Dr. Gary Wilson is a neuroscientist and author who has written a book on porn addiction, Your Brain on Porn. In this episode, Dr. Wilson talks about how he became interested in porn and how he and his wife created a website dedicated to helping men recover from porn addiction.
00:00:31.000Gary, firstly, explain to us what was it that got you into studying porn or getting this message out there?
00:00:42.000It seems like there's got to be a story behind that.
00:00:45.000There's a story, but it's rather strange.
00:00:47.000I was an anatomy and physiology teacher for many years.
00:00:50.000I met my wife, and we started to write books about the neurobiology of sex, love, and bonding.
00:00:57.000And that was about 15 years ago and she had a website and we had articles up there which had the words orgasm, ejaculation, dopamine, addiction, because those are related to bonding and love and sex.
00:01:10.000Now, about nine years ago, maybe it was ten years ago, guys started showing up on her website, Forum, which had nothing to do with porn.
00:01:25.000And she's like, what are you doing here?
00:01:28.000Well, Google, as it is, put the words in those articles together, which brought them there and then put the posts that they had, put those out there and brought more guys there.
00:01:38.000And then over the next few years, it became sort of a porn recovery for them.
00:01:45.000When I say older guys, they were in their 30s, 40s, and they had high-speed internet before anyone else, but they were complaining about sexual dysfunction.
00:01:53.000Well, around 2009, we started to write articles on Psychology Today about these amazing benefits that they started to experience because we tried to get the word out because it seems like there was a huge gap between what was really happening and what was going on in these guys' lives.
00:02:12.000So that brought a whole lot more guides, and my wife said, you've got to create a separate website.
00:02:18.000I created yourbrainonporn.com about four years ago, and then that blew up, and I followed all the links to it back to the original post, and I saw how big the problem was.
00:02:42.000So this is just something you came into because, like, I guess, business owners in a lot of ways, you saw a need and were meeting a demand.
00:02:51.000Now, right away, before your critics come out and say, this is just, you know, they've always said this to people who've ever been dissenters of the pornography industry, this is just some crazy right-wing Christian extremist who's trying to scare your kids.
00:03:05.000No, I'm a very far left liberal who's not religious and never been a Christian, neither has my wife or my parents or my grandparents.
00:03:14.000So nope, I wanted nothing to do with this.
00:03:17.000And we just felt compelled because there was this blind spot.
00:03:20.000And when you have guys writing you and telling you that they're suicidal because their penises don't work and they're not getting good information and the urologists are saying, you know, just take some Viagra.
00:03:36.000And there are a few things that I've seen you mention before in other interviews and obviously in your book.
00:03:43.000One of them was you talked about, which to me was just fascinating.
00:03:47.000I don't have the exact number, so I'm sure you've got this.
00:03:49.000You're like the computer wore tennis shoes.
00:03:51.000I've seen your interviews and TED Talks.
00:03:53.000there's a generation of young men who have had a certain amount of sexual experiences.
00:03:58.000You've said, you've numbered it in the thousands, you know, sexual experiences who for the first time have had all of these experiences without any actual sexual interaction with another human being.
00:04:12.000Well, I don't know that I put any number to it because there's no numbers to it in terms of, I read something, I could be misquoting it, where you talked about how there's a point now where you have kids who, I think it was a certain percentage, aren't even actually interested in real sexual interaction, and many of them have had certain sexual experiences based, you know, with pornography, but no actual sexual interaction, and there was a number in there that I remember just shocked me.
00:04:39.000So I'm not pulling it out of nowhere, there was a number that shocked me.
00:04:42.000No, no, no, I think what you're saying is, you're looking at Japan, so Japan...
00:04:46.00036% of young men ages 16 to 19 had absolutely no interest in sex.
00:05:32.000It is pretty fascinating, again, that you're sort of a liberal, not interested in religion.
00:05:37.000You really make the argument in the book, like you said, the physiological arguments, the arguments about dopamine receptors and the way neurochemistry is affected.
00:05:49.000Before we get into that, which we'll get into the next segment, have you gotten a lot of pushback from either the porn industry or other so-called progressives?
00:05:56.000Gotten no pushback whatsoever from the porn industry.
00:06:18.000Well, I even read something in The Atlantic where they talked about...
00:06:20.000And we'll get into the studies just because we have to take a break relatively soon here.
00:06:24.000And there's a lot of data to get into.
00:06:26.000But I will say, I'm surprised that you say that about the adult film industry.
00:06:29.000Because I have seen videos and posts online of people saying, you know, online porn is healthy and don't believe the fear mongers here who are trying to scare you out of it.
00:06:39.000But maybe they're just not emailing you directly.
00:06:42.000Well, I just think that comes from people who are progressive or...
00:06:47.000Even Christians or whatever, and they just like to use porn, and they're mixing up what occurred in the 70s where you're looking at a still picture and you're a 14-year-old and you can use your imagination.
00:07:21.000I'm a more right-leaning guy, and personally, I'm a Christian.
00:07:25.000So obviously, Christians have talked about for a long time how pornography can be harmful to one's sex life, namely because it creates unrealistic expectations of sex, and Christians believe it's something that should be kept between a husband and a wife.
00:07:38.000Now, I know that's not necessarily your contention with this book, but...
00:07:42.000You do talk about how porn has changed in the landscape of the internet.
00:07:48.000Like you said, at one point, the mild pornography required the use of your imagination, whereas now that's not the case.
00:07:56.000And you even sort of draw some parallels, I remember, with Facebook and this sort of instant gratification addiction of the internet.
00:08:08.000And words around for a long time, but all of a sudden you see this entire generation stuck with their iPhones clicking on pictures and words and videos.
00:08:16.000So what makes it so fascinating is the delivery system, the internet.
00:08:21.000And what the internet does is it takes advantage of innate mechanisms that are pretty much there in the reward centers of a mammal.
00:08:48.000So, of course, the internet, you can just click, click, click endlessly and keep your dopamine spiking forever.
00:08:54.000But here's what's interesting, is not only with internet porn do we have endless novelty available, but we have Nature's highest reward of dopamine, which is sexual stimulation, and nature's number one priority, which is reproduction.
00:09:09.000Then you combine it with other things that raise dopamine in animals, and that's such things as shock or surprise or even anxiety.
00:09:20.000Those things also raise dopamine, and what's not shocking or surprising or even anxiety It's even shocking just reading the transcripts from Dick Morris' fetishes.
00:09:37.000So I can imagine when you're actually seeing something that depraved on camera.
00:09:42.000And I think you mentioned, too, I've heard you mention, I want to clarify for the listener, not only novelty, but specifically with dopamine, you know, novelty, you included the exceeding of expectations, you know, which basically happens all the time online, right?
00:09:55.000If I say, hey, I want to research, I don't know, coffee mugs in World War II, boom!
00:10:01.000There's more than I could ever read on coffee mugs in World War II in a lifetime, right?
00:10:06.000And that causes a spike in dopamine, and you're combining that with sex.
00:10:11.000Yeah, so what makes dopamine go up isn't necessarily food because you can keep eating and you're just like, oh, I don't want to eat anymore.
00:11:30.000People watch my videos on average for over four minutes.
00:11:33.000So the average retention rate is 62% because they have some longer videos, right?
00:11:38.000That with YouTube is an incredible retention rate.
00:11:41.000If you're keeping people past 30% or 40% of a video, it's considered amazing, and that allows you to get a premium advertising revenue.
00:11:48.000I'm getting a little technical here, but the reason I say that is because my living depends on creating things that are quick, interesting enough, and the rule of thumb is always shorter, shorter, shorter.
00:11:58.000Because people's attention spans have noticeably – I mean they're measurably shorter than before.
00:12:05.000And I know that applies to YouTube, right?
00:12:08.000But I don't have the data or analytics.
00:12:13.000Do they have to create more bang for your buck in the shortest amount of time, which would seem to lend itself to, like you said, a little more shocking in a little less time, right?
00:12:23.000So if you look at what changed, everything changed in 2006 with the invention of YouTube, and then that created two sites.
00:12:30.000And often, you have in the sidebars on a porn site, you have little three-minute clips.
00:12:35.000And so you can just go from three-minute clip to three-minute clip.
00:12:39.000But most guys describe that they can't even laugh through a three-minute clip.
00:12:42.000They're bored, so they'll go to the next one and the next one.
00:12:45.000And then eventually what came up were compilation videos where you just have four or five seconds of a bunch of orgasms and ejaculations lined up and people just watch those end on end.
00:13:36.000You know, and here's the thing about when you're watching something.
00:13:40.000So people talk about dopamine and I talk about dopamine and how it's raised, but what's the end result of dopamine?
00:13:46.000Dopamine's there to wire into your brain so that you will repeat that behavior because it thinks that behavior is further your survival or the survival of your genes.
00:13:57.000So it thinks that in some level that you're actually impregnating a real person.
00:14:02.000But it's wiring in all the associations with that experience while you're watching porn.
00:14:08.000So what does that mean to a young guy?
00:14:09.000That means to a young guy that it's wiring in not touch and being touched and real interaction, but it's wiring in sitting, being a voyeur, Clicking from scene to scene, controlling your dopamine with a mouse, shock, surprise, multiple tabs.
00:14:28.000That's what you're training your brain to become sexually aroused to because that's what dopamine is telling.
00:14:34.000Be aroused to this so that you will repeat this.
00:15:00.000It's the same reason we talk about this right now.
00:15:02.000You're really talking about an evolution of human consumption of information since 2006.
00:15:09.000I mean, that's the number you just threw.
00:15:10.000How fascinating is that, that everything has changed since 2006?
00:15:15.000We don't really have, and that's the criticism I've seen sort of leveled against you, is people say, well, a lot of it is hypothetical because we don't really have enough numbers back yet because the generation who grew up on instant porn as much as they want, they're not really adults with families of their own yet, a lot of them.
00:16:39.000And I know you make the argument that it's almost a public health issue.
00:16:44.000I don't necessarily want to get into the legislative component of this because I'm more so interested in just the physiological ramifications.
00:16:51.000What's the endgame for laymans out there?
00:16:55.000For someone's brain, right, who's grown up, let's say, from they were 12 in 2006 when all of this porn became instantaneous, right, just completely readily available.
00:17:06.000What's the endgame in their brain where they end up if they're watching porn and click, click, click every day versus someone from the previous generation who didn't have access to that?
00:17:16.000Well, that's a hard question to answer for an individual, but there's two things that go on in the brain that you don't even have to have addiction with, and that's sexual conditioning.
00:17:24.000You can look at sexual conditioning in two ways.
00:17:26.000One, as a young man, you're conditioning your sexual arousal to sitting and clicking and being a voyeur.
00:17:33.000Or, as a young man, you're conditioning your sexual arousal to certain acts.
00:17:39.000So those acts you may want to replay out in real life because that's what you've masturbated to for the last five years before you actually had a date with a girl.
00:17:51.000One study was done and it found a tremendous increase in anal sex and when it asked these young people, 16 to 18, why they were doing it, neither the males nor the females were sure except they both pointed to porn and they also Neither the males nor the females enjoyed it, but they felt compelled to do it because they thought that's what they were supposed to do.
00:18:21.000Only it's, hey, let's do page 85 of this weird sex book or page 56 of PornTube.
00:18:28.000It's almost like a cyber peer pressure that people aren't even realizing.
00:18:33.000Yes, because, you know, the guys are exchanging videos, they're exchanging stuff at school, they're talking about it, and they're watching it, and they think it's normal, because they're watching real people have real sex and supposedly real orgasms, And they think that this is the way it's done because this is all they know.
00:20:25.000They've been using porn for 30 years, but they didn't develop erectile dysfunction until after the advent of tube sites.
00:20:31.000They said that was a big game changer.
00:20:33.000Then they would heal in about six to eight weeks.
00:20:37.000They'd be back functioning fine, strong as ever.
00:20:39.000Now, over the last two to four years, we've seen young guys showing up in their twenties, sometimes in their teens, with chronic erectile dysfunction.
00:20:50.000And it's taking them from six to 12 months, sometimes two years to recover.
00:20:56.000And even when they're recovered, they're still not completely solid.
00:20:59.000So it's taking them So much longer, even though they're younger, healthier, have more testosterone, and just have better everything, yet it's taking them longer.
00:21:08.000This shows you the power of conditioning your sexual response during adolescence when the brain is highly malleable and when you're pruning down all these nerve connections to rewire yourself to your sexual environment.
00:21:23.000And that's what they're doing, and their sexual environment is sitting and watching porn.
00:21:28.000Okay, let me ask you this, because, again, you said you've not gotten pushback from the adult film industry.
00:21:37.000Maybe they're just not emailing you, or maybe you have them on block because you have an incredible spam filter that filters out anything porny.
00:21:43.000But they argue, right, that this is fear-mongering, that it's perfectly fine and porn can and should be used in a healthful way.
00:21:56.000But you, as someone who does not have, I guess, a moral dog in the fight, you know, do you think there is a way for porn to be used healthily?
00:22:27.000I mean, this is a hard subject and it's hard for me to describe what's really going on.
00:22:33.000It's so much different now with the advent of the internet.
00:22:36.000Even with nude pictures, we've had young guys who developed erectile dysfunction while using nude pictures, but they would go through about a thousand or two thousand of them in one masturbation session.
00:22:48.000So you can't match that type of novelty in real life or in using magazines.
00:22:55.000So the problem becomes you're training your brain to be a voyeur.
00:23:00.000Now your question was, can it be used healthfully?
00:23:04.000I don't know if it can be used healthfully, but I guess it's about what are your goals.
00:23:08.000If your goals are to become really excited with a real partner, then perhaps you want to avoid porn.
00:23:16.000If your goal is to just become really excited no matter what, then you could use porn and become excited as that.
00:23:23.000My goal is to become excited with a real partner.
00:23:54.000Now, it is, you know, and this is where it comes from.
00:23:56.000Listen, you know, as Christians, which I am, there are certain spiritual truths which we hold to be self-evident, which a lot of times you see manifesting itself in a way physically here.
00:24:07.000You know, for example, there are a lot of things.
00:24:10.000You know, you probably shouldn't eat a ton of shellfish before.
00:24:12.000You know, watching a lot of porn and having a lot of promiscuous sex could probably be bad for you.
00:24:18.000And I don't think anyone argues with it.
00:24:20.000So I think there are a lot of ways for people to find common ground.
00:24:22.000I had no idea that you were a liberal, Mr.
00:25:02.000There have been a lot of people, more so, we would say, you know, on the right, a lot of Christians who have talked about this and maybe haven't necessarily had the same data to back it up.
00:25:11.000But I see you agreeing with a lot of those people, even though you come in at opposite sides of the political spectrum.
00:25:17.000So there are issues like this where I think people can just look at...
00:25:24.000This is something I don't necessarily know through legislation, but we should be joining hands here and making people aware of a real problem.
00:25:31.000Now, do you actually go as far as considering this a public health issue that would require some kind of government intervention, or is your goal just to build awareness on a personal level?
00:25:52.000And so I think what needs to be done is we always talk about education, but then people talk about sex education.
00:25:59.000If we look at sex education, you know, whatever it is, what's missing in sex education is education about neuroplasticity, about the reward circuit and how it is Very vulnerable to overstimulation and how you can actually alter perhaps your sexual trajectory,
00:26:25.000your sexual taste, your sexual desires by overstimulating it with a new stimulus that never existed before, high-speed internet porn.
00:26:33.000That's what I think should be in the sex education that isn't in there today.
00:26:38.000You know what you're going to hate to hear?
00:26:40.000You know who's going to be immune to this?
00:26:42.000Are those gun-toting rednecks out in the boonies because they're still dealing with dial-up.
00:26:47.000So they're the only people who will be immune to this absolute plague of high-speed pornography.
00:27:00.000Well, you know, listen, I think I truly believe, listen, that we agree on more than we disagree.
00:27:06.000We just had Lear Keith on last week, who you may or may not know.
00:27:10.000We both share a disdain for vegans, but she also believes that humans are, you know, a plague on the earth and that we need to reduce population.
00:27:18.000And, you know, the animals should rule all kind of deal.
00:27:35.000Yeah, and he's actually, you know, again, he would be on a different side of the political spectrum than either of us, much more of a moderate, you know, I'm to the right of Attila the Hun, I'm sure, to someone like you.
00:27:44.000Where can people go to find out more about you?
00:27:48.000And then I want you to have the last word here, Gary.
00:27:51.000What is the big takeaway you want for people if they're hearing this interview?
00:27:55.000Well, you can just put in yourbrainonporn.com.
00:28:02.000And you can buy a book if you want to.
00:28:04.000And the proceeds of the book are earmarked towards education and research.
00:28:10.000And the takeaway from this is that a lot of young men do not know that they're affected, that a lot of old men do not know they're affected until they remove porn use.
00:28:20.000Take it away for a couple of months, maybe three months, and then see if it changes for you.
00:28:27.000See if you have more sexual arousals with real partners, your outlook changes, maybe social anxiety goes away, maybe depression lessens.
00:28:35.000Take a vacation from porn use And then make the judgment about whether porn is affecting you.
00:28:43.000That would be my challenge to your listeners.
00:28:46.000And a perfectly sensible challenge that I think is easier said than done for many of the sticky, disgusting 14-year-olds listening to this on their podcast catcher.
00:28:55.000But Gary Wilson, thank you so much, brother.
00:28:57.000And really, we hope to have you back, liberal or not.