Explicit Content Debate: The Unseen Dangers Of Nofap & The Adult Industry Is Exploiting Our Brains!

this has never happened before today we have three experts in their field with three different opinions debating the subject of porn this is the first time I've gone on pornh Hub at work in one corner we have Dr Reena Malik the sex scientist helping millions of couples enhance their sex lives in the other Corner we have Dr Kate the psychiatrist specializing in helping people with addictions to pornography and more who is up against Erica lust who runs a large pornographic production company no one can sit on the fence here is porn a benefit to people

and Society definitely and especially for people who haven't really had that right to pleasure to understand their sexuality but I think what we're clearly seeing is a trend of it being damaging and let me just share with you all what I'm afraid of it is doing way more to the brain than we ever realized so the first thing that we know is that bye there's data to suggest that couples that use pornography together have better sexual en counters and women who use pornography have better sexual satisfaction rates and remember that women's sexuality has been so

much about pleasing others and you see it with the orgasm Gap from a devil's advocate would say that there is significant number of women interested in looking a certain way that they're often seeing on pornography that's harmful I'm a bit suspicious about this because honestly that statement is from 10 years ago but there's also unrealistic expectations about performance that creat shame and small penis anxiety is a real thing and it's often from watching pornography the real problem is we are not giving sex education to our young people they are lost but it doesn't have to

be an addiction it's the way that you relate to it it is something that people can control and parents can learn how to have these conversations with their kids there are a couple of really nice techniques that you can use the first is that this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the

free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much let's start with introductions Dr Reena who are you and what you do so I'm a urologist which is essentially a medical and

surgical doctor of the genetry urinary tract but I see myself more as a digital opinion leader in the space of sexual health and neurologic health so someone who can talk to and speak about complex Concepts in addition to Sexual Health in a way that people can understand can you give me sort of a a view of the VAR iety of things that you've worked on in your career the types of patients you've worked with and the subject matter broadly that you've addressed and are confronted with in your line of work absolutely so as a urologist

we're trained to treat anything in those areas of the genitor urinary tract so that can be kidney cancer prostate cancer bladder cancer Sexual Health erectile dysfunction female sexual dysfunction kidney stones children's issues but then when uh I did a fellowship in what's called female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery or Euro Gynecology so I initially trained in dealing with voiding dysfunction um and problems with bladder leakage overactive bladder prolapse those sorts of things and subsequently expanding my practice into sexual medicine so I take care of patients with issues with erectile dysfunction arousal or disorders ejaculatory dysfunction

um libido issues uh lubrication issues a whole bunch of different areas of issues that people deal with when it comes to sexual health Dr K same question to you sure so I'm a psychiatrist by training but I had kind of a roundabout way to get there so uh I failed out of college due to video game addiction and then went to India to find myself studied uh to become a monk for about seven years and then wound up going to medical school becoming a psychiatrist and now the majority of the work that I do is

actually like focused on the internet so what I noticed when I was training was that if you look at like academic Psychiatry or Psychiatry we focus on things like depression or bipolar disorder or anxiety but I saw that there was a whole lot of evolving mental health problems for the digital Generation video game addiction pornography addiction and I noticed that most of the psychiatrists weren't focused on those we kind of had an opioid epidemic that's still going on a lot of problems with alcohol and marijuana but there all these digital addictions that are emerging and

those are the people that I work with now Erica yeah who are you and what you doing I'm Erica I'm independent adult filmmaker I'm an entrepreneur I made my first short film explicit short film 20 years ago and then I developed a career in this space of Indie adult cinema and are you a director yes of adult films yeah I direct films I produce films I also run the company to set the stage on where we are with pornography I found some statistics which I thought were quite pertinent to the discussion which is the first

statistic is that 30% of all internet traffic roughly is related to pornography 35% of all internet downloads are pornographic in nature 79% of young men view pornography monthly 64% of young adults actively seek out pornography weekly or more often one in five mobile searches are for pornographic content 58% of men and 38% of women watch porn at work and pornography websites receive more traffic than Netflix Amazon and Twitter combined interestingly I found another statistic which said that pornography in Poland has increased 310% between 2004 which I guess is when you got into the business and

2016 some other sort of potentially adjacent Trends which I thought were interesting were that the percentage of men aged 18 to 24 reporting no sexual activity in the past year increased from 18.9% in 2000 to over 30% in 200 16 and similar increases in sexual activity are seen in men and women um similar decreases in sexual activity have been seen in men and women among high school students the percentage who have never had sexual intercourse increased from 45% in 91 to 70% in 21 and finally the average age of first exposure to pornography is now

just 11 years old and 64% of young people report to that they came across pornography by accident so I guess my first um point of discussion that I wanted to raise is is pornography a benefit to people and society and I realize that this question is intentionally short and narrow but that's the basis of the first conversation and I want to start with you Erica is porn a benefit to people in society it can be it can be definitely and especially to the others who haven't really had that right to pleasure to desire to the

sexuality remember that women's sexuality especially has been been so much about pleasing others I think that it can help women to find you know their own desire to understand their sexuality to see others what they like what they are doing and to turn their Liberty on Liber on which is obviously one of the things that so many women are struggling with let's go anticlockwise Dr K I'll repeat this statement is porn a benefit to people in society the way that corn is being produced and consumed is starting to cause way more harm than good I

mean the the the statistics that you really just machine gunned out right like it's like one thing after another thing after another thing of things that are you know very scary like each statement that both of y'all made I could think about a specific person that I've worked with where it's like yeah I've seen that problem I've seen that problem um you know early exposure so when you get exposed to pornography before puberty so everyone thinks that pornography is about you know like sexual lust and and this kind of stuff and I think in a

in a good way it can be but what I've seen a lot adults for adults is that children are getting exposed and I've seen like a very scary correlation between early exposure to pornography like seven eight nine years old right so I think your statistic was the average is 11 yeah that's average which means that there are people that are higher and people that are lower and when something I don't know what exactly but when we get exposed to pornography very early it makes some kind of alteration in our brain that makes us way more

likely to addictions not only pornography but other things so I think that there you know sexuality is a healthy part of human existence um a lot of the current research suggests that masturbation is also like relatively speaking not unhealthy it's somewhat healthy and so pornography can be a part of that I think especially listening to Erica and how pornography can be used to elevate Horizons increase awareness um there can be benefits but I think what we're clearly seeing is a trend of it being damaging so I would say that I agree with Erica completely I

think there's actually some data to suggest that women who use pornography have better sexual satisfaction rates have more frequency of sexual encounters because they're learning about their bodies I mean we can't know exactly why that is but we know there is a correlation in that specific way and so when people are using pornography for sexual curiosity um for pleasure um they're generally showing good for for the most part without any signs of addiction or or concerns of compulsion and use of pornography they're using it in in a good way and they're having better sex because

of it now in terms of using it as a couple there's also really strong correlations that couples that use pornography together have better sexual encounters and better sexual satisfaction so I think there's a lot of ways that pornography is used in a positive way and not to undermine that there are people who struggle with it absolutely but I think yes there are some benefits it allows people to experience fantasies to see different types of sexual cultures as Erica mentioned and I think that that that is an important side of pornography in terms of um using

that to learn what you like and learn what you want to try in your relationship if that's applicable much of the literature that I've read about and the studies I've read about show that if you consume pornography you're somewhat desensi ties to the real thing I.E sex in your relationships and when we look at those stats on sexlessness people are having less sex than previous years people are losing their virginity later and later and I wonder if that is we've sort of been desensitized to the real thing because of pornography Reena absolutely so I think

that there is certainly people who feel they use pornography as a way to achieve pleasure and that is the sole way that they achieve pleasure so they are constantly using pornography and it's sometimes correlated with a certain style of masturbation and those things cannot be replicated with penetrative intercourse of any kind or you know manual intercourse with another person and so in those cases then it becomes difficult because your brain habituates to that style of stimulation and excitement and visual sense Sensations that they're getting from watching pornography and so that does happen to some individuals

I would say say it's not the large majority but certainly we're seeing more of it what is the impact though on the brain especially a young brain that is exposed to pornography yeah I mean there's no we there's no studies on kids looking at pornography so I couldn't tell you exactly but you might be able to talk a look more about this yeah I mean so like first of all I think this is a fascinating discussion and if I can kind of track back and freestyle for a bit so I thought it was so interesting

because Stephen asked this question right and he's like you know is pornography a problem and then I thought it was so interesting that the two women at the table had the more positive answers and the dude is like it's bad right so I I think the first thing to understand is that and it's so for me it's eye openening to hear both of y'all talk because I I think so much of it is like your experience of it right we're talking about pornography as if it's an isolated thing but the biggest takeaway that I already

have is that there is a relationship between the human and the pornography uh Erica was talking about you know how the pornography can be used to help the human understand sexuality become more familiar with pleasure that we have con with your desire yeah and we have this orgasm Gap and then and then you know she's and Arena was saying you know we don't I forgot exactly what you said but something about we don't see it very much or you said that the the problems of um you know sexuality relating to pornography are I thought you

said not that common which is which is something that I'm not saying it's common or uncommon I think that's just such an interesting selection difference because I work with people who have pornography and like death grip syndrome because I've never heard it discussed is like very common what's death grip syndrome so it's exactly it's a twitch chat degenerate way of describing what Dr mik did a great medical job of describing which is that so what happens is our body can acclimatize to a certain kind of stimulation so when um often times what happens when and

I I haven't worked with too many women and and sexual stuff way more men um so that there's a selection bias there too but often times what happens is that boys or men will start to masturbate without any kind of lubrication and so there's a ve they almost train their bodies physio physiologically to climax with a certain degree like a certain you know pounds per square inch of force and a certain sensation which they get used to not only at the physiologic level but also at the neurological level which Dr mik alluded to that there's

a certain kind of um visual stimulation that they almost get used to the brain acclimatizes to in order to achieve sexual Climax and then what happens is when these people have a sexual relationship for the first time the sensations and the the from a visual perspective you know auditory perspective because the sounds that we hear in these big you know fast food pornography Productions are nowhere near the sounds in real life um and and so the the inputs of an actual sexual act make it very difficult to have a A Satisfied sexual life and so

I think that there's a lot of subtlety to you know when Dr mik said when couples watch porn together there are also studies that show that as you increase your pornography consumption that correlates with relationship dissatisfaction but that could be a chicken or the egg problem am I watching more porn because I'm unhappy with the sexual relationship or does watching pornography decrease my satisfaction in the relationship and so I I think it's there's just like so much here to explore yeah yeah and I think your point about the couples usually yeah if there's a discrepancy

in one partner is watching more porn than the other then there's s decreased satisfaction certainly um and I think that your point to saying that you're seeing a lot of it well that's these people come to you for this problem right so you're seeing this exclusively um but I think in the general population um and maybe they're not coming to the urologist as often right um but certainly I'm not seeing as much of it and it's not reported in terms of like people complaining about it in studies and again these studies are small numbers and

they're not generalizable to the entire population but I would say that it's not as common as I think we let on but the other important thing to add is that there's a because it's so nuanced there's a big moral component people have a belief about what pornography is good or bad and so when they watch pornography if they have a moral in congruence meaning they think it's bad to watch pornography they are more likely to report having a problem with pornography so there's a lot of nuance here in terms of how pornography can be beneficial

or harmful to a specific individual and how it affects that specific individual's brains whether it's going to send same Pathways um you know as any sort of strong visual stimuli the way your body sensitizes to those Pathways is very individual and what about poog on the brain then in terms of its impact on dopamine and how that then will Cascade into other areas of Our Lives yeah so I mean I I'll launch this one um so I I think that the biggest takeaway that I have is it is doing way more than we ever realized

so the first thing is if you get exposed to pornography early on in life and this accidental exposure by the way the most common story that I hear and this is such a weird like anecdotal statistic is um if you're if you have older brother and you're a younger brother I see so many pornography addicts who have older brothers and the most common story that I hear is you know older brother is post puberty and is watching pornography which is like a little bit more understandable and acceptable and then your younger brother wants to do

whatever you're doing and they get exposed to it at an early age so the first thing that we know is that early exposure correlates with an increase in potential for addiction that's probably somewhat neurologic olcal and potentially somewhat um sociological or family oriented because if you think about what kind of seven-year-old will get exposure to pornography maybe parents aren't in the house as much so there could be other risk factors but we we absolutely know that when you activate in an artificial way the dopaminergic circuitry of the brain it sensitizes the dopaminergic circuitry and makes

it more vulnerable to dopamine later on this is something called the kindling effect we see this also for example in like marijuana as a gateway drug the reason marijuana is a gateway drug is is not because it makes you immoral it's because once we start activating certain circuits in the brain during brain development it changes the way that they develop the second thing that we see is that pornography is used as a method of emotional regulation so if you look at like I was trying to figure out what effect does pornography have in the brain

and so I was thinking about okay which part of the brain does sex come from and it turns out that every part of the brain every neurotransmitter is involved in the sexual act because the purpose The evolutionary purpose of a human being is to procreate so all of our circuitry is designed for this thing so we we see that there's absolutely an emotional regulation component um because when we get aroused like our brain doesn't care about you know anything else in our life when it comes to the act of procreation so we see a lot

of emotional regulation which then becomes an emotional crutch so I see a lot of this now with where um people at work will watch pornography and it's not about masturbation or lust it's about emotional regulation I've seen a huge spike in second screen pornography so we'll be working over here and I'll just have porn like running over here like this is a a really common story and it's an emotional regulation effect now the third thing that that you uh the question you asked about is dopamine so here's a really fascinating thing so it absolutely messes

with your dopamine when it messes with your dopamine it messes with your motivation because dopamine is the prim neurotransmitter involved in motivation so as you watch more pornography you just stop being as motivated about the other things in your life and the Really crippling thing the really scary thing from a relationship standpoint is that if we look at falling in love falling in love is primarily the function of dopamine so when we look at a relationship there's initial attraction which it comes from like the thalamus in our sensory inputs what do I see what do

I hear oh she smells great her laugh is beautiful right that's all sensory and then we get into the stage where we're in love when I can't get enough of this person I'm just sitting with this person we're not talking we're not doing anything we're just holding hands and oh I'm so in love so like literally what creates that feeling is dopamine and when we start using pornography on a regular basis our dopamine stores start to deplete we start to develop dopamine tolerance and like literally what I'm seeing clinically matches with this because it's harder

for people to fall in love when I talk to younger people now who are in their 20s and 30s and struggling to date you know you go on a couple of dates but what's the problem there's no chemistry there's no spark that comes from dopamine so I think we're seeing all kinds of really scary Downstream effects from unregulated pornography use I can't help but feeling that what you're talking about is a very masculine experience somehow and that when we're talking about poror addiction or compulsory Behavior with pornography it is very related to men and that

we in our society tends to see men's experiences as universal experiences and I think that we lack a perspective of really where when women get into this construction of of addiction of use of pornography is it Reena do you see it as an addiction so I you know this is what I think I think that I the so it's not been termed an addiction in terms of in medical vernacular they call it problematic porn use because it there hasn't been a clear definition in terms of addiction right um but I would say that I think

that there are certainly people who have this experience but there's certainly many many people who use pornography and don't develop this tolerance and maybe it's more common in younger people because they're getting access to it sooner and more often and that has yet to play out at least I tend to see older patients and so um so that has yet to play out in in older Generations but I would say that I think there's many people who use it fine and don't have an issue and so I think that while these issues do exist there's

also a whole bunch of other things that are ongoing in society right now that may make it more difficult for people to connect and for people to feel intimacy with people because it's very difficult currently more and more people are not getting married more and more people are choosing to stay single for a variety of reasons I don't think porn is the only Factor there I do think it is something that people can control and so they feel like okay if you feel like you have a problem with it and you can control pornography that

allows you to feel like you have control in one area of your life that then that control can potentially improve other areas of your life so I think that there is correlations here but I think it's very complex I think the way it affects our brains is very complex as well and like dopamine is one way to describe it but there's you know there's different sensitivities and how our brain responds to the same stimuli right the way I watch pornography the way you watch pornography the way anyone of us watches pornography our brains will respond

in a different way um because our receptors are either more sensitive or less sensitive and there's no way to really test that on an individual level one of the things I found most interesting when I had the first conversation on this podcast about pornography is my my team went out and looked at um a couple of tools which pull search data so what are people searching on the subject and the number one most search term was how do I quit pornography and that's quite an interesting thing because there's a certain desperation to that question you

know going to Google to ask Google how you quit a behavior that makes me think of it in the context of an addiction and in fact the second most popular search term was also about how how you quit this thing and and it speaks to a certain powerlessness that a certain percentage of people feel they have with pornography um throwing that out to to everybody here no but I think this connects also to the stigma the huge stigma around sex and around porn and this idea that people have somehow that it is bad I mean

people want to watch it at the same time they they have the moral idea that it's bad and that they shouldn't do it but I think we're also talking here I mean we end up talking about porn all the time but somehow porn is now very related to technology and how technology kind of has hijacked Our Lives it's not only porn we're struggling with in that sense and when you know with young people people they are saying they are not having as much sex anymore you were talking about it before uh kids are not playing

as much anymore outside as they used to so I think we have a correlation there that we need to think about the role of technology and then how much of that space does really this pornography take up and also to have in mind that when we're talking about po porn most people see it as a monolithic kind of thing when when if you go out on the street and you ask people what is porn they think about the tube sites that's what that's what they have in mind but actually there's many different kinds of porn

existing do you think there's such a thing as good porn and bad porn it's a very difficult kind of Distinction to say bad porn and good porn because if you do that then it's you classify some type as as acceptable and other types as nonone and you kind of you know grow the stigma around it I think that we need to think about porn that is made with great working conditions taking care of everybody who's involved in that process especially the performers made with uh support by intimacy coordinator Talent managers where the performers have been

able to be involved in the process to give feedback on what is going to be how how it's working they have they know all the conditions beforehand Etc they can give feedback afterwards H I think there are ways of producing pornography that are safer than what we have seen in the past we were talking a second ago about the impact pornography has on the brain um and I know some of your work involves dealing with people who have erectile dysfunction some of the stats I read on erectile dysfunction show that there's been quite a significant

increase over the last couple of decades in people reporting to have erectile function do you think porn has played a role in increasing erectile dysfunction as it relates to when I'm with my partner in the bedroom and I'm trying to have sex so I think this goes back to the people who are watching pornography and are learning what sex is through pornography and then they go to their sexual encounter with their partner and they don't respond the way that they do on pornography or their partner doesn't respond the way they do on pornography and immediately

they feel insecure right immediately and that leads to this psychogenic ere dysfunction where you are no longer able to perform because you're so stressed about the anxiety of being able to get an erection because maybe things didn't go the way they were supposed to or maybe you're insecure about your body image or a whole host of things that come from watching maybe some of the big box pornography where we're not really showing real sex we're showing a produced product that is meant to entertain and uh Captivate people for a short period of time and so

I think that is one certainly issue that I do see where people start feeling this the other thing is where people are um you know using pornography over quite often and then they again are are unable to get that stimulation through a partner right they can't get the same they're using death grip or they're using um you know the same this very erotic stimuli very intense visual erotic stimuli that they can't produce with a person and so then they're like why am I not getting aroused and why am I not getting an erection and it's

because they've now relied on this solely so I do see that certainly um as an issue in some people who are using pornography but I don't think it's like pornography use leads to ED I think it's these other factors on the way to having psychological concerns about your own performance that lead to issues with directions and before we move on on Dr K's point about motivation as well do you believe that there's a correlation between the amount that we watch pornography and mass debate and someone's motivation based on what you know about dopamine receptors you

know hard to say I think again it's very individual certainly some people will take the E like you know there is a availability part when it comes to any sort of addiction type Behavior so when something is more available to you and you're using it more often it can become more problematic and so certainly I think that plays a role in terms of like if you're using it a lot and it's very available to you and it's an easy way to emotionally regulate right if you're having stress and life you're unhappy with your relationship or

you're unhappy with other things people are often using pornography as a way to avoid those negative emotions and really just participate in something else like take their mind off of that and so that is sort of where it becomes this challenge for some people yeah I just wanted to chime in so this is fantastic because because I I I agree with everything that y'all are saying and I also kind of come to a slightly different conclusion so the number one search term that we have is how do I I quit porn so when I hear

that and and I think Dr mik has also done a great job of pointing out you know there's a difference between anecdotal clinical experience and what we have randomized clinical trials on you know we're not exposing seven-year-olds to pornography and then seeing how their brain develops by doing MRI scans over the course of 10 years so some of this research is absolutely not there and we also have the number one search term is how do I quit porn what that tells me is that there is the literally the largest population of what people are looking

at is to stop using pornography and I think the reason for that is is there good porn or is there bad porn is it individual is it Nuance completely agree with all those points it's not a problem for everyone but I think what I'm seeing very clearly is that it's getting worse right so it's not an issue of good or bad what is the trend that we're seeing we're Tren the trend that we're seeing is that Erica is saying hey pornography can be more than the tube sites so that then begs the question why does

everyone think that pornography is the tube sites because they hijacked the system exactly so I think that word is is beautiful hijack so I think what we're seeing what I'm seeing is that pornography is getting worse for sure it's becoming more of a problem if we look at these tube sites there there you know it's kind of like there's nutrition and then there's calories and a lot of what I'm hearing y'all talk about you know Dr mik is saying if you watch it as part of a relationship ship that's nutrition it can be something healthy

we can learn about ourselves we can destigmatize various things fair enough but I think we're seeing the same trends that we see with like fast food where now pornography is becoming mass-produced and there are actually studies that show there's a really fascinating bizarre piece of research right which is where the you have to go this is where I've gone to find this stuff because we don't have studies but there was a particular group of biologists who were noticing that a population of beetles was dying out and they were trying to figure out like why is

this population of beetles dying out and what they discovered is there's one thing that's responsible for these beetles not mating with each other which is green beer bottles that were being littered and the green beer bottle then what they noticed is that the Beatles were trying to go up to the green beer bottle and mate with it and they were like what is going on you'd see this this litter that has a green beer bottle and a bunch of male beetles are clustered around it and like they're like what is this and it turns out

that there's this concept of something called a supera normal stimulus so when a Beetle's eyes look at the environment there's certain signals that indicate this is a fertile female and a green glass beer bottle activates those parts of the brain and what we're seeing with these tube sites is things are [ __ ] things are louder things are slipperier right we have these 4K high defa like so we're we're sort of turning we're taking what used to be nutritious and we are turning it into fast food and that and what why all these tube sites

why are they successful they're in this darwinian war that's kind of like a race to the bottom how can I create the pornography that is going to leech the most traffic away from my competitors and they're figuring out very rapidly that there are all kinds of weird ways to activate the brain what our brain looks for and what it gets excited about and so it feels to me like there's a race to the bottom we're making pornography for money we're making it more addtive but the thing is that these companies Behind these tube sites they

are not interested in human sexuality they're not interested in sex they're not interested in porn they're not interested in the conditions of the people who are working in front of the camera I mean they're selling advertisement and what do they need for that they need content that is Extreme that has words that are click baity that are kind of small clips that are quick to watch they look at the algorithms to see what works right but this reminds me of the food industry yeah of course it's the same as big F the same as big

farmer big fashion Etc big porn is the same how does an industry succeed if it doesn't engage in that practice though if because think about the food industry the thing that has the most sugar in that's the most available the cheapest is the thing that's going to succeed the most so in the we think about these tube sites some of the stats are crazy I mean only fans released their earnings for last year up 20% they made 6.6 billion um PornHub one of the big tube sites is the eighth most trafficed website in the world

at the moment doing 5.5 billion monthly visits these are the brands that people recognize and it's it's extreme like if we think about nutrition high in sugar it's extreme so I get the the most extreme sort of dopamine stimulation it's so easy to access I can one I don't have to put my shoes on and put my After Shave on I can just I can get on there within 15 seconds for me to get laid I'm going to have to put in some work I'm going to have to go to the gym I'm going to

have to take care of I'm going to have to go get a job I'm going to have to get some money I'm going to Le I'm going to have to learn how to speak to a woman or 15 seconds and I can see the most extreme yeah I I think that's the problem but I do worry to some I'm going to play a little bit of Devil's Advocate my devil's advocate would say that because there's so much moral in congruence that leads to problematic porn news porn addiction whatever you want to call it right that

we're creating more of it by disparaging pornography right like that everywhere people are saying pornography is bad pornography is bad you can't go on any social media platform without somebody citing a study that says pornography is leeching people's life force and their you know their life is falling apart because of pornography and Destroy lives right and and so but so then we're also adding to that moral in congruence by saying that all pornography is bad pornography is there because we're watching it right and so people like if you asked like probably the generation older to

me like would you be would you be watching porn where you're seeing um the things that you're seeing now which I mean shocking to me right like they would be like no I don't want to see that right like I that doesn't interest me in the slightest but like why is this becoming so you know people are watching it I mean to me so much of this is totally anti-erotic I sometimes go there to investigate and to kind of see what's what's going on and what's happening and I feel like oh no don't J it

is I don't want to see it oh I rather throw up than you know feel excitement and wanting to to have sex so it has an opposite effect on on lots of their their audiences actually but again what is it about the it's about earning money and concentrating power it's about selling advertisement that's what they're doing it's grow your dick pills it's dat the sexy Latina in your neighborhood it's and and as a society we have been very slow to see what has happened because these sides they were born you know 17 years ago 2007

they came out it happened very very fast so a couple of thoughts the first is like yeah that's exactly what's going on is like so if we think about it we have all of these every part of our brain right oxytocin dopamine serotonin estrogen testosterone right those are hormones not brains but you know every Circuit of the brain all of our neurotrans MERS they're all to help us procreate and now what's happened is people have fundamentally hijacked all of these circuits and we're seeing problems and I'm with you about the moral in congruence because we

see this in other addictions as well where we we tried to like demonize like alcohol usage right and we know that once we separate out the moral in congruence because once I feel guilty and ashamed this is something I see a lot I watch pornography now I feel ashamed how am I going to cope with those emotions watching more pornography and so you create thisy of like like this moral Focus cycle of Shame and that actually fuels the dependence so that's absolutely an issue at the same time like these companies and they don't care about

erotic or Falling in Love or Whatever right they're interested in making a buck and they're exploiting our brain and while we should be a little bit careful about the moralistic nature of it I mean I've seen it gets so much it's getting worse like every time every year and this could be selection bias right cuz I I'm an addiction psychiatrist but I I think it's like even with something like only fans because now what we're adding is a social component the one Refuge we used to have when it comes to pornography whether it's ethically produced

or non- ethically produced is that there's no way that this person is ever going to pay attention to me I'm just consuming something but now now I can interact with someone someone can send me a DM hey thank you for watching my video and jerking off that makes me so happy but you know it's an AI bot right sometimes so so so I know it's an AI bot but I am so ashamed of myself that you know take whatever water is given to you in the desert I am so alone I am I feel so

bad about myself and there's a chance right there's a chance it's not an AI problem the real problem is that we are not speaking about sex we are not speaking about intimacy people don't have the sex education and they are lost and they are human beings they have this drive and this need and we had it in all cultures right do you think people had the sex education they would still be on only fans talking to what's probably cuz there are big agencies now I've seen on social media there are big agencies of men who

pretend to be these porn stars on sites like only fans and I I see them bragging about their income it's this big thing on Twitter at the moment I've made $10,000 this month pretending to be this actress speaking to young men on only fans yeah and I think the reason that men do that part of the reason is because they know what men want to hear right there's a part of us that they know exactly what to say because it won't be an AI bot it'll be this kind of person and now what's happening is

we're activating the social loneliness aspect and combining it with pornography so now you actually have a relationship with maybe an AI bot maybe a dude right but there is like some amount of genuine human interaction over the Internet so this is getting worse and I think sex education is an excellent point at the same time I don't know if sex education is going to be sufficient because I think we can teach people about their bodies but we're also seeing like a wh scale social skills atrophy where dudes don't know how to talk to girls anymore

yeah and also media porn is Media it's important to understand that it's telling us messages about gender roles how we interact about sexuality how our body functions Etc so when we have all this misinformation going on on this online huge media of free porn and we see women screaming in fake orgasms after four minutes of hard penetration and as a woman you look at her and you say she didn't even use her fingers what happened you know and you just know that something is wrong here that this is fake but then there's lots of men

out there thinking this is what my girlfriend should be doing this is how it should work and then they don't connect in real life what kind of point do you make what kind of porn do I make I make I make lovely porn I make beautiful porn I make cinematic porn I make porn with you know with intentions of of of showing different uh ideas of desire and fantasy where people I try to work with people who are connecting who show chemistry together I ask my performers who they want to work with I try to

team them up I support them with a system of intimacy coordinator Talent managers producers in the background that take care of them that check who they are what they like what kind of sexuality do they have but if I was a consumer of your pornography what would I notice that what would you notice probably the great cinematography would be the first thing you would notice kind of narratives uh that are erotic driven somehow where people explore their desire and their sexuality you would notice um you you would feel very I mean many people tell me

they they Go like Erica but I watch your films is it really porn because they identify porn as something that is kind of tacky agly kind of objectifying Etc so suddenly when they see people in my films having sex coming together and everything is kind of you understand why they are Desiring each other and you kind of I am invite them to join this kind of erotic journey of the characters then they go but this is more like like in the in the cinema in the eroic cinema can I is it fair to assume that

because you from what I've heard though the pornography you produce is has a slower story arc which is more reflective of what sometimes okay so so I'm trying to because the things that you it sounds like you might have yeah removed from the pornography you make yeah versus the pornography I'd find on one of of the big tube streaming sites the most popular videos on the tube streaming sites it sounds like you might have put yourself at a bit of a competitive disadvantage in many respects because those streaming sites if their incentive is purely money

yeah the data is going to determine what people see so that's so it feels like they've really optimized for user consumption where you've optimized for something around ethics because I care about it for me the money is not the most important aspect why I you know created this company why I'm making this I really want to kind of send a different kind of message out to the world do your content end up on those sites sometimes sometimes uh years ago it was taken on those sites for example changing the wording of it because remember that

many of these sites also what they do is that they fetishize people they use very racist language chauvinistic language Etc and my movies may have much softer kind of language and the way they are so uh they they obviously pirated them they put them up and they changed kind of the wording for for the bits it was a very hard process to take them down Etc what do you think is better for someone's relationship specifically so men and women do you think no porn is better for their relationship do you think your porn is better

for their relationship or do you think and obviously I think it's individual I think it's a very individual decision what works best sorry yeah I can answer I've never seen one of your films I can tell you it's her porn thank you better than no porn I'm going to go ahead and go out on a limb and saying that if you're someone who's struggling with pornography watching an erotic film with a glass of wine with your significant other is a great way to transition from bite-sized Fast Food calorie dense [ __ ] slippery loud porn

two it's like how do we rewire the brain right how do we move one step at a time from this to this and because like like the word erotic seems so powerful to me it's about anticipation even when we talk about you know differences between male and in female sexuality the the lag time of parasympathetic activation in foreplay is so much more important biologically and correct me if I'm wrong here um uh for women than it is for men I mean we're like kind of ready to go and we want to make it short and

and so I think like it's almost like a part of that sexual education is in understanding okay how can we teach men to be erotic again instead of these like very like chicken nugget style highly processed like this is what I think it is maybe watch some of Erica's film when we talk about watching pornography with your partner I wonder if that is the rule of the exception to the rule you know because I yeah I mean so you're saying what do we do I think we have an erotic film watch party right we have

anime watch parties we have different kinds of watch parties like this thought had never occurred to me before I'm sure it is a terrible idea on that point though if you reduce the stigma by having these watch parties um does that then because you cited earlier that it's a tool for emotional regulation so when people are stressed or depressed or anxious they seek it out if we remove the stigma does that increase the addiction so it's a great question so I think there's it kind of goes both ways and what I mean by that is

see we run into addictions when this substance becomes or or behavior becomes one to one correlated with something else so right now the problem with pornography isn't that it it yeah it's so the problem is if I watch pornography and that's the only method I use to regulate my emotions that will increase the addiction now the flip side of it is also true if the only reason I watch pornography is to regulate my emotions that will strengthen that addiction capability so I'll give you all just a simple example from like alcohol right so if I

use alcohol after A Hard Day's Work to get through the day and calm down and then I stop drinking for fun whereas alcohol can be used as an emotional coping mechanism or it can be used to celebrate a wedding right so the substance can be used in different ways and the more that we use it in different ways in healthier ways the more it actually chips away at the addiction in some cases this is also highly individualized so depending on your genetic predisposition dispositions and stuff like that you know you may not be able to

drink at weddings but we also see the opposite which is like you know a huge number of people are qualify for an alcohol addiction in college and then most of those people are able to develop healthy relationships with it and one of the biggest changes we're seeing in addiction is that there do seem to be healthy relationships that we can develop I think it's about changing our relationship to the thing now seeing someone naked engaging in a sexual act is not solely about getting off it's not solely about emotional regulation it's not solely about dopamine

it can now become a film experience that we can enjoy so we're diversifying our relationship to the object I don't know if that makes sense psychoanalytic awareness mindfulness understanding of other of how you use that how you and then I I think this is also great like just the simple idea that like if dudes are watching this recognizing watching an erotic film with your significant other assuming a heteronormative a heterosexual relationship you know may be a great way for you to enhance your sexual experience you don't need dick enhancing pills or or you know whatever

else right like because that's and I'm sure Dr mik knows better than I do but you the majority of the no I I meant more as a year I didn't think that but okay no no so so like you know my understanding from med school right so back when I was doing Urology and I I work with some things like vaginismus and stuff like that yeah um is you know the majority of the female nerve endings are are you know at the front end of the vagina and if you get all the way back to

the cervix that's like painful so you don't actually need a gigantic penis I was trying to think about whether I should use some other word but you know and and so to help like you know if men are the ones who are primarily having this addictive problem then let's call it what it is which is help men realize that sex ual pleasure engaging in a relationship that pornography can be a force for good and doesn't necessarily have to be evil but and maybe like erotic film moves Us in that direction and like I just got

to say man like my degenerate male brain is kind of telling me like you know watching an erotic film for an hour and a half could be the best and easiest foreplay that I could ever do would be a lot easier yeah pretty quick um but I would say the other thing I've been thinking about while we've been talking about this is we don't talk about erotic audio literature or erotic books which is more commonly used by women but we don't stigmatize that like women are like oh I love these books and I read them

all the time and nobody is sitting here saying like it's bad I know thoughts on that because it's not naked bodies I guess here the main problem again is back to to our bodies we are somehow ashamed of our bodies of our nakedness of our sexuality I mean women can show nipples online we know that uh you can I I mean I'm heavily censured I can't show anything on my accounts my my social media accounts are cut off all the time it's impossible to grow do you think pornography should be bound on social media Dr

K should pornography be banned on social media yes pornography should be banned I can answer that I'm I'm I'm making it I definitely think it should be banned but I don't that the explicit images should be banned but the right to discuss about it to talk about it to give uh sexual advice or to you know discuss different topics around sexuality we should be allowed to do that we should be allowed well we're allowed to do that no I get I get banned too really cuz this doesn't get banned maybe you are allowed to YouTube

is different Twitter's fine Instagram's fine YouTube's fine Instagram Instagram I have Ted Talks that are censured so only people who are over 18 and have an account online have access to watch watch them and it's me talking yeah no it there is definitely uh limitations the thing that we've noticed is your video just doesn't appear in search in the same way but they still recommend the video so when we had for example Andrew huberman on a couple of weeks ago and he talked about pornography because PA was in the title in the thumbnail the video

got huge recommendations by the algorithm but if you typed in Andrew hub it would not come up until we CH took the word porn out and you type in Andrew hubman and it comes up so that's the only we've noticed but we've been quite surprised actually by yeah I I think it's so cool that like you know you asked me that question and she jumped in with an answer no no I think it's good I I think it's like because you asked I mean I think that's the value of this right because my I I

don't feel nearly as passionate I mean you asked her the question you know is it which of these is the best and I jumped in with an answer I was like this is clear to me and and I I think just a couple of things that I just want to touch on the first is that um you know what Dr bollock was saying about you know audio Literature Like erotic fiction or romance novels right so I I think it's harder to commoditize that which goes back to Erica's point of of you know like some things

are more likely to be turned into fast food so I think that erotic literature it's like harder to do that um I also do think that going back to this earlier point of like you know men are epidemiologically more vulnerable to addiction I think it's more complicated than that in just psychological hurt or problems manifest in men as addiction and look different in in women when it emerges um so I think it's kind of like you know so we're we're sort of seeing a difference in addictive quality it's easier to commoditize more sensory organs uh

so I think that's an important point and I I think in terms of you know should it be banned or not like I don't know um so I work kind of like more at the individual level and arguably some at scale but like like one of the key things is you know I have some ideas about what should be done but I I'm not too sure about that I'm I'm curious you know I I don't know like I no but I'm saying it basically because it's open for kids again this is why I'm saying if

if we're having social media and it's for people 18 about then we're talking about another thing but go to Twitter or it's not called Twitter anymore uh the X go there and it's full of porn it is it is it is full of porn you can you accidentally stumble across porn I was saying this to my partner a couple of weeks ago I said look at how Twitter's changed and I said watch this scroll down my timeline and I know there's ALG so if I dwell on something more often then it's going to show me

more but I scroll down I scroll down I was like look porn and I was like oh look she's taking her close of scroll scroll scroll I didn't realize it was new to the it didn't happen I've actually not seen it but I've had many people who tell me that it comes up on their feet all the time recent change to the algorithm which is prioritized again um View time so if you want to want people to dwell longer show them video Extreme video people being shot someone being hit by a car fights pornography wow

you increase your dwell time you increase your advertising and this is just how incentives play out so much of the discussion we've had today and much of my like why I refer to it sometimes as being idealistic because sometimes it can sound like just give them broccoli when actually if you leave them to their own devices no one's going to want broccoli they're going to take the cookies if the cookies are available and If you equate this to food we did put labels on food to say look this has got this much calories in it

we've put a sugar tax on sugar in the UK we you on cigarettes we say if you smoke these cigarettes this is what's going to happen to your lungs and we put explicit images of how your lungs will get you know cancers and things like this should we be doing something similar with pornography because part of me goes just you know saying we should just give them broccoli this kind of like erotic different point they're not going to they're not going to eat it no but but but also again adults I think they have the

right to watch pornography whatever kind of pornography it is as long as it's legal and and and well done I wish all pornography would be ethically produced I know that the industry is working towards more standards Etc because you know we have been as a society talking about it they don't have much of a choice because if they don't go that way should we should we tell them about the harms of pornography at the point of consumption like we do with cigarettes it's a bit difficult Maybe maybe I I think we should we should talk

about what could happen like gambling what effects like like gambling like but but this also happens you you've been talking about gaming a lot you know there's a way of of gaming and healthy gaming right there's a way of video games that is too much and not too much I what do you think don't okay yeah so I mean I think it's it's a great question so I've got like um a couple of different things so I'm going to about to contradict myself so the first is that we know that you know putting warning labels

on things does move things in the right direction but I love to just share a story so when I was a medical student didn't really understand much about medicine or Psychiatry or humans um you know I had a patient who came in and was smoking and so I I came in and I was like you know he came in I was like a first year medical student so I was like I'm gonna be a doctor one day and so this person comes in I'm like sir do you know that smoking is dangerous it can cause

lung cancer it can do this it can do this it can do this so the person's like yeah you know oh like that sounds bad I don't want L cancer I was like great we're going to give you like a prescription to help you quit and you can get a nicotine patch and like I was like I'm going to be a doctor one day so month later guy comes in and like I ask him how's the quitting smoking going and he's like well I I'm still smoking and then I was like I don't think you

understand man it increases risk of heart disease and stroke and all these kinds of things like it's going to like do all this kind of stuff and he's like yeah oh that's bad I don't want any of that stuff and I was like cool so like you're going to quit right and he's like yeah and so I then he comes in and I I comes in the next month he still hasn't quit and I started to try to figure out what's going on right so one of the key things that we learned is that if

you want someone to eat broccoli instead of cookies um telling them that cookies are unhealthy for you isn't good enough so we need generally speaking when you look at recovery from addiction and behavioral change you have to have a good enough reason to do it yeah so I was still blunt and I figured this out and talk to my my preceptor and stuff and then I asked this person so what's important to you and he's like oh you know I love my daughter and then I asked them a very bad question I was like when

you and he was like I was like what you know tell me about your daughters and he was like you know I can't wait like I'll know I can die a happy person once I've walked them down the aisle and I they're married and stuff like that and then I asked him a question I was like when you walk down the aisle do you want to be carrying an oxygen tank behind you and he was like what I was like if you keep smoking that's what's going to happen or maybe you'll be in a wheelchair

right so I was a first year medical student kind of brutal but that actually sunk in you have to connect with people with what they care about yeah that is still a warning though isn't it you've put a warning on that Absol but it's it's it's a little different right so so it's individualized but even now when we you know I'm I stream on Twitch and I try to get people to stop playing video games which is like holding an AA meeting in a bar and what I've discovered is I'm with you we've lost a

lot of faith in humanity if you give them a broccoli and a cookie they're going to take a cookie but I I'm still hopeful I think that we do see the number one search is how do I quit porn there's a lot of energy in desire to do it they just don't have a path and I think one of these very simple things is like emphasizing an erotic film and telling people hey if you're lonely hey if you're having trouble finding a relationship you know hey if you're if you have a problem with premature ejaculation

or you're having difficulty engaging in a sexual act and can't achieve orgasm what you need to do is slow it down don't make sex a three minute jiggly slippery experience slow it down watch an erotic film reprogram your brain like I bet you money that if we somehow figured out if we told people you can reprogram your brain by watching erotic film and we could say that scientifically that would be incredibly successful because I think people are hungry for this right they're hungry for what we were biologically designed to do which is connect and have

fulfilling sexual relationships what's your take on that Dr yeah I think that that's that would be helpful absolutely because I think's telling someone to go cold turkey from having something that they do derive pleasure from right even if they're even if they have addictive potential addictive personalities towards that behavior then giving them something else that they can still derive pleasure from and have the the benefits of orgasm and have the benefits of feeling that desire and enjoyment is is a really great way when you tell someone you take something away that they've used as a

crutch potentially and they have nothing to replace it with and I you know we've talked about this far giving people a purpose a lot of times people don't have purpose and so they're they're like they have nothing else to do and they're like oh I'll just do this thing because I'm bored and that's one of the reasons people watch porn is because they're bored and so you give them a purpose something else to do whether it's an erotic film or actually purpose in their life um maybe it's meeting people outside in the real world which

would be even better that would help our our issues with not getting married having high divorce rates and not having kids right but like I think those would be great Solutions if we could come up with ways to get people to either find a substitute or find purpose interestingly there's clearly a two-way relationship with purpose porn motivation Etc so it we giving them a purpose one might say well then we stop porn because then I'll have more motivation to put their shoes on yeah so I I think you know if you look at there's one

study that showed the two strongest variables with pornography addiction or a sense of meaninglessness in in life and I forget what the other variable is maybe early age of exposure um but so I I I think it's it's kind of spoton right so when I don't have a life that's worth living what happens my body and my brain become squeeze bottles of dopamine because what is the joy of life so I try to just extract as much dopamine as I can for my brain so that I have some joy in the day some kind of

pleasure and then I watch more of this mass-produced supernormal stimulus pornography because that squeezes more dopamine out of my neurotransmitters and the more that my life becomes that now there's a moral component now I feel ashamed now if I remember looking at some statistics on online dating profiles and like saying that you're a dude who watches porn is like an instant no but if I'm watching pornography it's going to sap me of the motivation to pursue my purpose absolutely so if I'm extracting all my dopamine through watching pornography I'm going to have none left for

Behavioral reinforcement from other activities so what reading books becomes not as much fun going to a park becomes not as much fun so it's absolutely this vicious cycle where meaninglessness I have no reason to do anything all day so I might as well watch some porn not erotic film so we canel porn then no so please let us have it yeah I I don't know I mean the on you're done the majority of my income and why brand would collapse if you started Bing so short no I mean I think there I think we have

to I I mean I think there's a lot of things we've talked about but I think sexual education I think understanding that you know explaining to younger kids of what they're watching right I think adults have a little bit more um their brains are fully developed they understand what they're watching they know it's a produced product they presumably have already gone through the process of finding a job and doing other things that give them purpose maybe they have children maybe they have a family right but but the I think it's really in that Young Generation

they're finding themselves maybe they're going out and they're not finding a partner because we know that there's less people coupling there's higher you know Mis match of expectations we've talked about that too in terms of dating and so you know it's it's very easy for those people when they're still trying to figure out what to do with their lives to fall into something like that and I think if we really focus on that generation I think and that's a generation that probably shouldn't be watching porn anyways right um and and I think that would make

huge a huge difference and help parents because parents are really really worried how' you do it I mean you you there's many way of kind of of of of starting it but but they what they need to know really is that you are there for them you are open if they have any kind of of Doubt situations you are going to be there for them this is not a subject that you are going to you know bail out because you feel too ashamed or you can't handle difficult questions I would tell parents educate yourself if

you're having kids you're going to have to talk to them about sex if you didn't get education what age you need to start when really really young you need to start when they're learning language I mean young kids today many of them they don't know the difference between a vagina and a vulva even Billy ish in an interview came out saying that she wanted to put her face in in people's vaginas no and you go what what happened you're talking about vulva girl you know yeah no it has to start from I completely agree with

everything you're saying I have kids I've talked to them about sex I think you you have to start early with at least knowing the anatomy right knowing what their body parts are and what the body parts of are of the opposite gender um so that they know that they're different and and all that stuff and then honestly being open they're going to ask you questions like it's kids are curious and so they'll come home and be like what's this what's that and not being like oh no no no I'm not going to talk about that

it's just like okay yeah let's have a conversation about it and let's talk about it and realize that it's not going to be one conversation it's going to be like throughout their development as they become older you're going to maybe introduce more topics or they may have a question for you and just never shaming that and that can come even early right kids are masturbting babies are masturbating like as young that's a soothing Behavior right and so sometimes you'll see your child doing it you don't want to shame them right because that's already setting up

that stage of Shame so sort of allow being like okay that's that's fine that you're doing that but maybe do that in private and that's something that you do in private um but you know I think it's really important to have these conversations and it's uncomfortable it's going to be uncomfortable and know that it's going to be uncomfortable but like we have a duty cuz they're not going to learn it at school in the way or enough in school yeah so I I I completely agree with what they said so it's really interesting because the

number one question so when we started talk working with Gamers what happened very quickly is parents started reaching out and they're like hey I have a son who's got this problem usually a son sometimes a daughter 7030 and um how do I talk to them so we actually started doing a study in 2020 2020 or 2021 where we started developing different kinds of techniques and measuring what worked best so now we have four years of data um a lot of those findings went into the book about how to raise a healthy gamer which is actually

all about conversational techniques for parents about how to talk to their kids so for four years here are the biggest takeaways uh so that book is like it's conversational techniques about video game addiction but we find that this works really well for pornography too so the first is uh like Dr mik said um multiple conversation so the first mistake that parents make is that they think that they have to get it all in in one conversation talk no it's it's lots of them second thing start earlier than you think you need to yeah so one

of the biggest principles that we learn in in you know medicine is that you don't have endof life conversations when someone is dying you have to have the conversation before it's an issue so I I think we were talking about you said what 64% of people get exposed to pornography at the age of 11 right so accidentally accident still but so that what that tell parents think oh I like I can push this off and wait until they're 14 or and and of course my Beta is not going to watch right oh he's good he's

so good not my Beta KS right yeah not in our house yeah and you I I noticed you said you talked to your kids about sex have you talked to them about porn yeah okay my older one my older one nice good job thank you um your beta is going to be so good so so I think it's going to be multiple conversations start earlier than you need to and then there are a couple of really nice techniques that you can use so the first is asking open-ended questions and not about you watch porn it

can start with hey are are you familiar with what pornography is do you know what it is what do you understand about pornography another really good evidence-based technique which has been shown to be effective for talking about drugs is do you have friends who watch porn do you have friends do you know people or kids in your school watching this yes or no what do you think about that so oftentimes you don't want to ask the kid directly you want to ask about what's happening around you and then you can ask them what do you

think about that do you have questions so make yourself a resource and signal to them that hey we can have this conversation and it's preparing them for the world really it's giving them the tools to be able to manage situations that will come up because sex is not easy and they're going to be in difficult moments and if they have been prepared they're going to know better how to respond to those moments you know if they're watching that pornography though the type that's available on those tube streaming sites do you believe that it will cause

or lead to a rise in violence between men and women because when I look at some of the statistics around this nearly one in three porn videos contains physical violence and almost 90% of the most famous porn scenes are violence scenes 18 to 21 year olds out of 18 to 21 year olds 179% had seen pornography involving sexual violence when they were children and almost 50% of young people say girls expect sex to involve physical aggression such as Airway restriction and according to a study in 2024 um of 18 to 35 year olds they found

that 57% of young people aged um from 18 to 35 had been strangled themselves during sex and 51% had been strangled um at least once during sex and my last stat on this is the BBC revealed that 38% of women under the age of 40 have experienced un wanted slapping choking and gagging during consensual sex and 42% of these women said they felt pressured or coerced into doing it so we can allow people to watch pornography but is there not a risk that at a very young age at the age of 11 we're going to

learn that sex is a violent act and that's going to make us more violent G to start with you yeah this is a really important discussion and I think you know I actually spoke to De Debbie herban who leads a lot of the studies on strangulation and so basically what they found is that very commonly Young people College age students are having strangulation or during intercourse or during for plane it's become so common that it's almost like kissing right like this is something that is so common and often consent is not being discussed or like

hey can I do this yeah it's all right but it's not like a real discussion and as you guys all know and especially asphixiation can lead to loss of oxygen to the brain and and sort of a whole host of things and so I think ultimately that is a concern for sure in terms of um you know we have in movies for a reason right like we don't show our kids like the boys for example on Netflix right because it's very violent and so similarly we would like to have ratings on pornography and they shouldn't

have access to it but sometimes they see it now uh yeah that is a concern I don't know exactly how to rectify that maybe you have some thoughts is that because we want it though earlier on you said a porn is there because we we want it so I'm thinking isn't strangulation in porn because that's the type of porn that people want so there is you know some people who derive pleasure from is you know from a temporary occlusion of uh of of breath right and so there is some people who enjoy that erotically but

that doesn't mean that that's Universal and um and again it's fantasy so just because you watch something on pornography doesn't mean that you should be doing it it's a fantasy um it's not real life and that's in a hopefully a controlled safe situation where they're producing that pornography but I think it's very important when we're starting to talk about sexual violence towards women that we understand that that doesn't come from porn that existed long before porn sexual violence towards women is a systemic problem we have in our society and we all know that the most

dangerous place for a woman is her own home it's her own husband or her boyfriend or her relatives around her Etc so the way I see it porn reflects the values we have in our society I think I see porn a bit as a mirror of many of the of of of the values in our society amongst them sexual violence towards women but then it's also true obviously that nowadays as porn has become more popular we're getting into a bigger problem right where their attitudes are also provoked by what they are seeing so now it's

not that easy anymore to say that porn is just a reflection because obviously they also learn from what they see and then they go into their own lives and they try to reproduce what they have learned on online and that's in that case then if I watch violent pornography when I meet my partner at 15 16 18 21 I'm going to have this expectation that pornography looks certain I'm going to think sex has to be performed in this way where I choke them I hit them I but or whatever they whatever because that's the only

sexual education I've had and I got it from Twitter for example so that in that case it will lead to sexual violence unwanted SE not necessarily it will lead to that uh it might lead to a curiosity of trying it out because 42% of women said that they have been uh felt they were pressured or coerced into slapping choking or being gagged yeah and I think many women also feel coerced just to have regular sex many times in their own marriages what do you think Dr K so so many thoughts and and agree that this

is a a very important discussion so like I was kind of curious about this because I've noticed there's this rise in like asphixiation so the first question that I asked is like why are people doing this so what I found is there's once again not randomized control trials that we're going to take 100 people split them into two groups and you're G to you know and so the first thing is the physiology is actually like fascinating so the I know this is gonna sound random we don't really know exactly what's going on but so it's

really interesting because if you look at states of meditation right so these are states of like Bliss so something changes in our brain when we're in a meditative State now what the hell does that have to do with asphixiation so one of the most common trends of esoteric and deeply spiritual meditation practices are a very low respiratory rate right so one practice that I did had a respiratory rate of one breath every eight minutes so that's like you know the regular respiratory rate is 13 to 14 times a minute so what we know is that

when the brain runs out of oxygen as long as we don't damage it and that's the big problem with this asfixiation is that there's no consent there's no preparation people feel coerced into it what we know in meditation is that a high CO2 level and a low O2 level cause alterations in the brain that will probably lead to something like a psychedelic experience a blissful experience things like that so when when we're talking about asphixiation something is going on in the brain where we're altering the State of Consciousness we're cutting off air flow to the

the brain it can be lethal it can be damaging permanently damaging and something can change in the brain that will enhance the experience of sexuality that is exper that that people have so somewhere along the way people got into this idea I think the other thing the other B basic Trend that we're seeing is that we're getting sexually desensitized so if you look at um this is not just sexual but like if you look at you know pornography what tends to happen happen is what I find arousing will drift over time so I need to

watch more and more hardcore porn to get the same level of arousal so there's also something that show there there's uh you know studies that show that If You're vulnerable to an addiction you're also vulnerable to risk-taking behavior so when you take when you engage in Risk what happens is like I don't know if this kind of makes sense but you know I I had a a a patient once who was working in a jail and he was telling me about when he commits a crime and what he loved he has a really bad ADHD

and what he loves about committing a crime is he is completely dialed in because of the risk he has a survival reason to pay attention to every single detail he is so focused on the task and we know that things like flow States involve an intense amount of focus and so when we're taking a risk it's activating our dopamine way more we feel when I've talked to patients who engage in this kind of behavior they feel the most alive because of the danger so there's a lot of stuff that is being activated if it's done

in a healthy way now there's all kinds of unhealthy stuff going on um I think the statistics kind of speak for themselves like my gut check is that while everyone it doesn't necessarily increase the risk for everyone I think we're seeing the intersectionality of a couple of things so the first thing is that men are angry so we have incels we have school Shooters um you know men are resentful towards women so I think part of the reason we're seeing this violence against women in the pornography is because there's an angry incel who's home alone

who doesn't believe they're ever going to have sex believes that women are gatekeeping this and so the the the masculine predatory systemic I'm GNA teach this woman a lesson she doesn't get to say no to me so these kinds of feelings are being someone has figured out on a tube site that if I give men this fantasy they are going to watch it more and more and this is what we see punish [ __ ] of women we see punish [ __ ] of women all the time I'm going to destroy you I'm going to

you know banging and smashing and and but you're saying that's a social problem not a porn industry problem well so I think what the porn industry is is doing yeah the porn industry is figuring out this is what all technology is doing the machine learning is figuring out machine learning is figuring it out so as you cited some statistic about you know sexual activity like more virin than ever before more sexual frustration than ever before more frustration with life than ever before and so let's give you this extreme thing that's chck Tech chck checking a

couple of different boxes but interesting within this I heard something which is you basically have described softcore pornography as a gateway drug to hardcore pornography because the brain gets desensitized it looks for a bigger kick like it was heroin or something else you need a bigger more extreme experience to get the same high so if we start people on a porn the broccoli they're eventually going to get to the cookie that's a great assumption I think it's different because I think the desensitization hap it's different circuits of the brain there's a patience to it there's

an emotional component to it so I don't think I I think you're right that if we talk about squeezing out dopamine could it be a gateway drug absolutely but part of the reason that in this moment I think it could be part of the solution is is erotic is moving away from dop erotic is not about the orgasm the dopamine is the orgasm erotic is about everything else except for the organism so even when I'm working with patients who have unhealthy relationships with sexuality the point is let's move away from orgasm let's recognize that the

sexual act and speaking of the orgasm Gap if you're a dude you can have sex and not have an orgasm and it can still be a positive experience and this kind of goes back to the sexual violence what really scares me is that as people watch this stuff for whatever reason what's going to happen is they're going to start to think and I've seen this a lot recently it's amazing how much this is spiked how normalized this has become Oh I thought women liked it this is what I'm supposed to do right and then you

feel coercion from the side of women I think it's interesting right I I wouldn't be surprised if I wouldn't be surprised and this is a bias in literature we ask do you feel women as a woman do you feel coerced into doing this I don't think we ever ask men do you feel pressured into doing this we don't even ask men what they feel coerced in because there not that many masculine scripts either of of of having sex there's basically one that's a great point and it's you know the penetrative sex machine that's the script

we are why is that that must be a reflection of the demand well I think it's a reflection of who's making the content and who's been making even traditional media right like movies where you see how people have intimate acts even they're not showing the act right it's always ma penis and vagina within minutes the female orgasms and that's it right that's the whole thing that's not real life and it's been made by men I think it's this two-way dance really so I think there's there's a certain demand that exists because of whatever's going on

in the world and then we meet that Demand with conversation which enhances sometimes the demand for that content or subject and it's this kind of two-way dance where there's more content about it so the demand increases and people get more interested in it and all sees rise you know yeah absolutely so I think that that's exactly what's going on here there's some preset demand but right now the problem is that the only people who are fulfilling that demand are making you know highly processed calorically densed you know orgasm masturbation focused pornography and we even see

this in like other dimensions like if you look at literature right now you know the fantasy genre has so it has an an inje of female authors so fantasy has changed completely in the last 10 or 15 years ya has changed completely in the last 10 or 15 years I think maybe what we need is dudes writing romance novels and consumers they always have power remember that people who are watching porn they are part of this industry they are voting with their attention their time their clicks online hopefully with their money because everybody should pay

for their porn because porn should not be out out there for free for anyone it's it's a people are working in this they are you know they have lives they have kids they have to pay their rent the food on the table their schools Etc we have to respect the work of those people sorry I couldn't help the laugh I just realized you said porn shouldn't be free we live in a world where food is not a human right water is not a human right Healthcare is not a human right but porn is free for

everybody is porn free because it it's behind a different advertising it's just an advertising model which means you are the you are the product like so if you're consuming advert you're basically paying with your attention it's just a different currency we're paying with there's no porn that's free if you think about it fair enough you I mean yeah yeah you're paying with your attention either way you're looking at an advert beforehand you're scrolling past a display advert on the right hand side of the page or even on Twitter if you're on Twitter you're consuming ads

when you stumble across porn it's a different advertising model but not the right people are getting the money the people making the content you mean exactly I mean it's the dealers who are getting it when you look at only fans interestingly 6.6 billion they made this year and about five billion of that went to the creators and that's you know only fans has been a real phenomenon in culture last couple years I mean if we look at the the porn industry so it changed a lot I've been in this industry now for 20 years when

I started you know there was sites online pay sites tubes didn't exist Etc and then uh when only fans came around and when they become big in the pandemic they changed again the rules for this industry a bit and I do think that it's better that the people who are making it are receiving their you know customers directly Etc and that they can make decisions for themselves I think it's a good part of the industry that it works that way no fap a term I um only came across a couple of weeks ago this idea

of noof FAP which is I believe and you clearly know much more about this than I do Dr K but um I believe the term is it's it's proposing a solution to the pornography challenge that some people have where you completely abstain from watching pornography and or masturbating at all um Reena if I recall and I don't want to mischaracterize your opinion here but I think when we spoke the first time on the podcast you made the case that masturbation does have positive impacts so what is your view on this idea of noof FAP yeah

so I think the the movement it's so the idea of retaining from or abstaining from masturbation or watching pornography is a very individual one and it may have benefits for some people in terms of uh they may because if they're using these things in a negative way abstaining from them may allow them to have more control over other portions of their life but a lot of people will misinform people and say oh you're going to have a higher testosterone you're going to have all these physiologic changes which have not been born out in the literature

there's like a very small study looking at men who abstained from um ejaculation for 21 days that saw a very small minute increase in testosterone like 10 guys so it's not generalizable it's never been repeated um and testosterone varies as it is quite significantly over days and throughout the day and you know one day to the next so ultimately there's no evidence to support report the fact that abstaining from anything like masturbation is actually going to have a benefit more likely than not either you're going to have a nocturnal emission or you're going to body's

going to absorb that cement so it doesn't really change what's going on physiologically is there an impact on fertility if I masturbate or don't murate yes so fertility we do see that if you abstain for about five days up to five days you're going to see some improvement in the seen qu um seen volume potentially and also some characteristics of of the sperm uh but above and beyond that you start seeing DNA damage and so that can actually be negative if you abstain for too long so the sperm are effectively dying in the well you're

seeing like mutation so they're not as they're not as effective they're they're not going to die necessarily but they're not going to create uh a healthy you know fetus or embryo okay no F that is fascinating I didn't know that's really interesting um so a couple of things to understand so there are a lot of tradition that abstain from sexual activity I think um we don't study those Traditions very well and I think the key thing to understand I personally think that um celibacy and abstinence from sexual activity can be incredibly powerful um and so

I think part of the we have to remember right so if we don't have any evidence for something why do so many people believe it so some of it is there's a lot of bad information out there but people what happens on the noof fap community is that people are having some experiences and they're saying this kind of thing changed my life and there's so many layers to that so the first is that I think nofap is kind of a way to wrestle with any kind of Behavioral control so if we look at like you

know people who are addicted to pornography we talk about all of these negative impacts of this cycle of I don't have anything to do any day anything today so I'm going to jerk off and then I have no mean meaning no purpose no dopamine so I'm just like stuck in the cycle so they want to break the cycle and they just pick one thing and I think just challenging yourself from a self-control perspective I completely agree with Dr what mik says there may not be a physiological thing going on here but just challenging yourself and

saying hey like this one thing messes up my relationships messes up my dopamine messes up my purpose and my motivation I'm going to take control of this and it'll change my life so I think if you look at it from an isolated stance of masturbation it may not have much of an effect we'll talk about the exception to that rule in a second in the spiritual Traditions but I think that a lot of people are just using it as a vehicle to come to terms with something challenging in their life and they're like they're making

a commitment right I'm going to do this thing and the benefit comes from that maybe not any physiological thing um you know all the stuff about testosterone and stuff completely agree I don't think that there's a clear thing there but if you look at some of the meditative Traditions one of the really common things and this is really fascinating because this is true of uh meditative or religious Traditions all over the world so you'll see cibus is a part of some of the abrahamic religions it's part of some of the karmic religions from the East

so human beings at some point figured out that abstaining from sexual activity can have different kinds of impacts in the organism so a couple of things that it does is it reduces our thoughts of lust um if we do it the right way and we'll get to a couple of specific examples of what the nofap community doesn't understand so when I deprive myself of a particular thing I sometimes reduce that behavioral reinforcement so if I look at someone who's addicted to alcohol you know when they stop drinking alcohol at the very beginning their desire will

increase but then 10 years later they don't even think about it so if you are someone who is thinking about sex constantly and you stop engaging in sexual perceptions so remember the thoughts in our brain come from what we perceive this is why advertising is a thing because an Advertiser knows if I can show you this thing you will think about it now if I'm fapping and watching pornography I'm getting this perceptual um input which is then creating thoughts in my head now I'm thinking about this stuff instead of thinking about something else so there's

that layer of thing too when I cut something off from my perception when I break up with someone why do I block them because if I watch their social media if I get text from them that's going to enter my perception and control my thoughts so they can also use it as a benefit of like thought control if I stop looking at this stuff this has also been hijacked by generally speaking patriarchal structures for like you know there's a particular religious sect of Hinduism where the priests are like I'm never going to see a woman

like no women are allowed in the house if I'm going to come visit your house right so this gets turned into some weird things but so noap gives us an opportunity for self-control it gives us a chance to reduce our sensory input which reduces our thoughts and then there's also these meditative Traditions which say that you know achieving esoteric spiritual experiences which is a lot of what the noof fat community like talks about like they become slightly different human beings celibacy is a part of that now the key thing about the meditative Traditions is that

they're not taking advice from randos on the internet so I'll give you all just one really simple example when you do esoteric meditations spirituality celibacy kind of stuff it's usually accompanied in the Hindu tradition or Buddhist tradition with certain yogic postures and one example of this is something called sidasa sidas is adapts pose and literally what you do is in this pose you place the heel of one your right foot usually up against your perenium so you put pressure on the area between your anus and your scrotum if you're a man it's a slightly different

location if you're a woman and then what that actually does from Anatomy I'm sure you know this better than I correct me if I'm wrong is that you know we know that the blood supply to the scrotum passes through that right it's on the underside it's like in that pelvic floor region so one of the really interesting things that I remember learning from a yogi who was a medical doctor is that when we compress blood flow through the testes like if you have gently compressed blood flow that increases over time you're going to get less

blood flow to the testes you may get some kind of reduction in testosterone production in semen production or whatever so there may be some physiological things that people do when they're normally like try to be celibate that allow it to be healthy in a in a good way so I think kind of the the key takeaway don't disagree with anything that Dr mik said I think you've got to remember that nofap is not a Surefire solution to fix all your problems and at the same time some people have positive experiences also Dr mik has been

emphasizing this point of it's not the same for everybody and we know that there are a couple of things working with this community quite a bit you know there are a couple of things that happen about self-control challenging yourself setting a goal creating purpose in your life changing what your sensory inputs are so you you're not thirsty all day long and thinking about being horny and all this kind of stuff like sometimes you got to kind of cut it out of your life and so it's almost like this this uh cold turkey kind of approach

which which can sometimes work for nicotine can sometimes work for things like sex but I think like your mileage may vary and we don't really know exactly what's going on yeah I think I'll add I think the the problem I have with it to some degree is when people are white knuckling it right they're really and they're getting peer pressured into it like you got to stop right and so then they're they're they're really trying hard not to ejaculate and so they're tensing up their pelvic muscles they're developing problems because they're tensing up their pelvic

floors they're developing dysfunctions they're getting pain with ejaculation they're getting pain with erections or they get so much shame when they have a nocturnal emission for example nocturnal emission is a nighttime ejaculation exactly so they're they're they're getting so shamed by the community because they've failed which is completely out of their physiological control like you're going to have a nocturnal emission if your body wants to have one there's nothing you can do about it so you know I think ultimately there is a lot of Shame and peer pressure that can sometimes create harm in these

situations now if you're using it in the way Dr K describes like that's fine if you're if you're deriving benefit from it I have no problem but I do take issue with the people who are harming themselves because they're getting a lot of pressure from the from the group if I can jump in for a second so I want to emphasize this point too so this is really weird but people are white knuckling it they're they may be making their addiction actually worse so there's a really interesting principle in addiction where if I'm white knuckling

something like so like I let's use the example of like opioid addiction right so when when I have when I'm working with an opioid addict at the very beginning what they have is like a psychological craving like I want to I want to have an opiate so that I feel better mentally I feel better I feel Euphoria and then if I White Knuckle it what happens is things start to get worse then I start to go into withdrawal and then my body is like now I'm going into opioid withdrawal so instead of euphoria now I

start to feel pain all over my body and as I feel pain all over my body then finally what happens is I crack and then I use opioids and then something really interesting happens the body learns what it what it has to do to you to make you use opioids again so when you White Knuckle and actually crack at the end what we find is that you're the the body jumps straight to level 10 right so it's kind of like we see this also with like kids and devices Mommy Daddy can I have an iPad

no and then they're like Mommy Daddy please no ah and then they start crying then they start thrwing a temper tantrum if you give them the iPad when they throw a temper tantrum that encourages them to throw a temper tantrum and we see that internally biologically physiologically where if you resist an addiction and then you cave at the end the body is like hey there's no point messing around with the early stages let's just go to hard withdrawal way faster so I think it can be so harmful when people are white knuckling it they don't

realize that every time they fail sometimes what they're actually doing is train in their brain to punish them way harder so their brain can get the dopamine that it wants you talk about pornography being a substitute for relationships in society okay have you spoken about that I don't want to misiz your opinion um I've got a quote here but your experience is is has been that pornography usage is really just a powerful coping mechanism um and it sort of scratches this evolutionary itch for relationships yeah is it therefore not a bad thing for people I'm

reflecting on that idea which we kind of addressed at the start but also just what I see in the comment section which is people really seem to hate dating apps and pornography but they also seem to use them both and I just as a podcast you we we were really surprised the first time we had a dating app CE CEO on the show because I thought oh great episode we learned a lot about business and how they built the app and then I looked at the comment section and this group of people had shown up

with like P like pitchforks and they were expressing their like desperation and they're feeling that these dating apps and pornography has very much ruined their lives and so I just I'm throwing that out there because it's a reflection of the comments that I see yeah no so I I didn't say okay to try to shut you I was just like let's hear the rest so so yeah I I think what was once again remember that the brain every part of the brain every neurotransmitter is involved in sexuality and relationships so what's happening is when we

this is the what we see is that when we use technology to activate the brain there are parts of the brain that don't know the difference the problem is that there are other parts of the brain that don't get activated so this is this is going to get a little bit weird but so if I think about like you know I'll give you let's just use the example of food so when I feel hungry I can eat something that's calorically dense and that will satisfy my Hunger but the calorically dense food may not have nutrition

it may not have micronutrients it may not have fiber so when I replace something nutritious with something tricks my body into thinking oh like now we're fine that can be very damaging so one of the things that we see with pornography is that if we look at like you know being horny why are human beings horny it's because if we weren't horny we would never mate like that's like it's a evolutionary it's not a bug it's not a problem it's a drive to help us succeed so then we have this thing called post-nut Clarity right

which is like when we have post-nut Clarity our our our horniness kind of goes down and then then it changes the way that we see the world so part of what we see a lot with like pornography as a substitute for relationships is first of all we've evolve to have these parts of the brain that get activated right relationships are a healthy thing for us and now we figured out how to partially activate the brain through pornography this is getting worse with things like only fans because now we develop a parasocial relationship there's usually not

parasocial relationships with like you know adult film actresses or maybe there are but now we have interaction I've seen more uh marriages ruined through only fans than I have through pornography and I've seen a big spike in this recently because now it's not just a physical thing there's enough insecurity and physicality and problems in the bedroom now there's an emotional relationship if pornography online didn't exist would we have better romantic relationships in real life you've got an opinion haven't you yeah we don't know short short answer is we don't know but even shorter answer is

yeah things worse with pornography and here's what I look at right so like if we don't have rcts what else can we look at rcts randomized control trials you know what we can look at is global Trends so what are we seeing what's the global Trend in pornography and what's the global Trend in relationships now this isn't causality there could be all there's all kinds of I think one thing that I really appreciated is um you know my my co- guests have clearly showed how nuanced and multifactorial this issue is but generally speaking people are

watching way more porn and relationships are getting worse we have declining birth rates people are getting married later um you know there's we're seeing a kind of global like Zeitgeist problem between men and women and por pornography is like correlated with those two things so in my mind if you H if if I say if you have to if I have to put an answer if we removed allll pornography from the world would things get better I would say yes but that's because the way pornography is right now and I think is and let me

finish I think I'm going to tee you up so I think it's it's it's because and the reason removing it would be better is because it has gotten more toxic right so as pornography becomes more harmful as it morphs and transforms into something that is more damaging removing it should make things better which is inevitable because of how the brain works you said we get increasingly dis so we want more extreme so if you start here you're eventually going to end up here regardless I would say for who would it be better or worse because

for me and my taste it would probably be worse I think that people who are searching ideas desires fantasies scripts outside the kind of heteronormative male dominant pornography that's out there they have really you know had a benefit of what has happened during the last years on the internet today they have access to different Role Models they have access to different stories they have access to representation they you know have access to sex education that is not heteronormative and and you know kind of you know in a heteronormative script when it comes to sexual debut

Etc people always talk about that that is through penetrative sex that it's not necessarily true is it what did we do before porn I mean were we struggling in a in a bedroom before pornography existed I mean I think people were more open about sexuality the the way the frigidness around sexuality has is a modern concept right like in in ancient civilizations you were watching people have sex it was in in live right like it was but it wasn't easily accessible in 15 seconds and extreme so we're saying we should come off we should we

have to mature I think I think we are in a maturing process that porn online this way is still pretty new and we haven't talked about it much in you know General Society so I think that this conversation that you are having now that you invited us to have a new conversation taking lots of time to talk about different aspects that is exactly what we need yeah I agree and I would just say just back to your point I think you know yes we see the rise of all these things concurrently but if we got

rid of porn would there be something else that people would be turning to right like is it's is chicken or the egg right it's probably not the cause it's multifactorial and so would people then turn to something else so would it be only fans instead of porn right would it be I mean an only fans can be a variety of different things right but it's now a live person that's communicating with someone else or is it going to be AI robots that have sex with you right like are we going to turn to something else

gaming addiction or some other type of addiction gambling or recreational drugs or alcohol or so it's really you're saying it's more just of a symptom of a set of challenges in society that people are using it for the emotional regulation that you described Dr K I think there's a little of both right it's easily accessible it's it's free I mean your time is time but like it is not costing you money um so that is that is part of the issue but I'm saying I don't think it's I think that there is a bigger problem

and that people are using as a scapegoat to avoid this problem just to kind of CounterPoint to that I don't think you'll disagree with what I'm about to say so the other thing that we know from addictions is that people have drugs of choice right so to say that it would be completely replaced I would disagree with because I think that the way that pornography affects your brain uh is unique compared to video games um and at the same time we also see a lot of stuff to support I agree with Dr mik is that

like we're seeing a rise in video game addiction we're seeing a rise in social media addiction we're seeing a rise in pornography addiction and depending on your individual makeup you may be vulnerable to pornography versus social media right so when you have when you need that parasocial relationship without the sexual sexual component maybe you get addicted to social media when you have that sexual component Maybe get addicted to to pornography and so I I think it is I do think it's like a pretty unique thing so if we just look at the physiology of sexuality

in relationships that's a pretty like it's a dangerous dangerous thing to to hijack because it's so like fundamental to like life in mating so you know I I think it I think it's somewhat specific I I don't think it I think if we removed it it would have some effect but I I think what I'm hearing from my co- guests is that you know I think this is true of all technology it's not that oh we should ban it that's why I'm kind of reluctant when you you ask that question and I'm happy to say

sure on balance I'll say yes but I think the key thing to understand is that we are developing things as the human race without realizing what we're building we are developing so the problem with pornography is almost like an issue of like um you know when you introduce an invasive species to a new environment there are no checks and balances so I think like there parts of Australia for example example where like they introduced rabbits and rabbits have like just taken over the whole continent and so I think what's happened with pornography is we started

letting people arguably the wrong people start building all of this pornography it's ripped through our society it's changed the way that now 40s something percent of women are coerced into asphixiation in college like what the [ __ ] right like this is insane like how did how did we get here but it's only just the beginning you mentioned there virtual reality AI these new technologies um one of the great things about these new technologies specifically AI in large language models is they can have a conversation with you and this is something in technology that we

couldn't really do before in such a remarkably personalized way so you kind of combine these Technologies you go okay I'll add in virtual reality robotics is on the rise as well we now have these large language models that can communicate with you in whatever way they need to to make you feel whatever you need to feel and I I look at that and go the future's not bright as it relates to sex sex relationships and pornography people you know they did a study in 2020 with virtual reality and they found the researchers found in that

study that virtual reality porn um made people feel more desired more flirted with and more connected to the actress so the more immersive we make pornography which is the direction of travel in the world generally the more it's going to be addictive the more it's going to bit feel like a better substitute than having a real relationship with a real person yeah I agree I think it's it's unless we develop some checks and balances and we prioritize relationships with other human beings uh as a society we're we're going to be in trouble so what do

we do there do we ban it do we ban virtual AI porn because there's already websites now there was three websites that I found that allowed you to make your own um partner um and they're calling this Digi sexuals where you can pick their personality you can pick their physical preferences you can pick the sexual fantasy that they perform and that you want to see them perform um and and uh and these are becoming increasingly popular and the great thing about these according to the websites that make these sexual characters that you can make yourself

is it remembers all of your previous conversations so quote it can improve communication and cater to what your desire is so it can really speak to what you want but it can't touch you oh it can't hug you it can't kiss you but the robots can those big sexual robots can so like I know this is going to sound crazy but like you know I I think we we look at the end of the human race and we look at things like climate change and nuclear war and and maybe like some super bug that is

resistant to all of our antibiotics like there's a tiny tiny chance that what's going to end the human race is something like this and I know that's like kind of a bold statement to make but like let me just share with yall what I'm afraid of so what's going on is you're right it's becoming more immersive and the whole whole problem with like technology and even the virtual world what we see in video games is that the immersive world is one that we prefer to the real world right so if you kind of think about

let's say only fans versus a real relationship only fans like this person is financially invested to not piss me off whereas I know this is very frustrating for a lot of dudes out there turns out if you're in a real relationship with a woman there's a human being who has thoughts and feelings and desires of her her own I know it's tough right and and so like what happens is we and only fans like they're they're invested in making you happy and now what we're happening is AI girlfriends that's just the start of it man

like right now they they can try to fulfill your desires someone's going to figure out that a random reinforcement schedule is better so if you want to create the most addictive virtual girlfriend she's actually not going to give you what you want some of the time she's going to piss you off she's going to throw a temper tantrum that is going to trick your brain into thinking this is a real relationship which comes from gambling psychology right gambling psychology right and so now what I'm going to do is get more addicted to technology and this

is why video games are adictive there's a really fascinating study where people were like the the reason video games are addictive is because of a denial of a reward so if you look at fortnite fortnite is a game that has a 100 players in Arena there's one winner which means you lose 99% of the time but oh boy if you're the winner that one time the dopamine surge that you get is astronomical when we deny human beings rewards and then we give it to them they're hooked this is gambling this is also why we respect

people sitting at this table because we've all worked hard what we did is not easy to do that's why everyone values it someone's going to figure this out with AI girlfriends and then this is the thing they can't hug us but they can so this is happening so this technology was actually developed in the early 2000s for medical reasons so when we were seeing um clinics in remote parts of the world that would have these things called haptic feedback gloves so this is back uh when if you look at like a doctor who was this

was specifically a technology developed around detecting breast cancer so what happens is I put on a glove I'm a doctor and someone else puts on a glove somewhere else in the world and then they do a breast exam so they feel the breast okay and then based on the lumps that you feel whatever their glove feels I'm wearing a glove that makes me feel the same things so we have some of these sexually assistive devices like you know for both men and women now when we combine haptic feedback and they start throwing temper tantrums like

I really think it could be like there's this tiny chance it's just the end of the human race cuz we're not like why bother with another human when I can get touch and I can get activated and you can get irritated every so often every so often which makes it so much sweeter right makeup sex is great the end of the human race scary I don't I don't want to go with there I I think we have to actively work at it right like we have to teach our children that like relationships are hard and

worth it and you know like like it has it's hard though it's it's really hard but I think um yeah I think it's it's going to be a challenge and we have to have some checks and balances and we on our own have to work in our own little microcosm to try to continually have the younger generation see the value of relationships and procreation and all those things because that's uh you know on the decline don't people in life typically just go for the path of least resistance when left to their own devices you know

I was thinking as you speaking about when I was in primary school they came in and taught me about your five a day so like you meant to have like five fruit and vegetables a day or whatever but then if they they tell you that information but then they put you in a food environment where um every shop is selling me candy and you know processed foods because it's it's more nutritious my brain spikes more there's no it doesn't matter if what you told me it doesn't matter if I know fight for fruit and vegetable

but we still have like this obesity crisis and I think if you went up to the average American and said what food is healthy I think a good proportion of them would be able to say what's healthy and what's not but then if you ask them what they consume it's a very different answer irrespective of pricing because your brain especially in a more stressed world than ever before is really driving driving you so I'm picking up the the soda I'm picking up and I think about the same in pornography we can know something is not

good for us but if it's readily available and it's low friction to access it the incentives are going to win out over the long term and I think about this in company culture I say to people all the time I say you know as a CEO you can stand there and tell your group of people how you want the team to behave but it's almost uh it's really naive to assume over any long long period of time that people will act outside of their incentives so you can say I want you guys to Al to

innovate but if your job description is literally rewarding you to do your current job and your bonuses are rewarding you to do your current job you're going to do your current job regardless of what the co is barking you know at you I think about the same in porn like we can't just we can't just rely on telling people that it's bad people do people do do things for delayed gratification right we went to medical school there is a lot of delayed gratification in medical school you're a CEO you're a producer like these are not

easy things to start right and you do it because you know there's potential reward at the end of it so there is you know human psychology and I'm sure Dr K can talk more about that like where you can foster this appreciation for delayed gratification and also with good food you know when you eat well when you eat green Etc you feel much better and that gives your energy and then you want to keep going the stats just the Obesity stats are just horrifying in the in the US in particular it's a country where you

know education education education we tried that you know in school I was told that vegetables are good and this is good but then obesity stats since the time I was in school have just gone in One Direction Still yeah that maybe it's about the practice we have to learn you know how to get into the right practice of things and this is a question really about is it the individual that has to find this discipline or this this sort of selfcontrol or at Social level do we need to put things in place to make the

environment easier to operate in so couple of thoughts the first so the first is I think the answer to that question which we learn in medical school is there's never an either or the answer is always both it's always multifactorial so I think um I'm with you that so like I when I think about like you know what what is my life's work it's I work on the individual level so when you ask me should we ban something it's like I I don't know cuz my thought is that we got to save a couple people

the good news about the human race dying out is that you know if a couple people continue to have sex with each other then all the people who are vulnerable to AI relationships will actually not procreate and Humanity will survive right so maybe we're okay but I I think that the other thing you have to keep in mind so this is maybe a little bit more of a spiritual event so I'm with you that there's an obesity crisis I'm with you that human beings it's kind of like we treat human beings like the lowest common

denominator right we're like oh human beings if we give them broccoli and cookies like they're going to eat cookies but I think that there two things the first thing is that like Dr Malik said you know I think even if we look at this podcast like the people who are watching this are not interested in eating cookies and there is an appetite why have podcasts exploded because people tried to educate kids in school and what we have organically evolutionary discovered is there is a different way to communicate information that that creates behavioral change that's the

first thing so we're seeing the counterbalancing force of obesity like the whole world became obese because we had people making calorically dense food without an awareness of it but I also see the highest amount of like whole grain advertisement that I've ever seen before now we know it's a problem and now humanity is fighting back the other thing so this is what I think really separates human beings from animals and maybe this is an argument that a more competent biologist will will say I'm wrong here this is more of a spiritual perspective but I think

human beings are the only species on the planet that may be able to run against our programming right and you can argue that this is even a deeper level of programming but like the whole point to Being Human the cool thing about being human is my brain can drive me like you said in One Direction but I can say hey even though my brain is driving me in this direction I don't want to go in that direction human beings are it's really interesting right because we're the ones that like so I remember you know watching

this Tik Tok or something about a vegan dog and someone was like oh yeah you know my dog is vegan they don't even like food Let's do an experiment there's one piece of meat and one piece of some weird corn broccoli chowder right dog sniffs both has never had meat for the last two years and eats the meat so if we look at animals like animals it's not clear to me that animals are able to regulate their impulses in the way that human beings do why have human beings dominated the planet it's because when we

feel like having a cookie we have broccoli when we feel like yelling at someone we restrain ourselves and there may be some deeper biology evolutionary kind of thing going on there but I I'd ask each and every one of you to look at your experience for a second forget about biology when you have an Impulse does that impulse control you or can you fight back I fight right we all fight that's The Human Experience The Human Experience is fighting against our impulses every [ __ ] day and then we try to learn how can I

get better at this because what my tongue wants I'm talking about calories not sex for a second you know what my tongue wants is not there's a part of me that says this is not good for me in the long run this is delayed gratification how many of our impulses do you actually think we're winning the fight against because I would argue that we're losing pretty much all of the fights against our impulses in fact the fact that we're all sat here is probably us following our impulses the rise in social media usage is us

being a slave to our impulses the rise in obesity globally is US failing losing the fight to our impulses the rise in pornography is US losing our fight to our impulses the rise in gaming gambling alcohol whatever is US losing our fight with our impulses yes alcoholic people so this is going to sound wild I think we're getting better at it so I know you're saying we're losing the war right human beings self-control is increasing and the reason why we're losing the war right now but the enemy is coming up with better and better weapons

technology is getting sophisticated pornography is getting sophisticated social media is getting sophisticated and yet the human race in some ways we're collapsing but we're also like operating in some ways at the best level that we ever have so we're getting outgunned but I actually think human beings on the whole what I see in the community what's the top search how do I quit pornography so there's something happening like on a Humanity level where we're like as human beings we're like we got to start fighting back this podcast is is a consequence of that this is

human beings fighting back so are we losing the war yeah but I think we've been like we got caught by surprise we got caught with our pants down right which may be a weird analy in this context but you know so so like I'm with you that there's a lot of reasons to be scared and also like the reason that people pay attention to me and Dr Malik and Erica is because we're fighting back right that's why we're here Stephen this is brilliant man because here you are and what are you what are the questions

you're asking us we're all screwed we're doomed isn't all screwed right so you've become so sophisticated that everyone who's listening to us you're pulling out the strongest messages of hope that the three of us can muster you're figuring out how to give people hope because you keep on asking these pessimistic pessimistic pessimistic questions so this is what it takes man it takes like people who are like figuring out how this works maybe you're controlling their impulses who knows no no I have to represent whatever the opposite of whatever you say is if you say left

I'll say right yeah right but so that's beautiful so think about it when you were at school did anyone ever tell you there's a conflict between broccoli and cookies no they said eat broccoli so we have figured out as a human race that we need to represent both sides of the conflict to get the best out of a human being that's a critical principle for addiction treatment too you can't tell them it's good you have to weigh the good and the bad is there any such thing as too much point Dr Reena so I think

it's really about how you feel about it so in all the data about problematic porn use it's like people who feel bad about it like they're like oh I really don't I think I use too much then you probably use too much right but if you use it and you don't feel bad about it and you're still able to go to work and you're still able to maintain your relationships and have sex with your partner or Partners or whatever then it's not a problem right so I think it's really it's it's comes down to how

you feel about it and usually you're right about it usually if you feel like something's wrong and you're using too much then probably abstaining or trying a different alternative may be beneficial so just to conclude then if I made you Prime Minister President of the United Kingdom the world let's say and you had to put legislation in place to make our relationship with pornography healthier or to make it a net more positive force for society or impact on society what exactly would you do Dr Reena this is a tough question so I think I would

have some mandatory self analysis of your porn use that everyone has to take every so often so that people can actually have to look at it with an objective like not watching porn but seeing like how many hours do you use it and how often are using it and again frequency is not always related to problem but it is one marker that we can measure and then you know maybe again have a warning to them that this seems like a lot of use are you still and then they if they have a certain marker of

use maybe are you finding that you're having difficulties in relationships and whatever and and that would hopefully alert some red flags to people who may need some assistance and and hopefully we'd have some sort of intervention for them what about you Dr K uh honestly what I do is resign like the first thing I would do um but if you're asking for like a single policy change I can get behind one thing so I think the biggest thing that we need right now from a policy level is social and emotional skills training for all children

I think we need to reevaluate what we teach in schools and what what people actually need to learn today so school when knowledge and information was not easily accessible school was about learning information but I don't need to learn the capital of any state or country now because I can look it up so I think what we really need is social and emotional skills training there are also studies that show that this is very very helpful for people so how do you regulate your emotions how do you form connections with other people these are the

two biggest things that we need because our emotions when they get out of whack they're the birth of all addiction and media straightening so young people can understand what they actually are watching and that media is sending out messages to the world and that we are decoding those messages I think that is absolutely necessary but what I would do I I I think porn should be behind a payment barrier for me that's I believe that that's the way it should be and better sexual education better sexual education I would add that I add that to

the Mandate yeah absolutely I don't know how to say this you in a way that you're going to understand but perfect Ted is banging I'm an investor in the company I drink it every day the whole team drinks perfect Ted every day we have a perfect Ted fridge in the office here's why I like perfect Ted typical energy drinks used to give me these crashes and as a podcaster the last thing you want to do is be crashing in a conversation the founders of perfect Ted wanted to create an energy drink that wouldn't create that

horrible crash cycle that many of us go through so they used matcha as the energy source and somehow they also made it really really delicious they've just come out with this new flavor called juicy Peach and it is banging if you try perfect teds juicy Peach and it's not banging feel free to get in my DMs and cuss me out you can pick it up at tesos or waitr or you can get it online and here's a secret that you've got to keep to yourself I'm going to give you 40% off perfect Ted just so

you can try juicy Peach yourself go to perfect.com and at checkout put in the code diary 40 I'm going to leave that up for some time not forever that's perfect ted.com and then use codee diary 40 at checkout when you try it make sure you tag me on Instagram and and say Steve you were right it's banging what's the most important thing we should have talked about but we didn't talk about as it relates to the work that you do and what you've seen as it relates to Sexual Health relationships love and dating um I

think what we didn't spend enough time on is how pornography changes our body Images so I think there's a significant number of people men interested in increasing panal length women interested in maybe labioplasty or looking a certain way that they're often seeing on pornography and I think that creates a lot of dissatisfaction a lot of Shame a lot of um you know small penis anxiety is a real thing and it's it it is very detrimental people are so um so focused on the size of their penis that they are now thinking about it ruminating about

it um potentially doing harm to themselves to try to increase Penal and so I think that this is something we didn't talk about but that is another potential harm of seeing people who have chosen to be pornography actors who have you know on the high standard deviations of size that's not normal right and so they're not seeing normal anatomy and I think that's that's potentially harmful I I agree partly but then also I hear many people when they're talking about porn they're saying porn creates unexpected kind of ideas of of your bodies and Etc but

I'm I'm a bit suspicious about this because honestly look at Fashion what is fashion doing I think it's worse I really think it's worse many time I I I in porn there are so many different people today different body types different ages different you know different everything that are being represented so I think that that statement might be you know from 10 years ago or something where does that statement come from just I mean we know that there is small pieing we know that people are St concern my highest viewed video is about increasing panut

length there's over 30 million views so it is um clearly something that people are searching now is it from pornography 100% no not necessarily but that's where they're seeing these very large organs is typically on pornography yes you can see a whole host of a variety of different types of people but I think they're seeing it there and feeling probably when it comes to men there are less Variety in porn than when it comes to women Erica do you use large penises in your work I don't know how to say that is part of your

sort of do you shoose them by the size no I do not I look for I look for people's personality that's what I'm after I'm I'm looking for people who who feel like real people I'm I I I mean Beauty and energy and passion and chemistry these sort of things but does the penis size matter no to me it doesn't matter but then if we're gonna be 100% honest it's true that many of the performers have slighter bigger penises than what is considered average what's the average penis length it's about 5.1 to 5.5 in erect

and uh is there a a gap in the perception there do men think the average penis length is bigger yeah actually both genders do so when you look at um studies where people like look at a penis and estimate the size both genders tend to um tend to overestimate average penal length but they also are not really great at looking at a penis and telling the size so sometimes they'll see like a five and a half inch penis and think it's six inches um you know up to an inch in variability basically when you get

on the the above average sizes so there is you know obviously perception issues but ultimately I think the people who tend to want to be and correct me if I'm wrong um who want to be performers who are male will generally have something they want to show off and they will think they have a larger penis what about the length of sex though is there disparities between how long we think sex should be and how often we should think we should be having it which causes a lot of sort of dissatisfaction in relationships yeah absolutely

so there's um the average time to ejaculation for a man is about five five to six minutes the average time to orgasm for a woman during partnered intercourse is about 14 minutes so there's definitely a disparity there that um needs to be addressed if you want the if you have average duration in your relationship then the part the female partner needs to be prioritized so she can reach Climax and that's not the end all goal for everybody you can still have a great relationship and have a great experience without an orgasm but if you want

both people to climax you need to stimulate the female partner a little longer you're going to say something that don't care yes I it's just when she was saying you know that's not the priority she look at Eric so so there's just I'm sorry like my brain grew up on the internet and like there's like a subtrack that's running this whole time but so I I think you know what I what I teach my patients is almost identical so if you look at the average sexual intercourse like people don't realize it's three to seven minutes

um is what's really even really fascinating is that speaking of misperceptions about 50% of women start uh don't want sex longer than 15 minutes so I didn't know what the average time to female and male orgasm was but I know what people prefer and half of women like they don't want you know if you watch like a a two film or something like sure sometimes there's shorts and stuff but there's also like you know porno is like 45 minutes of all kinds of stuff like it's like 3 to seven minutes and women start complaining after

50 seconds so I see a lot of this um you know this like uh body dysmorphia almost it's like getting to that level in both men and women unrealistic expectations about body unrealistic expectations about performance that creates shame once I feel feel shame then I want to watch pornography then you know I want to watch Dr Malik's video that has 30 million views or get pills to increase my penis size on the advertisers you know so I I think that there's just a lot of bad information out there so does this mean that we need

to make pornography that is reflective of reality i. make it 3 to five minutes long for men and 14 minutes for women but also um does it mean that we need to introduce pornography that's reflective of all body Images because again I go back to this like broccoli cookie analogy so I don't think it has to be pornography so I had an interesting experience so like I was in Europe and I went to a coed SAA right so like we don't have that here in the United States and the coet was like mostly like older

people so you see like you know the majority of people there were like 60 plus so you see like you know a hundred naked bodies of like old men and women and it really puts things in perspective I think part of the problem is with things like fashion and things like pornography we don't you know we just don't see what a normal naked body looks like so what what's the only we see two kinds of naked bodies we see our own and then we see you know highly produced or highly selected we don't see normal

naked but if I made a porn porn film that had reality in it would anybody buy it well I think if you made a porn film explain yeah that would sell out what are you talking about no but but but the answer the answer here is yes I made a film with a couple who are 70 plus and it's very successful people there's a very popular older female I don't know her but I've seen her on social media who's a porn porn actress and she's you know she's normal looking quite many actually uh but why

don't the industry make videos then of people with normal bodies and normal sized penises but those videos aren't the popular ones according to the data not necessary if you go on any streaming website and you click the popular button what you'll see is idyllic bodies now if people were searching out the pornography you're saying those would be the most popular because the the companies would make more money from them I mean there's so much content I think that that really lots of it is is is popular I I I mean there's you know one of

the things that they are doing on this size on the sites is that they are categorizing people by their primary features kind of so you can look for porn with bigger bodies for example and it's quite a popular category actually actually but you can also look for tiny teens you can look for mils you can look for for cougars you I mean people many people they have kind of gotten away from what is kind of desire and connecting people and has gotten into this way of kind of having their favorite kind of people their favorite

kind would your business be more or less successful if the bodies were reflective of soci society and the penises were reflective of society would your business be more or less successful in my case I don't I don't think so I think we already show a great diversity of people is it reflective of society 100% not but who is is Netflix reflective of society is Vogue magazine reflective of society Etc I mean I think that we do tend to look for beauty somehow but beauty doesn't mean uh stereotyped model liked people yeah just to chime in

so I I I I I think I challenge your question just a little bit because I think when you say like I'm I get what you're saying but I think we can also see the amateur porn is on the rise yes and if we look at when you say only fans made 6.6 billion I think a big appeal in only fans is that you have much more normal looking people and so when when we look at the success of a business or not I I think there's also like a you know a varied market so

people are looking for different things and I I think we're seeing that there like even as porn becomes highly overly produced and stuff there's kind of this like almost paradoxical upswing in amateur content in things like only fans where you have someone who really is closer to the girl next door when we're talking about a heteronormative sort of situation and and I think we can also see that in in we see that Trend all over the place right so as we get short form content we're also seeing an explosion in podcasts so I think there's

a variable consumer there I was looking as you were speaking at the top 10 earners on only fans and I have to say none of them look like they reflect the average person yeah so the top 10 earners won't top 20 no no no you can't look at the top you have to look at what percentage of the six billion comes from the top 10 earners and what percentage comes from other people I right so so is only fans of the kind of thing where it's like you know the majority of the revenue is earned

by the top 10 earners or is it this kind of thing where the top 10 earners get maybe uh 50% but then 50% is like a pretty wide variety that's the statistic you need to look at I can tell you that what we do see is that people search a lot on our sites for real sex it's a a concept that people are really looking for I also looked at PornHub this is the first time I've gone on PornHub at work just to see again that that the the most viewed uh porn stars on PornHub

and it's the same reflection none of them look like the average person you know I'm looking at the heterosexual so I'm looking at women and men and they all look like manakins all 30 of them well I think you and your team need to do more research you can't you can't accept an answer his values okay closing statements closing thoughts we've talked about a lot today so I want to go clockwise starting with Dr Reena Malik um what are your closing thoughts and statements to the wide variety of people that would have clicked on this

video for the wide variety of reasons whether they're parents whether they're the young men that struggle that you often spend your time dealing with Dr K what are your clothing closing thoughts for them but also we have a lot of people that are in government that listen and we only found that out because sometimes they reach out to us doctors reach out to us people in Parliament um in Congress Etc reach out to us so what would your statement be to all of those people my closing thoughts are invest in education about your body and

about sex so whether that means learning what your Anatomy is and learning what real sex is and I think that is of Paramount importance to having a successful relationship with yourself and your partners that you can enjoy sex and use pornography for curiosity and not for boredom yeah I I think um remember that your body is learning all the time and that we think about pornography and its negative effect which it can have a negative effect so I I'd start with really understanding you know what pornography is doing for you what's the root of your

relationship with it and also recognize that I mean it's I I really do think after this conversation that pornography can be a force for good and many of the reasons that you may be watching it you know if you transition to erotic film if you use it to in a sexual relationship like it doesn't have to be a bad thing it's the way that you relate to it and you know really think about how you can utilize it in a healthier way and if you are a consumer think about what you are watching see if

there's an about page can you learn anything about that company about these directors producers performers can you watch them behind the scene footage something that makes you feel that you align with the values of the people who are creating it because not all porn is monolithic there's many different kinds out there and there's many great people working in this industry to spread sex positivity and a better acceptance of our desires fantasies sexual lives uh who are interested in the erotica the erotic aspects of sexuality I I also think it's worth saying you know we've talked

widely about the subject of pornography um but one of the things that I really did come to believe and I saw when there was a call to ban only fans was that only fans as a website and as a platform is allowing porn stars and you know adult actresses and um actors to have a safer way to make their money to do their business and previously what you'd seen is there was um much of the escorting industry which was much more of a dangerous industry have now move over towards these platforms which do provide greater

safety for a behavior that is going to happen irrespective of whether there's um a ban in place or not we have a closing tradition on this podcast as you all know um you might not know this um where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest and because the last guest was you I'm going to I'm going to skip past it and I opened up the book to a question that's sort landed before that so I'm going to ask you all this question individually and I'd love to hear your answers what can you

do to improve humanity and the life of all the people that are listening I think continue educating people on and empowering people to to know what they're bodies are doing and how they can relate to the opposite sex if they're heterosexual um in order to have a satisfying sex life it's not just an extracurricular activity it's something that we do that's a part of our innate biology and it's important and valuable yeah I mean I I think um showing up tomorrow is like the most important thing like not here but like Ju Just you know

if we think about improving Humanity like human like you know decisions are made by those who show up so I think the most important thing that I can do is just showing up and continuing to do what I think is best the most important thing that all of us can do is just continue showing up uh the majority of the people that I work with in my community the biggest problem they have is sometimes not showing up uh I would say connect with other people on a deep level uh dare to have difficult conversations there

to be wrong because I also think that we live now in a society where so many people are so afraid of being wrong of saying something wrong of that sometimes they don't even dare to connect on a deeper level with other people you your point um Erica your answer about being okay to be wrong I think is really really important to a lot of the conversations we've had today because most of the time people don't want to have these conversations because they're sort of ideologically attached to a certain position typically the position that's associated with

whatever their job is or you know their incentive structure and I think sometimes it's important to have these open Nuance discussions like we've had today because we can all start to learn a little bit about other people's worlds and bring down some of those sort of ideological walls that keep us imprisoned and all progress I think is happens when you have this sort of com this conflict of ideas but with the purpose not of you know proving someone is wrong or you're more intelligent or whatever but through the purpose and the lens of progress and

that's why this conversation has been so enlightening to me because I get to see a bunch of different worlds from a bunch of different perspectives and I can use that to form my own opinion on the subject of pornography and I will start by saying that my opinion of pornography has actually changed in this conversation because there was clearly parts of my understanding of pornography that were in the dark and those lights have been turned on so now I have a more contextual picture of the industry thank you so much for your time today I

really really appreciate it it's um as I said a second ago it's super inspiring and super enlightening for me to get all of these perspectives and to use all of this new information to reform my own opinion on the subject matter in a much more naive sort of biased way so I really appreciate the time that you've all given us today and uh uh on behalf of all my audience as well thank you so much appreciate all of you thank [Music] Youk isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the D CEO at

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