Name: The Science Behind P*rn Addiction is Scary
Uploaded: 2025-05-28T17:57:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Science Behind P*rn Addiction is Scary' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Science Behind P*rn Addiction is Scary' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-28. Transcript available.

so one of the big things that i think is is a huge problem that's about to
happen in the world is um
uh pornography addiction right i think it's i believe it's humongous i believe
it's bigger than
alcoholism i believe it's like the wave of it that we're we're starting to see
like people really
suffering from it i think it's one of the reasons why there's a lot of divorce
um what do you see
like neuroscientifically uh about how we can how people can start to manage
that and then even just
what you just talked about about dopamine it's like i think it's helping people
realize with that that
it's like such a hole that you're getting into no uh no whatever that thing is
called no pun intended
um how does that how can people start to cut that off for themselves is there
anything they can do
manage like or do they have to get help if they believe that they're suffering
from like pornography
or uh sexual addiction yeah uh super important questions i'm so glad you're
raising this because
you know it's it's interesting if you look at the research on pornography and
sexual behavior
generally right what you'll find mostly in the academic studies of those areas
is kind of an attempt
to normalize a lot of behavior there are reasons for that some pseudo-political
some um just kind of the
way those studies were done for a long time but it's really important to
emphasize that it takes a while
for science to catch up to culture okay it takes a while for science to catch
up to culture yeah it takes
it and the reason is not because scientists are lazy or they're uninterested is
that doing science well
takes a long time look i've run studies in my lab on animals on humans clinical
trials it takes a long
time like three four years sometimes to get a really good study done meanwhile
life is happening and in
the last in the last five years especially there's been an exponential growth
of the amount of pornography
available online the different formats right only fans um you you know all the
different sites that
people can go to oh yeah free pay ai ai and within each of those there's also
been a huge amplification
of the of what's called like high intensity porn what's high intensity porn it's
more than two people
it's um bdsm now bdsm is its own discussion that maybe we could talk about at
some point you know just
separately about this merge of pain and pleasure that the reason i'll just the
punch line um is that
dopamine is also increased by what we call the cessation of pain when pain
starts and then stops
you get an amplified dopamine surge so a lot of people are watching or engaging
in what we would
call violent porn right and we're as primate species humans we have an empathy
so when people are watching
pornography they're obviously not experiencing the same things exactly those
people are doing and
experiencing but they're tuning into it right they're getting to it and we can
only speculate as to what
they're doing to themselves right typically when we're talking about porn let's
just be direct
that we're also talking about masturbation right typically when we're talking
about watching video
porn sometimes it's women most often it's men by a huge majority oh yeah the
men are the one watching
it yeah although you know years ago i had a girlfriend a woman i was dating
very seriously and
and she confessed to me that prior to our relationship she had developed a porn
compulsion it wasn't an
addiction um you know addiction again is a progressive narrowing of the things
that bring you pleasure
it hadn't taken her to the point where it was destructive but she would had the
wisdom
to cut herself off from it early on okay so it does happen with women but it's
much more frequent with
men so here's the thing we can think of pornography now as like the methamphetamine
of pornography compared to the pornography of you know we always hear about oh
you know like when i was
growing up drawing the playboy or or you know that the thing when i was a kid
like i'll confess as first
didn't know i was going to do a confession but yeah they had those like um sex
education books
where they were like sketch drawings and pencil oh yeah bring them and i you
know when i was you
know probably you know 14 13 i was like this is awesome yeah you know this was
awesome but it was about
you know teaching you basically about sex it was teaching about body parts and
that was uh you
know for sure pencil drawings i can't believe we're looking this up no it's
interesting because i think a lot of people
if you do uh pencil drawings uh who knows what kind of freaky stuff's gonna
jump up here no we have a
blocker on i'm pretty sure no these are yeah there we go there we go so yeah
see human loving this is
very different than today's porn sex and hue i love how they used to call it
human loving human loving
that's nice though there's something at least it makes more sense it puts even
your head into something
you know instead of like uh britney's butt world or whatever you know which
takes it to a whole
different deal and there was no discussion whatsoever of elements of pain or bdsm
or power play there you
go you know yeah yeah i mean you know god for a heterosexual young male the
fact that they put her
naked facing us as opposed to the guy on the other side you're like okay cool
but you know the other
thing about pornography i like is that it in a young brain this this is very
important it relates to
everything we're talking about today from about age zero to 25 your brain is
incredibly plastic it's
modified by experience just by being in those experiences when you say plastic
you mean it's
more like it's not so solid yet that's right you can literally wire neurons
plasticity wire neurons
to other neurons very readily i mean this was um known for a long time but it
was really
formalized by my scientific great grandparents david hubel and tornston weasel
they won a nobel prize for
showing that if you take a cat a monkey or a kid and you close one eyelid for
just a few hours each day
the brain becomes blind to visual input through that eye once you open the eye
up unless you do something
else like close the other eye in order to reverse that plasticity however if
today i just wow yeah that's
how fast and permanent it is unless you do something to reverse it but if i did
that same thing to you
now or me now there'd be no brain change close your eye obviously you can't see
through a closed eye
pop open the eyelid later you see just fine so we know that from a until about
age 25 the brain just
modifies itself based on experience so if you're doing cocaine amphetamine or
let's just stay with
this example you're watching high intensity violent porn with more than two
people right you know we forget
that every time you add another person if it's two women and one guy or it's
you know what's this
woman on x i mean i have to say it makes it gives me an aversive response yeah
which i think is the
healthy response every time she announces i think she's like sleeping with a
hundred and a thousand
people and listen she's obviously in control of her own life conference right
now i think i just saw the
other day i don't know what barbaret uh is it barbaret blues bonnie blue body
blue yeah i mean this is
like blue this is like methamphetamine with heroin and you know what you get
the picture it's starting
to layer in all these different things and so the young you think about the
young male brain in
particular young female brain watching this stuff and it's not just setting a
behavioral expectation
because we always hear about that you know they they think sex is like that and
it's not it's setting this
this incredibly high threshold for what they consider stimulating not just
stimulating sexually but
stimulating mentally oh yeah i mean i mean it's crazy it's like you know listen
i like playing cards
every once in a while so you go play a play card game with your friends be like
the first time you
play cards you got a million bucks you know you're or you're back there in the
high state you're in
like the dana white room right like i know like when i see sometimes his
gambling hands right he's
you know it's wild but he can afford to play right and he also knows where that
fits into the rest of
his life but you think about a a kid you know you have a chance to win a you
know a million dollars
actually there's this scene in that movie uh that show remember succession yes
a show that it's all
about dopamine this family of rich brats who are completely corrupt everything's
about more more
more dopamine has been called in a book i forget the author the molecule of
more it's all about
wanting more and there's this dreadfully sad scene where they go out to play i
think it was like a
baseball game or something and they bring their uh their garden help and they
take the kid and they
say hey if you can hit a home run these people's kids people are clearly oh
yeah and they say if you
hit a home run you have a million dollars and you see the anticipation this
would transform these
kids and their parents life and then he doesn't get the million dollars and
they give him like some
watch that's probably worth 25 000 this is dopamine reward prediction error in
a in a nutshell had they
given him the watch the family probably would have been pretty thrilled they
could sell it they could use
it had they not been involved in the game their dopamine is the same as when
they go home at night
but they had a chance at a million dollars and when they didn't get that it
drops them below baseline
and then you see the kid that evening like sitting around his apartment just
completely
despondent with the watch sitting there as if it was worth nothing nothing that's
dopamine and when
you think about pornography that's what young people are being exposed to so
their first sexual
experiences not only are quite different remember pornography is about
obviously people are getting
aroused by watching other people have sex oh yeah um you know i don't know what
kind of sex people are
having out there but in my experience you know the whole the whole business of
sex and learning how
to have great sex is about learning to be in the in the experience with
somebody and it's a communication
it's an ongoing communication and it's about being in the experience being
present not watching someone
else have sex oh yeah i was thinking the other day watching some other dude
like have sex with a woman it's kind of
i don't even know if it's homoerotic i don't know what it is it's definitely
when you really when
you take a step back from it it's a little bizarre it's definitely intrusive
right but for surely it
alters the way that you think about things i mean i know in my own life i got
exposed to pornography
real early i would bike across town to get a little look at some pornos
perfectly normal behavior for a
young male pretty normal i was breaking into houses to freaking you know yeah
that's i had friends like you
growing up where did you grow up uh louisiana all right i had friends growing
up i mean in the in
south south bay palo alto was pretty tame but when we when i started getting in
the skateboard thing
oh for sure you know we drew from kids from all over and listen i'm very
grateful for that early
exposure oh yeah it's easy to jerk off to if you get some good graffiti oh no i
meant early exposure
to kids that from all walks of life but i knew kids like you breaking in a
house oh dude yeah i remember
yeah it would be crazy you would like you know yeah just like breaking in just
like yeah we made some poor choices
like you know yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get
a little bit off of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it it's easy to get a little bit off
of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get a little bit
off of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get a little bit
off of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get a little bit
off of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get a little bit
off of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get a little bit
off of it

The Science Behind P*rn Addiction is Scary

so one of the big things that i think is is a huge problem that's about to
happen in the world is um
uh pornography addiction right i think it's i believe it's humongous i believe
it's bigger than
alcoholism i believe it's like the wave of it that we're we're starting to see
like people really
suffering from it i think it's one of the reasons why there's a lot of divorce
um what do you see
like neuroscientifically uh about how we can how people can start to manage
that and then even just
what you just talked about about dopamine it's like i think it's helping people
realize with that that
it's like such a hole that you're getting into no uh no whatever that thing is
called no pun intended
um how does that how can people start to cut that off for themselves is there
anything they can do
manage like or do they have to get help if they believe that they're suffering
from like pornography
or uh sexual addiction yeah uh super important questions i'm so glad you're
raising this because
you know it's it's interesting if you look at the research on pornography and
sexual behavior
generally right what you'll find mostly in the academic studies of those areas
is kind of an attempt
to normalize a lot of behavior there are reasons for that some pseudo-political
some um just kind of the
way those studies were done for a long time but it's really important to
emphasize that it takes a while
for science to catch up to culture okay it takes a while for science to catch
up to culture yeah it takes
it and the reason is not because scientists are lazy or they're uninterested is
that doing science well
takes a long time look i've run studies in my lab on animals on humans clinical
trials it takes a long
time like three four years sometimes to get a really good study done meanwhile
life is happening and in
the last in the last five years especially there's been an exponential growth
of the amount of pornography
available online the different formats right only fans um you you know all the
different sites that
people can go to oh yeah free pay ai ai and within each of those there's also
been a huge amplification
of the of what's called like high intensity porn what's high intensity porn it's
more than two people
it's um bdsm now bdsm is its own discussion that maybe we could talk about at
some point you know just
separately about this merge of pain and pleasure that the reason i'll just the
punch line um is that
dopamine is also increased by what we call the cessation of pain when pain
starts and then stops
you get an amplified dopamine surge so a lot of people are watching or engaging
in what we would
call violent porn right and we're as primate species humans we have an empathy
so when people are watching
pornography they're obviously not experiencing the same things exactly those
people are doing and
experiencing but they're tuning into it right they're getting to it and we can
only speculate as to what
they're doing to themselves right typically when we're talking about porn let's
just be direct
that we're also talking about masturbation right typically when we're talking
about watching video
porn sometimes it's women most often it's men by a huge majority oh yeah the
men are the one watching
it yeah although you know years ago i had a girlfriend a woman i was dating
very seriously and
and she confessed to me that prior to our relationship she had developed a porn
compulsion it wasn't an
addiction um you know addiction again is a progressive narrowing of the things
that bring you pleasure
it hadn't taken her to the point where it was destructive but she would had the
wisdom
to cut herself off from it early on okay so it does happen with women but it's
much more frequent with
men so here's the thing we can think of pornography now as like the methamphetamine
of pornography compared to the pornography of you know we always hear about oh
you know like when i was
growing up drawing the playboy or or you know that the thing when i was a kid
like i'll confess as first
didn't know i was going to do a confession but yeah they had those like um sex
education books
where they were like sketch drawings and pencil oh yeah bring them and i you
know when i was you
know probably you know 14 13 i was like this is awesome yeah you know this was
awesome but it was about
you know teaching you basically about sex it was teaching about body parts and
that was uh you
know for sure pencil drawings i can't believe we're looking this up no it's
interesting because i think a lot of people
if you do uh pencil drawings uh who knows what kind of freaky stuff's gonna
jump up here no we have a
blocker on i'm pretty sure no these are yeah there we go there we go so yeah
see human loving this is
very different than today's porn sex and hue i love how they used to call it
human loving human loving
that's nice though there's something at least it makes more sense it puts even
your head into something
you know instead of like uh britney's butt world or whatever you know which
takes it to a whole
different deal and there was no discussion whatsoever of elements of pain or bdsm
or power play there you
go you know yeah yeah i mean you know god for a heterosexual young male the
fact that they put her
naked facing us as opposed to the guy on the other side you're like okay cool
but you know the other
thing about pornography i like is that it in a young brain this this is very
important it relates to
everything we're talking about today from about age zero to 25 your brain is
incredibly plastic it's
modified by experience just by being in those experiences when you say plastic
you mean it's
more like it's not so solid yet that's right you can literally wire neurons
plasticity wire neurons
to other neurons very readily i mean this was um known for a long time but it
was really
formalized by my scientific great grandparents david hubel and tornston weasel
they won a nobel prize for
showing that if you take a cat a monkey or a kid and you close one eyelid for
just a few hours each day
the brain becomes blind to visual input through that eye once you open the eye
up unless you do something
else like close the other eye in order to reverse that plasticity however if
today i just wow yeah that's
how fast and permanent it is unless you do something to reverse it but if i did
that same thing to you
now or me now there'd be no brain change close your eye obviously you can't see
through a closed eye
pop open the eyelid later you see just fine so we know that from a until about
age 25 the brain just
modifies itself based on experience so if you're doing cocaine amphetamine or
let's just stay with
this example you're watching high intensity violent porn with more than two
people right you know we forget
that every time you add another person if it's two women and one guy or it's
you know what's this
woman on x i mean i have to say it makes it gives me an aversive response yeah
which i think is the
healthy response every time she announces i think she's like sleeping with a
hundred and a thousand
people and listen she's obviously in control of her own life conference right
now i think i just saw the
other day i don't know what barbaret uh is it barbaret blues bonnie blue body
blue yeah i mean this is
like blue this is like methamphetamine with heroin and you know what you get
the picture it's starting
to layer in all these different things and so the young you think about the
young male brain in
particular young female brain watching this stuff and it's not just setting a
behavioral expectation
because we always hear about that you know they they think sex is like that and
it's not it's setting this
this incredibly high threshold for what they consider stimulating not just
stimulating sexually but
stimulating mentally oh yeah i mean i mean it's crazy it's like you know listen
i like playing cards
every once in a while so you go play a play card game with your friends be like
the first time you
play cards you got a million bucks you know you're or you're back there in the
high state you're in
like the dana white room right like i know like when i see sometimes his
gambling hands right he's
you know it's wild but he can afford to play right and he also knows where that
fits into the rest of
his life but you think about a a kid you know you have a chance to win a you
know a million dollars
actually there's this scene in that movie uh that show remember succession yes
a show that it's all
about dopamine this family of rich brats who are completely corrupt everything's
about more more
more dopamine has been called in a book i forget the author the molecule of
more it's all about
wanting more and there's this dreadfully sad scene where they go out to play i
think it was like a
baseball game or something and they bring their uh their garden help and they
take the kid and they
say hey if you can hit a home run these people's kids people are clearly oh
yeah and they say if you
hit a home run you have a million dollars and you see the anticipation this
would transform these
kids and their parents life and then he doesn't get the million dollars and
they give him like some
watch that's probably worth 25 000 this is dopamine reward prediction error in
a in a nutshell had they
given him the watch the family probably would have been pretty thrilled they
could sell it they could use
it had they not been involved in the game their dopamine is the same as when
they go home at night
but they had a chance at a million dollars and when they didn't get that it
drops them below baseline
and then you see the kid that evening like sitting around his apartment just
completely
despondent with the watch sitting there as if it was worth nothing nothing that's
dopamine and when
you think about pornography that's what young people are being exposed to so
their first sexual
experiences not only are quite different remember pornography is about
obviously people are getting
aroused by watching other people have sex oh yeah um you know i don't know what
kind of sex people are
having out there but in my experience you know the whole the whole business of
sex and learning how
to have great sex is about learning to be in the in the experience with
somebody and it's a communication
it's an ongoing communication and it's about being in the experience being
present not watching someone
else have sex oh yeah i was thinking the other day watching some other dude
like have sex with a woman it's kind of
i don't even know if it's homoerotic i don't know what it is it's definitely
when you really when
you take a step back from it it's a little bizarre it's definitely intrusive
right but for surely it
alters the way that you think about things i mean i know in my own life i got
exposed to pornography
real early i would bike across town to get a little look at some pornos
perfectly normal behavior for a
young male pretty normal i was breaking into houses to freaking you know yeah
that's i had friends like you
growing up where did you grow up uh louisiana all right i had friends growing
up i mean in the in
south south bay palo alto was pretty tame but when we when i started getting in
the skateboard thing
oh for sure you know we drew from kids from all over and listen i'm very
grateful for that early
exposure oh yeah it's easy to jerk off to if you get some good graffiti oh no i
meant early exposure
to kids that from all walks of life but i knew kids like you breaking in a
house oh dude yeah i remember
yeah it would be crazy you would like you know yeah just like breaking in just
like yeah we made some poor choices
like you know yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get
a little bit off of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it it's easy to get a little bit off
of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get a little bit
off of it
yeah it's easy to get a little bit off of it and it's easy to get a little bit
off of it
yeah it's easy 