what do you recommend for MacBook pro software protection/malware protection?
Nothing. The only people who ask that have recently come from the Windows environment. The Mac has essentially everything you need built in. You can get and run Malwarebytes from time to time, but there’s no reason to rn it in the background. One dirty little secret of all the commercial malware detectors is that for them to work, they MUST turn off the built in System Defender Apple provides to let any malware IN so they can detect it!
Don’t blindly click to install every pop-up that wants you to (and enter your password).
Only install from known sources.