Andrew Huberman: OnlyFans Is Hijacking Your Brain - Fake Intimacy, Real Consequences PT 1

In this eye-opening first half of Impact Theory’s sit down with Dr. Andrew Huberman, acclaimed neuroscientist and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, Tom Bilyeu tackles the hidden—and not-so-hidden—forces rewiring the male mind in the digital age. If you’ve wondered why so many men are feeling demotivated, anxious, or isolated, Dr. Huberman’s explanations will open your eyes to the deep biological and social mechanisms behind today’s dopamine-driven tech traps. The duo explores the impact of social media, pornography, and platforms like OnlyFans from both a neuroscience and evolutionary biology perspective, revealing how modern technology is expertly tailored to exploit ancient reward circuitry. Dr. Huberman breaks down the unique wiring of the male brain, how testosterone and dopamine interact to drive pursuit and effort—and why these very circuits are being hijacked by addictive virtual feedback loops. Tom and Andrew dive into the evolutionary roots of male behavior, the biology of status-seeking, and how today’s online environments subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, sap men’s energy and ambition. This must-listen episode is essential for anyone curious about why men are struggling and what’s actually happening beneath the surface of our modern digital landscape. SHOWNOTES 00:00 Welcome and Introduction to Andrew Huberman09:27 Status Games, OnlyFans, and Relational Pornography18:24 Closed Dopamine Loops and The Dangers of Being “Consumer Only”29:15 Consequences of Dopamine Depletion and A Warning for Modern Males33:12 Behavioral Change: Replacing Addictive Loops with Meaningful Action43:06 Tom and Andrew’s Personal Reflections on Challenge, Control, and Progress FOLLOW ANDREW HUBERMAN: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/hubermanlab⁠ https://www.instagram.com/hubermanlab Twitter/X: ⁠https://twitter.com/hubermanlab⁠ https://twitter.com/hubermanlab YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@hubermanlab⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@hubermanlab Podcast: ⁠https://hubermanlab.com/⁠ https://hubermanlab.com/ CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Tailor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. From the year 2000 to today, the average male's testosterone levels have dropped by more than 25%. And modern life is only making the problem worse. Algorithms are now so effective at hijacking the male brain's dopamine system that millions of men are stuck in loops of porn, OnlyFans, and endless scrolling,

• 1:29Tom Bilyeu?

  feeling like they're making progress, but in reality, they're stuck. According to my guest today, Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, modern life is uniquely disrupting the male brain. In this interview, he details the trap that men are falling into as well as exactly what they need to do to climb out and optimize for success. If you're a man or you love one, you're not going to want to miss this episode. So without further ado, I bring you Andrew Huberman. Modern life seems to be hijacking men's brains. So whether it's porn, OnlyFans, social media, you've got men that are depressed, demotivated, unable to form relationships. What do you think is the actual breakdown?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  I think what's happening is that the technology, AKA the algorithms, have gotten so good at tapping into the circuits for motivation that they've basically pulled many males' focus and efforts into this very narrow groove of pursuit. And you would ask any of those guys, like, what are you actually pursuing? Like, is the thing that you're chasing, is there a payoff? And they'd probably say, no, I realize there's not, but I can't stop.

• 2:40Tom Bilyeu?

  That's wild.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  And, you know, we've talked before about dopamine, and I think nowadays, most people appreciate that dopamine is about motivation and pursuit, at least as much as it's about pleasure. Or at least, the things that we're motivated to do at first bring us pleasure. The drug, the gambling, the pornography, et cetera. But that very quickly over time, it keeps us in the groove of pursuit, and that groove is getting tighter and tighter. But the pleasure value starts dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping.

• 3:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, do you think that male acquisition of goals, like the obsession with that, is disproportionately affected by the modern dopamine hijacking things like social media? Or is this universal to men and women?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  I think at the extremes of sort of male, female stereotypes, I think, yes. I think that if you think about video games, porn, maybe not so much social media. I mean, social media is social, right? It's about who's saying what about who. And, you know, sure, there's this pursuit of followers and pursuit of likes that, you know, I think all people are susceptible to, in good or bad ways. But when I look at Instagram, for instance, a platform I love and teach on and learn from, and I look at X, I would say, X tends to be sort of male-dominated, and its essence is kind of more masculine. People are, the things that people are saying, how they're saying it.

• 4:05Tom Bilyeu?

  They're trying to convince you.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  They're trying to convince you, and it tends to be less about who's talking about who. They might show something bad that somebody said. But Instagram is far more relational. The way that comments are structured, comments on comments, there's discussions down there that you can see, then the way videos are pulled and reposted. It's X feels more linear and it feels more kind of direct to one statement. It's like, okay, here's somebody being bad. Here's someone beating somebody up. Here's someone being an idiot. Here's them being, you know, morons about the economy or morons about the election. Or, you know, whereas Instagram, if you, if you look at the stuff that gets really high, high salience, it tends to be more relational. And I think that, I could be wrong about this.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I don't know the behind the scenes numbers, but that's, that's the way they feel to me. I think that the Y chromosome, you know, which basically is deterministic for maleness. You know, I Basically? Well, there's a gene, I would have thought the Y chromosome, but it turns out there's a gene on the Y chromosome called S R Y. And all the, you know, genes, you know, eventually DNA, RNA, and then proteins. So proteins are the kind of the action end of the business. But all of the proteins that are downstream of, of the S R Y gene, S R Y is a transcription factor turns on and off a bunch of different genes. So it's kind of a, sets up a menu.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  That S R Y gene and the things on it suppress the malaria ducts, the fallopian tubes, the ovaries, and creates the male genitalia. And it also organizes the brain to be male. And I'll explain how it does that in a moment if you want. But what's so interesting is if that S R Y gene is translocated to the X chromosome, and this has happened in humans, you get two X chromosomes. You have an S R Y gene and you get a true biological male. Penis, whole thing. And fertile, right? And fertile, because there are cases, for instance, where you have X Y, for instance, an S R Y gene. You get testosterone, you get all the different testosterone, you know, things like dihydrotestosterone, et cetera.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  But there's a deficient androgen receptor, so that testosterone has no action end. It can't really work, you know, it can't engage in the receptor, the parking slot and have an effect. What you end up with is a biological male who looks female, testes that don't descend, and then they're infertile, basically. So you've got a chromosomally male, but it looks female. It's fairly rare, okay? But what we can say is that the S R Y gene is deterministic for creating a male. And so then you say, well, what genes are downstream of S R Y? And the one that's really interesting is dihydrotestosterone, D H T. Not to get too deep into the biochemistry, but testosterone, which we're all familiar with, made by the testes, gets converted into dihydrotestosterone by an enzyme called five alpha reductase.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  During embryonic development, when you and I were in the embryo, downstream of S R Y, we made D H T. We made testosterone, some of it was converted to D H T. That set up the brain, your brain and my brain, to be male later when it was exposed to testosterone. So when you come into the world, provided you had the S R Y gene, and it's functional, your brain is organized male, and your genitalia are organized male. And then when you get a testosterone surge during puberty, the penis grows, the brain and the brain areas that are larger or smaller in males become that way. And then those circuits basically make you male. This is what we call deterministic, because for instance,

• 7:38Speaker 01

  there's a genetic mutation where, believe it or not, males, X Y males with the S R Y gene are born. They don't actually convert testosterone into D H T, and they appear as biological females across development. They look, it doesn't look like they have a penis. It looks like they have a vagina. They, and it turns out actually they have testes that haven't descended yet. And then during puberty, testosterone is secreted from the testes, and they literally sprout a penis.

• 8:07Tom Bilyeu?

  What?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  It's called Juve dosis. It's penis at 12. It's a genetic, genetic related mutation. And it's well known about in these communities where it exists, because there's enough of, you know, enough of these have occurred, that what we can say from these kind of wild, you know, these are kind of unusual circumstances, is that there's an S R Y gene, you get male. You get a male brain, and you get a male body. If there isn't an S R Y gene, even if you have X Y chromosomes, you get a female body. So, you know, the biologists have really boiled it down to that. Now, you know,

• 8:41Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm sorry, really fast.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:44Tom Bilyeu?

  So we'll wrap this up, and then I definitely want to get back to the way that I think modern life is breaking male brains. I think uniquely, so it'll be interesting to see your take on that, since you all have the data to back it up. But I am stuck on, a kid is 12, he has a clitoris?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:59Tom Bilyeu?

  And then it literally becomes, is it a micropenis at the end of this?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 9:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so this is Bad News Bears. Like, if you've got that, you're really bumming out.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, and they they often don't know, they sort of don't know that they're male or female. It's sort of like.

• 9:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So they end up being surprised. Is this what people mean when they say intersex? Or is that a totally different phenomenon?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  That's different. That's different. Yeah, that's different.

• 9:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Not to derail on that.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, not to derail, but but and we, you know, but then let's think about what's when we talk about the brain being organized male. What like, what is that? Right? So everyone's familiar with testosterone. Best way to describe testosterone is a molecule that in addition to be important for sperm function and libido and things like that. Testosterone makes effort feel good. Testosterone and dopamine. Yeah, yeah.

• 9:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting. I've never heard that.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and in fact, there've been studies where testosterone has been administered to adult males. And what you find is that whatever psychological traits and behavioral traits they tend to already have, just get amplified. In fact, there's a really nice study that my colleague, Robert Sapolsky, the great Robert Sapolsky, taught me about.

• 10:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Amazing.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Which was if you, for instance, go to an auction and you give some males testosterone. They'll try and outbid other other men, which sounds like, oh, they want to own all the stuff. Now, if I tell you that the, because this is actually the case, that the auction was actually an altruistic auction, that all the benefits went to charity. These guys with more testosterone are basically fighting and giving up resources to give more resources away. So it's not that testosterone makes people jerks. However, if somebody's a jerk and they have and they're given testosterone, they'll become more of a jerk. It tends to just amplify whatever behavioral traits somebody has.

• 10:38Tom Bilyeu?

  I remember what Sapolsky was saying, and please correct me if I'm wrong. It was whatever, like testosterone is going to make the man want to win at the thing that gives him status. So if you get status by winning the giveaway your money auction, then cool, you're going to do that. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:55Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not like it's necessarily making them more altruistic. It's just making them want to win at the status game.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. So you you put a finer point on it and you're correct.

• 11:04Tom Bilyeu?

  So I think that- That's interesting. And this is part of what I'm getting at when I say that I think modern life is uniquely breaking the male brain is it's giving these proxies for status seeking and it's giving you a different set of games to play that are not translating well into real life. Yeah. And so you're, maybe you're winning at social media, but you're not actually translating that into a job. Or maybe you're winning at, and one of the things I most want to talk about is OnlyFans. Like you're getting the signal that you've accomplished something, acquired something, you've got relational access to a woman, and it's somehow like giving you the signal that you did the thing you came to do.

• 11:49Tom Bilyeu?

  But it's such a bizarre proxy. Like OnlyFans, I did not understand it. When I first heard that it was real, I was like, there's no way that people pay money for that. I actually, I'm like, they do know that porn is free, right? I could not fathom it. So am I off base here? Like what, like as you think about OnlyFans as a specific phenomenon, what do you think is happening there? Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned.

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• 14:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think, when I think about testosterone, the one other point that I want to make is that it tends to suppress activity of the amygdala, which is why it can make effort feel good. It tends to suppress fear. It tends to make effort feel good, as opposed to effort feel scary.

• 14:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And you do that by dulling or dimming down the fear response.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  That's right. It brings, so, things that are challenging bring about less anxiety. So you're able to apply more effort with less anxiety, generally speaking. Okay. The dopamine system and the testosterone system are intimately related, especially in the male brain. Okay, so dopamine, the molecule of motivation and so forth, as we know, is associated with, you know, the pleasure of pursuit, as opposed to the pursuit of pleasure, another beautiful Robert Sapolsky-ism, so I didn't say that he did, but I'm borrowing it. Let's think about A kid sitting down to play like video game. You love video games. Video games can be very healthy, right? You get a score, you're motivated. It's sort of updating with what? With novelty, right?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  As you progress, you get to access more in different worlds and more in different experiences. This is also true in the non-virtual world, right? In the so-called real world. This is also true in OnlyFans to the extent. I've never gone on OnlyFans full of foot and mittens, but I think I know what it's generally about. You pay money, you can see things that are stimulating, right? Arousing, right? That's the idea. As one does that, there's the tendency for people to seek more and more intense experiences. Why? Because the same amount of dopamine isn't being deployed as you go into it for the first time, as you go into it the 10th time and the 100th time and so forth. So people are willing to invest more effort or and or money in order to go further and further into this terrain.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  I think that the most important- What do you consider the terrain there? Ah, right. So are you familiar with Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis? He wrote the book. Yeah, I've had him on the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he shared with me that there's this very interesting study or set of studies being done at a experimental casino in Las Vegas. He lives out in Las Vegas. A few years back, somebody who worked for the casinos saw his kid playing video games and the light bulb went off for him. I'll fast forward 85%. 85% of the revenue from casinos comes from slot machines. That didn't used to be the case. I know. I know, I didn't believe it. I was like, there's no way. Here's what the massive shift from slot machines being a small percentage

• 17:13Speaker 01

  to the vast majority of the income for casinos was. He saw his kid playing video games and he saw that in video games, there's a near infinite number of experiences that a kid can encounter with playing the game. Now, there's some constraints, right? You're the player, this and that. But in theory, you could introduce any number of different worlds or experiences. And dynamics. So what he did is he brought that to the casino world. And instead of having slot machines where it just would roll numbers or fruit, or you know, crowns or whatever, they created electronic versions of this. Where yes, you could update more quickly. Instead of pulling a lever, you could press a button. But more importantly, it could create an infinite number of electronic combinations. So that as the person was starting to kind of grow tired and the algorithm could tell would grow tired of,

• 17:57Speaker 01

  you know, trying to line up muffins with ice cream cones. They would start switching out cake for ice cream cones. And like little anime girls for, for the, you know, for whatever else the other thing was. And over time, what they found is people would just keep playing and playing for even the smallest and actually increasingly smaller changes in novelty. So the newness of OnlyFans at the beginning is not what you need to recreate in order to keep the brain paying the same amount or even more to keep going. What you need is novelty and the brain, because of the way dopamine is deployed in smaller and smaller amounts, and is giving smaller and smaller amounts of pleasure.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Especially if you ping it with an occasional big burst of pleasure every once in a while, or more dopamine. All you need to do to keep somebody paying in a landscape is give them new experiences intermittently. Good old fashioned intermittent reinforcement. But now the reinforcement isn't necessarily a bigger monetary win. Or, you know, seeing, you know, here I'm hypothesizing, you know. I mean, you can only introduce so many different players in a pornographic scene, right? So many different things. So they started changing the novelty in subtle ways. And it keeps people going and going and going. And I'm not going to say that the male brain is uniquely susceptible to this. But because of the relationship between testosterone and dopamine, and the tendency for the male brain.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  In its most stereotypical form, but let's just stick with that. Being really in pursuit of things that are sort of forward linear motion. Like looking for the next thing. I was just talking about this in the discussion I had with your wife, which is, you know, men like to concentrate on what's happening now and forward movement. Generally speaking, we're not really like defaulting to, let's talk about the past for a while. Let's think about the past. Let's rehash the past. That's not, not a typical male phenotype. It exists, but it's, and, and it has its importance, but that's not where, what we default to. And that has a lot to do with the fact that I do think a lot of the circuits for testosterone are about, how can I have action out there? Right?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Stereotypically, the female brain is more oriented towards relational things. Yep. And with men, it's like, how can I have an impact out there? Look, I mean, impact theory, literally. Or let's think about Elon wanting to send things to Mars. Or let's think about the first time, like, you know, cavemen probably picked up a, a rock, the probably after they hit themselves in the head with it, they probably hit the person next to them. And they were like, wow, that hurts, that hurts. And like, let's throw it against that wall and see if it breaks. And then let's see if we can hunt something and get a better meal. It's about action at a distance. And I'll tell you, I mean, I love watching the rockets launch. It's just, it's the, one of the ultimate expressions of seeing like human engineering at a distance. Like you're having this huge impact. Whereas most of the things in life, you can't really control, they're out there and you can observe them. Watch the sunset, beautiful. Watch the sunrise, I'm all about that.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  But ultimately, our careers, our lives, our feelings of what we've accomplished, are about creating action at a distance. And it doesn't mean that the further the distance, the more impactful it is, but human evolution has largely ridden this wave of this desire to like, let's see what happens if. And that's not like, oh, let's see what happens if we like, you know, etch a small, you know, uh, you know, note in the sand. It's like, no, let's see what happens if we draw a mural like as big as that wall. And then, I don't know, let's see if we can like throw someone over that wall. Like this is like, this is the, this is the S R Y gene in, in action. Right? I'm only half kidding. Leave you alone for like an hour to come up with all the things and guys like the crazy shit we could do.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Like, like, you know, okay, there's relational stuff, but you know, I had a sister, I have a sister. I mean, they would play in a room and like, okay, you play this and you do this. And it was like very relational. They weren't like. Let's see if we can, I don't know, go like build a giant, you know, ramp in the backyard and like jump over the neighbor's fence like a bunch of idiots and get impaled on it, you know? So you can sort of make it out to where the outcome is, uh, you know, kind of sounds like male stupidity. But if we really step back, this is beautiful. This is essential to human evolution. This is why we have the fields that we do, which now of course include men and women, right? This isn't uniquely male. But this notion of like testosterone and dopamine about novelty and how are we creating novelty, action at a distance. Now let's think about

• 22:14Speaker 01

  OnlyFans or a kid that's like addicted to social media, watching YouTube all day long. I have examples of this from friends, kids that are like addicted to it. There's no action at a distance. These algorithms have, you know, as wonderful as they are, right? We exist on them as well. But they are, they're designed in your case, in my case, to teach people things to take into the world. But they are their own, what we call closed loop. They can create these loops where you think you're making progress and then you look up and it's like another day went by. You did nothing. You were on the consumer end of this whole business. And it really is a hijack of the dopamine. And I do think the dopamine and testosterone system is when we're talking about males.

• 22:54Tom Bilyeu?

  It is very possible that I'm just not thinking about the right things. So obviously, I'm hyper aware of the way that social media gives women anxiety and that's obviously going to be deeply problematic. But when I think about the modern world, I think that we really have swung from the moment you freed women from sex equals conception, like their game has been more and more possibilities opening up to them. So I think the modern world for females has really been an expansion of opportunities, not necessarily positively in terms of like actual emotional satisfaction outcome, not necessarily negatively. I'm just saying it is objectively more.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  I think it depends on the person. There are more opportunities. Yeah, I mean, academia and research science, you know, used to be heavily skewed male. Now, depending on the subfield, right? Cause biology is a big field. It's It's still not quite 50 50, you know, but there are many more women in the field than there were even when I started. But I agree that in general, like, there's been a, there's been a trend toward more openings, a trend toward it.

• 23:52Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure. Now, for guys, on the other hand, I think that things are getting more and more narrow in terms of their ability to navigate the world well. And when I look at what are the things that are trapping them, not to get too economical, but part of it is just America since the 90s has been outsourcing things, manufacturing very specifically overseas as rapidly as possible. It's caused the loss of millions of jobs for just a certain type of guy that that is evolutionarily wired to use his body as his form of intelligence. And so you start getting that, you're going to have problems. And so, anyway, not to derail us on that. But when I look at what's going on with pornography for sure, and I think

• 24:32Tom Bilyeu?

  maybe even more extremely with OnlyFans, as I started looking at, okay, what is OnlyFans? What is this hijacking? Why is this working so well? So if you put men into the context of, uh, women are hypergamous, so they're going to date over or up. And as they enter the workforce, that means that that pool is getting smaller and smaller because they're making more and more money. And then men also in another context are, it's a very high risk situation of being accused of something. And so there's a standoffishness, there's also the whole idea of toxic masculinity. So for decades and decades, we're like making men more and more paranoid about sort of natural impulses, which is making them less

• 25:12Tom Bilyeu?

  likely to pursue females. Then you create something like OnlyFans. And I'm so curious to know if they, if the people that created it fought through it like this. But when you really think about it, to your point about action at a distance, so you can influence this person, whether it's just getting them to engage with you. So I pay them money, they engage with me. They either aren't aware or don't think about the fact it's probably not that person engaging with them. It's their team writing them back, but they feel like, okay, now I'm able to have this relationship with this person. I'm able to have, uh, I'm able to gain at least visual sexual access to them, things that I would not historically been able to see. Forget the, the exact quote, but it's something like,

• 25:55Tom Bilyeu?

  A thousand years ago compared to today, a man today can see more naked females in a single day than that person a thousand years ago would have seen in their entire lifetime. And when you think about that nested inside of the social context of things have changed for men, and then the technological context of the dopamine loops and how easy it is to put on the phone female nudity and then to make the person feel like they have a relationship with them. Once I understood OnlyFans as relational pornography, where now it's not, sure, like pornography is free, but I can't interact with that person or have a proxy of it. And so then I was like, oh my God, this is like pornography like

• 26:39Tom Bilyeu?

  cubed, quintupled, like this is really for somebody who would otherwise be isolated by choice or otherwise, you now give them the thing that they don't have to be afraid of. There's no fear of rejection. They get access to something that is legitimately exciting to the male brain, which is the, I get, I'll call it inappropriate, but I get inappropriate or elevated levels of access to their body visually. And it's like, ooh, I get how now people end up, if that's the context that they're in, I get how that drags them down fast.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do too. I hadn't realized there was this relational aspect where the people who pay can, can influence what they see. I mean, that's, so they've captured the relational aspect, which is missing from traditional pornography. That's huge. The novelty aspect is somewhat under their control in this case.

• 27:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, women make the most money the first month on OnlyFans. It's, I don't know what the exact stat is, but the vast, vast, vast majority. First month they come in, that's gonna be it because all the guys that are paying have never seen that person before. It's the newness, the novelty of it, and then that starts to decline fast.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And it shifts standards. So one thing that's interesting is if you talk to the evolutionary biologist, they'll tell you, you know, what is this notion of women talking badly about other women who sleep with a lot of people? What's that about? I mean, men will do that, too. That's a different phenomenon. But what's that about? And the evolutionary biology argument is, well, they need to do that because if there are women who are giving up sex, sexual access without the need for very much in return, then the cost is basically going down. It's a sort of market, market system argument.

• 28:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Women act as a cartel.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 28:34Tom Bilyeu?

  They price collude, basically.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Right. So if that's happening, then also men's expectations of what women will or won't do starts to shift. And so this is why there's, there's intense relational sort of community control over how female promiscuity is, is viewed by other women and by other men, right? Men oftentimes on X, if, if, even if you're not looking for it, will shame women for, for being promiscuous, right? There's this woman who's like slept with all these men and continues to sleep with more and more men, right?

• 29:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Wild.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Why is she such a phenomenon? Was she such a phenomenon, a cultural phenomenon, or whatever you want to call it? I'm not applauding what she's doing. That's, you know, her right. And I'm not, I'm not the guy to talk about the ethics of this.

• 29:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Evolution is gonna slap her about the head, neck, and chest. I hate that it's true. She's not gonna get out unscathed emotionally. Not, not even just from other people, just evolution does not want that.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, she's, she's expanding the upper threshold, right? I mean, that's kind of her, her thing, her shtick is to expand the upper threshold. And as a consequence, you know, it's clear men are paying for that. They're intrigued by that, right? That they want to see that. And yet, I don't think that, I'm speculating here, but I don't think that our men are running out in huge numbers to try and put a ring on her finger and make, make her their own.

• 29:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Someone will, but yeah.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Some probably who have their own kind of distorted sense of themselves in the world. So the idea here is that, you know, even just the realization that there's an extreme like that. Creates this upper ceiling on the kind of like dopamine novelty thing like that's not something I like ever conceived of right like I never thought about that and then you're you you see it out there so it shifts you know our standards of decency and share it shifts our standards of sort of expectation and we might say well okay well she's a real extreme in the same way that like okay you see those people with like tons of piercings and like covered in tattoos every inch of their body and then well I remember growing up like we didn't we didn't see many people with face tattoos Mike Tyson I think was the

• 30:36Speaker 01

  first and you're like whoa now people won't even bat an eye you know and so the the these sort of standards what we call you know kind of stand cultural standards risky to call them standards of decency because that's getting for a scientist I'm not trying to get into the moral judgment game but what it does is it expands what we what is possible in people's minds and therefore what they consider novel is over a bigger scale right so if the upper limit is let's just call it like arbitrary units 10 was something like the pornography that like you might have seen in the 90s on a videotape or something and now what you know what Bonnie Blue or someone else is doing is that represents the 10 well then everything up to a one is now been compressed okay not to get to like overly technical here but this this is it's a it's very interesting because you're you're the guy thinks about

• 31:21Speaker 01

  markets and finances a lot it's a market system right and when we think about dopamine I think about dopamine is the currency of motivation I think about is a young male or I or anyone investing your dopamine what's dopamine it's your motivation and energy are you investing it or are you just spending it now you can get things that are sheerly for pleasure right I eat food you could say well the food gives you energy to do other things okay you get a nice painting that gives you more energy and pleasure because you you enjoy it it's a it's some visual feedback on kind of that you've gotten to the point where you could buy that that's an investment of your dopamine resources into money money into into some thing a painting There's also just sheer spending of dopamine, your time and your life energy. You're not going to reproduce as a consequence of being on OnlyFans.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  It's probably lowering your reproductive potential, either directly or figuratively. And so, and same thing with social media. You can glean incredible valuable content. I do, you do, we, we, we teach on social media, we learn on social media, that then you can take into the real world. But years ago, I think it's an investor by the name of Chris Sacca.

• 32:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  He talked about you're either a consumer or creator. You're either a consumer or creator. And I sort of, in my own mind, expanded on that and decided, well, when I go to a platform where I'm a consumer, like social media, I'm trying to glean things that allow me to be a better creator off platform and then bring those back to platform. Now, think about all these people who are just consuming on social media, but it's not enriching their lives in any way. Or they're consuming on OnlyFans and it's actually, it's a, it's a, it's a double whammy. Because it's taking, I mean, time is the ultimate resource and it's depleting their, their motivational drive. And you know, we used to hear about this more that, you know, the sexual drive is, is one aspect of motivation. But if somebody is completely sated with food, with what they think is sex because

• 33:08Speaker 01

  of an OnlyFans interaction, their motivation to go do things in the world and to create real relationship, real business, real life, is just, it's going to rapidly diminish. And as always, the house takes it all.

• 33:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So I'm legitimately worried about that. I don't know, like what the, like, okay, so if I'm, uh, let's say I'm an eight on the, I think we have a real problem right now. Not just what we've been talking about. I've got a whole host of things that I think are problematic. But when I think about where we were in the eighties and the prospects that a young person growing up in the eighties were going to have in the future, uh, look great. Now I look at that and I think, ooh, we're, we're at an 80%, this is a problem status. Where would you put us in terms of the severity of the modern world?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  We're hitting pause for a moment. There's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

• 33:59Tom Bilyeu?

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• 34:42Tom Bilyeu?

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• 35:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's easier than ever to get caught in the current that we're talking about and just get carried along. I think it was David Goggins, the David Goggins, that said, you know, nowadays it's easier than ever to be exceptional. I think.

• 35:22Tom Bilyeu?

  But that's because so many people are getting caught up. That's the problem. Like, I agree with them.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  So for those that can get out, that can literally, and I think here, if somebody feels like they have to get on YouTube, they have to, I don't want to ding YouTube. Okay, I feel like, you know, if somebody feels like it's controlling them, like it's got them instead of they've got it, or OnlyFans, certainly with OnlyFans, the only answer is abstinence. Now, and I'm not saying this from a moral perspective, the only answer is you're never looking at it again, which is going to send some people into oblivion. They're like, wait, why can't it just be a little bit? The same way that they're now called, now it's called having alcohol use disorder, what used to be called an alcoholic, somebody with alcoholism or an alcoholic. You'd say, how many drink, you know, how many drinks can they have? Zero. Right. How many drinks? How do you do that? You have to replace that behavior with something useful, like 12 step, like, like a rehab program,

• 36:11Speaker 01

  like some sort of group where you can really take that energy and put it elsewhere and be rewarded for those other new behaviors. This is the hard part about OnlyFans versus real world relationship is it's, you know, stopping is just one part of it, but we know based on all the science of behavioral change and the dopamine system, et cetera, you need to give that person a replacement behavior. And the reason 12 step is so effective at treating, you know, alcoholism is it's so that people get sober and stay sober from drugs, from alcohol, from other gambling addiction. It's hard, but they have a community in which the reward system is now rooted around the sobriety they're trying to achieve. You know, and I may have told this story before, but I have a good friend.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  His kid was absolutely addicted to just watching YouTube videos all day. His friends had gone off to college, smart kid. He wasn't really holding a job well. He had a bunch of other issues. I'm not saying ADHD doesn't exist. I do think it exists, but he had been diagnosed with ADHD. He's on all the classic meds and, and the picture was kind of bleak in year one after high school, year two, year three, year four. Fast forward to now, he's now a junior in college on a hard major. How did he do that? It started with him understanding dopamine, him understanding that it had him and going full cold turkey. Did you talk to him? I did. Yeah, I did. And it was actually the conversation with Anna Lemke from Stanford, who really deserves the credit, you know, author of Dopamine Nation. All right. What's the magic sequence of words? Like, what was it?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  It was, look, it makes every bit of sense why you feel like you have to do this, but it's controlling you. And the only way to regain control, like to get the control panel back is to take a week off. And it was just like, there's no way. It was like a week off. And so he self-imposed a day. It was a classic one day at a time kind of thing where he could call me, he could call, you know, this is how it happened in several instances with cannabis, another discussion. I'm not anti cannabis for everybody, but I know some people have really succumbed to like using cannabis, dropping out of college, losing their relationship, being online all day. Boom, losing their job also. This is a real world scenario, not, I'm not making this up. And then.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  By going full abstinence and then focusing on a 12 step program in the case of the cannabis situation, or in the other case, just doing a one day at a time, you're calling.

• 38:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Stick with homeboy that he's watching too much YouTube.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  He's texting me at the end of the day. I managed to get to the end of the day.

• 38:31Tom Bilyeu?

  And what was he doing during the day? He's not just staring at a wall.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I told him to get outside and take a bike ride, take a walk, do anything but. At first, it's just anything but behavior.

• 38:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And when did that become drive? Because so I've always, I can't remember when, but I had a parent ask me like, hey, my kid is really in trouble. And I don't know what to do. We've tried everything. And I was like, okay, if I had one shot and I've, I've got to guarantee results. I was like, oh, this is easy. It like, you're never going to do it, but I'll give you the answer and it will work. Not 80% of the time or 90%. This will work 100% of the time. Get five people that he respects, kidnap him, take him out onto a deserted island and those guys are going to do things that he has to join them in doing to earn their respect. And if he respects them before they kidnap him and take him out, he will conform to the group.

• 39:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's like all of this stuff to me, and I get it. I, this is one of the thing that drives people crazy about me. But this like really seems, if you understand how the brain works, if you accept men and women are different, if you accept we are not blank slates. If you go, ah, men are goal oriented, men want to be a part of the pack, men want to do the things that are going to earn their respect, the respect of the group. Doing hard things is, I mean, I wouldn't have had the words to say that testosterone makes effort feel good, but it's like effort feels good.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  And there's feedback. I'm sorry to interrupt. And there's feedback when you accomplish something. You know, wake up in the morning, control something you can control. If it's getting sunlight, but then do, you know, get your sunlight, but then hydrate, get exercise. But do something that's under your control and where you can have an outcome that you know is a positive investment of your energy, of your dopamine. That has a positive feedback on the testosterone and dopamine system and low and behold, you have more energy. As opposed to spending it out. No, I absolutely agree with your kidnap and take to, to a deserted island. You know, because it captures all the elements of how the, the male brain works and wants to participate and wants to achieve things. I absolutely agree. I think that. You know, we are a social species and even though men, okay, maybe we're not relational

• 40:36Speaker 01

  in the case like you leave, you know, five average males in a, in a room, they're not gonna play, you know, they're like a play a house and like, you know, they're gonna play, they're gonna play like, um, Kick you in the face. Yeah, they're gonna beat each other up or like, you know, like wrestling, someone's gonna be jumping off the top and like, you know, like suplexing people like, that's males, right? You know, and, and sure, there are exceptions to that, there are less physical males, et cetera, but at some point, there has to be that effort, dopamine, reward, action loop. And the, the thing is that effort, dopamine, reward, action loop is in the OnlyFans interaction. It's in all sorts of interactions. The problem is, when you're deep in that, you know, in that trench, it's impossible to see that you're not going anywhere. You're treadmilling, you're not going anywhere. In most cases, you're spiraling down.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  And it's, it's just very hard to see because that dopamine and, and the state of arousal that it creates, puts you into a warped world where your time binning starts getting very fine. You're just focused on the next increment, the next increment, the next increment. And it's like, we talk about getting out and getting perspective, very hard to do, very hard to do. And I do think you're right. I think we need to yank ourselves out or have someone yank us out of that scenario. In this case, we set something up where he had to call me every single day or text me every single day, although I realized calling was more important because texting, people are much more willing to kind of like, oh yeah, did it, but they actually didn't. Now, it took some time, I'm not gonna say there weren't some relapses, but over time, he got to see the difference between how he felt when he relapsed versus how he'd felt right before.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Sure, he went through the same shame cycle, like, ah, I'm weak, and then back on the horse and kept going. You know, it's, um, it's, and it's an incredible thing now, I have to say, he's not my kid, but it's incredible, I've known since he was a little one, to see him like in, you know, in his junior year of college, he's in a relationship, like, he takes care of himself, he acts like he's gonna be, if he stays on track, a fully functional male in society. But it was looking super bleak. And the parents have all the makings of like a reasonably educated, reasonably happy home, you know, no major trauma, none of that. It was just, it was his S R Y gene susceptibility to things that were happening at that time, and he almost became one of the failure to launches.

• 42:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, this is, uh, this is one of those things just trying to get people to understand that we are not blank slates is like part of my mission. So, uh, for people that join me on the lives, they'll have heard this like a gazillion times, but I really feel like I'm in a battle for the soul of America right now and really getting people to understand that, uh, one, just you're having a biological experience. So you have got to come to understand your biology. Stop judging it. Stop trying to like cram everybody into an overly modern box. The fascinating thing is I'm probably the most optimistic about what's on the other side of this weird space that we're in where we metabolize the technological revolution,

• 43:28Tom Bilyeu?

  much like the industrial revolution literally changed the world in ways we never could have predicted. And going through that, I'm sure was extremely tumultuous and it was just whenever you're going through that kind of upheaval of structure, there are going to be people that fall down that you get crushed by the rubble, you know, obviously metaphorically, but then you get to the other side, but you're, you don't get to the other side by accident. You either just burn through the transitionary people and they have a hard time of it. Life sucks, whatever, but they die. You have some big war and then you're on the other side of it and then we're just forced to adapt. Or if you can orient yourself to what's actually going on, then you can avoid the problems, but you have to understand your biology. You

• 44:10Tom Bilyeu?

  have to know what the potential dangers are. And so when I look at OnlyFans going from just complete confusion to, okay, I get what this is now. And now I see it as something that's even more dangerous than I thought it was before in terms of its ability to suck you in, when you, you have to take it in the grander context of, uh, we've been telling boys that males are toxic. Uh, men don't necessarily understand hypergamy and like sexual market value and you have to understand that. And then making it such that, um, men are being like, you're always in danger of being put on blast on social media for a bad text or DM or whatever. And so now you've got like the, the fear centers

• 44:54Tom Bilyeu?

  going crazy and up right there. Comes this real easy serve up. And so the things that we have to talk about, the things we have to draw circles around and say, okay, this is why this is a problem. You've got to watch out for that. You're going to need a substitute for that. So like, what is that thing that you're going to be doing? But to create the new thing for them to be doing, you, you cannot demonize the things that they're naturally drawn towards. And I think that's where we run into trouble.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, amen to that. I mean, I, I think that explaining to men that what's been hijacked reflects the best part about their biology, their deepest like circuits of effectiveness. But they've been hijacked and they're being misused to someone else's gain. I think that's an important part of the messaging to get people out of that loop. Or I think it's the first step, not just like, oh, you know, it got me, you know? But the idea that, because I do think that another aspect of maleness is this idea like, nobody wants to be controlled, right? That you're the, you're the agent of control. And, you know, it's James Hollis, the great psychoanalyst who, you know, he wrote, he has this incredible lecture online called Creating a Life.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  I invited him on my podcast. He's 84 years old and I'm like, what's that? What's the key? You know, he's, he's so aware of what a really good life looks like for men and for women. And he's done it, written a lot on men's trauma. He wrote a book called Under Saturn Shadow, which is a really powerful book, specifically about men's trauma. This is years ago, before everything was therapized.

• 46:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Why Saturn? What Saturn?

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I forget the, the notion of, um, this has to do with some, um, uh, mythical text. He's a very, he's much more scholarly about those things than me. So forgive me, um, no, for not, for not knowing. But he, he said, look, the, the solution to this is actually quite simple, but quite hard.

• 46:45Tom Bilyeu?

  This being modern life is like messing us up.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Directing your life, being the agent of control in your life, especially if you're male, but also if you're female. But since we're talking about men, which is you have to, yes, develop a sense of, I think he calls it, you know, suit up, show up and, you know, and work. Like you just have to have that, like, okay, it's time to work. It's just like time, like you did with. With your business and you continue to do or Jaco, there's like four thirty, you just gotta show up, you know, suit up, show up and get to work. You have to develop that. You also have to have a place where you reflect and decide where you're going to direct your energies. And that has to come first and then you just keep looping the two. And he talks about it not as a form of meditation, but literally a stopping for even just a few minutes a day.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  And it sounds so simple, but it's hard to do where you literally just close your eyes and you think like, is my energy being directed in the, in the areas and directions that make sense for me? Am I building my life? And you set some intentionality because we hear all the thing, you know, between stimulus and responses, you know, this, this buffer, very hard when you're in the moment. And you know, these algorithms are so damn good at looping us in that we can either, because really they do one of two things. They either allow us to numb out and pass time. Or they give us just enough arousal, kind of rage bait and engagement or like intrigue, like sexual intrigue, or like maybe you're looking at, um, you know, like cute pup, maybe like cute puppies. It's not sexual at all, or maybe it's rage bait, or maybe it's a fight where someone gets punched in the face.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  You know, open up X, you can see all of these things. It will find the hook. So the idea is that you, you set your, for lack of a better word, your intention about, and you understand that you have this energy that you were born with, that's replenishable. It's again, all harkens back to dopamine. It's, you know, you can, you can deplete it, but it's replenishable. And you start thinking, how am I investing that? And then the, the key thing is to, at some point relatively early in the day, you have to invest in something that has a, a logical and real payoff for the, for the expansion and growth of your life. And even, even if you write a paragraph, even if you, you know, um, as long as you are investing in your future in some way. It's the difference between a dollar spent and a dollar invested, or a dollar wasted and a dollar invested.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  And I think that Hollis really nails it with that. It starts with this like recognition and then subtle, subtle things that control your behavior. And sometimes people have to divide their day into thirds. He tells me in order to be able, these aren't even just addicts, but he'd be able to like, okay, the first third of my day is going to be completely under my control. I think that in, said differently, if you explain to men that they can control themselves as opposed to other things controlling them, they're going to start to look at it as a fight. And if you start winning that fight, I mean, I deal with this every day. I'm like, I'm gonna just get on my phone and I'm like, I'll just look for a second. I'm like, I'm like, man, okay, I'm gonna look. And then I see, I saw something the other day and I was like, I don't want to see that.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  So I scrolled to the next thing. It was the opposite. And I was like, damn it. And I like took the thing I, I put it down on the face. I'm like, man, it almost got me. And I'll tell you this feeling of satisfaction when you're like, nope. Like, and then you actually go do something useful and you can bet I picked that thing up three more times before I actually dropped into like a good groove on something. The, the feeling that one gets is so empowering and it's not just quote unquote empowering. It's literally a surge in your own sense of agency and you increased your, your dopamine stores, your arousal state continues to go up as opposed to just, oh, two hours went by. And you're just thinking, I should do this. I should do that.

• 50:05Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that only works though, if you aim at something that is in line, I'll say with your biology, I think, I always think of things through the lens of evolution. That's what I was saying about Bonnie Blue. She's just not, she's not in line with what evolution wants you to do. And so you're gonna have a profound sense of dis-ease. Can't remember if it was her, but I think it was that after her first like hundred guys in 24 hours or whatever, she was crying. She, and she was like surprised that she's crying about like, whoa, like I didn't expect to feel like this, like, yeah. Like that is not what evolution wants you to do. Like you have so much wiring.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Runs counter current to everything we know about wiring of the female brain, everything. Which is not to say that I'm judging promiscuity, but hers represents an extreme of performative promiscuity. That, yeah, I agree. I mean, it, I mean, we could think of another, a hundred other parallel examples of, of self abuse that.

• 50:54Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't even think of it as self abuse. It's just, i- if you're out of alignment with what the deeply embedded in your brain algorithms want you to do. It only has two levers, pleasure and pain from an evolutionary perspective. So it's gonna make it feel bad. It's just trying to make it feel bad. So you stop doing it. Now, I don't need anybody to think she's a bad person. I don't think she's a bad person. I feel bad anytime I have to go through something where I'm like, whoops. I'm clearly out of alignment with what nature wants from me. Or if somebody else does something that's out of alignment with what nature wants from them. It's like, yeah, it's gonna suck. Like you've gotta like find that thing. And I bring that up in this context. So.

• 51:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Guys are only going to be able to get out of this rut if they figure out to aim at something with, I'll call it high utility, a thing that is in alignment with what men are hardwired to do, that culture is going to celebrate so that as they do it, they get some sort of positive feedback from the world around them. So what would you, like, obviously, it's not going to be neuroscience, but like, what would you have men aim at as a category of thing so that then they can structure their lives in such a way that putting the phone down makes sense because I'm actually aiming at this thing?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  I thought you were going to tell me that you're developing an online platform that is incredibly addictive, that allows men to build their financial portfolio or creative portfolio.

• 52:15Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting. We'll get into game development if we have time, where I'll explain why I still, because I'm utterly fascinated by that stuff, but no, I just want to know, like, what should guys aim at?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Well, I will, I'm borrowing a lot today, but I will borrow from Ryan Holiday and say that if you don't know what you want to do with your life, you should probably go to college.

• 52:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Because, you know, his idea is, you know, a few years-

• 52:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Even if you're 35?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Um, you should probably get involved in some education or vocation that you-

• 52:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Broad spectrum. Is that the idea?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you can afford to do that, I mean, certainly work of any kind is of value. And I'm not saying that to be politically correct. I mean, Anna Lemke, author of Dopamine Nation, when I asked her a similar question, she said, "The key is, like, for young people who are quote unquote, 'looking for their passion,' like, she thinks that's a crazy idea. It's never going to work. She thinks what you should do is look around you and find something. I know this sounds crazy, but it makes perfect sense in the context of the biology. Find something that needs fixing or doing. Maybe it's mow the lawn. Maybe it's assemble the fish tank that's been, you know, piled up in the corner. Do something that has a beginning, a middle, and end where you can feel like you accomplished something, because it feeds back on the circuitry that you can accomplish things."

• 53:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Is Hannah the one that worked, has she done work in video games?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Uh, on video games, she was in that movie that was about, I think it was called The Social, um, The Social, was it?

• 53:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Dilemma?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Social Dilemma.

• 53:36Tom Bilyeu?

  I've had her on the show, but you also, I think, man, I could be conflating things, but there's another woman that I've had on the show that worked in game development.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:43Tom Bilyeu?

  And-

• 53:44Speaker 01

  That's somebody different.

• 53:45Tom Bilyeu?

  This sounds so familiar.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Beginning, middle, and end, sense of accomplishment, because as a game dev, I will just tell you right now, and technically, I'm not a game dev, I always say that, but hopefully people know what I mean.

• 53:57Tom Bilyeu?

  That is, you're literally going, how's the brain wired? How do I leverage that to make this engaging, enjoyable? Like, you're obsessing over, when do we get secrete? When do we get them to secrete dopamine so that they'll keep, they want to keep pushing? I mean, it's, it is, uh, it's all very conscious stuff that game developers are doing. So how do we, cause a hundred percent.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, do something.

• 54:22Tom Bilyeu?

  But they could do that something that other people are gonna look at and be like, that's what you're pointing yourself at? Like, that is lunacy. It'll still have the same sense of accomplishment. Are, is mowing the lawn better than running a 4K?

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's all important and they can all be done because we're talking about things that are sort of beginning, middle, and done. So, you know, the sole notion of wake up in the morning and make your bed, right? Like, uh, right, and, uh, clean your room, right? Or McChrystal, I think, was the first, make your bed first thing in the morning.

• 54:52Tom Bilyeu?

  He's a general, right?

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, a former Navy SEAL. I think this is at a commencement for University of Texas, Austin. The whole idea there, you know, he framed it as, you know, get back at the end of the day. And even if your day went terribly, at least your bed is made. Okay. I think, with all due respect, I think the practice itself is far more valuable than that. From the perspective of, you were able to take something that was disorganized and organize it and then move forward. So it's not like you make your bed all day, 50 times. It's that you have the ability to act on your environment and complete something. Then you pivot and you look for the next thing that needs to be done. Now, you could spend all day doing chores. People do this when they're procrastinating, right? They started doing all sorts of things they haven't tended to in the previous days and weeks. But the idea is that if you can organize your immediate physical environment,

• 55:35Speaker 01

  then there is that quote unquote sense of accomplishment, but it's more a sense of that you have an ability to accomplish things. Right? So it, it is hard to imagine someone who's, you know, home space is slovenly, who's super effective in the outside world. Hard to imagine. I'm sure it exists, but they probably have maids, right? So.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Taking control of your environment, keeping the things that you have in order, taking good care of the things that you have, however few, has a feedback on you. It's a self-respect thing. It allows you to feel like you can control what's in your environment. And again, the circuitries that we're talking about relate to dopamine, motivation and pursuit. They are subject to plasticity. And what you're talking about, when you're talking about OnlyFans is plasticity in the direction of hijacked plasticity, where you're getting less and less dopamine, less and less pleasure, and you're investing more and more. It's literally, the circuit is being hijacked and it's atrophying in certain important ways, and it's hypertrophying. It's growing in other ways that are beneficial to OnlyFans and destructive to you. When you make your bed, it's probably neutral. Is it destructive to you? No. No. Is it super beneficial to you?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  No, I'm not delusional. I don't think that making your bed first thing in the morning or cleaning your room is going to completely transform your life. But it's also what you're not doing during that time, right? It's a pure behavioral replacement. So then you go out and you run, you get some sunlight, you hydrate. It's, if these things, they start to ratchet on top of one another. Now, is that going to make somebody confident enough to go out and ask a girl out on a date? No, but probably more confident about her, you know, maybe eventually coming back to your apartment and seeing the place and it's not a total disaster. And as we know, she'll be looking to see how you maintain your stuff. So I think that people who learn how to take control of their immediate external environment, this is the essence of building confidence. I really believe that. You know, when we're little kids, we make something with our legos or whatever it is,

• 57:25Speaker 01

  and we show our parents, they go, "Good job." And then pretty soon we realize they did a good job to anything, right? Unless it's like really exceptional. What, the pivotal moment, I believe, and at least in my childhood, is when I did something I looked at and I was like, "That's awesome." Hmm. Like I used to design fish tanks when I was a kid, and I was pretty bad at it. Now I'm really good at it. I have a couple, and I'll just say, like, I'll go toe-to-toe with anybody on a quarry. Fish tanks? Yeah, man, aquascaping. How big are we talking? We're talking big fish tanks with coral and sun and octopus and discus fish. Could I lay inside of it? What's that? Could I lay inside of it? Yeah, one of them.

• 57:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Are we set that big?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, some of them are 300 gallons or more. And the idea is the balance between the, between the fish and the aquarium. If you really want your mind blown, go and look at Takashi Amano. He did what's called aquascaping, which was these underwater. He had ones that were as big as this room. Unfortunately, he died in pneumonia and, and, uh, at 60. But he has a whole museum dedicated to him, like, you know, like.

• 58:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Did you know him?

• 58:17Speaker 01

  No, I wanted to meet and, and, and apprentice with him and he died before I was able to. But, you know, so, you know, am I, am I going to become a fish tank designer? No, like, I don't plan to.

• 58:28Tom Bilyeu?

  You already? You just said I'll go toe to toe.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  As a profession, as a profession.

• 58:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure, but.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  But like, it's very important to me that I have a certain thing. Like, I get so much joy and, and, and like positive stimulation and ideas from just sitting in front of that thing. And so for me, it's very important that those spaces in my house are not just like empty spaces. You know, and for some people it's painting and for some people it's gardening. And, you know, these are more artistic things, right? Now we're not talking about like going out and like conquering markets or like, you know, yes, I also go to the gym. And yes, I also run, I do those things that are more like traditional male, you know, masculine things. But just the idea that you can

• 59:07Speaker 01

  touch into a feeling of like, I did that. Is this generative drive as it's called, like touching into that where you know it was a job well done.

• 59:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  And you're, no one's looking. Right? I don't care if anyone ever sees my fish tanks, frankly, like no one's looking. They give me energy and they give me energy because I love them. And because they're, it's hard to do a tank right. And it's hard to keep the balance right and the ecosystem right. But it feels so damn good. Now, I'm not saying everyone should go out and get fish tanks, right?

• 59:32Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, no, but you're, you're really onto something. I, I want to pitch you an idea. I want to see if I'm thinking about this right because, um, I, I am really obsessed with this. So I think AI is going to terraform the world in ways that people do not understand. I think it is going to be devastating in a thousand ways. And I think it's going to be unbelievably cool in a billion ways. Going to be hard to get through the ways that it's going to be tough. But when I think about that, I start thinking about, okay, what's going to be the future? I start thinking from an evolutionary lens. What does evolution want from us? I'll assume for now that we're not altering the structure of the brains. And I'll say, we're going to keep working the way that we work. And when I hear you describe that, I hear the very thing that excites me about game development. Because I'm like, oh, forget aquariums and needing to actually put glass in your house and all that.

• 1:00:17Tom Bilyeu?

  I'll give you the ability to design an entire ocean. I'll give you the ability to design an entire universe. And I think that people are going not only to design them, but explore them. And so then people start going, well, they're going to poo poo that and say, okay, but that is just a video game. It's like, when I hear you say, I don't care if anybody ever sees my fish tank. I'm like, oh, this is a gamer. You just, there's a certain type of game that you like. It's like the, you design these farms and stuff like this. It's an actual type of game, so a whole genre. And I'm like, oh, I get it. But we, there does seem to be some bridge that society is not comfortable with us crossing where it becomes virtual. So an esports athlete, they're unbelievable.

• 1:00:59Tom Bilyeu?

  They are so skilled that the window that they can be the best in the world is so narrow. By 24, you're like washed up because your reaction time is off by like one, like thousandth of a second.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went to a gaming tournament, actually, with one of the kids I was describing earlier. It was his birthday years ago and he said, well, I was like, what do you want? He wanted to go to a gaming tournament. It was here in LA and it was wild. I mean, this is going to be familiar to you and everyone else. The kids had like hand warmers.

• 1:01:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  And then the audience, instead of clapping, they were like banging together these like styrofoam things. And it was like a whole thing and this, this, this girl walked in. And she's just like, she's probably like, you know, like mid twenties, like really attractive. And when all the dudes were like, no way. And they were like fanning out on this chick and he's like, she's so hot. And I was like, okay, this is a totally different world.

• 1:01:44Tom Bilyeu?

  It's a different universe.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  But it, but here's the, the thing, the, the fish tanks or the video game or the, the virtual version of the fish tank farming, or whatever it is, the real key for me, anyway, or at least my understanding of it is the energy and inspiration and kind of sense of capability that I get from that. It's not a closed loop. I don't sit in front of my fish tank all day just going like, man, I'm a good fish tank designer. Like I'm the next Takashi Imano. No, none of that. I take the energy of it and I take it into my profession. I take it into my creative pursuits that relate to the podcast or to writing and I've got a few other things that are brewing now. What's that?

• 1:02:21Tom Bilyeu?

  How?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  It's purely energetic. It's like I can accomplish things. Like I can build a really awesome home environment.

• 1:02:27Tom Bilyeu?

  See, okay.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  And I used to do this, like now I, now I converted an art gallery into a living space. Like that's kind of my obsession right now.

• 1:02:33Tom Bilyeu?

  You wanna study your brain for science?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  But when I lived in a one bedroom studio, I did this.

• 1:02:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  I had a plant. I had my TV. I would think, I'm not like an interior designer, but I was like, how can I make this place like the best study environment? This was in college and I was like, chair, desk, that back then it was like tape and CD and I had like little posters and I kept really good care of everything I had. And that place is where I built my degree, which led to my masters, my PhD, running a lab, getting tenure, the podcast, sitting here with you. And so for me, back then I had no idea what a podcast was. It was in the mid nineties, right? But that room was so important to me. Like that's my whatever dojo. That's my canvas. Like what I'm, and I just trusted and I still trust that if something is closed loop, it's dangerous.

• 1:03:21Tom Bilyeu?

  When you say closed loop, what do you mean?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  I mean, there's no, that whatever energy you get from it is this, is discarded in the, in the thing. I'm gonna get kind of.

• 1:03:29Tom Bilyeu?

  But why? So, okay.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Well, let's talk about OnlyFans.

• 1:03:31Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, no. Don't leave yet. Cause I really want to understand this and I wanna understand if we're saying the same thing or just wildly different things. So I believe that all, all of human existence, there's nothing outside of what I'm about to say. All of human existence is us trying to manipulate our own brain chemistry. Period. No parentheticals, no new chapters. Everything that we do, I think that evolution has made that just obviously true because evolution is trying to compel you to do a thing and it only has pleasure and pain.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  To propagate it. I mean, evolution has an end game, right?

• 1:04:07Tom Bilyeu?

  To you to have kids to have kids.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:04:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Full stop. Do we agree?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Species wanna make more of themselves and protect their young.

• 1:04:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Tom Bilyeu?

  But like, period.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  I, I agree with you.

• 1:04:18Tom Bilyeu?

  I work backwards from that. I'm like, evolution has a goal and I'm its vessel. Evolution wants to make sure that I have kids that survive long enough to have kids. Everything is just trying to get me to do that. The thing that it is using to get me to do that is all the neurochemistry stuff that you actually understand. And then me, whether I'm drinking alcohol, doing drugs, having sex, whatever. I have been given a set of circuitry, whatever your chemical processing plant, however you want to think about it. And I can do things to yank those levers that make me feel a certain way. And then all of us are just yanking those levers. Now, the thing that you and I are getting on to is you're saying, okay,

• 1:04:58Tom Bilyeu?

  there's a way that you can pull those levers where the energy goes inside and dies. And there's a way that you can pull those levers that that energy somehow does a new thing. And that new thing is what I want you to explain because you may be able to put your finger. Because I've like, I, there are two things I'm going to be attacked in the future. I'm not super attacked by it right now because not enough people know that I believe it. But over time, they're, they're really going to come after me for it. While I'm, I, it won't happen to everybody, transhumanism is going to be a thing and I'm totally supportive of it.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  How is that defined? I just, because I'm not sure I know exactly.

• 1:05:35Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll merge with machines.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Got it. Okay.

• 1:05:38Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll alter our biology. It'll be one of those two things or both.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Gene editing.

• 1:05:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Robots, nano robots.

• 1:05:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I'm an easy sell on this, but yeah, 100% that's going to happen.

• 1:05:48Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  I mean, it's happening now.

• 1:05:49Tom Bilyeu?

  But I'm supportive of it. That's where I think I'm going to lose certainly the religious crowd. And the second thing is that I really believe that going out into space is cool and I'm glad some people are doing it. But the reason that aliens don't visit us is any sufficiently advanced tech, uh, society will develop technology where they collapse inside of virtual worlds. It's the only thing that makes sense. Because you don't have to worry about altering your physical body in terms of dealing with radiation and stuff like that. It's just so much, you don't have to bend spacetime. You can literally just create a virtual world. So I want to create virtual worlds. It, it is, I am obsessed. It's not what I'm known for, but it's the thing that I'm obsessed with.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  I can tell.

• 1:06:32Tom Bilyeu?

  But.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:06:33Tom Bilyeu?

  On this, I want to make sure that I'm not putting. People in a box where their energy dissipates into nothing.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:06:40Tom Bilyeu?

  And I've done a thing now that I that doesn't make me respect myself. I'm already rich. I am not doing this for the money. I'm doing it because I'm like, yo, this is where we're going. This thing is incredible, but only if done right. And so now, tell me more about the fish tank and why the energy like rebounds into something else. So I can make sure, one, that I continue to point my life towards things like that. And as I'm building, that I'm, because I feel what you're talking about, but I wouldn't be able to articulate it.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, you and I are completely aligned on this evolutionary argument. That our brain circuitries and bodily chemistries are organized around evolution. And that the innate, even if unconscious or conscious awareness that we're trying to propagate our species and just go forward. There are a lot of traps, as I'll call them, these things that can hijack us, like opium will hijack the pleasure centers and ruin your life. You know, we've seen that. It's all about what it does and what it no longer makes you want to do. Okay, it makes people on opium, they just don't care to work. They don't care to do anything, right? It's just, it's just a slippery slope, as they say. Here's, here's why the fish tanks are more than a hobby and they're more than a fascination.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  And here's why it's different than OnlyFans, okay?

• 1:07:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Why fish tanks are different than OnlyFans?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of reasons why my, my aquariums are different than OnlyFans, especially the way I'm interacting with them, just to be clear. But here's the difference, and I'm going to use an example that might seem a little bit crude, but I think it's the, it captures it best.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Let's be honest, people aren't just watching OnlyFans. They're masturbating while they watch OnlyFans.

• 1:08:22Tom Bilyeu?

  I hope, for their sake, Jesus.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  That presumably involves some pleasure or generates some pleasure for them. I certainly am not of the belief that all sex and masturbation is just about, that is about reproduction, right? Obviously masturbation is not, is not the most efficient way to reproduce. Okay?

• 1:08:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Try a different method.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  But let's just imagine, and it's not pleasant to imagine, but I think we can all know the general contour of this. I don't have to say too much. Someone's watching OnlyFans. A guy's watching OnlyFans. He's paying. He's telling her what he wants. She's giving it to him. There's an exchange of money. There's an exchange of time. Okay. There's a, he's spending his dopamine and he's literally spending it. And then masturbation, right? And then what happens after that? Is he more, is the net increase in dopamine testosterone gonna cause him to go out and look for a real date? Hmm, no. No. Is he, uh, has he invested his biological resources in DNA, in his sperm, in reproduction and evolution of our species? No. Is he a contributing member of society? Well, to her bank account, yeah. It's part of GDP?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Right. It's not, it's not like taking an Uber where like Uber takes a slice, but you actually go someplace in the car. He stayed right there. He actually spent out his, you know, God given, nature given, evolutionary given, whatever your, your beliefs are, um, gifts there. And guess where it went? Nowhere. It's a, it's a net negative. Okay. Now let's talk about my fish tanks. Okay? Now, do you think that evolution has some sort of backdoor punishment for that? It depends on the, the extent to which society will pick up the slack. Because we know that throughout societies, there have been people who have been, you know, opiated, who've, um, who, uh, can't work, that we support. Sometimes we support those people for good reason. They're not able to support. They're out on disability from

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  a workplace injury. Like, you know, societies have, have mechanisms set up, but if you look at thriving societies, right? I mean, a certain threshold number of males and females getting out there and doing work and educating young and like, you know, and here it's real, it really does take a village. It takes men and women and it really needs to be, um, shift workers. It's terrible for your health, but we need those people, right? So we need, we need contributing members of society. The more things that we offer for people to opt out, and they don't even realize that they're opting out of the evolutionary game, but- Being under the illusion that they're somehow doing the right thing and they sort of know they're not, but they're receiving all the pleasure that evolution has installed into these circuits, but they're not doing anything, they're not actually contributing. Forget quote unquote contributing to society, that's really important. They're not even

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  contributing to their own life in a meaningful way. Sooner or later, they have to make the money that they're gonna, you know, contribute to OnlyFans. I doubt anyone wants to see that guy on OnlyFans. I mean, there presumably are people, but I don't think that's the end game. So what I mean when I say like the fish tanks are like the inverse of all that is, you know, I have the tank, which helps me, you know, feel like I can do something that's somewhat mindless. I might listen to a book or a podcast while I'm doing it. I might enjoy it for pleasure, but then, but I get energy from there that I take elsewhere. It's not like I'm like, oh, you know, I'm gonna start like, you know, podcasting about fish, although here I am, but it is not my goal. I'm not gonna start like an aquascaping podcast. There are amazing aquascapers. That's not my goal. The idea is it gives me energy.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  And this is what, you know, my good friend and I'm sure, you know, like, I always seem to mention him and, you know, forgive me for name dropping, Rick Rubin really understands about the creative process that he talked about in The Creative Act. There's another book by a woman by the name of Twyla Tharp, who's in her 80s, who's an absolutely incredible choreographer. And she talks about how her process of going to the gym in the morning for two hours, she was a ballerina, every single morning, the process of going to museums, the process of having a regimen, all of that is designed to give her the kind of raw materials in her unconscious that then she can put into being, and she is one of the greatest choreographers of all time, anyone that pays attention to the dance world, which isn't my world, but they, they will, they'll know her name. And so the idea is what are the

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  things that you are doing that you get energy from, that you can transmute into useful work? Being a better husband, being a better son, being a contributing member of society? Maybe it's, maybe it is the old fashioned version of like you go check on the neighbor and you like give them some cookies or something like that and they like it and you feel like you've done something useful and you have. The problem is the things that where you think you've done something useful and you haven't and you actually have moved back two steps. You didn't not just go anywhere, you're actually drifting down because you're, some of your peers are moving forward. I want to just briefly mention that there is a, a parallel argument for, against the evolutionary theory that is not the one that people typically think of, and this is the scariest one of all. I just want to share it with you. It's

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  a fun one and it's scary as shit. Which is, you now know about the gut microbiome. We have trillions of little micro bacteria living in our gut. They help us manufacture serotonin, they're talking to our brain, they're informing about our body chemistry, they're controlling our immune system, super important system, involved in everything from mental health to physical health, inflammation, and uh, and uh, and uh. There's an argument that's been made by the people that study the microbiome, that we, in our infinite desire to think that we know everything, have come up with this thing that we call evolutionary theory, but actually, we are just vehicles for microbiota. I came here today, I shook your hand, I sat in one of your chairs. Elon wants to go to Mars, and guess what? The people that are proponents of this theory argue that, you know,

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  it's kinda cool, humans think that they're going to Mars to colonize Mars, which I believe that they do, but that the microbiota just really wanted to get there. So there's this, so they like create changes in our neurochemistry, which create changes in our thinking. It's a kind of fun theory, that lead us to think that we're leading these meaningful lives and like propagating our species, but really, we've already been hijacked from the inside.

• 1:14:12Tom Bilyeu?

  That's wild.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  And there's no sense that there's intention around it, like that they're sitting there going, oh, like, let's get some guys to play video games and interact with OnlyFans and like, you know, like, let's adjust the numbers of people by lowering reproductive rates. Like, there isn't that idea that they have that kind of consciousness. But anyone who's studied evolutionary theory knows that evolution doesn't sit back in a chair and think about it. This is just, these, it's the statistics of outcomes that drive this.

• 1:14:35Tom Bilyeu?

  The blind watching.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  That's exactly, exactly. So I offer that as, as kind of a fun and scary example. That's the one that keeps me up late at night, where I go like, oh shit, what if I'm just a microbiota vehicle? Because it all, and you can't really destroy this theory, there's like no hole that you can poke in it that dissolves it completely.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  It's scary as hell.

• 1:14:55Tom Bilyeu?

  They better stop the AI from coming on board, because I don't think the AI is gonna need a microbiome, so.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  So that might be, that might be.

• 1:15:00Tom Bilyeu?

  The one cash is they, they done messed up, Andrew.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Couldn't resist offering that one, it's not the theory I subscribe to.

• 1:15:06Tom Bilyeu?

  No, I love it, and look.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  But it's counter creation, it's like the opposite of like, of a master plan, right? It's this idea that we think that we're so clever, and we're doing all this stuff, and we're just like meat vehicles, that think we think in, in important ways for the microbiota. Super scary, I hope that's not true, um, but.

• 1:15:25Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, there's certainly an element, did you read Sapolsky's book, Determined?

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:15:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  I spoke to him about it. Um, because, but basically he told, he told me to my face, there's no free will. Basically, that's the, that's the idea.

• 1:15:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, bro. If, he literally leaves no stone unturned. Just when you think, I got you. Nope, he's like, yeah, there's a chapter on that. Trust me, by the end of it, you're gonna be like, oh, yeah, we, we are automata.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's sharp as a razor.

• 1:15:52Tom Bilyeu?

  You, you literally just have to let go of that it matters. And I'm like, look, I believe we really are automata and that it just doesn't matter. And that to, dude, if you read the book, you're gonna be like, there's no wiggle room. There's nothing left. There's, and to be honest, even before I read the book, I believe we're automata. Because I can manipulate your brain so completely to make you, uh, I mean, you know, the Phineas Gage story. Like you alter the structures of the brain, the person will be forever different. I don't under, I don't even understand people that, uh, think that we could be anything other than automata. We are limited by our biology.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And so it's like, if you don't think we are, then go to somebody who's profoundly retarded and tell them to like, um, solve for physics. They're, they are not going to be able to. It is not physically possible for them. The structures of their brain are such, that's just not within their realm of possibility. And so it's like, okay, well, if I'm limited by my biology, then I am my biology. If I am my biology, where exactly is free will sitting? So anyway, I'll never be able to do the job that he does in that book. It is so detailed, all the way down to anybody right now at home that's thinking, well, Tom's ignoring quantum. Or he, no, he has a chapter on the ridiculousness of thinking that that's the same as free will. He'll walk you through it.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Are you familiar, there are these really interesting studies by a guy named Robert Heath, very controversial neurosurgeon back in the, I think it was the seventies and eighties. Basically, he ran studies in humans where he stimulated different brain areas during neurosurgery. And, um, one, you know, he had this one experiment, very few subjects, but his human experiment is hard experiment. So there's still value in what he found, which was. People get different brain areas stimulated and then different sensations come about and they get to sort of report what they liked the most or the least, which brain area and which sensation it was associated with. So you stimulate the brain area associated with sexual pleasure and they really like that. With laughter, they really like that. With drunkenness, some like that, some don't, and on and on. The brain area that they like

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  and will work to stimulate, self-stimulate more than any other brain area, this is gonna blow your mind, is an area of the thalamus called the medial midline. It's a midline thalamus, a little structure. It doesn't really matter what the structure is called. And the subjective experience was one of mild frustration and anger.

• 1:18:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Humans are hilarious.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Humans are hilarious.

• 1:18:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  And you wonder why everyone gets on X and it's just like, "Good morning, let's fight."

• 1:18:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. I've talked about this before because I have a very low anger response and my wife has a very like fast one. And so when I click over into it, I'm like, "Oh, this is, it feels really good." There's so much certainty in anger. I am right, they are wrong, and that sense of I know exactly how the world should be and I know exactly now how to move forward and how to react.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  It's like it clarifies.

• 1:18:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Sorry, I didn't mean to speak over you. We said the same word at the same time. So we do in stereo that it seems like it clarifies so much of our understanding and maybe, maybe our experience. Maybe that's what the whole thing about organizing your room, AKA Jordan Peterson or Make Your Bed, McChrystal or these things of running. You know, the number of people that I know who were addicts, who got sober by just running a lot is pretty spectacular and stay sober.

• 1:19:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Are they just clicking over the obsessive nature and giving it something else?

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Probably. It's linear, it's forward, it's quantifiable, you know, has a lot of the elements of kind of great replacement behavior. I mean, it can be taken to the extreme, but I think, you know, like Rich Roll's example, right? You know, I'm not saying, I don't think Goggins is an addict, but I mean, the guy just keeps running, running. Cameron Haynes, right? Just, you know, beast, right? Just runs and runs and runs, you know, is able to drop alcohol, never go back, you know, running for sake of hunting, for sake of family and providing, you know, these things tend to ratchet into one another in ways that we feel. Really functional. And people like to point fingers and say, well, that's all excessive. You know, what would you rather have people doing?

• 1:19:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Just there on OnlyFans or like, you know, I, I think we're getting back to a place where some of the kind of core stereotypical circuitries and drives in, in males. I mean, these exist in females too, but in males are really being celebrated again or encouraged again because we need functioning members of society.

• 1:19:57Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure. That's it for part one of my conversation with Andrew Huberman. We are only halfway through though. And what comes next is packed with the kind of insight that can truly change how you act in the world. This is not one you're going to want to miss. So make sure you are following the show wherever you're listening. You don't want to miss out. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day.

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