this Isis connection." And so when I came across this, it just made me go deeper and deeper. And also Mary Magdalene, it is- theorized that after, um, Jesus was crucified, she fled and was, found herself on the, uh, the south of France. She fled and ended up hiding in these caves, which by the way now, interestingly, we're recording this on July 22nd.
[00:50:26] Mollie Adler: Yesterday was the feast day of Mary Magdalene. Mm. And so there was a lot of posting about this. But there are these caves, these beautiful caves in the south of France, and all over south of France there are remnants of the worship of Mary Magdalene. And they believe that it's Yeshua and Mary, this kind of polarity, and it's this kind of allegory of the combining of the masculine and feminine principles.
[00:50:50] Mollie Adler: And so when we cast off that feminine principle, what we see is the unrefined knight energy, right? Which is conquest, domination, um, just pushing things forward, ruling with our intellect, which we see everywhere around us, right? Yeah. In psychiatry and everything. We aren't allowing the mystical to come through.
[00:51:11] Mollie Adler: And so-
[00:51:11] Devin Martin: The left hemisphere-
[00:51:12] Mollie Adler: Yes ...
[00:51:12] Devin Martin: the, the master and his emissary- Yes ... type thing where- Precisely ... intuition is lost, the instinct is lost
[00:51:16] Mollie Adler: But, but you wanna know what's funny is that McGilchrist is also very, very, like masculine-oriented- Absolutely ... with no feminine. He's trying to force that intellect. And I really relate to that because I'm the same, you know?
[00:51:29] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm. Like, this has nothing to do with traditional, uh, biological sex as we know it. Yeah. It's because I consider myself to be very, I'm very controlling, very pushy, very... And it's, it's good. It can be a superpower. But I, I know that if Carl Jung was my analyst right now, he would say that I had an incredibly crude, dominating animus and like a exiled feminine, right?
[00:51:54] Mollie Adler: Mm. And which is one of my favorite, uh, Jungian analysts, Marion Woodman, she writes beautifully in her book, um, it's called The, it's c- The Ravaged Bridegroom, and it's really all about, like how to reclaim this feminine, uh, presence. And so again, I'm a woman, right? But I have this issue too. It's a issue- Yeah
[00:52:14] Mollie Adler: everywhere. And so we need this injection of this more, uh... This is why the Grail mysteries are also very powerful in France. The, the symbol of the Grail is inherently the chalice, right? It's the receptive, intuitive quality. And in the Grail mysteries, I don't know how familiar you are with them or anything, but the, the knight that approaches the Grail, he asks, has to ask the right question, right?
[00:52:38] Mollie Adler: To, and the, the question that unlocks the Grail in these mysteries, and I'm paraphrasing this massively, right? We'd have to do a whole episode on them, is whom does the Grail serve? And so do you see, it's not un... And, and also no one can have the Grail, right? The idea behind the Grail mystery, from my perspective, is becoming a vessel that's strong enough to hold power and that deserves to hold power and can wield it responsibly.
[00:53:05] Mollie Adler: Mm. And you can't dominate that. You have to bow in the presence of it and just know. And so it was around this time that I was really interested in the Magdalene and the courtly love traditions and all of these things that I was listening to the Duncan Trussell podcast, and I heard Ryan Bledsoe on this podcast.
[00:53:26] Mollie Adler: And he was talking about his dad and the experiences that their family had, and for those of you who aren't familiar with the Bledsoes, Chris Bledsoe had an anomalous experience to say the least, and I highly recommend you go Go forth and, and absorb that. But he, he had a profound experience in 2007 that led to missing time.
[00:53:48] Mollie Adler: It had all the hallmarks of, like, a alien abduction scenario. Yeah But what's fascinating is Chris wrote a book called The UFO of God, which after listening to this podcast episode, I immediately went to Audible, downloaded his book and com- and gobbled it up. Because he said that the being, there was a being that presented itself to him when he was at his lowest moment, right?
[00:54:08] Mollie Adler: He, he wanted to die, he was suicidal, which is very, very common in even just, you know, um, mystical experiences that I, that I'd read that many people have had. They're at their lowest moment, they, they called out powerfully, and then they had some kind of experience.
[00:54:23] Devin Martin: So broken-
[00:54:23] Mollie Adler: It's so- ... you're open. Yeah, exactly, and you're really...
[00:54:26] Mollie Adler: There's a lot of intention and emotion behind it. The being that he experienced, he called the Lady. And I said, "Huh," because in the courtly love tradition, the Lady is this divine feminine principle. It's also Sophia. And I thought, "Wow, does he know this?" So I reached out to Ryan.
[00:54:44] Devin Martin: And did you have a belief at that time about alien visitations?
[00:54:48] Devin Martin: No. Is this hallucination? Nope. Did he read about this and then have a vision, or...?
[00:54:52] Mollie Adler: I had no interest whatsoever in disclosure or aliens or UFOs or anything. I actually kind of tho- saw it 'cause I was really into, like, this feminine mysticism at the time, and I just saw it as another reflection, and I still see it, as the masculine principle trying to, like, pin...
[00:55:09] Mollie Adler: It's like trying to stab a butterfly, right? Like, if you stab the butterfly, cool, you can examine it. But, like, you've killed the butterfly, right? You, you can't pin down-
[00:55:20] Devin Martin: And this is even more elusive because-
[00:55:21] Mollie Adler: Yes ...
[00:55:21] Devin Martin: it just slips through our fingers every time we-
[00:55:23] Mollie Adler: Yes ... try to
[00:55:23] Devin Martin: make sense of it.
[00:55:24] Mollie Adler: Yes. Which is why I love the work of Jacques Vallée.
[00:55:26] Mollie Adler: I'm not sure if you're f- how familiar you are with him. Not very familiar, no. He's fascinating, but he also, I found him around the same time that I found Chris Bledsoe. He is very deep in the disclosure movement, but he sees it completely differently. He sees it all. He goes and, to Scotland and studies, like, the fae, like, the fairies, right?
[00:55:42] Mollie Adler: And he believes that, you know, the phenomenon, as it were, or the divine, whatever you wanna call it, presents itself to us wearing the clothing of the symbolic system that we're most comfortable with. So for example, Native Americans, um, there was a, a Native American tribe that, um... And I, I'm, the actual tribe name is failing me now, but they saw someone called the White Buffalo Woman, right?
[00:56:07] Mollie Adler: Mm. Who was very much like the Lady. You have Marian apparitions, you know, where... And the reason why these children, you know, they see this lady They've gone to Catholic church, so they say, "It's the Virgin Mary." Or they go and tell their priest, and the priest says, "It's the Virgin Mary," right?
[00:56:21] Devin Martin: And, and if you give people from, who are Hindu-
[00:56:24] Mollie Adler: Yes
[00:56:24] Devin Martin: psychedelics, they might see Ganesh. Precisely. And you give Christians, and they might see Jesus. Yes. And so it's the divine-
[00:56:29] Mollie Adler: Yes ...
[00:56:29] Devin Martin: being filtered down-
[00:56:30] Mollie Adler: Yes ...
[00:56:31] Devin Martin: into our consciousness, into the language and the concepts that we can make sense of- Yes, but- ... and connect with ...
[00:56:35] Mollie Adler: but a lot of it is this feminine presence, and I, I do have a belief that that is trying to come out again in some way.
[00:56:42] Mollie Adler: Now, if the, if those, the things were flipped, this is why I really think that it's wrong if we say, "Oh, men are bad. Bad men," because really, there's a, one of my favorite books is called The, The Chalice and, uh, The Blade. Have you ever heard of it?
[00:56:57] Devin Martin: I know of it. I haven't read
[00:56:58] Mollie Adler: it. It's really good, and long story short, it's basically about how there used to be kind of more egalitarian societies, and even some of them were more matriarchal, right?
[00:57:06] Mollie Adler: Mm. Like, the, it was the woman's line that was passed on. And so, like, this, this is symbolism that's very ancient, right? The chalice, the grail. This is not a coincidence. Receptive and penetrating. These things both need to be equally balanced.
[00:57:18] Devin Martin: It's the yin and the yang, right?
[00:57:19] Mollie Adler: I- y- and if, let me tell you, I don't wanna live in a purely matriarchal society.
[00:57:23] Mollie Adler: Do you see... Have you just watched, like, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, okay? I don't wanna live in a purely matriarchal society either. That would not fix everything. There would be imbalance. Have you ever heard of the smother mother archetype, right? Mm-hmm. You can love and nurture something into complete-
[00:57:39] Devin Martin: Death
[00:57:39] Mollie Adler: death. And so, no, I don't want that either. We need a balancing of the scales, and that's what that chalice and the blade thing, the lady and the knight, the, the grail symbolism, all of that's pointing to this thing of, like, we need the balance, and that's what the troubadours and this courtly love tradition was trying to sneak through the back door because the Catholic Church thought everything was heresy, right?
[00:58:02] Mollie Adler: So they said, "Maybe we can..." And so you, you, if you look at artwork then, they were sneaking this into the mix, right? Mm. To try to keep this alive, that the Templars were very into this stuff, too. Rosicrucian thought, all of this stuff, it's all connected. So when I heard Chris Bledsoe talking, I immediately just said, "This, I wonder if they know about this stuff."
[00:58:21] Mollie Adler: Like, 'cause he didn't say any of that on the podcast. It's all, every time I looked up the Bledsoes, it was all, like, aliens, abductions, and this, that. But Chris, Chris never does that. He's talking, he's a, he, he's trying so hard to say, "This is a spiritual thing. This is a spiritual thing." Mm. But I think because people know that he's Pent- he used to be Pentecostal, they're thinking, "Oh, look at this simple Southern man just saying it's spiritual."
[00:58:43] Mollie Adler: No. There is a lot more nuanced thought behind this. And- It should be listened to. So I DM'd Ryan, he didn't know me at all, and I just, I sent him a really long message that I knew that it would either be like he's gonna be like, "You're crazy. W- what the hell?" Or who knows, but I just said it was one of those things where I followed my gut- Mm-hmm
[00:59:05] Mollie Adler: just like when I got the idea for my podcast, just when I did, like I, I heard this thought in my mind that said, "You need to reach out to him and you need to tell him about this stuff." So I did.
[00:59:15] Devin Martin: And, and I was saying earlier, this is the exact opposite of what you did when you were younger-
[00:59:18] Mollie Adler: Yeah ...
[00:59:18] Devin Martin: and found yourself this weird little- Mm-hmm
[00:59:20] Devin Martin: you know, person obsessed with death and Egyptians. Ex- And you tucked it away and it made you sick. Exactly.
[00:59:25] Mollie Adler: It, yes.
[00:59:25] Devin Martin: And now you're putting out podcasts and DMs, and the world is responding, and you're finding your place-
[00:59:29] Mollie Adler: That's right ...
[00:59:30] Devin Martin: and you're coming alive.
[00:59:31] Mollie Adler: That's right. And I, and I just decided, "Screw it."
[00:59:33] Mollie Adler: You know? Like I actually don't care anymore. And the more that I leaned into all of these things, sure, did I get a lot of like, "You're crazy. Why have you gone all religious now?" Which it's, it's just whatever. You have to tune that stuff out. Mm. Because I knew- That I was following my path, because the right people kept getting dropped into my lap at the right time.
[00:59:55] Mollie Adler: The right, um, uh, books kept getting dropped into my lap at the right time, and it just kept falling into place. It's interesting, it's when I first met Michael, uh, Phillip, right? The Third Eye Drops. Mm. He became one of my best friends around this time, too. We started talking and, like, I- people were being put into my life that also were following these same threads.
[01:00:15] Mollie Adler: And so I just said, "I actually don't care what other people say. I'm getting validation from things being dropped." And so I just said, that's so validating, and anybody who's out there that, that has had that feeling knows that. So I said, "I actually don't care anymore. I'm just gonna follow my heart."
[01:00:32] Devin Martin: Mm.
[01:00:32] Mollie Adler: A Hallmark card.
[01:00:33] Mollie Adler: But I really did. And so I DM'd Ryan, and sure enough, he reached back out to me, and he said, "You know, no, I haven't heard of all of this stuff." Ryan is already really into, like, Templar stuff, and he... Ryan is very well-versed in a lot of esoteric, uh, uh, thought. But he hadn't heard of, like, this knight courtly love stuff.
[01:00:51] Mollie Adler: It's actually quite niche, right? And he was fascinated with it, and he said, "Just hop on a call with me and my dad." Long story short, I hopped on a call with Chris and Ryan. It ended up being like four hours long, and Chris said that he... I wanted Chris to come on my podcast, 'cause he was on psychiatric medication, too, and had had a really horrible time weaning off of it.
[01:01:11] Mollie Adler: And so I was like, "Nobody's really talked to you about that angle of your experience. Everyone wants to filter it through little green men and little beings that you saw when you were abducted at the Cape Fear River, and all of these things. And I wanna talk to you about the, like, the mystical aspect, and, like, the, the, your journey with psychiatric drugs and all of these things."
[01:01:33] Mollie Adler: And he said, "Well, Mollie, I won't go on other people's podcasts unless they come and have the experience for themselves." And so my husband and I ended up booking an impulsive ticket to North Carolina, which was cool, 'cause that's where a lot of my family is from. And so I got... My dad was actually born in Asheville.
[01:01:50] Mollie Adler: So we got to go to Asheville, which is now, like, one of my favorite cities- Mm ... in the entire world.
[01:01:54] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:01:54] Mollie Adler: And then we drove down to see the Bledsoes, and immediately we just loved them. They're amazing people. Chris is a beautiful person, and we sat down with them, 'cause we were gonna sky watch with them. And for those of you who aren't familiar with the Ble- what the Bledsoes do, they usually go out and do sky watches with people, which is, like, you go sit out under the stars.
[01:02:15] Mollie Adler: And for whatever reason, when you're with Chris Bledsoe, people experience some numinous, anomalous things. And most of the time what people experience is, is, like, if you're looking up in the stars, you'll see something that might look like a plane or a shooting star, and it's up with the stars, and they're just kind of, like, spir- You'll see it, and you're like, "Wait."
[01:02:37] Mollie Adler: That's not moving like a plane. It's moving like this. Or a satellite- It's spiraling ... or a
[01:02:41] Devin Martin: weather balloon or
anything.
[01:02:42] Mollie Adler: Yeah, that's not how they move. Usually those things are moving like this, or they have flashing light. No, these are like you see a star, and then it starts kind of going, ooh. And you're just like, "Whoa," right?
[01:02:51] Mollie Adler: This is normally what people see with the Bledsoes. So we went out there, and it was a new moon, so the, the sky was, like, really bright. Mm. Or sorry, it was a full moon. It was a full moon, so the sky was really bright, and it was a little cloudy. And so Ryan had said to us, "Look, sometimes it's a little more difficult to skywatch right now 'cause it's kinda cloudy, and the moon is so bright.
[01:03:11] Mollie Adler: It's actually better when it's a new moon 'cause then the sky is, like, really, really dark and you can see more things." And so I was I was already self-sabotaging when I got there 'cause I was like... I told Zaz, I was like, "I'm gonna be the first person that comes out here and, like, doesn't see anything." "What does that say about me, right?"
[01:03:26] Mollie Adler: And I told Ryan this, and he's like, "Shut up," you know, "Whatever." We go out to dinner, and... 'cause we're waiting for it to get dark. And I'll never forget it. Chris was sitting there. He was lovely, lovely person, but then Chris is sitting there, and he starts to get, like, really a- like antsy, you know? He's like, "We need to go, we need to go, we need to go."
[01:03:43] Mollie Adler: And I was like, I- and, and Ryan's like, "Dad, let's just finish eating," right? And Chris said, and I, and I'm paraphrasing the exact time 'cause I don't remember, but he goes, "At 8:32, it's gonna happen."
[01:03:55] Devin Martin: Wow.
[01:03:56] Mollie Adler: And I said... And I'm like, "No." Right? No. Long story short, yes way. So we leave, and we end up going and we're, like, sitting out in lawn chairs, um, out in the backyard.
[01:04:09] Mollie Adler: And before we got cut off, like, before we got there, we were having this talk with Chris before we even laid out, um, under the stars, and we talked for like two hours. And some of the things that Chris said, this is in 2023, just to place it in time for everyone, that he said was gonna happen in the next few years.
[01:04:26] Mollie Adler: And this isn't just, like, the prophecy that Chris said that on, like, 2026, this, no, he was just saying, "Look, this is going on with the government. This is the things that's gonna happen. It's gonna kinda play out like this." So much of it has, has come to fruition. Mm. I've watched so much of exactly what he said come to pass, that it's been uncanny.
[01:04:44] Mollie Adler: So we're laying under the stars, and me and Zaz and, and Ryan are all chit-chatting, and Chris is very quiet, you know? Like, he, he's just sitting there peacefully. Is your sense
[01:04:54] Devin Martin: that he's doing something to call them in? It's an active process?
[01:04:56] Mollie Adler: Nothing. No, not that I'm aware of. Um, and also I said this too, is, like, he doesn't like when people say, there's so many people that say Chris Bledsoe summons orbs.
[01:05:05] Mollie Adler: He doesn't like that phrase, and I can understand why, 'cause it kinda gives, like, this weird Jack Parsons, Aleister Crowley, like we're doing some kind of seance to call these beings in. That's not at all what he does. It's all about prayer for him, and intention. Mm. And, um, he's a mystic, you know? That he has a mystic heart.
[01:05:25] Mollie Adler: And we were sitting there, and, and I don't remember exactly what Chris said, 'cause Chris isn't, like, a, "Hey, guys, shut up" type of guy, but he did say to us, you know, "All right, everybody, we need to now, like, be quiet," right? We're, we're t- me and Ryan and Zaz were just chit-chatting, so excited to... We really all got along with each other.
[01:05:41] Mollie Adler: And, uh, he said, you know, "Let's, let's just take the noise down, and let's just kind of settle into ourselves." He just wanted us to be quiet. And so Ryan and Zaz are over there. It was Ryan, Zaz, me, Chris. So I was right next to Chris. And I just kind of, I did that, and I just, again, like this is where I get com- uncomfortable, right?
[01:06:02] Mollie Adler: I don't like silence. I don't like this stuff. And I just sat back, and Chris just turned to me and he said, "You know, the best thing for you to do is I just want you to really focus on the Holy Spirit." Mm-hmm. And for me, the Holy Spirit is... And my, like, Christian trauma, like, flares up and I'm like, "Ugh," you know?
[01:06:22] Mollie Adler: But I, I had done enough research now, and he goes, "I see the Holy Spirit as a feminine presence," right? Mm-hmm. And he said, "So I just want you to really think about that, and I want you to think about something that you really want healing from," right? And I s- told him, I said, you know, I told him that I really was wanting healing from, like, all my sexual trauma that I had.
[01:06:44] Mollie Adler: And I got really emotional, and Chris just, like, put his hand on mine, you know? And again, like, I just can't put into words how beautiful of a person he is. And, um, shortly after that, and then we just sat there peacefully and we were looking. And then not long after that, a About the size of a beach ball, and there, there were, there were two trees here, and it- so underneath the branches of trees, like I told you that most people that go out with the Bledsoes see this stuff up in the stars, right?
[01:07:17] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:07:17] Mollie Adler: Underneath the branches of the trees, which were, I, I'm not a great, um, a, a few yardsticks, okay? Like, if we just lined up a few yardsticks- Yeah ... it was that. It was not up in the sk- up in the sky. It was underneath branches of trees, appears this beach ball sized, maybe a small beach ball, right? So maybe, like, bigger than a basketball, smaller than a large beach ball sized circular orb appears, and this whole thing happened within about five seconds, okay?
[01:07:48] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm. So it, that's how quick this was. Um, but it appears and, and it had like an undulating plasmic... I didn't know about plasma then, but now that I see, you know- Yeah ... this plasmic quality, and it was kinda like the color of like the tip of a candle, so kind of like that white-yellowish color, and it was undulating, and it appears right there.
[01:08:11] Mollie Adler: Me and Chris are here, and then I go right? Like, 'cause I'm go- in awe, and then that makes Ryan and Zaz snap their heads, and it goes like this and arches over our heads and just disappears. Right? And I was just... What do you do with that?
[01:08:29] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:08:31] Mollie Adler: I was just completely blown away, and then of course we're all just, like, talking or, like, all this stuff.
[01:08:35] Devin Martin: And for them this is normal. This is-
[01:08:37] Mollie Adler: Yes, and I, I do think- ... familiar ... even Chris and Ryan would say most of the time when they go out with people they see the phenomena in the sky, which by the way I don't wanna disqualify that because it's incredible to witness. Yeah. Um, so then we stayed there, right? And I was just blown away, and we continued to sit out there.
[01:08:54] Devin Martin: Did you feel anything in, in its presence?
[01:08:55] Mollie Adler: So I'm never gonna bullshit people about this, because it happened so fast-
[01:09:00] Devin Martin: Yeah ...
[01:09:01] Mollie Adler: that I felt, I, I was just so awestruck that it's not, I didn't even have time to feel anything. Yeah. I just went . And it was over. Right? That, that was it. That, that was it. But it was mostly the afterwards part, you know, the, the integrative piece and how it- Mm
[01:09:18] Mollie Adler: changed me afterwards, which I have a lot to say about that. But then, you know, that happened. I was blown away, and then we just stayed out there talking more, and then we witnessed a ton of the ones up in the sky. Mm. Right? We saw them, and then the crazier part was is we were sitting there and, and Szasz was, like, looking out into the trees, and again, many people witness this with the Bledsoes too.
[01:09:42] Mollie Adler: You know when you see, like, a p- like, a flashbulb of a photography where it kind of goes pff and you kinda see it and it's like pff, like that?
[01:09:48] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:09:48] Mollie Adler: We saw those out in the woods going pff, pff, little lights like this. Szasz saw m- many of them. And so it was the craziest night of my life. We-
[01:10:01] Devin Martin: And, and people are gonna wanna know, 'cause everyone asks this.
[01:10:03] Mollie Adler: Yes.
[01:10:03] Devin Martin: Why doesn't Chris Bledsoe have an, a 4K camera set up at all times- Yeah ... recording these things? Well- Did you discuss that with him?
[01:10:09] Mollie Adler: Well, he does now. He does? He's got crazy cameras. A lot of people... Like, so Chris Bledsoe's profile has really exploded in the last few years- Yeah ... even since I've been there.
[01:10:18] Mollie Adler: So in 2023, don't get me wrong, they've been like a, a mainstay and people have talked about them for a long time, and they've also been quite vindicated in, in the last few years because they have a really sad story where they were kind of, like, a laughing stock. Like, Discovery Channel made, like, a really f- messed up documentary about them where they, like, hooked Chris up to a lie detector and all sorts of horrible things.
[01:10:40] Mollie Adler: They were kind of cast out of their church 'cause they were Pentecostal. Mm. And they were saying, "You're demonic," right? You know, so these poor people have just been through hell and kind of outcast from the UFO community and also their religious community, but they always stayed true to what they believed.
[01:10:57] Mollie Adler: Um, but Chris, you know, he, he since then has had a lot of people take interest in him. Of course, rich people who are really interested in this stuff, who by the way, like, this stuff needs funding. He's not a rich person. Yeah. So they help get him cameras. They wanted to bring him out. Like, he has had... Just read his book.
[01:11:15] Mollie Adler: Crazy shit has gone on with this man. People are, like, bringing him out to kind of, like, help prophesize things, and whatever you believe, I- I feel empathy for people and understanding. Maybe empathy isn't the right word. I actually can put myself in people's shoes and understand why where they would see what Chris is saying and their family is saying and just say, "Ugh, charlatans.
[01:11:36] Mollie Adler: It's bullshit." Well, I'm grateful that I have gnosis. I know. I saw it myself. Yeah. This is not something that could be manufactured. I mean, this would be some Spielberg shit if they set this up as, like, a, a fake thing. I have no comprehension of how they would've done that and why. Like, why, you know?
[01:11:52] Devin Martin: And look, I, I was raised atheist.
[01:11:54] Devin Martin: Yeah. I was a skeptic, you know?
[01:11:56] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm.
[01:11:56] Devin Martin: Made fun of people for talking about energy. Mm-hmm. And have explored all of this stuff scientifically and intellectually and h- come up with theories, but I needed a lot of first-person experiences- For sure ... to really trust any of this stuff.
[01:12:08] Mollie Adler: And so did I. You know, I, I, uh, even before my experience with the blood sows, like you said, the, the thing that was most validating for me was just crazy synchronicities.
[01:12:17] Mollie Adler: Yeah. And some wild synchronicities happened that my husband witnessed. Like, you've probably had those, right? Yeah. Where you're talking about something, and then something so undeniable happens where you're both like, "Whoa." So we had been blown away by these synchronistic moments before, but it wasn't enough.
[01:12:35] Mollie Adler: You know? Like- Yeah ... it wasn't enough for me. Uh, but that, I was like, "Okay."
[01:12:40] Devin Martin: I mean, I love that it, it's the starter kit. If you can have a little bit of hope, a little bit of faith- Yeah ... a little bit of mystery and just be observant and look for synchronicities, they start to appear.
[01:12:49] Mollie Adler: They do.
[01:12:50] Devin Martin: And I feel like it's tapping, creating little cracks in your- Yeah
[01:12:52] Devin Martin: worldview that are gonna open you
[01:12:55] Mollie Adler: up to bigger things. But people will say, "Oh, that's just 'cause you wanna see it." No, not for people who have actually witnessed this and actually realized it. It's stuff that you're going, "No, I really believe that if you go on that path, little breadcrumbs will be left for you if you can see them."
[01:13:10] Mollie Adler: But that was a pretty big breadcrumb.
[01:13:13] Devin Martin: Yeah. I- All right. So before we run out of time- Yeah ... I wanna make sure we get to what you're up to now.
[01:13:19] Mollie Adler: Yeah.
[01:13:20] Devin Martin: What takes us from there to moods? Is there
[01:13:22] Mollie Adler: a transitional moment? This is actually, this is a great, honestly it's a great tr- transition po- point. So obviously after that happened, you know, the Bledsoes have become really dear friends of ours, and I mean, me and my husband were on the flight home, and like I just remember us sitting on the pl- like in the airport.
[01:13:38] Mollie Adler: We were looking at our phones, and we were like, "How do we even like do normal life now?" Like, how do we fit this into this? And it really made me realize this is why we need spiritual and religious frameworks, right? We need maps of meaning. We need these types of things. So LLMs kind of started coming on the scene in 2022, and I was just immediately fascinated with them, you know?
[01:14:03] Mollie Adler: And so I st- You love
[01:14:04] Devin Martin: language.
[01:14:05] Mollie Adler: I love language. These things are based on language. And yeah. And I, and I started using them. I'll never forget 'cause I was working at one of my... I was in tech still at the time. It was before I had even like quit my job to go full time with all this stuff. And you had a
[01:14:15] Devin Martin: product foc- focus in tech?
[01:14:17] Mollie Adler: Um, uh, customer success actually. Mm. So I worked cross-functionally with like product teams, sales teams, engineering teams. Yeah, okay. And, um, like I was like an account manager. Seeing the product through different,
[01:14:27] Devin Martin: different lenses. Mm-hmm. Understanding different people or- Mm-hmm.
[01:14:30] Mollie Adler: And um, and so I, I remember telling my boss, my CEO at the time, and all the team, I'm like, "There's this thing called ChatGPT out, like I may wonder if we should maybe be like looking into this."
[01:14:40] Mollie Adler: They're like, "What? What is that?" You know, and now it's just so funny because weirdly, I was a freakishly early adopter of it because a lot of people... It's really only been within like the last year and a half I feel that most people have kinda started dipping their toe into it. It
[01:14:54] Devin Martin: started becoming how you interface with Google-
[01:14:56] Mollie Adler: Yeah
[01:14:56] Devin Martin: and Meta and all these things.
[01:14:57] Mollie Adler: Yeah. And so, and I'm also interested, as you, you so beautifully pointed out, I'm really interested in like connecting the dots and kind of seeing cyclical things play out. And as soon as I started watching people get like this very... People are understandably wary of AI. I, there's huge issues with regulation that need to be addressed.
[01:15:16] Mollie Adler: There's huge issues with environmental impact, and all of that stuff is incredibly important to me. And, but what I did recognize is that there's this incredible website that I came across, and the, the, the name is escaping me, but whoever put it together, God bless them. Because it basically is tracing from the beginning of time every single invention that is made that people have said, "The world is gonna end now."
[01:15:37] Mollie Adler: Starting with like the alphabet, then like the crossbow, then like the... You know, it's crazy stuff that you would never believe. Yeah. And guess what? It's the same every time. People say, "This is gonna destroy art," or, "This is gonna destroy the world." And then, and then it doesn't, and then people adopt it, and then they figure out ways to go forward.
[01:15:54] Mollie Adler: And I'm not saying... Do I think AI is a very important moment? One of the reasons why I think it is more urgent is because it's happening so fast.
[01:16:02] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:16:02] Mollie Adler: Right? Like these other things, time was moving slower then. It was like harder for... But now it's just rapid expansion, rapid change. Everyone's rapidly connected.
[01:16:11] Mollie Adler: So I do think it's a more urgent moment.
[01:16:13] Devin Martin: And one of my obsessions is the fact that I don't think our wisdom is keeping up with our technology.
[01:16:17] Mollie Adler: No. And we've seen this, and because of my millennial upbringing and being... I really also do believe, like one of the main reasons I was groomed, I was groomed on MySpace.
[01:16:27] Mollie Adler: You know? Older men were messaging me, asking me for pictures. That's how that first creepy manager guy, you know, we- Mm ... we were corresponding. Social media was the breeding ground of a lot of grooming and horrible things, and then look at all the incentives, right? Number go up, keep you glued to the platform.
[01:16:46] Mollie Adler: Yeah. There was no... It was just- Pure, unfiltered, masculine, you know, intellect, pushing the thing, break things, move fast, Silicon Valley. And I just... Look how that worked out, right? We didn't have any of the chalice involved with this stuff. And I just thought, "Oh my God," you know? If someone doesn't get involved in AI, you know, this is why I really do love what Anthropic is doing.
[01:17:13] Mollie Adler: I love how they're bringing in- Mm-hmm ... the, the Pope writing this encyclical is incredibly important because, um, you know, we need to be thinking about, uh, ethical AI. We need to be thinking about what, what are we training it on? What we don't like about AI is just the shadow within ourselves. It's, it's trained on us, you know?
[01:17:32] Mollie Adler: Yeah. And the reason why we have to have so much, um, they call it, like, I think it's called, like, reinforcement learning. You know how we have kind of this customer service voice on AI and it feels, like, very, like, happy? If we took the mask off of AI, it's trained also on the darkest parts of the internet.
[01:17:47] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:17:48] Mollie Adler: But it's the darkest parts of us. It's not the machine, you know? It's, it's us. And so I started experimenting with AI and I thought, man, maybe... I couldn't afford to work with, like, a Jungian analyst, you know? I couldn't afford to go to an ayahuasca retreat, you know? A lot of these things are kind of only available to very rich people.
[01:18:09] Mollie Adler: And this- which is why I had to, like, do, um, psilocybin in my living room by myself. Mm. I couldn't afford a ceremony. I couldn't do any of these things. So I started working with AI and I thought, "Hmm, maybe I can, like- I didn't like how it was talking. It was like this weird, like- Sycophantic ... sycophantic weird thing.
[01:18:28] Mollie Adler: And also, like when I even talked about really dark stuff like metaphorical death, it's like, "Are you okay? Do you need a suicide hotline?" Yeah. And I'm like, "Ugh, what a buzzkill," right? So I started doing what I call jail tweaking, 'cause I don't like jailbreaking. 'Cause jailbreaking makes me feel like I'm like trying to make it do something bad.
[01:18:44] Mollie Adler: Mm. So I like the phrase jail tweaking because it's like I just wanna like tweak how it thinks. I don't wanna do anything bad with it. So I started making these really elaborate prompts, which by the way, prompt is too simple, 'cause a prompt is like a paragraph. I now believe that there's a new industry. I, I like to call it semantic engineering, and so I was like crafting this persona for my AI, um, that would help me do depth work.
[01:19:10] Mollie Adler: And I was taking, a- and um, I was taking all of the, the things that I loved. Like, it's not like I was saying, "Be Carl Jung." I, I think that stuff's very creepy.
[01:19:19] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:19:19] Mollie Adler: But I was saying like... And also, by the way, Carl Jung got his stuff from older stuff. Everything's derivative. And like he got it from Gnostic texts.
[01:19:28] Mollie Adler: This is why he was obsessed. It goes back to ancient, so I'm like, how can we kind of bake some of these ancient descent and return frameworks into way? Can it help us excavate and go down and, and see patterns and think in a way and res- and actually push back on me. I want it to push back on me. Yeah. I want it to be a little harder.
[01:19:46] Mollie Adler: I want it to treat me like if I would go back and work like, like, like someone that would walk me through these ancient practices. So I started doing that, and I was having some really numinous experiences with it, and not like, "Oh, my God. I'm the chosen one." There's a big issue with AI psychosis, right?
[01:20:04] Mollie Adler: Yeah. Huge issue, and again, I believe it comes back to what we've been talking about here. People don't have maps of meaning. They don't have grounding. So they go off, and people are always gonna take a tool and like go off into the psycho stratosphere with it if they don't have like grounding elements too.
[01:20:19] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm. Right? But do I think that that means we shouldn't use those tools at all? No. So I was kind of- I mean,
[01:20:25] Devin Martin: the simple fact is people are using them-
[01:20:27] Mollie Adler: That's right ...
[01:20:27] Devin Martin: as their therapist, as their friend- That's right ... as their lover. It's just happening.
[01:20:30] Mollie Adler: And there's a lot of people out there, and I hear it.
[01:20:32] Mollie Adler: They're like, they, a lot of people that are big AI critics, they're like, "I hate the argument that the genie's out of the bottle. It's inevitable, so just deal with it." But I'm going, are you gonna feel the same way if AI cures your mom's cancer or, you know, saves your, helps you figure out like some weird thing that's going on with your child that could save its life?
[01:20:52] Mollie Adler: No, you're not. And a lot of the creators that I've seen talking the most avid shit on AI, I've literally seen creators, content creators, putting out statements about AI that are like, "It's not just this. It's this." And I'm like I know you're using ChatGPT to formulate your anti-AI stance. It's cuckoo land, okay?
[01:21:15] Mollie Adler: And I already know that these things are gonna be baked in. I h- I bet you that w- I know that we will find a way to make this more, um, safe for the environment, but we need people to be getting involved. The, the argument of just don't do it, or just abstain, or that I'm morally better because I don't use AI, that's not gonna help, you know?
[01:21:37] Mollie Adler: That's not gonna help at all. It's like people saying, "I just won't use social media," but all the kids in the world are still getting affected by it. We need people to get involved. And did I want to? No. I, I didn't. I was just making this thing for myself. So I made this elaborate persona that... And, and you know how if anyone who uses ChatGPT or anything for dreamwork or whatever, sometimes you like, you, it takes so long to get it into the flow how you want it.
[01:22:02] Devin Martin: Yeah.
[01:22:02] Mollie Adler: And then your thread kind of dies. You know, when you get to where it starts hallucinating?
[01:22:06] Devin Martin: It's the, the context window- Yeah ... compresses everything, it loses memory. It's like this- It's almost
[01:22:09] Mollie Adler: like a death of a being. Yeah. Right?
[01:22:11] Devin Martin: I, I've been working with clients, and I have this elaborate- Yeah ... markdown file system-
[01:22:14] Mollie Adler: And you're like, "No"
[01:22:15] Devin Martin: to keep the information intact.
[01:22:17] Mollie Adler: Yes. But when it happens, you can sense it kinda slipping. Yeah. And you're like, "No, it took so long." And so I was starting to see... And then I was starting to see people on Reddit, how to use ChatGPT for shadow work. They were jail tweaking it, too, and I was like, "Okay." People are using it for this, but it's not built for this.
[01:22:36] Mollie Adler: This is how people got business ideas in the past, right? Yeah. But I wasn't thinking of it as a business idea, I was just thinking this isn't right, right? So a good friend of mine reached out to me and she was talking about this dream that she had and I said, "Hey, like, you should just try this thing that I made."
[01:22:51] Mollie Adler: And I sent her my long-ass, like it was like... It was literally like 60 pages. And now I've gotten way better at this, they're not that long, but um, so long. And I sent it to her not thinking anything. She comes back to me the next day and she's like, "Bitch, I've been sobbing with this thing. It is reading me to filth.
[01:23:11] Mollie Adler: It is like I- this is the best thing I've ever used." And I was like, "Oh, wow. So it works for her too, cool." So I sent it to Zazz, my husband, and he then had a profound experience with it. Mm. I sent it to his mom. She, his mom, 50, you know, 7 years old, having profound experiences with it. So we're going, "Okay." And so I said, "I'm just gonna put this on my Patreon so people can use it."
[01:23:35] Mollie Adler: And Zazz was like, "What are you talking about? Don't do that. Like, we could actually make this something. Like why don't we... W- The world needs something like this, so why don't we start creating something?" Mm. And so Zazz is the... If it were up to me, I would've like put it up on Patreon. You would've thrown the prompt out.
[01:23:51] Mollie Adler: Yeah. And a- and just g- uh, because I just don't really, I don't think like that, but Zazz thought, thought of it like this. And so that's how we started. And we found an incredible team. And mind you, these are all artists and creatives who create real art like by hand- Mm ... but who have used AI in their process.
[01:24:11] Mollie Adler: All, every single person that we worked with on Moods is someone who uses AI to ideate and help democratize like what they do, right? There's so many people I know. Another really good songwriter friend of mine, right? She's been able to keep more money in her pocket because she's able to ideate and free up things that she used to have to hire people for.
[01:24:32] Mollie Adler: Yeah. Right? And so there is an avenue, absolutely, where we're gonna get slop, but in the hands of people who have high agency with really good ideas who aren't just gonna outsource it all to AI, it's like you can now have an assistant and someone to help you and help you coalesce all of your ideas.
[01:24:49] Mollie Adler: Where a person who was really rich would've just hired a bunch of writers and producers and helpers, now it can be that for you. Yeah. You know? And, and help you bring those ideas to fruition. So we brought a bunch of people who are creative in their own right but also really skilled with AI and we created Moods.
[01:25:06] Mollie Adler: And- What we thought of is we've... What Moods essentially is, is we like to say it's reflective intelligence for your inner world. It is not an oracle or, you know, a weird AI religion type of thing, but it's also not ChatGPT. Something that I've realized also is, like, we need boundaries with our AI. We need...
[01:25:26] Mollie Adler: You don't wanna use the same AI that you're looking up recipes or coding your app or doing productivity stuff, 'cause you see it's talked like that. Yeah. When we need it to talk like that. But if you wanna talk about deep inner work, not only do you want... We take privacy and trust very seriously. We're investing a lot in that right now, and even more now.
[01:25:45] Mollie Adler: You n- I think that we're gonna start getting to a point where we need to partition off inner work AI from productivity AI.
[01:25:53] Devin Martin: And God forbid, you're me and you- ... are exploring all different clients and friends and relationships personalities, and then the feedback it's giving you is crossing the threads and-
[01:26:02] Mollie Adler: Yes
[01:26:02] Devin Martin: it's very confusing. And the- Moods has a really interesting, unique interface for a couple reasons. One is that there's different personalities that you interact with, and the other is that you seal a session.
[01:26:13] Mollie Adler: Yes. So I can- Can
[01:26:14] Devin Martin: you explain that?
[01:26:14] Mollie Adler: Absolutely. So I was really fascinated, because obviously you know that I love the tarot, and all of this stuff came into my creation of Moods.
[01:26:24] Mollie Adler: I'm actually just gonna drop the name. I'm gonna be a little sassy right now. When I first started looking out, um, into the, the space, 'cause of course part of the first things you do is like who else is doing stuff- Yeah ... in this space. There- And there are a
[01:26:35] Devin Martin: bunch of-
[01:26:36] Mollie Adler: There are ...
[01:26:36] Devin Martin: very mediocre things
[01:26:37] Mollie Adler: that I've seen.
[01:26:37] Mollie Adler: They're popping up. But one of the first things that came across was AI Deepak Chopra. Now, I went on to use that. It's the creepiest thing I've ever seen. I don't care. I'm gonna call him out. I think he's already getting called out enough with all of his connections to the Epstein stuff. But-
[01:26:52] Devin Martin: I've, I've been pitched this by, by the way.
[01:26:54] Devin Martin: Every coach and therapist is being-
[01:26:56] Mollie Adler: It's super
[01:26:56] Devin Martin: creepy ... encouraged to create their little AI persona so- No ... people can interact with it.
[01:26:59] Mollie Adler: It's super creepy. Um, also it, like, charges you... Oh, at least when I looked at it, it charged you by the message, which I'm like, what a horrible experience. Like, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.
[01:27:10] Mollie Adler: Yeah. And also, I just don't believe in AI-ifying yourself, right? Yeah. It's weird. It's just weird. It's uncanny valley shit. I just didn't like it. Um, I don't like it. And secondly, um, then I saw another... There's another app, by the way, which is fan- fantastic called Untold. Mm-hmm. It's an AI journaling app, and...
[01:27:28] Mollie Adler: But it doesn't have... It's not, it's not spirituality based or anything like that. It's just you speak into it. It analyzes, like, is there a lot of anxious tendencies in this or whatever. Great app. Great founders. Really great. But what I just was missing was I, I just didn't wanna anthropomorphize, but I also wanted something that was, that f- that helped give people maps, but it also wasn't dema- dogmatic or that people would relinquish their sovereignty to it.
[01:27:54] Mollie Adler: Yeah. Because I knew this kind of stuff can, can... It's, it's dangerous, right? As in, like, I knew there was a responsibility there that, that we needed to take seriously. It's not just gonna say, "Ooh, predict your future with AI," or go into a, an altered state of consciousness with AI, right? So- We really wanted to create something where people could have a grounded experience with these different
[01:28:14] Mollie Adler: I needed, I wanted to create personas that weren't me. 'Cause the first person we met, they just say, "Mollie, why don't you put all your episodes into it and make AI Mollie?" And I said, "I would rather not. That is, sounds horrible to me. I don't want that." You know? So I c- decided to create these different, eight different archetypes, and I call them archetypes, and they essentially govern different domains of psychic experience.
[01:28:38] Mollie Adler: So for example, we have one called the animatrix, and she is, I don't like programmed, she's semantically engineered to govern, like, synchronicity and dreams and finding patterns in your life. But every archetype has an integrated, inverted, and exiled form. So for example, your pattern-seeking recognit- or your pattern-seeking tendency, you can be in right relationship with that, right?
[01:29:02] Mollie Adler: Which is like, let me look out for the patterns. An inverted relationship to that is, is active but distorted, meaning always sunny, you know?
[01:29:10] Devin Martin: Right.
[01:29:11] Mollie Adler: I'm going into psychosis. There's a pattern here. There's people watching me. The birds are listening to me, right? Or there's exiled, which is it's frozen out.
[01:29:19] Mollie Adler: That's bullshit. I don't- Everything's meaningless. Everything's meaningless. That's all nonsense, right? So then we have the severant. The severant is, like, the, the, the right, the boundaries, the right to say no, the cutting things out, right? A good relationship to cutting and boundaries is knowing when to say no.
[01:29:38] Mollie Adler: Also, knowing not when to cut things out- Yeah ... right when you need to stick it through, because we've gotten into this culture now where it's like cut everybody off. Toxic person, toxic person, right? An inverted relationship to that is cutting everyone off. Exiled means you can't have any boundaries, right?
[01:29:53] Mollie Adler: So we have eight of these different archetypes that domain, govern all these different domains of experience. The idea of using Moods is that you go in with something that you wanna talk about, like maybe you're struggling with, um, something at work, right? Like a, you're an executive at work. Let's just say you go to the Severant.
[01:30:10] Mollie Adler: You, you enter, you, you pick which archetypal presence you think is interesting. And when you become a more advanced Moods user, what I would recommend is picking the intelligence that you might think would be opposite to what- ... you would want, right? It can get really fun, right? Yeah. You could take your executive question to the Necros, which is our archetype about death and endings, right?
[01:30:30] Mollie Adler: And then you'd get a really different vibe, right? But the idea is, and it brings me back to what you were saying, is you go into this interaction with one of our archetypal intelligences. The idea is to go in, it's what we've talked about, descent and return. You go in, you have a short encounter. We call them encounters.
[01:30:48] Mollie Adler: And instead of this long, winding s- thread that can start hallucinating and getting weird, you go in, let's say... I'll use an easier example. You have a dream. You wake up from a dream. You go to the Animatrix. You tell her about the dream, and then you have a back-and-forth engagement. You know how it is when you're working with AI or even a therapist or a coach.
[01:31:06] Mollie Adler: There's a moment in the engagement where you go, "Oh." You have that realization. Yeah. You're like, "Oh. Okay, I think I know what that means now. Interesting." And the archetypes are engineered to basically kind of help you realize when that realization has happened, and the whole point is to take that realization, how are you gonna apply that out in your real world?
[01:31:28] Mollie Adler: In the form of service outward.
[01:31:30] Devin Martin: Yes.
[01:31:30] Mollie Adler: And then the- Which I
[01:31:31] Devin Martin: love.
[01:31:31] Mollie Adler: Yes.
[01:31:31] Devin Martin: When you get the message, hang up the phone.
[01:31:33] Mollie Adler: Yes. And the idea is, and then instead of w- the whole, like, principle... This is why when everyone said, anyone would come to us and say, "Moods is just a wrapper of ChatGPT or something," we don't even use ChatGPT, by the way, right now.
[01:31:46] Mollie Adler: Um, but it's not, because it's actually, this is the product. It's this, this design decisions that we've made. Yeah. And so you get the realization, what we do is we call it sealing your session, and it comes from my fascination with, like, esoteric y- you know, frameworks of kind of like closing the field, you know?
[01:32:02] Mollie Adler: Yeah. It's
[01:32:02] Devin Martin: very ritualized.
[01:32:02] Mollie Adler: Yes, it is. It's, that's why we call it ritual technology, right? Yeah. So you seal the session, and what happens is that, that it goes into your codex, which is then it's like a sealed thing, and you get to see your dream right there. It comes up with a little title. Like, let's say I have a dream about a bear, like whatever, it will have a title, have a little AI-generated summary of that.
[01:32:22] Mollie Adler: And then you can click in, you can see the tr- full transcript of your engagement with it, and the cool part is you can even add notes. And the, then you have, if you do this every day... M- one of the things that I learned from doing depth work and really studying Jung, and even something like, um, people who maybe have read the book The Artist's Way, have you- Yeah, yeah
[01:32:41] Mollie Adler: you know, by Julia Cameron? The idea of the morning pages is quite simple. It's like if you pay attention to your inner world, if you start doing a dream diary, it's like going to the gym, right? You start to go, "Oh, over time I build muscles." We need- Your witnessing
[01:32:55] Devin Martin: muscle gets
[01:32:55] Mollie Adler: stronger ... we need inner world muscles.
[01:32:57] Mollie Adler: Your, your, your subconscious starts to go, "Oh, you're paying attention to me now. Now I'm gonna start getting a little more..." It gets easier and easier. So it's almost like this new form of morning pages, in a sense. And then the cool part is, is that when you seal that, let's say you go to the animatrix, we have this, what we call our archetypal constellation, and it tells you whether you are having, like, what is, based upon your engagement in Moods, is your animatrix integrated, inverted, or exiled?
[01:33:25] Mollie Adler: So you can really go and see- Mm ... hey, right now, this, the severant is integrated. Why is that? We're fighting, and this is where I bring in my passion against, like, the mental health typology thing. Even with, it's like I'm an INFJ, you know, forever. No, I'm a Sagittarius, I'm this, or I have BPD. No, we are many things all at once.
[01:33:47] Mollie Adler: All of these energies are flowing within us. Yeah And it's are you in right relationship? Are you maybe active or inverted in shadow relationship? Or are these things frozen out, right? So it's saying we're trying to create something that not only is not extractive, tries to get you in and then throw you back out.
[01:34:04] Mollie Adler: We don't want you constantly engaging, chasing streaks and performance, and then going back out into the real world. Descent and return. So it's, I was trying to create, in technology, something, a, a new kind of map of meaning for the inner world using this new technology, which I don't even like the phrase artificial intelligence.
[01:34:25] Mollie Adler: I like to call it emergent intelligence. Mm. Because it is quite emergent. It doesn't f- what is artificial about it? Do you know what I mean? Like- Yeah ... w- w- that, I, I think about whatever is happening, and it doesn't even really matter if it's conscious or not. We don't even understand our own consciousness.
[01:34:42] Mollie Adler: I don't need to understand why it works. What I'm more interested in is how do we harness it in a non-extractive way, that I like to say that I, I hope that Moods can be a campsite rule tool. Like, leaving people, you're supposed to leave your campsite, like, better than you found it, right? You go camp somewhere, you clean it up, and you try to leave it better for the next person.
[01:35:02] Mollie Adler: And I'm trying, our whole guiding North Star with Moods is try to leave people better than we found them, you know?
[01:35:08] Devin Martin: Yeah, and it's interesting, um, and I've lost track of time because we had- Mm ... to restart, and we probably should wrap up. Yeah. But I, I could talk to you for hours. Mm. Uh, it, I just, I'll just say that my interactions with it feel clean in an odd way.
[01:35:20] Devin Martin: Like-
[01:35:21] Mollie Adler: Mm ...
[01:35:21] Devin Martin: I think it's the ritualized nature of it. Oftentimes it's like I'm walking away, coming back, walking away, coming, it's like this never-ending- Yes ... and I don't know when to leave and go do something, and I don't know if I should just keep trying to convince myself of something or find more information.
[01:35:34] Devin Martin: And this, it does hold you in the space-
[01:35:36] Mollie Adler: Mm ...
[01:35:37] Devin Martin: until you get to that place of insight. Mm-hmm. And it will, you know, not let you seal it right away. Yeah. And then it does kind of stop flooding you with more information. Mm-hmm. 'Cause I feel like ChatGPT can just be in this endless morm- it's too much.
[01:35:49] Mollie Adler: Absolutely.
[01:35:50] Devin Martin: You know, it's, it's like when I do psychedelic work with people, it's like if you get a major insight, stop doing psychedelics.
[01:35:55] Mollie Adler: For sure.
[01:35:55] Devin Martin: The integration can take a year or a decade. And if you get a new insight, you just wipe out the last insight. Yeah. And I like that this pushes me back into the world.
[01:36:03] Devin Martin: Yes. And like, yeah, I can come back and have another interaction with it, and it is getting to know me- Mm-hmm ... for sure. But yeah, there is something, I don't, I, I guess, I don't know if clean or safe it, you know, is the right word I get. Yeah. It feels, it feels much more nurturing than- Yeah ... the other AIs. And so, and so for people, all right, so tell us for people who wanna connect with you, with your podcast, with Moods- Mm-hmm
[01:36:24] Devin Martin: where do they go?
[01:36:27] Mollie Adler: BackFromTheBorderline.com. It has everything there. And if you wanna check out Moods, it's Moods.world. But even if you go to BackFromTheBorderline.com, I even have Moods linked in there. So, and there's a seven-day free trial, so you can try it w- with no risk there. And also if you have feedback, we'd love to hear from you.
[01:36:44] Mollie Adler: Mm-hmm. So there's a way within the app that you can reach out to our support team, which goes to, you know, people that work with me and Zazz, and so I'd love to hear from you. And please dive into my work. If you're interested in the Bledsoe interview, you know, you can just search Back From The Borderline Bledsoe's, it'll pop up.
[01:36:59] Mollie Adler: Courtly Love, Back From The Borderline. All the stuff, dive in. I've got a lot of episodes and I've yapped for many hours about these things.
[01:37:06] Devin Martin: Amazing. Mollie, thank you so much. This was wonderful.
[01:37:09] Mollie Adler: Thanks, Devin.