Sex Scientist: Phone Addiction Is Killing Your Sex Life More Than Porn!

Is your sex life bad? Dr Rena Malik walks you through every single sex question you're too nervous to ask - from testosterone, porn, and erectile dysfunction, to libido and stress! The Better-Sex Doctor Rena Malik is a urologist, pelvic surgeon, and sexual health expert who helps millions better understand sexual health and taboo topics through science-based education and honesty. She is also the author of her upcoming book 'The Hard Truth'. She explains: ◼️Why bad sex is often a sign your overall health is breaking down ◼️Why erectile dysfunction can be an early warning sign of heart disease ◼️The 4 pillars that control your sex life: fuel, strength, environment, and confidence ◼️How porn, masturbation habits, and performance anxiety can rewire arousal ◼️What low testosterone actually feels like, and when TRT is a mistake Independent Research: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/DOAC-Rena-Malik-Independent-Research-Further-Reading.pdf Follow Dr Rena: Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/9eD5dDG X - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BDcDWi8 YouTube - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/CTzkeOx Website -https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/TyaRNr You can pre-order Dr Rena’s book ‘The Hard Truth: Everything Men Need to Know for Good Health, Great Sex, and Long Life’, here: https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/FQSv9xe Enjoyed the episode? Share this link and earn points for every referral - redeem them for exclusive prizes: https://doac-perks.com The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsor links: Wispr - Get 14 days of Wispr Flow for free at https://wisprflow.ai/steven Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order Fiverr - https://fiverr.com/diary and get 10% off your first order when you use code DIARY Cometeer - https://cometeer.com/steven for $30 off your first order *Steven is an investor in this business

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a way to enlarge the

• 0:02Speaker 00

  So you can put your penis in this device. They've actually done research on this. So 30 minutes, twice a day, and it does show improvements in length, about two centimeters. And that's not all. So they actually did a study on pistachios. Where guys had 100 grams of pistachios every day and they saw a decrease in erectile dysfunction. Because if you're not having erections, now you're no longer getting blood flow to your penis and it will shrink over time. And the same goes for women with their clitoris, because it's the same type of tissue. But also, when you look at people who have sex once a week, they live 49% longer than people who only have sex once a year.

• 0:35Steven Bartlett?

  49% longer?

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And for every 100 orgasms men had, they lived like 13% longer.

• 0:43Steven Bartlett?

  Be right back.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Dr. Rena Malik has become the world's most watched urologist.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  After sharing everything you need to know about hormones, sexual health,

• 0:53Speaker 04

  and how to have better sex, based on the data.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  So how can you have the best sex possible? So there's four main pillars of sexual health. So pillar one is fuel. So how you nourish your body. And it's a huge part of sexual activity. And then pillar two is strength. When people think about strength, they always think about going to the gym and lifting weights. It's much more than that. So when you look at the data, any sort of cardiovascular exercise is going to improve sexual function. It's going to improve blood flow to the penis and to the clitoris. And then also, if you do 150 minutes a week, it is the same amount of improvement as you would see when you take a medication like Viagra. And the other part of it is the pelvic floor. It's underevaluated, under-discussed, and we'll get into that. But pillar three is environment. So things like stress, sleep, and undercan-disrupting chemicals.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  For example, they looked at data on men sleeping five hours a night versus eight hours a night. Guys who sleep five hours a night, their testosterone drops by 15%. And then the last of the four pillars that we don't talk about enough is and that's so important.

• 1:53Steven Bartlett?

  Rena, I want to talk about morning erections, squirting, clitoral stimulation, and certain positions that are going to increase the probability that my partner has an orgasm.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Let's talk about all of that. First of all.

• 2:07Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. It's the algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:45Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Rena Malik. If somebody was to come up to you in the street, having watched your videos online, and they were a follower of the content you've produced over the last couple of years, if you had to guess the question they would ask you, because it's probably the most frequent, popular question you get asked, what do you think they would say?

• 3:03Speaker 00

  They would say, what can I be doing right now to improve my sex life?

• 3:07Steven Bartlett?

  Who would be asking you that question? And why do you think they'd be asking it?

• 3:10Speaker 00

  I think everyone can agree that sex is something we enjoy. It's something that's important, that we want to have, right? And there is a desire to have good sex, or feel like maybe you're missing out on something that could be even better. So how can you have the best sex possible? Because you hear all these people talking about amazing sex in the media. You might see it on pornography. You might feel like this is something amazing. Why am I not having that? I want that, right?

• 3:37Steven Bartlett?

  So on that point, you said it's obvious that it's important. I think it appears to be increasingly not obvious that it's important. Because when you look at some of these stats, and I'll throw this graph that I've found here up on screen, and it shows that people are becoming more sexless, especially young adults between 18 and 30. This graph is pretty stark.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Think about 50 years ago, there was no cell phones. There might be some TV programs, but there was ads in between TV programs. And there was only certain TV shows you could watch at a certain time that you enjoyed, and then there was nothing to watch. There was no email. So you went to work and you came home, and there was really not a lot of communication between you and your coworkers or your job. They made dinner with their family, they hung out, and then maybe they watched a program or two, and then they lied down in bed. They didn't have a phone to scroll on, they didn't have anything to keep them up. And so then they were like next to their partner, and maybe they're talking, maybe they're cuddling. And so there was more like opportunity and space for sex, right? It was a thing that you did for enjoyment, for pleasure, for fun. Now we have all these distractions that keep our mind away from sex.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  In order to enjoy sex, you need to have space for it, to be able to enjoy your partner and feel like you want that, right? And now we're sort of, there's not as much room for it. That's one. Two is, younger people, how are they dating? How are they meeting each other? They're meeting each other through apps, through DMs. And so they're not actually like really having these deep, meaningful connections. There's a big hookup culture, there's a big like fleeing culture. And imagine, first time sex for most people is not great. You don't know your partner, you don't know what they like, and you may not be able to express what you like. You're never taught how to talk about sex, right? So you don't know how to say like, hey, I like it like this. And you may be self-conscious, because it's your first time. So you have like mediocre sex, or bad sex.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  And they're like, well, I don't really want that. And there's just no like follow through, right? There's not a lot of education on what sex should look like. The only education people are getting are from often erotic films. And so they're seeing sex that's not real, that's curated, and they're trying to emulate that. And that's not pleasurable for most people. And younger people these days are actually having a rise in more, we call rough sex. So choking has become very, very common. As common as like, they call choking almost like vanilla sex. So young people, if you look at data, like 60% of women, and I think it's 20% of men have been choked during sex of that age group, like college age group.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  And of those people who get choked, 20% have been choked 25 times or more. Now, I think it's fine if you're into that, but I can't imagine that that many people are into choking. And there's data to support that. So when you look at qualitative data, and this is by Debbie Herbeneck, she's a sex researcher, and she did qualitative research, and she asked people, like, what is it like? Do you enjoy being choked? Tell us about it, right? Women were like, yeah, it's okay. Sometimes I'm scared because my partner is big and strong, and I'm, you know, smaller, and they have big hands. Sometimes it's fine, and sometimes I don't really care for it, but like, it's just a part of sex. It's just as normal as kissing, for example. And so if you're having sex and you're doing things just because you think that's what your partner wants, or what it should look like, and you're not enjoying it, well, that's

• 6:53Speaker 00

  not going to be sex that you want to have.

• 6:56Steven Bartlett?

  That point you said about the lifestyles we lead and how that might be impacting our sex lives, I thought was really interesting, because we don't talk enough about this. But when you look at some of the data on this demographic, you know, people 30 and below, around that age, the extreme outliers are spending eight to 10 hours on their phones, on social media, and on the internet. And roughly about 15 to 20% of young people describe their usage as almost constant, effectively scrolling during all waking hours, while they're eating, while they're in the bathroom, and before they go to sleep. So and I was wondering, from a dopamine perspective, if there's correlation between these like dopamogenic activities that are now like hijacking our lives, whether it's

• 7:38Steven Bartlett?

  short-form videos on social media, whether it's pornography, or food, whether it's having an impact on what then happens in the bedroom, and our performance in the bedroom?

• 7:47Speaker 00

  If you think about what you need to have good sex, is you need to be sort of in the mind space for sex. And if you're constantly like hijacked by all these other things, you're never like really getting in the mood, right? You're just like, oh, I'm going to be turned on when I see my partner, and we're going to have sex and it's going to be over. And it's just really a mechanical thing at that point, right? You're not actually, you're just trying to get an orgasm. You're not actually like spending the time to enjoy and to experience that fully, because you're just so like, you're just, your brain is always doing something else, right? Because people are constantly scrolling, like every 60 seconds, there's a new video, there's something else. And so it's really hard to focus. And so that can translate to the bedroom, where you're like, you're having sex, but your brain is somewhere else, thinking about something else you saw, or something you

• 8:32Speaker 00

  have to do, or something you want to see, or something you want to look up, whatever it is, but you're not really in there in the moment. You're just going through the motions. And so I think that's really where the challenge is, is that people are becoming increasingly distractible.

• 8:47Steven Bartlett?

  I find it really hard, I'm going to be honest, to have sex if I've had like a really, really busy day, or if I'm really, really thinking about something. I almost have to, I have to like intentionally create quite a lot of space.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 8:56Steven Bartlett?

  In order to be able to be in the mood.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, be aroused, right? It takes like time and energy. I think, I appreciate you for saying that, because a lot of people think that men are just ready to go at any moment. And that's not fair, right? Because everyone needs time to be aroused. It's not just instant for everybody, especially when you have a lot of work stress, or life stress, or other things going on. It's actually like you have to make time and space for it.

• 9:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, because as a man, you've got to get an erection. And I always think that an erection is a consequence, usually, especially when it comes to sex. And I'm not talking about morning glories here, but an erection is a consequence of like a story. Use the word aroused. There's like a story in my head, which makes me go, oh, that's kind of hot.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. You need something, you need some stimuli, right? You need to think about something, see something, smell something, feel something, right? You need to just be together and sort of allow yourselves to be intimate before that sort of desire and arousal come together.

• 9:54Steven Bartlett?

  And for me as well, it's not just touch. Like that doesn't necessarily, for me, it really is quite like a psychological thing. I was wondering if this is, there's any data around this, or, I mean, just even anecdotally, like people get aroused in very, very different ways, don't they?

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some people are very like visual, so they, you know, they see their partner and they get aroused very quickly. Basically, when you get aroused, you need to be in a parasympathetic nervous system state. So in order to get an erection, you need to be in the state, which is like rest and digest. So if you're stressed, if you're thinking about other things, if you're essentially on the go, you are not allowing your nervous system to calm down. And so for some people, that's a whole bunch of different things. Some people can switch more easily into that state, and some people need more of like, you know, to feel either mentally stimulated, or they need to have some associations, like it might be like they need a certain scent, they need to like relax their body, they need to like go take a bath, whatever it is.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  But some people need different things. And knowing what that is for your partner is super important, right? Because then you can incorporate that. Everything is scheduled in our lives, right? And then you're like, oh, but now sex is like the last thing on the schedule, right? And like, I don't even think about it. Like, oh, okay, now, yeah, maybe let's have sex. But if you actually make time to be intimate, allow yourself to be in that brain space, be together, that's when it can actually happen. Especially when you've been in a long-term relationship, it doesn't come as easily, like spontaneously, which we call spontaneous desire. It comes more of as a response to these other cues that allow you to feel desire and to feel aroused.

• 11:31Steven Bartlett?

  I also think, I was thinking about a previous relationship I had, where, on the days where I'd been like working very hard, and I was like tired or stressed, or had been traveling, and I was jet lagged, I think there was also, because I didn't see this person often, there was also an expectation that when I did see them, we were going to have sex. And that was, that was very hard, because actually, the expectation of it stressed me out more.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:56Steven Bartlett?

  And that can happen, like if it becomes the elephant in the room, it can become a little bit heavy, which then is sort of counterproductive to performance.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  And this is, you know, sort of a variation on performance anxiety. So when you feel like you have to perform on demand, and maybe you're worried it might not happen, it creates this vicious loop, right? So you maybe have trouble with an erection, or maybe it's like, I'm expected to have sex, but I really can't get there mentally. Whatever it is, now you're thinking about that, right? And then you're with your partner, and you're like, oh my God, am I going to have trouble? You're not enjoying the pleasurable sensations, or the visuals, or like feeling each other. You are literally thinking in your own head about how you're going to respond. And then that anxiety makes it so that you can't get an erection, or you can't be aroused. And so now you're like anxious, and you're not focused, you're just almost spectating, you're just watching yourself have sex, you're not actually like in the moment. So then, you know, you have a negative outcome, because when you're stressed, your sympathetic

• 12:48Speaker 00

  nervous system is on, right? You can't really get an erection, or you can't really get aroused. And so then you're like, oh man, now I've let my partner down, now I haven't performed, which I hate that word, but like perform the way I should, or I'm expected to, and now something's wrong with me. And now that just keeps going in a vicious cycle.

• 13:08Steven Bartlett?

  Have you spoken to people that have experienced this?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 13:11Steven Bartlett?

  It's common?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Very common. I tell people, anytime you have problems in the bedroom, it stays with you.

• 13:17Steven Bartlett?

  So how do you break the cycle?

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I tell people, when you're with your partner, take the pressure off penetration. Just explore each other's bodies. Do what's called like sensate focus, like explore the rest of your body, figure out other orogenous zones, other things that can turn you guys both on, that don't involve erections and penetration. And then, once you realize you're focused on that, you're really like exploring, enjoying, playing, you're having a good time, and you're not thinking about your erection, now you'll notice, oh, the erection just comes, right? And then, once you get to that point, then you can start even touching genitals, but still hold off on penetration. And then after you've realized, like the genitals are, you know, it's always working the way I want it to, and I'm not thinking about it, I'm not stressed, then finally, you can then introduce penetrative sex again.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  So it's just sort of like a radiated, sort of slow advance into, you know, having sex again, but now kind of focusing on being more present and mindful and enjoying those sensations.

• 14:14Steven Bartlett?

  I think a lot of people will be able to do that. But there's also a big contingent of people that just avoid sex. It's, it's a sore subject in their relationship, for whatever reason. Both partners don't know how to communicate, they haven't got the tools to talk about these kind of things openly and honestly. Do you see that a lot as well?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I mean,

• 14:34Steven Bartlett?

  What do you hear in this regard?

• 14:35Speaker 00

  So I think it's really sad. I see people come in and they're like, I ask every patient, like, are you, are you having sex? Why not, right? Because sometimes they'll say no, and most doctors will be, okay. But I always say, why not, right? Why are you not having sex? Is it because you're having an issue? Is it because you're having pain? What's going on, right? And oftentimes, I'll hear from people that my partner's just not into it, and I just sort of gave up. And I'm just, we just don't have sex anymore. You know, for me, that's a red flag, because sex is a huge, important part of our lives. It is a way we connect with another human being. It's also telling that things are working really well. So when you have good sexual function, meaning you get an erection well, or you get aroused

• 15:19Speaker 00

  well, and you have a good orgasm, and everything feels good, that tells me that, hey, you've got great blood flow to your genitals, your nerves are working great, your hormones are sending signals, like all these things are good, right? But also, sex is more than just the act of sex. It also helps you live longer. So there's been a few studies looking at sex and longevity. And when you look at people who have sex once a week, compared to people who have sex once a year, the difference in all-cause mortality is 49%. They live 49% longer than people who only have sex once a year.

• 15:53Steven Bartlett?

  49% longer?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:58Steven Bartlett?

  Be right back. No, I'm joking.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  So and, but even if you're doing like less than once a week, but more than once a year, it still improves your longevity. There was actually an interesting study in 1997, I think it was, where they looked at the number of orgasms men had. And they found that men who had, for every 100 orgasms men had, they lived like 13% longer. They had a 13% increase in life expectancy. And so it was really interesting to me, just showing you that like, this is not just an act of pleasure and fun. It is, obviously, but it's much more than that, because people who are having sex clearly have better health. And there, this connection with people, I mean, loneliness is a big issue right now. The WHO made loneliness like an epidemic.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  So they've said that loneliness is as bad as having like 15 cigarettes. And so sex is a way to feel connected to another human being.

• 16:50Steven Bartlett?

  On that data, we're not saying that it's the sex itself that's causing people to live longer. We're, I guess it's, it's hard to establish causation in terms of

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not necessarily sex, but they've looked at, like, they've tried to control for other things, like age and comorbidities and all these studies. And it's also like, sex is a cardiovascular workout, right? For many people, it's a cardiovascular workout. You're getting a physical, physical activity with your partner. You are increasing your heart rate, you are doing these things that are also good for your body. And the fact that you're able to have sex, right, tells me a lot about it, right? You're, you're able to hold a certain position, you're able to maintain this level of activity without getting short of breath, right? Like, these are things that having sex, you know, keeps you healthy to some degree.

• 17:36Steven Bartlett?

  If I want to make sure that I have great sex, what are some of the foundational things that I need to be thinking of in terms of my lifestyle?

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's four main pillars of sexual health. And I like to think of it like, your sexual health is your house, and these pillars are the foundation. And if you don't have the foundation, it doesn't matter what else you do, you can try to do everything else to patch up your house, but it's always going to break again, because the foundation's not there. So you've got fuel, and fuel is how you nourish your body. A lot of the data I'm going to talk about is about men, because there's just a lot more data on men and sexual health. But that doesn't mean that the same things don't apply to women, there's just less, less robust data on it. So when you talk about fuel, that Mediterranean diet is the most studied diet. So including things like healthy fats, like avocados, leafy greens, nuts, and we're going to talk about nuts in a little more detail.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  These things are super helpful. And obviously, having lean proteins, having an abundance of fruits, which we're going to talk about as well. There's a study called the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. There was a 20,000 men. And they saw that men who adhered to a Mediterranean diet had a 22% lower risk of erectile dysfunction. So what specific things in that diet, right? People are always like, what are the superfoods I need to have? Almonds are great, but pistachios, they actually did a study on pistachios, where they looked at 100 grams of pistachios, guys had 100 grams of pistachios every day, and they saw a decrease in erectile dysfunction.

• 19:01Steven Bartlett?

  So pistachio nuts will make my penis harder?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  I mean, so I always say, like, I don't love to talk about superfoods, because then people are like, oh, I just got to eat pistachios, and it's all good, right? It's, it's part of a whole diet. But certainly having nuts, because they have great omega-3s, they have healthy fats, these are the reasons that they, they really sort of improve diet. Fruit, anything that has sort of flavonoids, so like colorful fruit, like blueberries, citrus fruits, lycopene, which is red fruits, all of these things improve antioxidants, and also have been shown to reduce the incidence of erectile dysfunction. So having stronger erections, specifically, blueberries actually came out to have, I think something around 20%, also improvement in erectile function when you're eating blueberries regularly. So lots of, I think, things in the diet that can be helpful.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Also, fiber is one that we don't talk about enough. When you eat fiber, in your gut, it converts to short-chain fatty acids. These short-chain fatty acids then sort of have these endothelial protective mechanisms. They protect the blood vessels, they make them healthier. And so when your blood vessels are healthy, you get better metabolic health. So you get less diabetes, less high blood pressure, less high cholesterol, and these, all of these things together improve erectile function. So I think making sure that you meet the criteria for fiber, which is 38 grams for men, 25 grams for women, is really, really important. And then obviously, managing your calories and a maintenance, right? Because we don't want to gain weight, because excess adipose tissue or excess fat also puts

• 20:30Speaker 00

  you at higher risk for erectile dysfunction and other sexual dysfunctions. Next, we have strength. All right.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  So there's strength where we think about cardiovascular and resistance exercise, but there's also pelvic floor strength. So we'll start with cardiovascular exercise. The one study that's quoted very often is 150 minutes of exercise, of cardiovascular exercise in moderate intensity. When you look at the improvement in erectile function scores, it is the same amount of improvement as you would see when you take a medication like Viagra. So literally, if you do 150 minutes a week, you are getting the same improvement as you could get with a medication, potentially. And so I tell people, like, look, if you don't want to take a pill, this is a great way to improve sexual function. Now, you might say, okay, well, I, you know, maybe you're listening and you have heart issues and you can't really do moderate intensity exercise. They actually looked at that, too.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  So there was a group where they looked at men who had heart disease, and they weren't really able to do moderate intensity exercise. So they did like a five-minute warm-up, they did 20 minutes of walking, and five minutes of a cool down. And with this supervised protocol, they still improved erectile function by 70%. So it's all relative to where you're starting, but any sort of cardiovascular exercise that's above what you are capable, like what you're doing now, is going to improve sexual function, particularly erectile function, because it's going to improve blood flow to the genitals, it's going to improve blood flow to the penis, it's going to improve blood flow to the clitoris for women. So that's where cardiovascular exercise is so, so important. In terms of resistance exercise, now, these little weights are probably not sufficient for doing much, especially for

• 22:09Speaker 00

  men, in terms of improving muscular health. But obviously, we're not going to bring, like, really heavy weights to the table here. So, one, we know that resistance training is significantly correlated with testosterone. So when you do heavy resistance training of your large muscle groups, so like your lower extremities, your glutes, you're doing, like, Olympic deadlifts, squats, that sort of stuff, you actually see improvement in testosterone. Now, it's not going to be like you do it once and you get this sustained improvement, but continuous, sort of, regular resistance exercise improves testosterone. There's also data that shows that when men do resistance exercise to maintain muscle mass. So we know that muscle mass decreases about 7% every decade of life, after around

• 22:53Speaker 00

  40. When you maintain it through resistance exercise, they're three times less likely to have erectile dysfunction.

• 22:59Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they maintain erectile function, they maintain sexual desire, they maintain satisfaction with sex.

• 23:06Steven Bartlett?

  I read a quote yesterday that said, "Muscle is medicine." And I thought, hmm, that's really true. Based on everything I've learned on this podcast around, you know, like, glucose control and testosterone, and now you're telling me about your sex life.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. I think people push back because they think, like, why should I have to go to the gym? But our lives have changed. We sit at a computer, or we sit at podcasts, or we sit all the time. We're not moving, we're not doing manual labor, which is what a lot of our history is, right? Doing manual labor, farming, doing things outside, being physical. And we are meant to be physical. We're meant to lift heavy things, we're meant to move our bodies, and we're just doing less and less of it. So I think it's so important. The other thing is, we want to prevent sarcopenia. So sarcopenia is muscle loss. And when you have muscle loss, that also increases your risk of having sexual dysfunction.

• 24:00Steven Bartlett?

  What about the pelvic floor? Like, how does that come into this story of orgasms?

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, so we missed that part. So, the pelvic floor, here's your pelvis, right? It's this bony structure where all your organs live. This is a female. So I'm taking out the internal structures, which is the uterus, the rectum, and the bladder. And so that's what sits inside the pelvis. And so you can see this bowl of muscles here, right?

• 24:23Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting, I've never seen-

• 24:24Speaker 00

  And you can see them from the inside, and you could see them from the outside. That's your anus, and in this person, there's a vagina, so that's the hole for the vagina. So you can see that your anus and your vagina run through the pelvic floor, and in men, your penis runs through the pelvic floor. And so this, let me see if I can show you on this model. In this model, you can see, they kind of show you the muscles here on the side.

• 24:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  So these are your pelvic floor muscles that are around the penis and the anus.

• 24:49Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, okay.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Okay. These structures are very important for a variety of things. They attach to your bony landmarks here, your hips, your sacrum, your pubic symphysis, they attach to all these. And they sort of just work in the background for most people. How they affect your sexual function is, when you orgasm, these muscles contract and release at a rhythmic contraction of 0.8 seconds. And so you may feel that, right? There's like this pulsing feeling when you orgasm. And that's these muscles sort of doing that. And when men ejaculate, the pelvic floor muscles are contracting to help shoot the ejaculate out. They squeeze when you need to keep things in, so they'll keep urine in, they'll keep your stool in,

• 25:34Speaker 00

  and they relax when you need to pee and when you need to defecate.

• 25:37Steven Bartlett?

  So when you're trying to hold away, you're, like, tightening your pelvic floor muscles?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Correct, correct. But these are also responsive to stress. So just like people get TMJ, where they get tense in their jaw because they are stressed, and they, like, sleep at night, and they clench up their jaw, they don't really know they're doing it, the same thing can happen. These muscles can get very tight, or they can get misaligned. So say you have a hip injury, or say you have a back injury, the muscles can compensate by tightening up. And so a lot of people unknowingly have tension in these muscles. And it can present in multiple different ways. It can present with back pain, it can present with constipation, it can present with urgency frequency, because remember, your bladder is sitting right here, on top of these muscles. So when the muscles are

• 26:22Speaker 00

  tense, your bladder is feeling like there's something activating it. And so it's like, oh, man, I gotta pee, that means I have to pee. This tension is telling my bladder I have to pee. But it's really that your bladder's not that full, it's that these muscles are telling you to do that. You can also have trouble peeing, because you can see that your urethra goes through here. And if the muscles are really tight, sometimes it can be difficult to urinate, because it clenches off the pee. And then with sex, it can cause pain. If they're really tight, it can prevent blood from getting to the genital organs. So for men, they can have erectile dysfunction. For women, they can have difficulty getting orgasms, or difficulty getting arousal, because they're not getting blood flow to the clitoris. Sometimes it can also cause premature ejaculation in men. And so these

• 27:05Speaker 00

  muscles are so important. And all we hear about is kegels. And kegels are exercises to strengthen these muscles. But kegels are good when you have a normal pelvic floor, meaning, like, there's no tension, it's completely normal, it's acting normal, you're not having any symptoms at all. But if you have any of the symptoms I talked about, doing kegels might make it worse, because you're now tightening muscles that are already tight. We also talk about pelvic floor relaxation, doing exercise to specifically relax these muscles. So that can be diaphragmatic breathing, that can be doing, like, a figure four stretch, that can be doing happy baby pose, which are yoga poses, or child's pose. All these things can sort of stretch and lengthen these muscles, so they can learn to relax again.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Now, when it's really bad, you have to go see a pelvic floor physical therapist who can really work with you to identify which of the muscles are maybe more dysfunctional, and maybe work specifically on those. But I think it's so important, it's underevaluated, under-discussed when it comes to sexual function. It's a hugely important part of sexual function.

• 28:08Steven Bartlett?

  How many people are struggling with these issues, specifically, like, erectile dysfunction issues? And what age are they?

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it starts early. I think there's always been a sort of a disconnect, where we think, young guys don't have this, or if they have it, it's all in their head. That's not necessarily true. Many young men do develop erectile dysfunction because of biologic factors. But the data is really robust on older guys. So above the age of 50, we see 52% of men having erectile dysfunction, which is half-

• 28:39Steven Bartlett?

  52% of men?

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it goes up 10% every decade. So 60% of 60-year-olds, 70% of 70-year-olds. So erectile dysfunction continues to worsen. This happens because, one, you know, our blood vessels get older, they get stiffer, they're not functioning as well as they should. And we're seeing also a rise in all these other comorbid conditions, like diabetes, cholesterol, high blood pressure, all these affect how healthy your blood vessels are. And so with these, they see the problem in their penis, or in women's case, in their clitoris, before they see heart disease, or strokes, or brain issues, or dementia.

• 29:16Steven Bartlett?

  I think this is worth pausing on, which is, a erectile dysfunction problem is often a symptom of a cardiovascular issue, right?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, we call it a canary in a coal mine. So it is, like, telling you that something bad is coming. So the data would support that when you have erectile dysfunction, if it's because of an organic reason, right, not psychogenic, but most people, I think, have a combination of both, that within three to five years, you will start developing issues with your heart. And so it precedes those issues. And if seven years later, 14% of those guys will have a heart attack. And so it's really an opportunity. Sexual problems are an opportunity to look inside, to figure out what's going on, and to investigate, and to change your life.

• 30:03Steven Bartlett?

  And when you say erectile dysfunction, we should probably define what that means, because there's going to be a lot of guys sat at home now thinking, oh, my god, like, my penis is a bit softer than usual.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so erectile dysfunction is defined as the inability to maintain an erection that's sufficient for intercourse. So you can get an erection, but it goes away before you ejaculate or climax. And so that's typically, and I think it's really important to differentiate that from something like premature ejaculation, where you climax too soon. So you ejaculate before you want to, but that doesn't mean that you have a problem maintaining your erection, that's a whole different process.

• 30:39Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a friend, people are going to think I'm talking about myself, because I use that phrase a lot, I go, I've got a friend. He's, he's almost 40 years old, and I've heard him say, on several occasions, that he's lost his erection during sex. Is that erectile dysfunction? But what if he can keep his erection watching porn?

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Well, so that's more multifactorial, right? So I think, if you lose it once or twice, right, most guys will have an issue where they lose an erection at some point in their life. I think the important thing is not to catastrophize. It's a problem when it becomes a routine. Now, if someone is telling me, hey, I can watch porn and maintain my erection, but I can't with a partner, there's multiple different reasons for that, that could be at play. One is that there's no pressure, right? You're by yourself, you're watching porn, there's no pressure of performance, there's no anxiety of performance, so that may be part of it. Other thing may be that that level of arousal that you're getting from porn, if you're watching, like, let's say, the same kind of porn every time, you're masturbating the same way every time, maybe using a firm grip, or some people will masturbate,

• 31:39Speaker 00

  like, facing the bed, or, you know, against hard objects. And so that-

• 31:45Steven Bartlett?

  Against hard objects?

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, like their fist or something. And so that can't be replicated by a person, right? You can't replicate those behaviors by a vagina or a mouth. If you become habituated to a certain thing that turns you on, and that's the only thing that really gets you going, and that's, that's something that you can't really get with your partner, then it will be difficult to reach the level of arousal that you need to get an erection.

• 32:12Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so two questions then. So that doesn't count as erectile dysfunction if you can get an erection watching porn but can't get it with your partner?

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it may or may not be. So if you wake up with your morning erection, that's great, that's a sign, that's when there's nothing else at play, right? You are just, that tells me that your body's functioning well. You've got good blood flow, good, good hormones working, got a good amount of testosterone, and your nerves are working well, and you're getting a good morning erection. Now, morning erections or nighttime erections are normal, and they're healthy. So when you're a young boy, you get actually, like, erections three to five times a night, and they can last up to 40 minutes long. So you can spend a lot of your night with an erection. When you get older, like in your 40s, that drops to about half the time, so maybe erections are a little shorter, they maybe max out at 30 minutes, but sometimes they're shorter. You should still be getting three to five

• 33:02Speaker 00

  erections a night. You won't know all of these, but typically, you wake up with a morning erection. And so if you're not getting morning erections, that tells me that, hey, there's something going on that we should address.

• 33:11Steven Bartlett?

  And on your other point about how you masturbate impacting your sex life, I imagine that applies to men and women.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 33:19Steven Bartlett?

  And are you saying that if there's a particular way you get yourself off in private, that is very hard for the other person to replicate, you might become desensitized to that?

• 33:29Speaker 00

  You might just get habituated. I don't think desensitized, but habituated is like, you might just, your body just might respond really well to that particular stimulation. Now, that's not inherently a bad thing, right? If that's what gets you off, and you and your partner are okay with you doing that together, right? You may mutually masturbate together, and that's fun for you, and you guys enjoy it, there's no problem with it. It's just knowing what's going on, right? And sort of deciding, like, okay, if this is a problem, let me try to diversify what I do during my solo sex periods, or let me take a little break, and kind of try something, you know, just not masturbate for a little while, and come back to it later.

• 34:05Steven Bartlett?

  The fact that we get an erection in the morning, does that mean that we're supposed to have sex in the morning, from like, an evolutionary perspective?

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Not necessarily. It's just, it's the way your body releases testosterone is one of the reasons this happens, is overnight, your body is making more testosterone. That's when your body sort of has nocturnal testosterone production, and so it's highest in the morning, which is why very often you get a morning erection. And, you know, it just means that some people will have more desire also in the morning, because testosterone is a hormone of desire.

• 34:34Steven Bartlett?

  Is it the same for women?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so women, women also have nocturnal clitoral tumescence, same sort of pattern, and they won't necessarily know it, right, because they can't visualize it. But, you know, you can, some women may not sort of feel that pelvic congestion, or like, feeling that there's a bunch of, like, blood flow in the area. But most will not, and that's okay. But your body protects itself. So you've heard the term "use it or lose it," right? People are like, your body's protecting itself. You don't have to have sex. If your body is healthy, it will do this all night to keep your genitals healthy. It will make sure that your genitals are getting blood flow, even if you're not having sex. But if you stop having those nighttime erections, now it becomes more of a problem, because

• 35:18Speaker 00

  over time, say you stop having erections or clitoral tumescence for months, years, right? And then, there's no blood flow to those areas. Over time, and actually, I can show you here, this is a pelvic model, and here, this, this purple thing here is called the corpora cavernosa. And this is like a really nice, spongy tissue that fills with blood, and when it fills with blood, it expands and lengthens, and then the blood stays there until you're done with your stimulation, and then it goes back. And so if there's no healthy, fresh blood getting to the penis on a regular basis, either through nighttime erections or through sex with your partner, then you will get fibrosis of these tissues.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  That means you get a little scar in the tissues. And then over time, you might see some shrinkage of the penis. And so it is really important to maintain also good health of these tissues. And the same goes for women with their clitoris, because it's the same type of tissue. In fact, if you look at the clitoris, it is, this is the part that you see, we don't, right? We don't have a clitoris, do we?

• 36:20Speaker 05

  Is it that one there?

• 36:22Speaker 00

  This is the uterus.

• 36:23Steven Bartlett?

  You're gonna keep that in?

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Actually, I can show you here. There's this cut line.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  She told me it was a clitoris.

• 36:35Steven Bartlett?

  That's crazy.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, this is good, this is good.

• 36:37Steven Bartlett?

  They told me it was a clitoris.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  That's a little, that's, yeah, okay.

• 36:46Steven Bartlett?

  They told me?

• 36:49Speaker 00

  You're not gonna live that one down.

• 36:51Steven Bartlett?

  You asked the team where the clitoris was. Did you ask the team where the clitoris was?

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Well, I'm worried about who said that, too. Okay, so, so let's talk about the female anatomy. This is a pelvic model. And here, you can see, this is the vagina, this is the urethra, where you pee from, this is your labia minora, and you can't see the labia majora, but they would be out here, right? So inner lips, outer lips. Now, this up here is your clitoral glands. So it's the same as the glands of the penis. And so this is all you see, right? It also has a little covering, which you can't see here, just like men have foreskin, women have a clitoral hood that covers the head of the clitoris. And so when you look at the clitoris on the inside, which we can't see perfectly

• 37:36Speaker 00

  here, but I'm gonna just take this off, it actually goes all the way back, like this. So if you were to feel from the vagina, from the vaginal side, it would be at the very top of the vagina, going all the way back. These are the, these blue things are the clitoral bulbs here. And these are the legs of the clitoris here on the side. And so this is essentially the homolog of the penis. So if I take the penis, and we don't have a, like, a full model here-

• 38:05Steven Bartlett?

  What do homologs mean?

• 38:06Speaker 00

  So homologs means that they're essentially the same structure, they're made from the same cells, but they're in the male and the female. So here, you can see, this is, if this is your penis, this is what you see up to here, this is the bone, this is your fat up here. And then here, it goes deep into the pelvis. And so here's your testicles, right? And so below the testicles, this area of the perineum, you also have penile tissue, sort of, that you can palpate from this side, that's coming all the way down. And if you had sort of a 3D model, you'd see that it forks out, just like the clitoris does.

• 38:40Steven Bartlett?

  So does clitoral stimulation feel like stimulating someone's tip of their penis?

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so you could think, if someone just stimulated the head of the penis, they, it would be fine, it would be nice, but it's probably better if you stimulate more of the clitoris, or more of the penis. That's where you could stimulate, obviously, the external, the clitoris, but you can also stimulate from the inside. And some people are more responsive to that than others. What you hear of is like the G-spot, or the G-zone, right? And the G-spot or G-zone is, if you were to go in the inside of the vagina, at the top side, which I can't really stick this in here, but it would be about two centimeters in at the top. And that's because, that's an area where there's a lot of nerves endings. One, you can palpate the clitoris, basically, throughout the entire anterior wall, but

• 39:28Speaker 00

  also, there's the skeins glands, which are these glands that sit underneath the urethra, and they're the homolog of the male prostate. And so, they're right there, and then the vagina is there. And so that's an area that can be very enjoyable to stimulate. It's not necessarily always going to lead to orgasm, because some people have different sort of distance between the clitoral body and the vagina. So some people who have less distance may feel it better than some that don't. But ultimately, that's why that area is so sensitive for many women.

• 40:00Steven Bartlett?

  On this point of morning erections, I was thinking- Much of the reason why I've always been cautious of having sex in the morning, or even masturbating in the morning or anything like that, is I'm worried that it will cause a dopamine crash, which will make me feel lazy and lethargic.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Well, so when you think about what happens during an orgasm is you have this release of dopamine and then your prolactin goes up and sort of like everything calms down. Now, some people feel a sense of clarity. They call it post-nut clarity, right? They feel clear, they feel motivated to do stuff. They feel excited to go do something else and they sort of move on from what they're doing. There's some people who feel post-coital dysphoria. They actually feel sad or they feel depressed after the orgasm. And we don't know exactly why this happens, but it is because of this dramatic change in sort of neurochemical signaling in the brain. And for those people who have it, it can be days where they sort of like feel bad. It can be hours where they feel sad. And so it can be really traumatic.

• 40:58Steven Bartlett?

  So pillar two, what's pillar two of the four pillars of men's sexual health?

• 41:03Speaker 00

  We talked about strength.

• 41:04Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so we did strength, we did fuel. What's pillar three?

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Pillar three is environment. So we can start with the easy stuff and that's stress, right? Everyone knows stress is bad, but I think the thing is, people just think like, ah, I'll just, I'll deal with it. Everyone's stressed, like it's normal to be stressed. If you are chronically stressed, that means your cortisol is raised all the time, which is dampening your testosterone, which is also keeping you in the sympathetic state and you just cannot get in your mind space and in the nervous system place to actually have sex. So that's super important. And I think, you know, there's lots of different ways to alleviate stress. You've got to figure out what works for you. For some people, using a stress ball even, just at work. And I think part of it, you can actually incorporate some intimacy.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  There's some evidence, you know, the Gottmans have been on your podcast, doing a 20-second hug. So standing with your partner or a loved one and hugging for 20 seconds on your own, like independent gravity, actually helps alleviate stress and break sort of a stress loop. Doing a six-second kiss with your partner. And so it seems like six seconds, no big deal. But actually, if you time it, it's like, hmm, if I'm just doing a kiss and I'm not like, actually, it's a little bit longer than normal. And so these sort of small things can help alleviate stress. Any type of movement can be really beneficial.

• 42:23Steven Bartlett?

  The gym is great, breath work as well.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  The other thing is just having like interactions with people. And so that's where we're becoming more isolated. But even just like talking to the barista or talking to someone at the grocery store. This again tells your brain that you're in a safe space. Like you're talking to someone, you're having a normal social interaction. So, and then being creative. And we've been trying to work with this, work on this with our kids because there's so much external stimuli all the time, right? They want to play video games, they want to watch TV, they want to play sports. But we want them to be bored and be creative, like come up with creative ideas to keep themselves interested and engaged in a different way. So I think that's so, so important. And outside of stress, sleep, sleep is, there's just so much abundance of data on how sleep affects hormonal health.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  They looked at data on men sleeping five hours a night versus eight hours a night. So you take the same guy and he sleeps eight hours and you, you know, do five, five hours for a few days. His test for a week, his testosterone drops by 15%. That's like as much testosterone drop as would happen with 10 years of life.

• 43:26Steven Bartlett?

  And do you know how long they did that for?

• 43:28Speaker 00

  It was short, it was like a week. So a week of sleep deprivation will, will tank your testosterone. And sleep apnea is another one that I think people, one, don't realize they have and two, don't realize that fixing it could actually improve their hormonal health.

• 43:41Steven Bartlett?

  Wait, so does this mean that people who have chronically bad sleep probably have low testosterone?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Probably, yeah.

• 43:47Steven Bartlett?

  And what is the symptoms of low testosterone?

• 43:50Speaker 00

  So low testosterone, they're sometimes very vague. So it can be fatigue, it can be brain fog, it can be depression, it can be low desire, it can be erectile dysfunction. That's what people always think. It's just erectile dysfunction, but it's this whole constellation of symptoms. It can also be increased fat mass, decreased muscle mass. So all of these things can happen because we have testosterone receptors all over our body. We have them in our brain, we have them in our muscle, we have them in our bone. And these can all have really serious consequences when it's low. When you have sleep apnea and how you know you have sleep apnea is your partner might tell you that you're like waking up in the middle of the night, gasping for air. If you have one really easy way to check is take a measuring tape and measure your neck circumference.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  If it's more than 17 inches for a guy or 16 inches for a female, it means it's very likely that you may have sleep apnea. And that's because when you have excess mass, basically here, it's compressing your airway and can make it difficult to get air into your, into your body. When you improve sleep apnea, we've seen improvements in testosterone as high as 200 nanograms per deciliter. So huge jumps in testosterone after fixing sleep apnea. And the same goes for other sleep disorders, although the data is not as abundant. But sleep is so important. Then we talk about what's in your environment. So, let's grab this. Okay. So you get a bottle of water. So many of my patients, actually, they only buy like cases of plastic bottled water.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Once in a while, a plastic bottle of water, like don't stress yourself out. This goes back to stress. People get really stressed, like what's in my environment? What am I drinking? What am I eating? Like do what you can control. So plastic water bottles have things like phthalates and BPAs, which can affect hormonal health. They can mimic estrogen, they can reduce the production of testosterone based on these mechanisms. Also things like plastics in the environment, PFAS, so those things in like non-stick cookware, all those things can affect hormone health. Now, how do you sort of protect yourself, right? I tell people, again, don't stress, there's only so much you can control. So like, I love that we're not drinking out of plastic. If you have to drink out of plastic because you're at an event or whatever,

• 46:04Speaker 00

  try to make sure it's not a, a warm bottle. So it hasn't been like sitting in the sun for hours and hours and hours. Because as it gets warm, it releases more microplastics and more chemicals into the water. When you're eating food, if you are eating out of, say you get takeout, put it on a plate and warm it up. Don't ever warm up that plastic. And when you store food in the fridge, put it in a glass container or a metal container. But don't ever leave the food in the plastic and put it in the fridge. These are simple things you can control. You could also limit sort of your exposure to dust because dust has microplastics. You can try to wear more cotton fabrics, less synthetic fabrics, because they shed less microplastics. But again, I think do what you can do,

• 46:46Speaker 00

  but don't let the stress of these chemicals like derail you because stress is not helping either.

• 46:52Steven Bartlett?

  And how much of a difference does, you know, microplastics make on my hormonal health? Is it really a big, big deal?

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Well, I think it depends. It's all dose dependent, right? So we're all exposed. Like if you look at the data, like people are, you know, consuming quite a bit of microplastics and we're seeing them actually even in testicles, in penis tissue samples, like they're in our bodies. And so I think that it's definitely playing a role, how much we don't know yet. We just know that there are mechanisms and we know that they do affect hormonal health. And so do the best you can.

• 47:23Steven Bartlett?

  Do you and your family drink out of plastic bottles?

• 47:26Speaker 00

  No, we drink, we, we have like metal water bottles for the kids and myself and.

• 47:30Steven Bartlett?

  What about non-stick pans?

• 47:32Speaker 00

  We buy ceramic. We, we do our best to like avoid those as much as possible. So the other thing is the company you keep. I think we don't talk about this enough and we talk about it in terms of business. Like you want to keep people who are successful around you. You want to keep people who can help you. But it also plays a role in your sexual environment, right? So my husband is in these groups with a bunch of other male physicians and there's a lot of discussion about how they never have sex anymore. And they're all just like, oh yeah, this is just like normal. Like we're getting older, our partners don't want to have sex, it's so frustrating. And there's a lot of discussion about this. And, and it's, it's almost like, oh, that's okay. Like that's just normal, right? They're normalizing this experience where that sex has not become a priority because life is so stressful, things are so crazy. Maybe you're having relationship discord. So it absolutely plays a role.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  And there's actually some evidence that it may help you make better choices. So there's one study where they looked at, I think it was like 50,000 people and they did an intervention where they tried to encourage these people to surround themselves with positive influences that were like, have safe sex and avoid negative influences. And they saw that for, that these people had an increase in like sexual positive behavior. So like safe sex practices by 46%. So just by changing who they spent their time with, they saw this major difference in how they approached their sex lives.

• 48:52Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so if your friends are very pessimistic about sex and they're not having and they're complaining about it, that's going to become sort of contagious.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think it extrapolates to everything. What kind of relationships you're in? How do they view their relationship with their partner? Is it a priority? Do they make it a priority, right? Or are they just busy doing their own thing and they're just like living in parallel lives? They're doing their own thing, you're doing your own thing. You never really spend time with your partner. And then when you go hang out with your friends, you're like, oh God, I'm so glad to get away. And you're not like talking about how much you enjoy your partner. People tend to talk negatively, right? They want to like sort of like vent. And so when you have people who don't make that a part of their lives, it also affects you. They value their partner and they talk about them in a positive way. That's a great thing to say like, okay, this is the right kind of person I want because I want to value my partner too. And I don't want that to rub off on me because it absolutely does.

• 49:46Steven Bartlett?

  And the other thing you said in this category of environmental stuff is things like pornography consumption. Is it possible to consume too much porn?

• 49:52Speaker 00

  So it's not the amount of porn that you watch. It is the, sort of the way you feel about it. Many people watch porn for a variety of different reasons. Most often it's for pleasure and enjoyment. But there's some people who watch porn because they want to get away from negative feelings, right? This is giving them dopamine and they're using it as a way to just feel better in the moment. And so that become, that can become a compulsion where they're watching porn and it's like giving them these positive feelings and they feel negative in life and they're going back to porn to sort of again have that compulsion to watch porn again. But that's a small subset of people. The other thing is that there is a lot of negative discussion around porn, right? People like porn is bad, it's dangerous, it's evil. And I think, you know, it's more nuanced than that.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  But if you feel that porn is bad, every time you watch porn, you feel negative, you feel bad about yourself. That's where we see people having the most dysfunction associated with it because they feel guilty. They could watch it once a year and they could feel super guilty about it and it could affect their sexual function. They could see themselves as a bad person, they could see themselves as wrong or immoral. And that's really when it becomes an issue. If you are finding yourself either compulsively watching pornography and using it as a scapegoat, maybe time to reevaluate. Say, why am I doing this? How can I switch this out for something else that makes me feel better? That might be healthy, like exercise or going for walks or whatever that may be. And then if it's something that's really making you feel like bad or guilty

• 51:19Speaker 00

  because maybe that's how you were raised, maybe that's what you feel about morality, then yeah, maybe like you either need to work through that because porn is maybe something that you still want to watch at times or you need to abstain. But usually those are, it's very difficult to abstain for most people to abstain for prolonged periods of time. So I think it's, it's something that you have to work through if you find yourself having these sort of feelings about pornography or you're compulsively watching it. But for the most people, it's adults, for most adults, it is fantasy. It's a place where you can experience, see things that you may never do in real life that may be enjoyable, that are fun to watch, that arouse you to feel arousal. We see that when couples watch porn together, they are more likely to be more satisfied in their relationship.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  And when there's a discord, like one person really doesn't like it or doesn't use it and the other one uses it a lot, that's where we see the problem.

• 52:09Steven Bartlett?

  Is porn consumption going to impact my intimacy with my partner?

• 52:14Speaker 00

  So it depends. I think a lot of people watch it without an issue, right? They watch it.

• 52:19Steven Bartlett?

  Because if I masturbate and I ejaculate, I'm not going to then be able to ejaculate very quickly necessarily with my partner.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that obviously that is, you know, there's a refractory period after you ejaculate. Now, when you're younger, that refractory period could be minutes. And when you're older, that can be a day and a half. And so we see that some people may struggle, especially if they're watching a lot of porn every single day and their refractory period is maybe a day, then they may actually really have trouble ejaculating with their partner because they've not given themselves that time.

• 52:50Steven Bartlett?

  This has had probably the single biggest impact on my office. Of all the products that I've tried that have given me productivity gains or cognitive boosts, I would say that exogenous ketones are in the top three most pivotal things that have given me a massive productivity gain. It's some Stanford graduates that have been able to basically bottle up the effect you get from being in a ketogenic diet in a small shot that you can take that makes you feel incredibly focused and gives your brain an incredible source of energy. And the clinical studies that have been done on exogenous ketones have absolutely blown my mind. I reached out to them, I became a co-founder in the company, I became an investor in the company. And so it's with great pride that I can tell you that this exists. If you haven't tried these shots,

• 53:34Steven Bartlett?

  go to ketone.com/steven for 30% off your subscription order and you'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. I still buy my ketone shots predominantly online, but thankfully I can now grab them at Target whenever I drive past them here in the United States as well because we're now stocked in Target where your first shot is completely free. One of the smartest things a business can do is build like a bigger company without actually hiring like one. But the problem we all face is that most companies don't have every skill in house. So when I look at the businesses seeing real success today, the consistent pattern with all of them is how quickly they move. They bring in specialists with skills in emerging areas to keep themselves ahead. Even in our company, we spent the last year pulling in talent

• 54:15Steven Bartlett?

  across areas like AI native strategy, no code builds and product workflows. And we find this talent through our longtime partner, Fiverr Pro. Their premium service only shows you vetted talent. So you've always got the safeguard that anyone you pull in to help you with a complex project has the skills that you're after and will deliver to the same high standards as your internal team. And most importantly, they'll keep up with the pace. It's a simple strategy, but it lets us stay agile without compromising on quality. So if you need these kind of skills in your business, head to pro.fiverr.com to find pioneering talent to fill your business's gaps. That's pro.fiverr.com. And the last one, the last of the four pillars.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  The last of the four pillars we talked a little bit about, it's called confidence. And confidence is not like strutting around like a peacock, like I know what I'm doing. It's confidence in knowledge and curiosity. So knowledge, we talked about a little bit, understanding female anatomy. Like how do female bodies get aroused, right? What makes them aroused? Where is the clitoris? Knowing some anatomy. And two, actually talking to your partner or paying attention to their cues. We, for some reason with sex, it's the only time that we just expect people to be mind readers. We just want you to know what I like and just go for it, right? And, and then when it's not good, you're like, well, you just don't know what you're doing. And it's like, it's, it's wild to me that we actually never got taught how to talk about sex, how to bring it up with a partner,

• 55:36Speaker 00

  how to, you know, just explore and have fun with sex. Maybe add a toy to the bedroom. So there's lots of different types of toys. This is a vulva stimulator. So you put this on the outside so you can see that it would, in theory, if this was smaller, would stimulate the, the clitoris on the outside. It also can change in shape. It'll vibrate, right? It'll have different stimulations that you can play around with and decide what you enjoy.

• 56:03Steven Bartlett?

  So this one's run out of battery.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  They're brand new, they've not been used.

• 56:10Steven Bartlett?

  I didn't say they had been. Very defensive though. So if my pinky finger, if my finger here is the clitoris,

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:16Steven Bartlett?

  I put it on like there.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:19Steven Bartlett?

  And then it vibrates.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 56:21Steven Bartlett?

  And then the penis goes through the hole.

• 56:23Speaker 00

  And there's another version of that. This is basically, ooh. This is basically like the hole goes around the penis.

• 56:31Steven Bartlett?

  And that goes in.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  And that can go in and stimulate and vibrate. So you both feel the vibration and you both feel the stimulation.

• 56:38Steven Bartlett?

  I remember I was with, had a partner and she, she felt that sex toys were for older people, old people, specifically what she said. And she, she was kind of against the use of them. I've always been down. I think it adds novelty and it's exciting and it just adds something new. But she felt like it was almost like giving up.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, look, I think, I wonder why. I would, I would, if I, she was here, I'd ask her, why do you think that? What belief system do you have that's making you think that this is like not a good thing to use, right? We use technology in so many places in our lives, right? So why not introduce it in our sex lives?

• 57:13Steven Bartlett?

  Are you going to become reliant on it though? Because it does make it easier to get off with a sex toy.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  So they've actually looked at vibration and can you get desensitized to it? And the way they've looked at it is actually like construction workers where they're using those like vibration tools, right? To, and, and seeing if like their hands get desensitized. And what they've seen is yes, for a short period of time, they do lose a little bit of sensation on their fingertips, but then it restores back to normal. And so it's not that you're going to become desensitized forever, right? I think you brought up a great point with just adding novelty. Now, I think when I say novelty, people are like, oh my God, I need to role play in a different way or bring like some sort of BDSM or whatever into my sex life. And that's not exactly true. So when you think about sex, right? It's just like eating your favorite ice cream. Maybe you have vanilla ice cream, you know, three times a week and you enjoy it.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  But if you start having vanilla ice cream every single day, you're kind of bored with it, right? And the same goes for sex. Now, having routine in sex, knowing what you like, knowing what your partner likes, it can be very helpful. But it also is nice to add novelty. So if you think about, you could extrapolate from the flow state. So when you are in a flow state for work, right? Things feel really almost effortless and you're just like in a zone. You can also get into a sexual flow state. When you look at the flow state, yeah, you need things to be slightly challenging to get into the flow state. They can't be easy and they can't be so hard that you're going to get frustrated, right? And so you need to add a slight challenge to your sexual encounter to get into that flow state. And that's when you start having really great sex.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  Cause you're like in, you're so totally immersed, you're feeling great and it's, it's super fun, right? So I think that's another part of being confident, is being able to and confident to try new things and explore new things. And it can be as simple as like doing it in a different room or maybe getting a pillow or switching where your head position is. Like it can be so small, but it can just add a little bit of uniqueness and novelty and challenge.

• 59:12Steven Bartlett?

  Are there certain positions that are going to increase the probability that my partner has an orgasm?

• 59:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so typically when the female partner is on top, she has more control over where she's getting stimulation to the clitoris. Cause right, she can angle her body in such a way. So oftentimes that shows, that has higher orgasm rates. There's actually like this, this technique called the coital alignment technique where you sort of move in a rocking. A sort of a rocking motion so that your pubic symphysis, so this bone right here, is sort of like rubbing against their clitoris, like this area, the skin here is rubbing against the clitoris while you're penetrating, and that has been shown to increase orgasm rate and pleasure. And so really, it's about figuring out and trying different things and realizing like

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  that, for example, that coital alignment technique is sort of difficult, like it's not that easy and intuitive, and so you have to sort of play around with it and figure out like what is gonna work best. And yeah, realizing it might not work, you might be like super awkward and be like, okay, like that's okay, like it's not the end of the world if sex is not perfect every time because we're learning and we're playing and we're having fun. And so I think that's really the key is like not letting yourself get so frustrated if something doesn't go exactly the way you envision it in your head.

• 1:00:30Steven Bartlett?

  I used to think that a woman orgasming was when, this was when I was younger, was when she squirted.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:36Steven Bartlett?

  So like, that's what I thought it was, I thought an orgasm was squirting.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you're probably not the only one to think that. And so squirting, not every woman squirts, so about forty percent of women squirt. Squirting is the emission of fluid at the time of orgasm, usually it's clear, colorless, and it can be quite voluminous. It's coming from the urethra, which is the pee hole essentially. And remember I talked about those Skene's glands? Those Skene's glands are the homolog of the male prostate, and they have a little bit of fluid in them too. Typically, when you have stimulation and squirting, they will release fluid from the bladder as well as the Skene's glands that combines together, and it's emitted through that.

• 1:01:18Steven Bartlett?

  So it's not pee?

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  The way they describe it, and there's been a lot of research on this, so there's people who say it's pee, there's people who say it's not, there's a couple of studies. So one is they put dye into the bladder, and they took women who said they were squirters, and they had them orgasm, and they saw, is there dye in the, in the fluid? And yeah, there was dye in the fluid. So it's coming, it has to come from the bladder, the Skene's glands only hold a small amount. But it's chemically different, it's usually clear, odorless, it doesn't smell like pee. And so there's some theories as to why that might be. It may be that when you're having sex, there's different hormonal signals that change the concentration of what's filtering through your kidneys so that it is a little bit different in composition. There's some theories that when there's more estrogen around, that it may change, there

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  may be some like fluid filling in the actual interstitia of the organs. Again, it's hard to say, but it's absolutely coming from the urethra, which is connected to the bladder, as well as the Skene's glands. But I think like this, this whole discussion about what it is, it doesn't matter. Like, is it pleasurable? Are you enjoying it? Great. If you squirt and you enjoy it, great. If you don't, that doesn't mean that there's something wrong and that your partner hasn't orgasmed. The way to figure out if your partner orgasmed is you ask her, right? Either she tells you or you ask her. And sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes it's not, but you know, you sort of figure it out.

• 1:02:38Steven Bartlett?

  There's three theories that emerged in my research about why women squirt from an evolutionary perspective. The first was that, and these are just theories, they're not proven, of course, the first is that squirting contains PSA and zinc, which are naturally antibacterial, and ejaculating these fluids during or after sex may have evolved to flush the urethra and prevent UTIs. And the logic being in a pre-antibiotic world, a woman who could flush bacteria out of her system after mating was more likely to stay healthy and reproduce. That's one theory. The other is-

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Well, before you, I wanna talk about that really quickly.

• 1:03:09Steven Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  So that's a really interesting theory. So one, the reason they emit PSA is because Skene's glands are the homolog of the prostate.

• 1:03:17Steven Bartlett?

  Which means-

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  So the prostate makes PSA, which is prostate-specific antigen.

• 1:03:21Steven Bartlett?

  So this point, this word homolog again.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so basically, the prostate in the male-

• 1:03:25Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  The same tissue, when you're an embryo, becomes the prostate in the male and becomes a Skene's gland in the female. So that's why it's emitting PSA. That is an interesting theory because there are a subset of women who get UTIs after sex, not everybody, but some do. And it's, it's not because of the ejaculate or because of the male harboring some bacteria, it's because of the actual thrusting of the penis, it's taking bacteria from the outside and making it more easy for it to go through the urethra into the bladder. And women have a short urethra. And so I want just to debunk that myth that it's like you're getting it from your partner or there's something wrong with you, it is literally just anatomy. And so some women do get more UTIs after sex. And so that is an interesting theory because maybe that's true, I don't know.

• 1:04:08Steven Bartlett?

  The second theory was, in ancient ancestors, the hormonal surge during orgasm and ejaculation actually triggered the release of an egg. Humans evolved to ovulate on a cycle now, but we kept the plumbing and the neurohormonal reflex. It's a happy accident, a biological vestige that no longer serves its original reproductive purpose, but remains because it isn't harmful for survival.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  Interesting. I mean, there is some thought that maybe orgasming, spasm, orgasm help with fertility, but it's not really robust.

• 1:04:38Steven Bartlett?

  And the last one kind of matches what you just said there, which is the mate selection theory, the intense pleasure and psychological response of squirting or orgasm act as a reward system. It incentivizes women to seek out specific partners who provide high levels of stimulation, potentially signaling a better genetic compatibility or a more attentive male, which would help with the survival of offspring, maybe.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  That makes sense.

• 1:05:02Steven Bartlett?

  Forty percent of women squirt.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the other thing is, obviously, a lot of sex is focused on genitals, but there's a whole body of erogenous zones, right? Almost, almost your entire body can be an erogenous zone. We talked a little bit about it, we talked about sunset focus, right? You can explore, you can find areas that people find erogenous. So when you've looked at data, necks, nipples, lips, buttocks, inner thighs, all these areas are considered erogenous by most, most people, regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of their cultural upbringing, it seems to be pretty universal. There's actually a famous paper about non-genital orgasms, and like how people orgasm without any genital stimulation. So lip orgasms, anal sex orgasms-

• 1:05:49Steven Bartlett?

  Is that possible?

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's been documented, absolutely. And, and so it's nipple orgasms, there's a whole variety of ways, even like women have had orgasms during childbirth, like there's, there have been these documented ways to orgasm, and it's because these areas can be very erogenous. And sometimes stimulating multiple areas can like add more erogenous interest, and that's why you see people, like maybe in the BDSM community, they'll, they'll be using nipple clamps while they're doing other things, right? So there's, there's a whole bunch of areas that are erogenous, and most of the times, people are not really spending much time on foreplay or stimulating these erogenous zones as much as they should, right? You, you have a whole body to play with. And how do you stimulate them? There's actually evidence behind that.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  So on your skin, we have these special fibers called C-tactile afferens. When you stimulate these fibers, they help you feel pleasure, enjoyment, those sorts of things. And so there was a study where they took nineteen couples, a small study, it was not at London, and they basically told them to stimulate an erogenous zone and a non-erogenous zone, the non-erogenous zone being the forehead. And so they had the couple stimulated, and they told them stimulated at levels of eighteen centimeters per second, in terms of how fast you're caressing the arm or, or body part, and at three centimeters per second. And what they found was those who stimulated at three centimeters per second had more sexual arousal, had more pleasant stimulation compared to those who were stimulating it at eighteen centimeters per second.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Now, this makes sense because those C-tactile afferent fibers respond very well to that slow, gentle caress. The other interesting thing is that these fibers are only responsive to human touch. So if I take a glove and I put it on my hand and I touch you, it still doesn't work.

• 1:07:35Steven Bartlett?

  That's so interesting because in Los Angeles where we are now, we were viewing an office, and we were walking down the street to see what the neighborhood was like, and we walked past one place, and it is a robot massage parlor.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:07:48Steven Bartlett?

  And I always thought, great, like, well, part of me thought, maybe my prefrontal cortex thought, oh, great idea, because, you know, you can get massages whenever you want-

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07:57Steven Bartlett?

  It's gonna be cheap, maybe you can have one in your home.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Steven Bartlett?

  But then the other part of me, as I saw it, thought, actually, I don't actually think that's like why I get massages.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Steven Bartlett?

  I think there's something about human touch which makes a big difference.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Absolutely, there is. And so I think that's, we're evolutionary, evolutionarily built to seek out human touch and human behavior.

• 1:08:16Steven Bartlett?

  I wonder if I would want a robot to massage me?

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:08:20Steven Bartlett?

  It wouldn't be as good, nah.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  I mean, think about sitting in a massage chair, is it ever as good?

• 1:08:25Steven Bartlett?

  It's never as good.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Right? And so I don't think a robot's gonna be that different from a, maybe a little better than a massage chair, but like-

• 1:08:31Steven Bartlett?

  Massage chairs are never good.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  No, they're just like, they're okay, they're mediocre.

• 1:08:36Steven Bartlett?

  Rena, I wanna talk about testosterone, how that links to sexual function, but also just overall health, because I was reading that there's been a three hundred percent increase in the United States in the last ten years of testosterone prescriptions. And my friends are increasingly having a conversation about testosterone, which we weren't having even five years ago, it wasn't a conversation. And now, the conversation I'm having amongst my friends is like, is our testosterone high enough, do we need to go get supplements to increase our testosterone?

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Testosterone is declining. So when you look at testosterone levels from the nineteen nineties, like late nineteen nineties, the average level was around six hundred, and if you look at data around two, twenty fifteen, it was four fifty. So there's been like a twenty-five percent decline in testosterone. Now you're gonna ask me why. One, we talked about some of the endocrine-disrupting chemicals, that's part of it, certainly. Two, there's a significant rise in obesity. Testosterone has aromatase, and testosterone converts to estrogen using this enzyme called aromatase. And so when you have more fat mass, you have more aromatase, and more testosterone is being converted to estrogen. And so now you have less testosterone.

• 1:09:41Steven Bartlett?

  Sorry, how do we, how do you have less testosterone?

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  So because there's more fat mass, there's more aromatase. So that aromatase sees all this testosterone and it converts it to estrogen.

• 1:09:50Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  Okay, or estrogen.

• 1:09:52Steven Bartlett?

  And this is why they say, they talk about man boobs.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so when you have a lot of estradiol around, you can get man boobs.

• 1:09:58Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  You can get gynecomastia, is a term for it. So that's one. Two is, we see a rise in diabetes and insulin resistance, which also causes a decrease in testosterone. We're seeing a rise in ultra-processed food intake, and that doesn't have the optimal nutrition that you need to optimize testosterone. So we're getting, you know, highly caloric, which then leads to obesity, we're getting lack of healthy fats, where, you know, all these things are super important for testosterone. The Mediterranean diet is what has been the most studied, and basically, anti-inflammatory diet is what they found for testosterone. So trying to just eat like whole foods, unprocessed foods as much as possible, and minimizing

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  the inflammatory foods.

• 1:10:45Steven Bartlett?

  Does testosterone, having high testosterone make me more fertile?

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  No, not necessarily. So I think people inherently think that the higher your testosterone level is, when you check your blood work, that that's better. And that's not necessarily true. Now, everyone is different, and what I can't tell you is what your receptors look like, what your testosterone or androgen receptors look like, how sensitive are they to testosterone? And everyone's a little bit different. When you look at the same guy, or you look at two different guys, their variability can be so much that a guy who's nine hundred can be normal, and a guy who's five hundred can be normal, because everyone has individual genetic variations. It's how their cells, how sensitive their cells are, how many cells they have, you know, how many Leydig cells do they have in their testicles?

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  The CAG repeats, which are these DNA repeats on the receptor themselves, people who have more are less sensitive to the testosterone that's around, so they need more testosterone to get the same result, whereas people who have less repeats have more sensitivity, so they, they don't need as much testosterone. And so everyone is individual, and so that's why it's really important to understand, how are you feeling, right? It's not about chasing a number. And so absolutely, we know that when your testosterone is low, below two fourteen nanograms per deciliter, that your risk of mortality goes up by two. So you are gonna double your risk of dying if you have low testosterone. But when you go super high, super physiologic, meaning like eighteen hundred or higher, now you're putting yourself at risk for other things.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  You can have blood thickening, which is a known side effect of testosterone replacement, and that puts you at risk for stroke, heart attack, heart disease. Over long periods of time, it can affect your heart, because it can, there's also heart muscle cells that get exposed to this high level of testosterone, and when that happens, these, they sort of change over time, and they become more collagen deposition, they get more fibrosis, and this makes them stiffer, and so that you're not pumping blood as effectively as you would otherwise. And so there are real consequences to going too high. There's also the side effects of having acne, of changes in mood, in terms of aggression and things, when you get really high. So really, it's about finding what you feel good at.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  More is not necessarily better. Once your testosterone receptors are saturated, meaning they're all bound to testosterone, more doesn't help you. It might help you get more muscles, which is why people abuse anabolic steroids and testosterone, because it will continue to help you get bigger muscles, but that's it, it's not gonna help you with your brain health, your bone health, your sexual health, your any of that.

• 1:13:19Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a way to visually spot a person with low testosterone? Are there visual clues?

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Usually, it's someone who feels very fatigued, like they can't get out of bed, they feel just like so drained, usually they are a little bit more overweight.

• 1:13:35Steven Bartlett?

  Skinny fat?

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Visceral adipos, I mean, you can't always tell if they're skinny, it could be, because they could have visceral adiposity, which is meaning that the fat is around the, the organs, right? And so you don't see like a big pot belly necessarily. They may have really low sexual desire, they may have decrease in mood.

• 1:13:53Steven Bartlett?

  What about skin and bones? Does it impact skin and bones?

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if you get high testosterone, you can get acne, because it affects the sebum in the skin. Bone health, so testosterone converts to estradiol. And estradiol is really important for bone metabolism. And so when you have low testosterone, you can also have low estrogen, and when your estrogen gets very low, you get a higher risk for fractures, higher risk for osteoporosis, and so that's where your bone health can be in danger. And so that's why testosterone can help protect your bones because of its conversion to estradiol.

• 1:14:29Steven Bartlett?

  If you do have low testosterone, should you be considering taking anabolic steroids? Like, and who is testosterone replacement therapy good for?

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna ask you a question, why, why are you saying anabolic steroids?

• 1:14:41Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know, because I hear that people, big bodybuilders take anabolic steroids.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  The reason I asked you that is because people think anabolic steroids and testosterone replacement therapy are the same thing, and they're not. And so testosterone replacement therapy is what is given to guys who have low testosterone. If you have truly low testosterone, there's a few things, you can obviously improve testosterone naturally by going back to those pillars of health that we talked about, improve your sleep, do resistance training, avoid endocrine-disrupting chemicals. But if you are still low despite doing all those things, or you're like so fatigued that you can't move your body and you really need to do it, then I think testosterone replacement is, is very valuable. And so testosterone replacement is getting you to a level of testosterone that is within normal. We're not trying to get you super high, we're not trying to get you to become a bodybuilder,

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  we're trying to get you to normal, what you should be. And so anabolic steroids are different. Anabolic steroids are like all these different oral pills and injectables and things that work on muscle as well as work on your androgen receptors. And so those are typically things that people are taking on their own, they're kind of self-directing their care, and they're not really monitoring their testosterone, or they don't really care how high they go, they just want the end product of looking muscular. And so they are getting really high testosterone, and that has its own host of concerns, in addition to the ones we talked about, like blood clots and, and heart attack, but there's

• 1:16:09Speaker 00

  a fifteen times higher risk of having premature heart failure, and a hundred and twenty-two times more risk of cardiac death when you're taking anabolic steroids for the purposes of increasing muscle mass and not, and getting really high in your testosterone. So it is a real, serious issue when you take anabolic steroids, because it can have real, serious health consequences.

• 1:16:33Steven Bartlett?

  I've always imagined that once I have kids, so I'm, I think I'm scared that if I have testosterone replacement therapy at this age, at thirty-three, it might impact my fertility.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  It absolutely will.

• 1:16:43Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, good, so I'm not gonna do that until I've had all four of the kids-

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Steven Bartlett?

  As many as I can. And then, I figured, when I hit like forty-five, then I'll go on testosterone replacement therapy. Is this a good strategy?

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, I would wanna know why you wanna be on testosterone. Is your testosterone low?

• 1:17:01Steven Bartlett?

  I have no idea.

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  Right? Are you having any symptoms? I mean, you live a very high-powered, busy life, and so I can guarantee your stress is probably not under control, like probably you're not sleeping great, and not to say that those are things that, you know, you can't do in addition to taking testosterone if your testosterone is indeed low. But I think the important thing is realizing, like, it's only gonna help you if your testosterone receptors are not fully saturated, and giving you more testosterone is going to saturate them.

• 1:17:30Steven Bartlett?

  Doesn't it just drop anyway with age?

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  It does, so it drops about one percent a year on average, some people drop less, some people drop more. So if you look at someone who is healthy, and they have a normal testosterone, they usually won't become what we call hypogonadal, or have low testosterone even as they age, because the drop is so low, it's only one percent a year. But if you add on these comorbid conditions, if you add on a high-stress life, if you add on poor sleep, if you add on exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, you're gonna see that number come down much higher.

• 1:18:04Steven Bartlett?

  It's actually, I was just, I pulled up a graph here that shows testosterone decline with age, and it's actually not that steep.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  It's not. It is gonna decline, but it may not decline to the point where you need testosterone. So not everyone needs it. Depending on the data you look at, twenty to forty percent of guys have low testosterone, and when you look at the number that get treated, it's like two percent.

• 1:18:28Steven Bartlett?

  And it starts declining from about twenty years old?

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it depends on the person, twenty to forty years old, it's probably more around thirty to forty. And the reason we came up with these numbers, right, these guidelines to, to guide us on what's normal and what's not, is because you look at population-based data, and you look at when these symptoms arise, and there are like clear numbers, that you may start having bone loss around three hundred, you might start having, you know, decreased sexual frequency of thoughts at two fifteen, you might start having, feeling less physical vigor around two ninety, right? And so there are numbers that we know, based on population-based data, that we're seeing these numbers decline. Now, the other thing to think about when you're looking at testosterone is free testosterone.

• 1:19:12Speaker 00

  So testosterone comes in different forms in the body, it comes bound and unbound. So forty-five percent of testosterone is bound to SHBG, which is a molecule, a protein that is really tightly binds to testosterone, doesn't let it go for your body to use. Then there's some that's bound to albumin, which is sort of loosely bound, and then there's two percent that's free, one to two percent that's free. And that's what we say is like the most available to your body for use. And there's actually, you know, good data that looks at free testosterone, and the levels of free testosterone are correlated with these symptoms as well. And so you do have to look at the big picture. So I always check a total testosterone as well as an SHBG, because some people can

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  have elevated SHBG, due to thyroid dysfunction, due to aging, due to genetic variability, right? And women, SHBG goes up when you take oral contraceptives, and it stays up for life if you take oral contraceptives. So it can affect their free testosterone. The other thing to think about testosterone is it's for life. Once you take it, your body stops making its own testosterone. Many people over years will notice that their testosterone, their testicles get smaller because their body stops making its own testosterone. So it's not something to take lightly. Now, if you want, say you were low right now and you wanted to conceive, there are ways where you can take other, other pharmaceuticals that will naturally boost your own production, like HCG or Clomid or Enclomiphine.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  These work basically in different ways to either tell your brain that, hey, we need more testosterone, or they send, they mimic the signals that tell your testicles to make more testosterone. And so there are ways to do it. And you definitely need someone who's, you know, well versed in managing hormone management. But there are things that you can do if you're low. But again, I don't think it's, once you, once you start these things, you can't go, I mean, you can get off of it, but it's sort of a process. And it's not something that everyone will do because you're going to feel good on testosterone if you're taking it. And then when you get off it, because your body is like no longer making it, so you're going to feel horrible.

• 1:21:13Steven Bartlett?

  So do you think most 50 plus year old men should be taking testosterone replacement therapies?

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  Only if they're symptomatic and they're low, right?

• 1:21:22Steven Bartlett?

  Would it make the average man, the average 50 year old man, if this is the average, feel bad out on a daily basis?

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  Not necessarily, because if they are normal, like I said, if their testosterone receptors are already fully saturated, it's not going to change, right? It's not going to change the, like I said, it may make their muscles look bigger, but it's not going to change their, their cognition, it's not going to change their mood, it's not going to change their sex drive, it's not going to change their erections when their testosterone receptors are fully saturated.

• 1:21:48Steven Bartlett?

  And you know, in this graph, what is showing the decline here, has that got anything to do with whether their testosterone levels are fully saturated? Because

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  No, you can't tell from that.

• 1:21:57Steven Bartlett?

  You can't tell from that. So you could have low testosterone, but still be

• 1:21:59Speaker 00

  That's why we talk about symptoms, right? Because that's how I can tell. I think, you know, that's part of what being a doctor is, right? Talking to your patients and figuring out what's going on with them and what their symptoms are and making sure it's nothing else, right? You can have low thyroid and that can mimic what, what, uh, what low testosterone feels like. You can have a high prolactin because you might have a benign tumor in your brain that's secreting prolactin and that can reduce your testosterone. So that's the, the reason to get a full evaluation, to make sure there's nothing else that we're missing that's causing you to have these symptoms if your other levels are normal.

• 1:22:32Steven Bartlett?

  Uh, okay, that makes sense. So just because my testosterone levels would be low, doesn't mean I necessarily, if I don't, if I'm not symptomatic, doesn't mean that I should necessarily just assume that I need testosterone replacement therapy.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:22:45Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. Yeah, I think, I think most of my male friends are just assuming that once we hit 50, we're all on the testosterone.

• 1:22:51Speaker 00

  I mean, look, I think when, if you need it, it's a great drug. It's a great option to improve your quality of life. It's obviously preventing, uh, bone loss, it's improving your longevity, it's preventing, hopefully having some benefit in terms of cardio metabolic health. And so, yeah, absolutely, if you need it, but it's not something that like everyone should just take, cause why not, right? Like it's a, when you play with hormones, it's serious business, you know?

• 1:23:17Steven Bartlett?

  I guess a lot of men are self-conscious in a way that they don't often admit and they want to have big muscles and they want to feel strong.

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  And this is the, the problem I'm seeing with younger guys right now is that there is a lot of young kids taking anabolic because there's so much pressure to look a certain way, right? Because nowadays, when, how do you meet people on social media through like swiping? And, and all you see is what they look like. And so there's this pressure and like, I'll sit at the gym, like I'm like at the gym and there's these young kids who I'm like, there is no way you are naturally that built at that age, right? Like unless you've been lifting since you were like seven years old. And so, and of course there are some, but it is serious because one, it causes infertility, right? When you're on testosterone replacement, after about 18, 18 months, 70% of people on testosterone replacement will be infertile.

• 1:24:07Steven Bartlett?

  Seventeen?

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  Seventy, 70%.

• 1:24:09Steven Bartlett?

  Seventy?

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  And even as soon as like 10 weeks, we see some people having drops in their sperm count. So it's variable with how quickly you're going to see impacts on your fertility, but it absolutely happens. And it can, it can come back for the large majority of people, but how long it takes depends on your age and how long you were on testosterone replacement therapy. And in some cases, it can take as long as two years to come back.

• 1:24:34Steven Bartlett?

  I really need to get my testosterone levels checked.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, you should. But also you should get your semen analysis checked and

• 1:24:41Steven Bartlett?

  I've done that.

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  Good, good. Cause that's also a biomarker of health. We've seen that people who have poor semen parameters, they have higher rates of mortality and they actually live, when you look at age, like what age people die, they die younger compared to people. And it's dose dependent. So if you're, have like normal, uh, the concentration of sperm and then it keeps going down and down and down. And if you look at the ages, like they live to 78, 77, 76, like you can actually see it come down, except for people who have no sperm, because those are usually genetic disorders. Those are, live a little longer because it's not necessarily due to cardio metabolic issues. But it's basically a reflection of your overall health.

• 1:25:23Steven Bartlett?

  Steve, what are you doing? Uh, just making myself a delicious coffee. From the freezer? From the freezer. Have you not heard about Comteer? No. Oh my gosh, this is going to change your life. Couple of months ago, the founder of this business called Matt sent a big shipment of this coffee to our office in London. What most people don't know is that the processing of coffee takes out a lot of the taste. So what they do is they flash freeze it at the optimal moment when it's most tasty. And they send you in the post, the coffee in these little frozen ice cubes. Now Matt sent a big shipment to my office. I moved it to the kitchen. I said to the team, knock yourselves out. And then I saw so many messages in our Slack channel of people going, oh my God, what the hell is that? It's so delicious. All I have to do is pop it out in the morning, using the little button on the back of this thing.

• 1:26:08Steven Bartlett?

  I pour my hot water in and I mix it. And that is done. You can get $30 off your first order of Cometeer coffee if you go to cometeer.com/steven. Try it and please Instagram DM me, LinkedIn me, and let me know if you love it as much as I do. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've

• 1:26:52Steven Bartlett?

  never, ever released and so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to D O A C circle.com. I will speak to you there.

• 1:27:22Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things I was quite surprised by, I'll be honest, is when I went on your YouTube channel, one of your very high performing videos, I think it had 31 million views, was about enlarging your penis.

• 1:27:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:27:38Steven Bartlett?

  I didn't know that so many men were interested in ways to enlarge their penis.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting because when you look at the data, more men want to, so I let's say, most guys would love to be taller, right? If you're an average height man, most guys would love to be taller, right?

• 1:27:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, true.

• 1:27:55Speaker 00

  More men want to have a longer penis than they want to be taller.

• 1:27:59Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:28:02Steven Bartlett?

  Wow, wow. Why is this?

• 1:28:07Speaker 00

  Well, I think, you know, a lot of people, um, it starts at a young age. I have sons, right? And so I see it, like they talk about their penis in such a way, like very early in life, like, oh my God, my penis is so big or it should be so big or whatever. And, and there's, and it's like this, it becomes this like this society thing about who's got a bigger penis. Like it's very interesting, but there's a lot of pressure to feel like, and a lot of discussion around bigger is better, right? It's, it's talked about in media, it's subtly joked about. It is, um, everywhere you look, people are talking about like being well endowed as being better. But initially on my podcast, we interviewed the, the guy who has the largest medically verified penis.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  It's, I think it's like 13 or 14 inches in length. And, um, he actually has a lot of trouble because it's so large that people don't want to have sex with him and it's uncomfortable for them. And so like, it's not all roses and sunshine on the other side, but the reality is that many people feel what's called small penis anxiety. And they, they, even if they have a normal sized penis, they feel consumed with how the size of their penis is. And so that's why this video did so well. I naively had no idea how many people it would resonate with because I'm not a guy, right? And I see patients all the time, but at that time in my career, people weren't coming to me to talk about it. And so I, um, I realized like, there's so many people quietly feeling insecure. And we talk a lot about women having body image issues.

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  Men do too, right? They feel insecure about the size of their penis because also they're seeing guys on pornography who have very well endowed phalluses. And, you know, they chose to be porn actors for a reason, right? Because they are naturally well endowed. And so you're comparing yourself to the outliers and the average penis is about 5.3 to 5.5 inches erect. But when you look at like, what do women want? They will say on average, they want a six inch penis, but when you look at like the kind of sex toys they buy, and they did this study because they were looking at people who, they were trying to decide what kind of, when they were developing phalluses for trans people, like they, they reconstruct phalluses for, they wanted to, they were

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  making them too girthy and they were like, well, we need to figure out what girth women want. And so they looked at like what women buy on, online, like what are the most purchased sex toy? And it's actually pretty close to average.

• 1:30:31Steven Bartlett?

  Did you say 5.2 inches?

• 1:30:32Speaker 00

  5.2 to 5.5, depending on the study you're looking at. Yeah.

• 1:30:35Steven Bartlett?

  Erect.

• 1:30:36Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:30:38Steven Bartlett?

  And what size do men think the average is?

• 1:30:42Speaker 00

  Oh, they think it's like six or seven inches.

• 1:30:44Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay. So they think the average is bigger. And also how does age come into this? Because I'm presuming that when I get older, my penis is going to shrink or something.

• 1:30:50Speaker 00

  If you have good blood flow to your penis, it shouldn't shrink. So like I said earlier, if you stop having nighttime erections or you're not having erections, now you're no longer getting blood flow to your penis and it will shrink over time. Also, if you're gaining weight, it will appear that it's shrinking because you're getting more fat over here. So if you think about your penis here, this is the fat right above this bone. And as this fat gets more and more, you're seeing less and less of the penis.

• 1:31:17Steven Bartlett?

  And is there a way to enlarge the penis?

• 1:31:20Speaker 00

  So there are many ways that have been tried, discussed, um, attempted. So there's definitely surgeries that you can get, but they, there's not a lot of surgeons who do a lot of penile lengthening surgeries and they have lots of complications, like very high rates of complications because the penis is a very vascular organ. And the thing is that when you have the tiniest difference on your penis, you notice it, right? Like I have guys come in with the tiniest little thing on their penis and like, is this okay? Like this is new and like luckily it's nothing, right? But I'm like, they notice it, you notice it when something's wrong. So imagine you have a surgery and now something changes, right? So it is, it is really difficult to sort of replicate exactly a normal penis when you're lengthening it through surgery.

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  So I don't recommend surgery for lengthening penis. There is a safer way and that has been shown to help and that's using a traction device. So a traction device, we have one here. This is one brand, you can get many of these online and you can put your penis in this device.

• 1:32:24Steven Bartlett?

  It really, I like, I feel like, um, I get like shivers when I watch you do this to this penis.

• 1:32:29Speaker 00

  So you would wrap it, it would be more comfortable than just putting this like directly on your penis.

• 1:32:34Steven Bartlett?

  For you guys that can't see, she's clamping the end of the penis into this.

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  Into this device. And then you sort of lengthen it, uh, extend it with this 30 minutes, twice a day for this particular device. They've actually done some research on this one, 30 minutes, twice a day. And you, there's like a whole protocol on their website and it does show improvements in length, about two centimeters, but it is a commitment to increasing length and to doing this process.

• 1:32:59Steven Bartlett?

  So just on those numbers, two, two centimeter increase over what period of time and does that?

• 1:33:03Speaker 00

  Over about three to six months, depending, yeah.

• 1:33:05Steven Bartlett?

  And is it permanent?

• 1:33:06Speaker 00

  So that's what we don't know. I mean, most of the studies stop at, you know, once they get the results and we don't know that if you stop, will it just revert back to normal? I don't know. And so the other thing about this particular traction device that's nice is if you have a curvature in the penis, like you develop something called Peyronie's disease, this device can actually curve a little bit away from, if you have like, let's say you have an indentation on the top of the penis, it can actually bend away from that and it can help straighten out the penis. So that's actually a, a really nice utilization for it because, um, for some people that can be really traumatic and devastating to have a change in the way your penis appears because it starts curving all of a sudden. And this is safe and effective and you can have bruising, it can be slightly uncomfortable,

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  but it's, you're not going to really hurt yourself, uh, too much by doing something like this.

• 1:33:55Steven Bartlett?

  I thought a curved penis would hit the G-spot better.

• 1:33:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, sometimes a slight curve can be beneficial for some people, but again, I think like when you notice like there's a dramatic change, you do that more, come.

• 1:34:09Steven Bartlett?

  And then rip the end off.

• 1:34:10Speaker 00

  It's okay.

• 1:34:13Steven Bartlett?

  I'm just trying to figure out how this works. So I get the penis, I put it

• 1:34:17Speaker 00

  Through, yeah.

• 1:34:19Steven Bartlett?

  Clamp it down.

• 1:34:20Speaker 00

  And you want to put it at your normal, and then you'll just slightly advance the, the length. You're not going to pull crazy, you're just going to do a little bit of traction. So it's not uncomfortable, it's slight, like just a slight tension. It shouldn't be like, like that, it should be a lot much less tension. But it is, I mean, they can vary in price from a hundred dollars to $500. So it's a one time cost. It is not, like I said, not dangerous. What is dangerous is when people try to do something that became popular on TikTok called jelking. And jelking is where you use your, your hands and you make like an okay sign with your fingers and you're like stretching the penis with your hands. And this can be dangerous because you can create micro tears in the penis.

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  And we in the urology community have seen plenty of patients who have now developed erectile dysfunction after doing jelking because they've now created damage to their penis. And so I, I really caution people because this, there is so much despair around sexual function, around penile health, that people are willing to try things and they might really hurt themselves. No joke, I had a patient the other day ask me if he should drink hydrogen peroxide because he saw some ad that said hydrogen peroxide will fix your erection, erections. And I said, please don't, uh, this is, you know, but he really was like seriously, earnestly asking me this question. And I, you know, I didn't want to shame him by any means. And I was like, no, you know, this is actually not safe and it's not going to help you.

• 1:35:47Speaker 00

  And there's no pill, there's no drink, there's no anything that's going to give you a longer penis.

• 1:35:54Steven Bartlett?

  What are the cases that you see that break your heart?

• 1:35:57Speaker 00

  You know, I, I've seen, so there, I've seen patients who've had surgery to lengthen their penis and they are above average when they, at baseline, and they have these surgeries to lengthen their penis and then they have a bad outcome. And now their penis is disfigured forever. And that's what really, um, you, you never forget that because that person, knowing the risks and benefits perhaps made a choice and that choice didn't go the way they wanted. And now they have to live with that for the rest of their life. And that's really sad.

• 1:36:26Steven Bartlett?

  Gosh. Imagine that, Christ.

• 1:36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Steven Bartlett?

  What, and it just, it doesn't work anymore?

• 1:36:33Speaker 00

  Well, like, like the one patient I'm thinking of, um, he, uh, had a, like it basically developed a scar all the top of the penis. So it was like disfigured essentially.

• 1:36:46Speaker 00

  And so it was, it was really sad.

• 1:36:50Steven Bartlett?

  Before I hit puberty, I definitely had penis anxiety because I was the youngest in my year at school and I, I was the, I was short, very, very short, very small. I remember what it felt like to like hide my, hide my dick.

• 1:37:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:37:03Steven Bartlett?

  When I was around like guys in the changing room and stuff like that.

• 1:37:08Steven Bartlett?

  You know, after puberty, things have changed.

• 1:37:11Speaker 00

  And what I want people to understand, I think more than anything is that you don't need a long penis to pleasure a partner. We just talked about how the clitoris is the, is the most reliable route to orgasm, right? And so you don't need a penis to stimulate the clitoris. You can use your mouth, your fingers, you can use a toy. There's so many ways to help your partner achieve pleasure. And, and yes, of course there are a small subset of women who really appreciate a large phallus, but the large majority of women, if you look at survey data, are very happy with the size of their partner, are very content with average or slightly above average or slightly below average, as long as they are feeling intimate and they're feeling pleasure.

• 1:37:54Speaker 00

  And so I think that there's a misnomer that, that people think if I have a longer penis, I'm going to be able to pleasure my partner more.

• 1:38:01Steven Bartlett?

  As it relates to women, is there different size vaginas?

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the app, so like, just like there's averages, there's averages in females. And so average vagina, vaginal length is about three and a half inches. So when women get aroused, it expands and widens and lengthens to about double. So the average woman can easily accommodate the average penis, maybe slightly larger than average. And so I think generally speaking, knowing that like you will be able to fit in the average woman and you will be able to please her with the size of your phallus. And like I said, penetration is, is not as important. In fact, only about 85% of women orgasm through penetration alone. They need clitoral stimulation to achieve climax. And so again, penetration feels good.

• 1:38:47Speaker 00

  I, I tell guys, it's like somebody rubbing your testicles or your perineum, that feels good, but it's not going to make you orgasm. And so penetrating, yeah, if you're getting a lot of clitoral stimulation, because maybe she has a thinner, you know, her clitoral shaft is closer to the vaginal canal, maybe, you know, the size of the penis matters more. But for a lot of women, it's not going to be sufficient and they're going to need some directed clitoral stimulation.

• 1:39:12Steven Bartlett?

  Why do different vaginas feel different to, and I guess the, the inverse is also the case where like different penises will feel remarkably different, even if they're the same size roughly. And people, you can have sex with somebody and go, it feels really good.

• 1:39:27Speaker 00

  I mean, I think again, it's how you, it's like the ocean in the ocean, right? Like how you use your, so let's, let's talk about the vaginas first. So when a vagina is, um, has more pelvic floor strength, they may be able to like tense around the penis better, like they may be able to sort of grab the penis with their pelvic floor a little stronger versus someone who doesn't. And that's where I think some people get worried when I say, oh, you need to relax your pelvic floor. They're like, oh, I don't want to be looser, right? And that's not going to happen if you have a normally functioning pelvic floor. If you're

• 1:39:58Steven Bartlett?

  So the penis is going in here, right?

• 1:40:00Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:40:00Steven Bartlett?

  So if I, if you're a woman and you do pelvic floor exercises, then it could feel tighter.

• 1:40:06Speaker 00

  Well, you're, you're able to contract and squeeze those muscles during sex better, right?

• 1:40:12Steven Bartlett?

  Around the penis?

• 1:40:12Speaker 00

  Yes, but we don't want you to be tighter. We want you to be able to squeeze the muscles and relax the muscles. Use them like a normal muscle, like your bicep. You squeeze and relax, squeeze and relax. We don't want it to be constantly squeezed.

• 1:40:23Steven Bartlett?

  But to the man, it will feel tighter.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  You will perceive it as tighter, but it will not be that she's actually tighter. It just means that maybe her pelvic floor muscles are doing a better job. So that's for the female. For the male, it's, it's generally like how the penis moves and how the positioning is and where it's, uh, it may be girth that's different. It may be the way that you're moving in the vaginal canal and that may be why it feels different.

• 1:40:49Steven Bartlett?

  They often say that if you've got big feet or big hands, you know, like people think you have a big penis.

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  Not necessarily true. So there's, um, there's actually no evidence that big hands, big feet correlate to penile size. There's one study in Japan where they looked at nose length. And so the longer your nose is from the, the bridge down to the tip, that is potential, at least the Japanese population that they studied was correlated with the length of the penis.

• 1:41:18Steven Bartlett?

  People also think tall people have big penises.

• 1:41:21Speaker 00

  Not necessarily.

• 1:41:24Steven Bartlett?

  But nose length, there's some correlation in a study in Japan.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:41:28Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, let's just check my nose. The last thing I want to talk to you about is Ozempic and how this relates to everything we've talked about today. Desire, attraction, sex. Is there any early data emerging that shows any correlations?

• 1:41:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Ozempic, there's sort of benefits and there's potential downsides. So the benefits are that when you're on Ozempic, we see improvements in metabolic diseases. They have improvements in diabetes, improvements in heart disease, improvements in overall health, right? And so that is going to mean that your blood vessels are healthier, you're more able to get blood flow to your genitals. You're going to have stronger sexual function and arousal, right? So that's great. The other thing is that you are losing weight, so you feel better. You feel more like your body image is is feeling good about yourself. Also for men, remember I talked about this fat pad right above your penis? That's getting smaller. And so now you can see more of your penis.

• 1:42:24Speaker 00

  So you may have heard of Ozempic penis, where people are saying, oh, my penis is getting longer. It's not actually that your penis is getting longer, it's that this fat is going down, so now you're seeing more of your penis.

• 1:42:33Steven Bartlett?

  Which makes it look longer.

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Well, it is reality to the person looking, right? So those are all great things, and I think that's wonderful. Now, the other part of it is Ozempic works on the brain and it works on the reward pathways. So you now see food and you don't feel like it's that much of a reward, so you don't chase after. You have less desire for food. There's emerging data that we're seeing people on these medications, these GLP-1s, have less desire for, let's say, gambling. Let's say shopping, let's say, you know, alcohol, smoking, whatever it is, right? And so there's a theoretical, because it works on the same pathways, that it could also decrease desire for sex. And I think the thing that, you know, there's so many people on these medications, there's so many metabolic benefits,

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  that I worry that people may not even realize that their sexual desire is changing, right? They might just be like, oh, you know, I'm eating less, I look great, everything's wonderful. But like slowly in the background, they're like, oh, maybe my desire is less and maybe it's creating discord in the relationship. Hard to say because we don't have data yet. So yeah, I think it's just something that you should be aware of, that if you start feeling like you have less desire for sex, or maybe you're like, man, I just really don't feel into anything. Talk to your doctor, because maybe your dose is just too high and maybe it just needs to come down a little bit. And again, we don't know yet, but I do worry about this because I feel like we're we're gonna start seeing it.

• 1:43:58Steven Bartlett?

  Is it possible to do studies on this type of thing?

• 1:44:01Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So you can take people starting Ozempic and you can say, hey, here is, or or any GLP-1. You know, there's questionnaires. So like for women, there's the Female Sexual Function Index. For men, there's ADAM, which is a questionnaire about testosterone, but you could, there's sexual desire questionnaires that you can use. And you can take it at the beginning and then you can take it as they increase their dose and see if there's a change, right? In terms of their sexual desire.

• 1:44:25Steven Bartlett?

  You said at the start about knowing how to talk to your partner. I think like intimacy desire, maybe the conversations like with your partner, how to have that conversation when there's a problem.

• 1:44:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wish I could say there's like a script that you can follow and it's gonna work. But everyone's so different. But I think the important thing is like not giving up. Because what happens is, because we don't ever talk about sex, when you bring it up, it's immediately like, oh, my God, is something wrong? Do I do something wrong? Do you not like me? Am I not attractive? But you're automatically going down the rabbit hole of worry and concern. And instead of dealing with it, you're gonna shut it down. No, I don't want to talk about it, right? Especially if like maybe you haven't connected intimately in a while and like you just don't want to deal with that. Or you're, you have other stressors in life, maybe you're not feeling like very good about yourself. And so you're like, well, I don't really feel sexy, so I don't want to have sex. And so I think really understanding that whatever reaction you get from your partner, when you do talk to them, it's not about you.

• 1:45:18Speaker 00

  It's just usually about how they're feeling. And so don't stress about that. And two, like it's anything that is worth having requires work. So having a good sex life, having intimacy over the long haul with someone. If you are committed to that relationship, it is worth working for. It is worth dealing with a little bit of discord to get there. And so I tell people, when you want to talk about sex, first of all, don't do it in the bedroom. Don't do it right before or after sex. Do it at a time where you are both calm, relaxed, maybe you're out for a walk, maybe you're in the car. So you're not like looking directly at each other, you know, you're kind of parallel. And always start with a positive thing, like I, you know, I really enjoy this about our relationship and I would love if we could talk about this.

• 1:46:01Speaker 00

  And and maybe they're gonna be like, uh, I'm not ready for that. And you say, maybe we could come up with a time where we can talk about this that works for you, right? Let them feel like they're coming to the conversation with like, they're not being ambushed or like talking about something. And then be curious. I think the big thing is like being curious, like what's going on with you? Like, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be there for you. I love you. You know, I miss what we used to have, or I miss this about us. And I think that there's always these misconceptions, and I hear it all the time, right? It'll be like, this partner only wants sex and this partner never wants sex. And, you know, and that's it, like that's the end of the conversation. But the reality is that it's it's somewhere in between. So typically, women tend to view sex as like added stress sometimes when they're already stressed.

• 1:46:46Speaker 00

  Like they're like, oh, it's just one more thing to do, whereas men look at it as a stress relief. So one, you're coming at it from two different angles. The other thing is men aren't really taught how to be intimate. And so for a lot of men, sex is their version of intimacy. Like, that's how they connect, that's how they feel connected with a partner. And so oftentimes, when they're doing these initiations or attempts at sex, it feels like they're being greedy. Or it feels like they're, they just want sex. And I think we have to reframe how we look at that, like sex is not just sex. It is intimacy, it is being together, connecting with another human being. So how do we do that, right? And like, how do we make that sex worth having?

• 1:47:26Speaker 00

  We get into this frame where we have sex as like in a hurried, quick, like just gotta get this done way. I just need to get an orgasm, I just need to get a release. But sex is supposed to be something we look forward to. It's supposed to be something that we're excited about. And so we have to build that in, we have to sort of like build the environment where sex can can happen. So it may mean like, hey, we are affectionate during the day, maybe we send a lovey text message. Maybe, you know, I give you a hug, I caress your back, I tell you, you look beautiful. I'm showing you gratitude for how much I care about you in other ways. I think just really taking the time to understand why your partner feels the way they do.

• 1:48:06Steven Bartlett?

  I'm curious about on that communication point about how different genders in heterosexual couples have different sort of taboos and things that are just a bit sensitive. And I was looking at the the variance between men and women. And the the top one for men was around performance anxiety, so like admitting to things like erectile dysfunction. Because it feels like it's so intrinsically connected to masculinity. And you feel like a failure as a man if you can't get an erection and pleasure your partner.

• 1:48:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:48:32Steven Bartlett?

  And then for women, it was talking about prioritizing pleasure and asking for more foreplay or, you know, specific, specific stimulation stimulation around the clitoris or something like that. Because they don't want to be labeled as high maintenance or too much hard work, et cetera. And it's interesting that on that walk with your partner, there are different things that will trigger each of you.

• 1:48:56Steven Bartlett?

  Other ones for women were pain and discomfort, bringing that up, and body image and the mental load, explaining why you aren't in the mood. And other ones for men are expressing non-sexual needs because it might be seen as unmanly, unmanly. Boundaries and rejection, communicating when they don't want sex. And lastly, the script, which is discussing fantasies that deviate from the norm.

• 1:49:14Speaker 00

  So I want to talk about fantasy, but before that, I would just say that, you know, because of social media, we're in a place. And I get text messages from my husband 24 hours a day with like, not 24 hours a day, but like all waking hours with reels and videos. Oh, I think you'd like this, I think you'd like this, you should check this out. And it's like his way of like connecting and like, hey, let's talk about this later, like this is fun. And so I I tell my patients, like, send your partner a video that you saw on social media that might help them understand like why this is important to you. Maybe send them a video, send them this podcast, right? Say like, hey, I watched this, it was great, you know? And I I learned so much and honestly, so many patients bring their partners to me. Whether it's women bringing male partners or men bringing female partners.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  They come to me and they say, look, like, I want you to meet this doctor and I want you to talk to them. And like, it's beautiful to see that, like, I love it because it's it's so deeply caring that they like brought their partner and they want them to feel good and they just want to figure out what's going on. And like, I think it's so lovely to to to find someone who's so invested in making sure that sex is good for you, right?

• 1:50:17Steven Bartlett?

  As men, though, we're just not good at talking about this stuff.

• 1:50:20Speaker 00

  Right, but you know, I think you can't use that as a crutch.

• 1:50:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Speaker 00

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:50:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I do, yeah. We're just not good at it, though.

• 1:50:27Speaker 00

  But no one's good at it. It's not men, women are not good at it either.

• 1:50:30Steven Bartlett?

  I think men are worse at it.

• 1:50:31Speaker 00

  I think in general, no one is good at talking about sex. Like, you know, I think it's interesting because I talk about it all the time. But I have seen very good communicators struggle with talking about sex. And so I think it's just, it's just, it's uncomfortable. And and it's like, if you and I can have this conversation and we can talk about sex openly, like, there's no reason that you can't learn how to talk about sex. And it's it's a learning process and it's worth, it's worth investing in.

• 1:50:59Steven Bartlett?

  Do people bring you their fantasies?

• 1:51:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've had, I've had, well, more, not not as many fantasies as like real sort of diverse interests in sex.

• 1:51:09Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:51:09Speaker 00

  So I had a patient who came to me and said, you know, after some time, this was not like their first visit. Like, we built a rapport and he told me, you know, the, I I really struggle with arousal. And the only time I get aroused is I have a a medical kink. And so I go to this person who will put a Foley catheter in me and that's what turns me on. And I was like, that's really interesting. And I was like, okay, like, that's, that's great. But like, it took a long time for us to get there, for him to feel comfortable. But it also then was like, well, if that's what turns you on, you know, then you've got to sort of explore other ways to incorporate that with a partner. Maybe not full, so like a catheter is is a is a tube that you put in the bladder for to drain urine.

• 1:51:52Steven Bartlett?

  What hole does that go in?

• 1:51:53Speaker 00

  The urethra.

• 1:51:54Steven Bartlett?

  It goes in the penis?

• 1:51:55Speaker 00

  Correct. And so there's actually a lot of people who enjoy urethral play. So they will take sounds, they're called sounds, like little rods with a frail flared base and they will insert them in the urethra. But people do find that pleasurable. And so because there is some, you know, there, there's some nerve endings there that can be pleasurable. And so, again, it is totally fine to have interests that are, you know, outside what we call conventional. But of course, I think you need to, if that's something that you're really into, you have to sort of bring your partner into the into the fold. If that's what really gets you turned on. Now, in terms of fantasies, almost everyone fantasizes, right? Almost everyone does. And the interesting thing when you look at fantasies is

• 1:52:38Speaker 00

  there's a lot of fantasies that you would think are not common but are. So for example, being sexually submissive is very common. So women fantasize about it, like around 60%. Men are like 20% having this desire of sexual, this fantasy of sexual submission. It may not mean that they want to be submissive in real life, but that's the fantasy they're having. Men often have a voyeurism fantasy, so like watching sex. They also have sex with multiple partners. Women tend to have a lot of like sexual dominance, but also romance in their fantasies. So like in exotic places or that or with, and a lot of times, like 90% of the time, people fantasize about strangers.

• 1:53:23Speaker 00

  Or it could be someone they know but outside of their relationship. And so that's completely normal and nothing to be worried about. It doesn't mean that like you want that person, it's just a fantasy. It's a safe place in your head to think about fantasy. And I think one, realizing that if someone fantasizes about something, it means nothing about how they feel about you. It's just where their brain goes to explore. I tell my patients sometimes, write down your fantasies for yourself, just like write them down, don't share that with anybody. And have your partner do the same. And then if you guys decide you feel comfortable, at some point, you can each share one fantasy. And you can start talking, and maybe one that you would want to try. And like, it allows you to sort of explore and think about different things. It could be a negative outcome, like you could just be like, oh, no, this what didn't do it for me. But it could also be very positive. And so just like, again, I think the big thing is understanding like it doesn't need to be that serious.

• 1:54:07Speaker 00

  Like, we can experiment, we can play, we can have fun. And if you bring that back into your life, you are gonna be happier, less lonely, live longer. Like, everyone should just be having more sex.

• 1:54:21Steven Bartlett?

  It's, yeah, it's interesting that we're getting more and more sexless. Because I think the world is stealing our attention and that's causing a big loss in connection. But then everyone's lives are more stressful than ever before. If a bomb goes off 10,000 miles that way, I I see it when I open my phone. So it's an interesting time to sort of almost try and reclaim sex and to work on one's sexual health, the overall, the full picture of one's sexual health. You're working on a book, which is, I guess, endeavoring to do much of that, which is coming out in September, called The Hard Truth. Everything Men Need to Know About Good Health, Great Sex and Long Life. So if you're watching this after the 1st of September 2026, or around that time,

• 1:55:05Steven Bartlett?

  then the book is probably available for preorder or already out. It's not available for preorder yet, is it?

• 1:55:10Speaker 00

  It will be soon, but not yet.

• 1:55:11Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. When the book is out, I'm gonna link it below in the comment section, when it's available for preorder. The Hard Truth, Everything Men Need to Know About Good Health, Great Sex and Long Life. So if the subjects we talked about today have piqued your interest, the book, I imagine, is gonna go into greater detail on all of these subjects.

• 1:55:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think it's a book that really I I wish was a part of sexual education. I think all men need to know this. You know, as women, we end up taking care of our male partners. I make all the doctor's appointments. I, you know, I organize all of that. I make sure that my kids get all their vaccines, all that sort of stuff. And and, you know, it becomes on us to take care of our fathers too. And so as women, we hold that role. And I think it is so valuable to understand what men go through and also to be able to support them along the way. And I think it's a great gift for, you know, men in your life or for, you know, older sons even, to like help people understand their bodies. And honestly, it's a huge motivator. I tell people like, for nothing else, people care about sex.

• 1:56:12Speaker 00

  And I have seen patients turn around their lives because they want to have better sex. They'll literally improve their blood sugars, they'll improve their blood pressure because they just want to protect their sexual health.

• 1:56:23Steven Bartlett?

  Rena, thank you. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. This is the first time in Diary of a Seo history where the guest has actually stamped it with a stamp that says certified 100% human.

• 1:56:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:56:39Steven Bartlett?

  So you can see there's a little stamp.

• 1:56:41Speaker 00

  So it's not AI?

• 1:56:42Steven Bartlett?

  So it's not AI. It actually says that in the middle, it says Gen AI free. Sign of things to come. But that question, I guess, is somewhat linked to that. The question they've asked for you is, so much of the world feels hopeless about this moment. What would you tell someone to help them reclaim their agency?

• 1:57:08Speaker 00

  I think that

• 1:57:12Speaker 00

  we as humans are meant to be with other humans. We are meant to connect. And I think making that a priority will allow people to feel

• 1:57:26Speaker 00

  to feel a part of something again. You know, I think, I think there is like an emergence of people starting to look back at religious constructs and and go to community and be a part of things and enjoy live events again, like we weren't doing before. And I think if we prioritize that, there is still hope that we can come together as a society. And I think, you know, the pendulum always swings, right? In every way, like it's gonna go far right or far left and people are gonna hate each other and then they're gonna love each other and they're gonna come back. And I think if you just look at history time and time again, it repeats itself. And we will find unity and we will find togetherness. We are obviously feeling pain from a variety of different sources and we may feel pain, right?

• 1:58:11Speaker 00

  Like in terms of other things to come. But ultimately, I I'm an optimist and I think that we'll come together and and we will find happiness and joy in human connection.

• 1:58:23Steven Bartlett?

  And I hope you're right. And I think we're seeing the early signs of that now. For anyone that's listening that wants to learn more from Rena, I highly recommend they go to your YouTube channel. I will collab if we can. And if we do collab on YouTube, you'll see a little smiling Rena next to the Diary of Seo logo where you can click through to her YouTube channel. She's got almost 3 million subscribers and she goes through all of the questions which no one has ever answered for us. And I was looking at some of the questions that you answer for people, everything from why you dribble after you pee and how to stop it. Porn director reveals what what scenes are faked in almost every scene of movies. But then also a lot of the stuff we've talked about today around penal health, erectile dysfunction,

• 1:59:07Steven Bartlett?

  sex positions and so much more. So it's a wonderful repository of information that is constantly being updated, that is a great place to subscribe. So I highly recommend you do. Dr. Rena, thank you so much for your time.

• 1:59:18Speaker 00

  You're so welcome.