Name: Why It's So Easy to Get Addicted to Something
Uploaded: 2025-05-29T13:00:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why It's So Easy to Get Addicted to Something' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why It's So Easy to Get Addicted to Something' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-29. Transcript available.

- And when you think about dopamine,
the most important thing to think about
is how quickly does it go up?
How quickly and how far does it go down?
Because every time it goes up, it goes down.
Why?
Because remember earlier we were saying
everything's like a seesaw.
If you feel motivated, there is,
and this is so important for people to understand,
especially people with compulsions, addictions,
and this kind of thing,
the better it feels,
the lower you're gonna feel afterwards,
and the longer it will take you to get back to baseline.
So the drug of all drugs for this
to really nail home dopamine as a concept.
- Sex, or what?
- Well, behaviorally, sex, you're right.
So, and people have behavior addictions, process addictions.
Methamphetamine.
- Yeah.
- If you were gonna look at what creates
the biggest rise in dopamine the fastest,
so it's dopamine over time, okay?
'Cause listen, when you write jokes,
or when I'm reading papers,
I love reading science papers.
I'm like mining for papers.
Every once in a while, I'll take a little break,
and I'm super into cephalopods, octopuses.
I'm building an octopus tank at home right now.
So that's kind of my indulgence is octopus.
You know, it's a little bit of dopamine.
- Right.
- Methamphetamine is a huge rapid increase in dopamine.
Then what happened?
- How much do we get off that?
Bring it up real quick.
I just wanna see what is the--
- So it's how fast it occurs.
It occurs within minutes.
This is why crack cocaine was so much more addictive
than snorted cocaine, right?
It was the speed with which it hits the system.
- How much dopamine does an activity release?
Baseline is 100%, food is 150%, so a 50% increase.
Video games, 175%, sex, 200.
- I disagree with sex, by the way.
I think it depends on, you know, if you're,
and people should know this, if you live with somebody,
and you guys are having sex a lot,
and you've known each other a long time,
there's a lot of the reason why people are looking for novelty
in their relationship, et cetera.
I'm not trying to be salacious here,
but new sexual partner is probably about 400, 500%.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
And I think most people would not dispute that.
- Cocaine goes to 450%, amphetamine, 1,000%,
methamphetamine, 1,300%.
- That meth, that methyl group increases the speed.
That speed increases dopamine.
So it's almost, it could potentially almost be kind of the same,
but the speed at which it happens is so much greater
that it intensifies it so much.
- That's right, and remember, the brain is thinking
in terms of approach, pause, or retract.
So when there's a ton of dopamine, listen,
anyone on cocaine or methamphetamine,
everything's a good idea to them.
- Oh, yeah, anything.
- Right. - Oh, God.
- And then you think about cannabis.
Cannabis has its own discussion, its own effects,
but very different system, and tends to make people
pretty happy with right where they are.
The opioids tends to make people overly happy
with right where they are.
They tend to be amotivated, not motivated.
So dopamine, in this context, what happens is,
then dopamine drops below baseline after a drug or porn,
or even, you know, somebody's, you know,
let's say they make the huge mistake
of like going outside their marriage to a prostitute
or something, it's the anticipation,
the fear, the excitement, boom,
then it drops below baseline. - Oh, it's horrible.
- And now here's the real rub.
In order to get back to baseline, most people,
when they're in that trough, what do they do?
They use more.
But each time they use, while they're in that trough,
when dopamine is low, this is the key thing,
when dopamine is low, no matter how much you do
of that substance, no matter how much you engage
in that behavior, that dopamine is going to have less
and less of an effect, and it's not even going to get you
above baseline. - Wow.
- You have to wait.
The period of abstinence is when these circuits return
to normal, and with the exception of alcohol,
where people can die from rapid withdrawal,
this is why every addiction recovery program
has a period of abstinence.
They don't tell you to kind of taper off cocaine.
They're like, listen, this has got to stop.
And then when people relapse, the problem is they get,
you know, no pun intended, they get a bump,
but that dopamine level is not where it used to be.
And they're constantly, quote unquote, chasing the dragon
or whatever you want to call it.
So, you know, these dopamine circuits evolved
for a good reason, to drive us toward adaptive behaviors.
But listen, I have friends in the tech sector,
in the finance sector, you see this in the finance guys.
It's often finance guys, they're doing Adderall,
they're day trading, they're night trading,
you know, their friends are making a ton of money,
and we also have the social comparison thing.
So I'm not gonna say that social media hijacks all of this,
but let's just say, and I love social media,
I'm on Instagram and X, I teach there, I learn there.
Love your content, love Segura's content, Rogan,
you know, I'm learning there, Tim Dillon, right?
Like I love it.
- Yeah.
- But there are elements of this,
where if you find yourself on social media,
but you're kind of like, what am I doing here?
Like, this is like, nothing's happening here.
You are in a dopamine trough.
- You're in a trough.
You've already gotten your high.
You've gotten it, and we hear dopamine hits.
If it were really dopamine hits,
you'd be going, whoa, yeah, amazing.
Cool. No, that happens now and again,
but what's happening is the threshold
for what really draws you in is getting higher and higher.
- Which goes to show why, when it comes sometimes
to like sex addiction and pornography addiction,
that people's, what the kink that they need,
or the thing they need to see gets more out there,
because they have to, just to even get back to the baseline,
they have to, they've got to find more.
They need a higher arc.
- I think the thing to remember the following,
dopamine is not about the pursuit of pleasure.
It's about the pleasure of pursuit.
It's about motivation.
The other thing to remember about dopamine is it can,
if it's increased very dramatically and very fast,
it can drive addiction.
And I define addiction as a progressive narrowing
of the things that bring you pleasure.
A great life is where many, many things bring you pleasure.
And then the, perhaps the most important thing for people,
especially if they're concerned about porn, gambling,
internet use, or whatever,
even if they're not a full-blown addict,
they're just kind of feeling like a slave
to everything going on that, you know, just everything,
highly processed foods, all of that,
is that any high amount of dopamine that comes to you
without effort before it will eventually destroy you.
- Wow.
- Or bring you close to destruction.
So something that just feels so good that you,
all you had to do was open a package.
All you had to do was take a pill.
- Or open a website.
- Or open a website.
That is the slippery slope.
And if we think more in terms of, you know-
- Yeah, Pandora's box doesn't really have a key on it, huh?
- Like, listen, I'm not a huge UFC fan,
but I've been to a few fights and it's fun.
And I see you guys down there in the front row
and this kind of thing.
Look, someday I imagine, given my friend set
and given my interests, maybe I'll just buy a ticket
and it'd be a great thrill, right?
But if I were a kid and I suddenly were just planted there,
every single night, guess what?
You move one row back,
it's going to feel like bad seating, you know?
And it's, this is why the children of very wealthy people,
unless your father is like a Warren Buffett
who insists that you actually work in this kind of thing,
that children of very wealthy people
often destroy their lives.
You know, they destroy their lives
because they haven't had to work to have all this stuff.
And there's this huge cushion below them.
In fact, my graduate advisor-
- Yeah, they're almost swimming in dope
and they're almost in the hot tub,
but they've never been in the pool.
- And then they're, exactly.
And then they're, and then they're down below baseline.
And then it takes more and more and more.
You know, that show-
- Is that genetic then, sorry to interrupt you,
but is that genetic that your baseline level for dopamine,
is that genetic?
- No, this is all behaviorally driven.
And you know, I'm not saying parents-
- So you said it's all behaviorally driven.
- All behaviorally driven.
- So I'm just saying, yeah.
Say if like you had a, like, you know,
your father was an addict or somebody,
and then it could, to the next generation,
have that same like need to get back to that baseline
and it could be inherited type of thing.
- Well, there, okay.
So there are certain addictions
that appear to have some genetic component,
but it's confounded, as we say,
it's mixed up with the behavioral stuff around that.
Like for instance, the probability of somebody
becoming a severe alcoholic,
they now call it alcohol use disorder.
And I'm not trying to be irreverent,
but I just call it alcoholism.
- Alcoholism, yeah, for sure.
- Yeah, okay.
Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and stay out
of the lanes of political correctness.
- Yeah, we've all got it in here, so.
- Yeah, great.
So the probability that somebody will become an alcoholic
greatly increases if their first drink,
just their first sip comes before age 13, okay?
Now, some parents think, hey, listen,
if my kid has a beer when they're eight and 10,
then they won't have this, you know,
kind of mysterious feeling around alcohol.
That's one theory, but we know on good statistics
that drinking before the age of 13 greatly increases
the probability of becoming an alcoholic.
So now you can imagine in which households will that happen?
Well, where they're trying to normalize
high alcohol intake.
So it can be both genetic and circumstantial.
- But do some countries then suffer
with the higher alcoholism rates then?
- Yes, yes.
- Even European ones?
- Northern European countries, especially in the winter.
I have Northern European relatives.
I'll tell you in the winter, they can drink up there
and it's dark and, you know, alcohol is a depressant.
There's also about 8% of people have a gene variant
that when they drink, they don't feel the same sedative
type quality to alcohol.
When you drink, the first thing that happens for everybody
is your prefrontal cortex.
This is like the part of your brain
right behind your forehead.
It's the part that sets context,
like what's appropriate in different places.
- Oh yeah.
- It inhibits you.
Everybody gets a little more talkative, right?
Everyone's talking, talking, talking,
but then you drink more and people are trying to pass out
on the couch and people are slurring their words.
About 8% of people get a dopamine surge
and an energy increase from alcohol
with increasing alcohol intake.
These are the people, remember when you're in your 20s
and there's that guy and he's still awake
at like three in the morning, he's in the kitchen.
- And he's bumping around, he's in the cupboard.
- And you see him the next morning.
- Yeah.
- And he's like, hey, and you're like,
we were passed out, blacked out, drunk.
- He's doing laundry or whatever.
- He's just like, hey, let's go running.
- Yeah, he's doing, yeah, making a lemonade or whatever.
- So that's a genetic predisposition.
- Wow.
- That's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.
- Yeah, that's a genetic predisposition.