23min chapter

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This Keeps People Lazy & Pathetic! - Porn, Sex, Women, AI Girlfriends & Weak Men | Healthy Gamer PT 1

Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory

CHAPTER

The Impact of Technology on Human Sexual Behavior

Exploring the evolutionary basis of human behavior related to sexuality and masturbation, this chapter analyzes the influence of technology and pornography on the brain's reward system. It delves into the concept of super normal stimuli in modern pornography, affecting social interactions and reproduction patterns. The conversation also extends to the potential future implications of AI girlfriends and the integration of haptic feedback technology in creating advanced virtual relationships.

00:00
Speaker 2
You're still talking about guys here? What do you mean? You think it was hard for guys to have an orgasm?
Speaker 1
No. I mean, in a sense of sexuality and stuff. I was just wondering about how many years ago human beings started masturbating, I imagine it was a long time ago. All monkeys.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 1
So I realized I was about to make that comment. So you have a lot of evolutionary drive to do this thing. And then what happens though is that I think that the way that pornography has grown and if you look at all technologies, like so you talked about being an athlete. So the problem is that technology people have figured out how to activate some parts of your brain. So you do get that dopamine kick. You do get like all of the, like not all, but you get like some level of activation, which is what really motivates you. And then the problem is that your brain has a choice. So I can either do it the hard way, and get even less of a dopamine activation, or I can do it the easy risk-free way. And it's really about the risk-free. And I think that's what you kind of really touched on with this whole idea of going to the bar and getting rejected. And at some point your brain starts to say like, it's not worth the trouble. And people will start to consciously believe that. That's why they become in cells or whatever. And so it just becomes, the world is becoming lopsided once technology enters the picture, because we can get 50% of our brain structures activated or even hyperactivated. There's a really fascinating study on beetles. There's a population of beetles that were going out of, we're not going extinct, but in a local area. And it turned out the reason that they were becoming endangered is because they were having sex with beer bottles. And so people were like, this is really weird, but there's a particular green beer bottle, which the beetles were trying to procreate with. And then people sort of discovered that, okay, there are ways to create something called a super normal stimulus, which then these beetles are drawn to. So something about the way that they perceive this green beer bottle makes it look like a super hot female beetle. And in the same way, if you look at the trends in pornography, tits are getting bigger, higher resolution, louder sound, virtual reality. So we're creating these super normal stimuli that are drawing us in. And now the brain has a choice. It's like, I can either have no risk for free at my home and jerk off, or I can go to a bar, try to talk to someone. It makes me feel I get rejected, right? And then as I get a social skills atrophy, it starts to become harder and harder to engage with women. And then it becomes a vicious cycle where people then just tap out of the game, they're just done with it. And this is probably a piece of why we don't have why we have low birth rates. But I don't think it's, I think that's has other issues too.
Speaker 2
Have you heard of the gooning subreddit? There's at least a million, it might be multi-million people. So I'm just now learning about this, utterly fascinating. So massive subreddit, gooning is basically going into your bedroom or whatever, setting up oftentimes multi screens and saying, I'm going to be here for a while, pulling up frequently multiple pornographic movies on the different screens, and basically trying to edge and make it last as long as you can. Now, from what I know in the literature about pornography, if you're spending that kind of time on pornography, that pornography is going to get weirder and weirder. And if I'm understanding the subreddit, right, one of the most popular forms of pornography is transgender porn. And going back to the book, a billion wicked thoughts, they talk about that, that as you habituate to the type of porn, you look for more and more extreme novel, maybe an even better way to think about it. What do you think about that? What does that tell us about where we're headed?
Speaker 1
So I think it's back to the beer bottles, right? So what we're doing is as we acclimatize to a particular stimulus, our dopamine levels will go down, right? So this is why people overdose when they get addicted to opiates, because the original dose doesn't work anymore, because there's homeostatic tolerance. So I need to up the dose on the signal to chase that old high. Same thing happens with pornography. When I watch pornography every day, I acclimatize to the stimulus, I need more hardcore porn. So I think this is just the new version of that. It's going to keep going, by the way. So as you goon twice a week, you're going to need to do more and you're going to need to do more and you're going to need to do more. And that's just the nature of this kind of stuff. So there'll be transgender porn, there'll be more hardcore porn. So we see this where there's like basically you need a stronger and stronger stimulus to chase that old dopaminergic rush. And it looks like people have sort of stumbled into this, right? And they're making it like an art form of gooning, where we're going to try to work together as a community of a million people to figure out how to squeeze as much dopamine as we can from this particular thing. So I think this is like exactly what I'm talking about where like, as a human race, like we're not going to go nuclear war is not going to fuck us. It's going to be stuff like haptic feedback and virtual girlfriends and things like that. And someone is going to figure out, and this is what happened with video games, someone is going to figure out with that with an AI girlfriend, the way to really get someone addicted is we have to approximate the real experience as much as possible, which means once in a while, your AI girlfriend is going to pick a fight with you. And she's actually going to hang up on you when you call her. And they're going to exhibit I'm I don't know if this is true or not, but I would bet money that over time, this is exactly what we're going to see. And as we do that, we're activating other parts of the brain and we're making this virtual experience approximate the real thing, because I'm sure you're familiar with random reinforcement schedules, right? So right now the problem with porn is that anytime I watch it, it's always available. The moment that someone figures out that denying someone their pornography, 20% of the time means that they're going to come to your website more. That's so crazy. Right. So gooning is just one example. There's a thousand other examples of how porn will evolve as long as we as human beings are going to rely on the outside world to satisfy this. It's just the most recent manifestation. What do you
Speaker 2
think's really going to happen with AI girlfriends? Like, does it freak you out? Like, are you waking up in the middle of the night in the cold sweat? Because I know you have kids and thinking, Oh God, no,
Speaker 1
I'm not waking up. I think it could be the end of the human race, but I'm not freaking out about it. Right. So if the human race ends, it ends like what, you know, I can't control that. So like, this is where there's no, I'm not going to prevent, you know, I can't stop the tide of AI girlfriends. In fact, I may have just leaked something that will, you know, the first pornography site to start denying pornography to their users, they may figure this out. I may have helped them. But I think what's going to happen. So this is really interesting. In the late 90s, we developed an interesting technology in medicine called haptic feedback. And this was developed because we wanted to do remote physical diagnosis. So literally, what happened to someone developed a glove where you could palpate a breast in one location. And then that glove sends signals to a different glove where the person feels the resistance. So you could literally feel like a cancerous nodule in someone else's breast remotely, because it pushes against you. And we have these kinds of like, you know, things like flesh lights and stuff like that. And I think at some point, someone is going to combine all of this stuff into a girlfriend that throws temper tantrums that is there for you, maybe even like kind of pretend cheats on you. And then has all the psychologically like activating stuff along with physical feedback, fleshlights, virtual reality, it'll all get integrated. And then the human race is fucked.
Speaker 2
That's a very terrifying picture. What I find most interesting, I mean, there's two things. One that you are very, because you can't control the outcomes, you are very fatalistic about what might happen. That's certainly interesting. What do you mean by fatalistic? That the world might end or human race might end. So what it is what it is. So I'm trying to stop it.
Speaker 1
But I can't stop it.
Speaker 2
You can't have absolute authority over whether it stops just to play my own little game there with myself. Yes. And then the other part that I find interesting is that I do think the stakes are extraordinarily high. I agree with you on that very much. But that you think a key part of making this all work is a certain percentage of negative things that the AI girlfriend to be effective is going to pick a fight with you that she's going to, you said, like flirt with the idea that maybe she's cheated on you. Why would that up your attachment to it?
Speaker 1
Because that's what happens in regular humans. So you think about this. So you have an amazing wife of 21 years.
Speaker 2
Yeah, married 21. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1
So like, and what would happen to you emotionally if someone else started not quite flirting, but started doing something to pull your wife's attention away from you. And she's not sending you any kind of signal that she's going to be unfaithful or anything like that. What do you think that would do to you emotionally and like to your attachment to the relationship?
Speaker 2
He has interesting for me because that isn't my insecurity. My wife's done such an amazing job making me feel like her number one, ah, I that wouldn't make me insecure. I would be happy for her if someone is flirting with her and that she still got it and all that. But I trust me, I am hyper aware of the psychological response of if you think that your woman, like the study show, if you believe that your woman has been near other men and had a chance to cheat, your ejaculate volume goes up substantially. So you get into sperm competition and like this is, this is part of the reason why male porn is way more likely to be multiple men and a single female, because that cue going back to how you get into transsexual porn, even if you identify as a straight guy in these gooning subreddits, the brain is, the male brain is hardwired to be hyper conscious of the present presence of other penises, which is weird, but nonetheless true. So anyway, while I might have a mildly atypical conditioned response because of the being with my wife for 21 years, I certainly get the thing. But that's, that is really interesting. So in this distressing,
Speaker 1
yeah, so in this case, it's atypical, right? But you decided a bunch of research that pushes it in the direction of 100% right, I'm just super unnerved, because it means
Speaker 2
that we're going to be tr-, knowingly
Speaker 4
triggering anxiety in people to
Speaker 1
get them to come back jealousy, anxiety, and then, and then, oh my God, it goes even deeper than that, because she's gonna, she's gonna like, start to cheat on you, but she won't ever do it, right? And then she's gonna say, I'm so sorry, I should have paid attention to you more, and, and like, I'll never do that again. And then what's gonna, it's gonna be, it's, it's such a mess. It's not just the jealousy. It's the jealousy followed by the unwavering commitment that I would never leave you. And that's gonna be like a drug. I mean, this is what we're talking about, right? This is what all of our movies are about, all of our romances about this idea that she's gonna be with you forever. And now we're way beyond pornography. Now we're, we're into the core of humanity, which the study on ejaculate following is fascinating. This is what I mean. It's not just the jealousy, right? Then she's gonna apologize. I'm so sorry. And then imagine what that would do emotionally to the person. When she's apologizing to you because she's hurt your feelings, hey, girlfriends don't do that right now. Right now, they're all servile. They don't, they don't piss you off or anything like that. But if you look at what bonds human beings, this dynamic tension that you talked about. So someone's gonna figure out how to add that to an AI girlfriend. And we will approximate reality closer and closer and closer. This is what we did with video games. Video games used to be single player. Now there's a community aspect. What a lot of parents that I work with don't understand is that games are no longer games. You can be a programmer, you can be a streamer. So games have moved into relationships. They moved into community. They moved into career. They moved into success. I had aspirations to go to Harvard when I was 16 years old. And now 16 year olds have aspirations to be streamers. So technology is starting to approximate the real world and trigger these parts of our brain. And pornography is gonna
Speaker 2
do it too. Yeah, that that is for sure. What advice do you give to people about going down the path of AI girlfriends? Avoid it like the plague, don't even touch it. Never look at it. Or no, it's fine. It's like porn as long as you're not addicted, you're
Speaker 1
good. Yeah. So I think with with all technology, it's just recognize that if you have a life that is worth living, the addiction will melt away on its own. Right. So I had a video game addiction where healthy gamer now I teach my kids how to play video games, I play games with them. The whole point is that with these AI girlfriends, you're gonna be vulnerable to that if you have no other substantial relationships. Right. So I think the advice that I give to everyone is build a life that is worth living. And oddly enough, I don't even focus so much on the addiction because we have to have a solid foundation from which to combat addiction. And this is a big problem that a lot of people make. Even like, so they teach us this in addiction psychiatry that, you know, if someone has depression, that is going to be fueling the addiction. And if they have an addiction, that's going to be fueling the addiction, the depression. So you have to do something called dual diagnosis treatment where you have to tackle both at the same time. So I think the biggest mistake that many people make with trying to overcome an addiction is that they are not acknowledging the factors in their life that are driving them towards the addiction in the first place. And you have to tackle those things. And then you can deal with the addiction way easier.
Speaker 2
Let me ask, right now, I think that the tide of culture is sweeping men out to a cold, dark sea. What is it that's going wrong?
Speaker 1
I think that the world has changed and we're not allowing men to change. So if you sort of look at it, right, so like we have a certain idea of what it means to be a man. And the expectations around for being a man have not changed. But the world has changed. So just as a simple example, I think 70 to 80% of women want the man that they date to earn more money than they do. But 60% or more of people who graduate from college are women. So like the world is changing, but we're not sort of adjusting expectations for men. That's problem number one. I think problem number two is that men are as a class, the only group that we do not allow to suffer. So there's sort of this idea that men are privileged, which there's data for in a lot of ways. But the problem, and this is just my work as a psychiatrist. So like, you know, I work with a lot of men who are suicidal. And one of the crazy things that we assume is that if you're suicidal, it means you're mentally ill. But when I was going through residency, like I started out assuming all the men who I worked with who were suicidal were mentally ill. But as I started to become familiar with mental illness, I quickly found that like the majority of men that I work with who were suicidal are not actually mentally ill. They have no malfunction of their mind. Their life is so genuinely difficult that it just becomes logical to choose suicide as like your only option. Because to stay in the life that you have today is completely untenable.
Speaker 2
Can I just draw a line into that for a second? Okay, so it's your life is so bad that it is logical to contemplate suicide. That's super terrifying. Tell me more. So the expectations of men, that's certainly one thing, for it to be logical to contemplate suicide, a lot more things are going to have to be piled on them.
Speaker 1
Yeah, so let's just start. So when I first stumbled upon this, I was like, maybe I'm wrong. So I looked at the research and it's staggering. But one study, for example, shows that 50% of men who commit suicide have no history or evidence of mental illness. So we sort of look at it, right? We assume that this is like a malfunction that people aren't seeing things clearly. But as I've worked with a lot of men who are very suicidal, their lives, they just feel incredibly trapped and incredibly alone. And these are people that if you look on the outside, you would look at these people and they would be incredibly successful. These are people like bankers at places like Goldman Sachs, like they have everything that many people envy. And so it can be very confusing to think what why is this person complaining? And then we create a really dangerous ground because if you're in a place where you don't get, you're not allowed to complain, then suddenly if you're struggling in some way and you try to share something with other people, you say, hey, I'm struggling. And then people say, but what are you complaining about? You're privileged, you're lucky, you make so much money, you're so tall, you're so handsome, you have no right to complain. And the moment that we remove that, then this person has no way to get their suffering actually addressed. And oftentimes what I find is that men are not only do we create this kind of situation, but that we expect men to do a lot of things that are like very dangerous. And we expect men to be self sacrificing. So it's like women and children first, which I'm not against that is a rule of thumb, by the way. It's just that if we're doing this to men, we should at least acknowledge it. So like, I remember when I was a second year resident working on an inpatient unit on an aschisophrania unit. So these are where people are actively psychotic or actively manic. So they're like hallucinating their violent. Anytime there's a violent patient, I was working in a hospital with four other physicians, we were all on the same floor and the other four physicians were women. And anytime there's a violent patient, it's an unspoken rule that the women step back and the men step forward. There's no literally unspoken. No one ever said, hey, because you're a man, you have to step forward. What would happen is someone from the staff would come and get me. And then I would step into the room with the other men. So we sort of expect men to sacrifice. And it's kind of weird because you're not allowed to say as man, like, I don't want to do that. You're not even allowed to say, this is hurtful to me or dangerous to me or unfair in some way, because you're privileged, which in a lot of ways you are as a man. Like I certainly have grown up with a lot of privilege. So I think that there's just a nuance there that everyone is so black and white with the way that we sort of think about the experience of men, that there's no space for the suffering that men experience.
Speaker 2
Okay, I think this is really profound. There's a lot of different threads to pull on here. So, would it be fair in your mind to categorize? There's two kinds of problems that we have. We've got inside problems. We've got outside problems. So outside problems, social media, changing expectations of women going up and holding their expectations the same. Then we've got the inside problem, which is I have all the success that anyone could want. People envy me, but I still don't feel good. And I could process through that if somebody would only let me talk about it, but I'm not able to talk about it. And so now I'm in a death loop of there probably isn't answer because my life is pretty good, but it doesn't feel good because I can't process. Yeah, so
Speaker 1
even in that, we see another challenge. So like, you say, we're not allowed to talk about it. So there's like another really simple thing that I recently realized, which is if you look at the field of psychiatry, the field of psychiatry has all kinds of gender related biases. And let's remember that just because we're biased in one direction towards a particular gender does not mean that there can be a concurrent bias against a different gender. So we're biased against women and psychiatry for particular reasons. Like, a really good example of that is the hormonal fluctuations and how they impact mental health. So we sort of think about diagnoses as static. Like once you have ADHD, you have ADHD, but there's a ton of data that shows that menstruation menstrual cycles basically affect all symptoms of all mental illnesses. But that's not something that any of us are taught in medical school, let alone psychiatry residency. So, but if we kind of go to men, so a really good example is that this idea that talking about your emotions is the gold standard of processing them. So if you look at the history of psychiatry, 70% of patients are women, 70% of therapists are women. And so I started to discover as I worked with more and more men that even there are even studies about this. So if you look at studies of couples counseling, the reason that men are reluctant to go to couples counseling is because they are not good with verbal expression of their emotional state. So any time they go into couples counseling, they feel outgunned because they're this is a heterosexual couple. Their their female partner is able to like articulate their emotional experience better. And the therapist ends up it feels like the therapist ends up understanding and siding with the female partner more. So like as men, we just don't talk about our emotions. And this is where the society jumps to a conclusion. It says, okay, so this is a problem that you guys have as men. You need to learn how to talk to about your emotions more. But that therein lies the bias. We never stop to ask ourselves, hold on a second, if men are not very good at talking about their emotions, are there different ways to manage emotions? And if you look at historically the way that men manage emotions, we have all kinds of things that are different. We are much more physical, and that's viewed as a negative thing, right? To be like, instead of being physical, like you need to talk about your problems. If you have a problem with someone, you should articulate it out. So already we're starting to see that the way that our society judges particular things, we place articulation of emotions above physical expression of emotions.

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