 Welcome to the 21 convention 2016 in Miami, Florida. Our next speaker is Steve Maeda Steve Maeda is not only a personal friend. He is the longest running independent speaker in 21 convention history Second only to myself and actually speaking at the event. He's spoken now at 11 events at a 13. It was fucking awesome He is also the founder of the heroes dinner, which you guys enjoyed last night Which is now a highlight of the 21 convention since 2008 He's the founder of the sexual life and the speech is giving you today on addiction It's something that he's worked on and thought about for years. He's spoken to me about it for at least two three years now He's very passionate about it. He has some very unconventional views on it. I'm excited to finally hear them Please help me welcome Steve Maeda at the stage Thank you. All right Thank you so much. It's always an honor to speak here and Every time I speak I try and start off with you know What this is all about and what this is about in all the speeches that I give and choose to give are about men Moving into personal excellence so you can be your best self, but it's also Would be kind of naive for me to not thank my family and start off with a love for them as well Maria's in the back. Our kids are at home Sam a stay bond and then also Zephan and Kai love you guys even when I'm not with you and also this is about Addiction so if it's something that you're struggling with or you know wondering about that's what we're gonna talk about and it's really Serving that purpose so sex drugs and porn addiction and modern culture We're gonna be talking about all that today and there's a couple reasons for it You know, we hear a lot about it with men and with You know our journeys and there's a lot of misinformation about it and the reason why I was asking Anthony about presenting The on the speech years and years ago was because I'd watched so many different TED talks and I'd hear different Coaches and therapists talk about this stuff and it really rubbed me the wrong way partially because I'm an addict and here we have the fancy little definition of what an addict is but Doesn't really describe me that well, I mean I fit within those things, but to be more specific Drug addicts, you know, I've been an addict since I was 14 years old. All right. I have overdosed multiple times I've been revived. I've lived the life of what that means, which is pretty bad and Man, I mean like I know what it's like to just Have my life completely absorbed by that and live on the animal level of what that means Or of what that where that takes you and we'll get into a little bit of that also sexual addiction and I believe addiction is one whole thing that just takes hold at different parts of your life and I've Had that too. I've had it ruin my relationships I've had it ruin my friendships and I've made my life in an obsession and compulsion to find pleasure outside of myself Whatever that might be whether it's putting a pharmaceutical in my body heroin in my body alcohol in my body or finding sex in some sort of way to feel different and In this speech though what I want to look at is addiction is two different things This is what's going to make it a little bit unique Hopefully a lot of things make you unique, but the first thing is is that addiction is a natural phenomenon And so me coming from a place where you know, it's like hey, man You know, I am a drug addict and I forgot to say that it is one of my most proud things It's literally been what has made everything work And since I've been speaking at the 21 convention and been a coach and all these things for the past ten years that Foundation of addiction was was a huge thing for me But I also want to talk about the disease or the disorder and there's a lot of different terminology speculation there I use the term disease, but there's a bunch of neuroscientists that are kind of like moving around that term I don't really care about that, you know I think a lot of the stuff they're saying is right and I just kind of well throughout the term disease every once in a while and also what's super important about this is that Myself coming from a recovery vein that means I had a problem with addiction and have worked with it and hopefully have Managed it and all these different things and know the life of that. There's also the Medical community talking about it. There's also the scientific community talking about it There's also the public talking about it and the interesting thing is is all seem to be divided There's a little bit right and a little bit wrong about each and every single one of those communities and it confuses everybody about it So I choose to for this speech use the definition of addiction is a lifestyle That is built on the obsession and compulsion of finding something outside of yourself to make you feel better That's what I got in and that's what we're going to talk about whether that's the phenomenon the natural phenomenon or the disease and disorder So sex drugs and porn This is the reason one of the reasons why I wanted to give this speech and was so passionate about giving it and man I I would get so fired up and I would email Anthony or call him and I'm like man I got to give a speech about addiction He's like well, maybe you know and I just kept bugging him and bugging him and bugging him and I'd see this I say everything you know about addiction is wrong and this guy says some stuff and some of it might be right But in my opinion a total misinterpretation and not have anything to do with my story of being somebody who put heroin into My body hoping that I die multiple times and even passing out and being revived that I just needed a hug or hearing that Vietnam veterans Which these are these are true things But once again as we were hearing multiple times in this convention stats that are misinterpreted And I feel have a propaganda nature to them your brain on porn the Whatever this one is which is what is it the? the great porn experiment right and all these different things See before these things were popular about porn or the theories of addiction and all this sort of stuff as Ted talks I had already worked through a lot of this stuff and me being a sex addict. In fact, I'll tell you this It sucked and I looked at the pickup community. There's nobody Everybody was talking about their sexual behavior and activity wasn't talking about the pain their reality They weren't talking about what it was like when you felt the empty feeling of having sex and having sex with multiple women Over and over and over again to the point where it goes two three years And you think you hate having sex and then all of a sudden you actually connect with somebody and you you feel an emotion And you go my god, I did love it, but wait a minute. This is confusing. What is this? And you don't hear people talking about it You're the side effect and the frustration of you've got to be alpha and you've got to you know do these things and One there's a polarization. There's good sexual behavior. There's bad sexual behavior We're only going to do the good kind and there was such a gray line in between that and actually who I sought out and Help with sex addiction was all porn people and I'd bring that up all the time and when I'd hear dating coaches say porn is evil I'd be like man. They were the only people that helped me and you didn't You you were you were full of shit. You were lying and buying your own Kool-Aid Anyway, let's go with this stat another reason why I'm giving this speech one out of four one out of four of my clients I've been a coach for ten years. So people that come to the sexual life Have a problem with sexual dysfunction and they equate it to porn or the use of pornography But here's what's even worse if you take that to guys who are under the age of 27. So 26 and down It's eight out of ten. That's fucking crazy, right eight out of ten guys that come to me say look I Have a problem and or actually it's more like this like hey, so what's your program about and I'm like so I Have this thing where like I have sex and it's really hard and I'm like no man. Come on So it's like premature ejaculation You can't get an erection or you know, there's a pornography thing going you watch like this is your brain on porn and and this is this big deal Right. Yeah, but it's a super unique individualized thing, but it's eight out of ten And so when they come to our groups and we have this huge community everybody's like oh, man Awesome, they're like no no you don't understand. We're like no we totally understand And so it's very easy when you see that eight out of ten I mean that's for real and now that's my company. I have a company that focuses on sex And it may get a different sort of client, but that's a lot man That's a lot and so it's very easy to go Addiction or porn addiction is ruining your life porn addiction is an epidemic amongst young men it's destroying young men sex lives and causing Huge spreads of sexual dysfunction the neurological pathways in your brain are being rewritten It's this impossible thing that's coming about you make you hate women It'll make you hate yourself and it's very very easy to draw those conclusions from that It seems like a no-brainer, right, but again that wasn't my experiment or experience so I want to do an experiment and And I remember when when this happened now, it's very clear to me But I was like no this is this is bullshit because when I was having problems and I would watch pornography for 11 hours straight a day and I would go and have sex with a bunch of different chicks and feel nothing I was just nuts. It was in and I was in that mode, right? I was like, you know what I want to do. I Want to create a group of guys Okay, so this is the first time we did it and I want to create a group of guys And these guys are gonna be either recovering drug addicts. They're gonna be recovering sex addicts Or they're gonna be brand-new. They're gonna have no sexual experience experience Right, and we're gonna form a group and we're gonna agree to masturbating to porn for a certain amount of time every single day Okay, and so my average I committed to two hours a day I was gonna masturbate to in and I loved it because at the time I wasn't watching a lot of porn Right I had in the past, but I was like, oh man I'm gonna revisit this all my old all my old buddies online who don't know me, right and let's see Let's see what Laila stars up to I haven't seen her in a while and But the thing is is that every week we'd meet two to three times and sometimes more and we talk about it Now here's how we talk about it because you can't just talk about it. Just say yeah, I watched this and da da da We we were guys that were already in recovery So we had a little bit of a taste of what this was about, right? And we had no judgment if there was anything illegal It was not our place in the group to report it. Okay. This was about openness You know, we weren't the social police or anything So we weren't there to judge that and we were gonna be totally honest about all of our experiences now since then there was a little bit There's a few caveats to this if you were causing harm you just couldn't do the group So if you were actually inflicting harm on other people couldn't happen But if you had desires or pursued things but didn't take the action that were illegal or causing harm That was that was fine and we had to have that openness and then as it later went on We We basically we said like look if you're in the midst of a porn or sex addiction You're gonna chill out. You're just gonna join the group You're not gonna make any commitment to watching porn But you're gonna chill out and you're gonna get to know the guys and learn to be open, right? And so what were the results, right? What would you think would happen? All right, the same qualities of erectile dysfunction sexual performance problems hatred towards women distance from your partner Sexual dissatisfaction. We're all fleeting and they were quickly resolved if they even happened And so this would happen to me. I would not want to have sex. I'd be like well I'm not gonna fuck my chicken. I'm gonna jerk off the porn but but the thing was I had a group to talk about it and the Because we were so honest about it. It was like well, you know, sometimes I feel this it wasn't a big deal We took a lot of that that You know power away from it. All right And so the interesting thing was is because there was less shame wrapped around sex In fact, there was none right if we had shame we talked about it because some of us would have it We needed to talk about it, you know masturbation and a variety of sexual behaviors that that the people desired Including their ways of masturbating or ways are watching porn Man, they didn't carry that same weight The individual started to be proud of their sex lives and be okay with it And actually I wouldn't even say be proud of it. Maybe that was the first stage But ultimately see that it was normal Whatever they were doing even if they were into some crazy stuff There was a result of their sexual trauma in the past or whatever it was because we deal with sex addicts It's it's a it's a pretty interesting thing that they now saw that as normal Like well, I get off of this and this might be absurd to the general public, but man This is what I like so we actually watched more porn let ourselves get totally carried away with it But we took away the shame and repression Okay, so we took away the you're bad for this. This is a bad behavior and of the repression We took away the I can't do this. There was no longer a black and white You could do whatever you wanted and you could express it So if I'm going like I have a sex drive But I'm gonna halt it and not watch porn so I could be an authentic man or whatever thing You're gonna tell yourself you will not succeed in that you have to force that and Repression causes things to break and they may not break in the ways that you think they do All right, so in order for this to be true There had to be a fundamental problem with all the different stuff people were saying about addiction About porn and how it affected you All right, so the interesting thing about this group is it's been repeated over and over and over and over again and it's been repeated for seven years non-stop and In those seven years we realized that this isn't a quick fix There's nothing sexy about it It takes time and it will take hard work and if you do have a problem You're gonna have to unlearn it in a little bit and it is a process, right? But give yourself six nine months of sitting in our groups You'll get a lot better where you didn't get better before so this group is TSL online But more importantly then TSL online you should check this out the sexual life comm slash addiction There you can download the slides for this, but also you can look at a video Which is on the 21 convention website called everything you know about porn and masturbation is wrong You should check that out where this go the porn stuff goes more into detail Also, there's other resources that if you're struggling with addiction We'll get into the other ones that you can check those out you can also contact me and join some of our free online groups where we talk about this stuff and There we go, so let's go back to this one out of four eight at eight out of ten How can you beat that? What's up with that? Well check this out one out of four or that eight out of ten? That's under twenty six or twenty seven They were all clients who sought help with somebody else before us most likely a dating coach and a therapist All right. There's nothing wrong with therapy. Therapy is awesome. I encourage it But I'm sharing this speech to give you some awareness on what you got to look for right and they all felt unresolved with their issues around porn sex and it turned into a desperation that nothing could work that Nothing that they were doing because they did everything and the interesting stuff is is if you follow a lot of the stuff that people talk About on reddit or different dating coaches or different therapists It'll take a while for it not to work and that collapse will happen a month or six months down the road maybe a couple weeks and This is this is the most interesting thing about this I Don't know a person who has got who's sought sexual therapy help and prescribe this sort of plan that has actually come out Sexually healthy. I've never met some I've met people on it and then like six months later They're like off looking for hookers in the worst part of town because they hate themselves or they think there's something equated to that I mean it's progressive. It's crazy, right? And so why why does this not work? Well proposed solution man It does not work. What is the general proposed solution? There's all sorts of different ones, but it is to not watch porn to not masturbate to learn to respect women because there must be a problem with you and your viewpoint on women that you learn from porn and rape culture and all the sort of stuff and This is another thing that my friend he got you went to a sexual therapist He's like porn was the problem Steve the neural pathways that we said Steve the neural pathways man She's the neural pathways. It was like I was like a rat in a cage. It was crazy And you know, there's some truth to that but then He said look I got to go on 20 dates before I touch a girl And I have to start rewiring how I rethink about women. He really tried this dude Nobody's gonna make that work, but what he said was he's like dude was totally successful because when I had sex I was able his problem was he wasn't able to orgasm or get an erection Which is a very common thing and he said I was able to do that it was like instant It was amazing. I was like, but you hadn't masturbated or ejaculated in 30 days, right? And so your body then takes over and it forces you to do it and then maybe Four or five more sexual encounters down the road maybe 10 maybe 20 the emotional things haven't been worked out, right? And there's still that shame. It's still that if you let that bad thought creep in Man, you're fucked. All right It produced shame and guilt around sexual behavior. So you couldn't do one thing, but you could do another All right, your way of thinking was wrong and it was also based on a lot of propaganda more than reality All right and propaganda when it comes to porn and masturbation is nothing new In fact, this is something that's covered in that webinar, which is on the 21 convention site But masturbation we've heard things like you go to hell. You're gonna go blind I mean, I mean this is crazy like if you masturbate as a kid 30 years ago 200 years ago You are fucked for your eternal for the rest of you can perceive life So maybe you live for 30 years or 40 years or maybe 60 years. That's your break That's when you get it good after that fuck you, you know, you and the devil are hanging out Makes you blind you get hairy palms you go sterile porn when porn came about and so porn You know pictures things like that but when it came out on film in the 30s behind the green door All sort of stuff. There's all this shit that came out. It's gonna make you a drug addict I remember when Jeffrey Dahmer got caught where there was a slide that I was gonna put an image on here But the image was too small and it said this is your brain on drugs and it showed the egg And this is your brain on porn and it showed Ted Bundy and this was stuff that my mom actually told me You know, she found pornography in my room like when I was whatever age 10 or 11 or I was drawing naked pictures And she said Jeffrey Dahmer did that and that was one of the true signs that made him a sociopath Now there's no more sociopaths. It's only psychopath, but whatever I can keep up with this stuff But in order to understand the pornography Propaganda you got to understand this amazing propaganda the war on drugs now the war on drugs What did it tell us drugs kill drugs kill people? That's clear drug traffickers are some evil evil dudes They kill people and drugs are the whores of addiction are real things. These are all very true You know, how could you argue with that? How could you man? I mean for me being in recovery I know somebody once a month that I have been friends with that has been that has died that dies I mean it fucking sucks, right and drug traffickers are bad people. You guys all saw Narcos. They're terrible, right? How can all this be wrong and so 40 plus years later? We realize there's a little bit more to the war on drugs Okay, you know drugs were a political tool. Nixon was having some troubles. He needed to regain some popularity It was a distraction. It was for-profit There was for self a grandization whenever people wanted to be noticed you could always bring up drugs You know was always an easy sell and the thing is is that it actually created all these problems with our prison system it created created all these problems socially for us and It caused the need for traffickers to take harsher measures. So it created more violence, right? And you know just made more hysteria around drugs. So this is the the partnership for a drug-free America All right, never in the history of the world has there been a drug-free society in fact Because of that you will always have a war on drugs You will always have an enemy and it's estimated but in the history of the world there has always been Something about point five percent of the population to three percent of the population that has a problem with drugs Okay, in these that's a small percentage, but still very very relevant one percent is a lot Right, but so you'll know somebody that's affected by this But think about this. Do you want a drug-free society if you had to have a drug-free society? What would that mean? You would have massive massive social oppression in order to get there and Perhaps the search for drugs and the search for looking and finding those different ways of thinking and feeling That's always been a part to what you know was the bedrock of our culture no matter what culture you had to think beyond So the war on drugs actually did nothing to help people who were addicted to drugs It had nothing to prevent drug addiction It did nothing to help find the causes of addiction But what it did was it polarized it and made it a war all right and that caused a lot of problems So it told us the drugs were a national and world emergency Also when they never really were okay, so here's the truth the truth about drug addiction And these are studies that are actually cited from Carl Hart's book high price which Interesting good guys one of the good guys, but I'd like to talk to him more and again That's what this for because I'd like to build more of a dialogue between guys who are scientists making progressive information About the you know what's going on with the brain and drugs and with people in recovery and with people who are Therapists and people who are into the medical definition of it But 80 to 90% of people who use drugs like crack cocaine crystal meth heroin oxycontin alcohol Marijuana do not get addicted to them. That's crazy and how this is actually worded It should be worded better is that if you use them regularly You will not get addicted that wasn't my story That wasn't my story in any way shape or form and me saying that knowing that these things You know mainly things like heroin or oxycontin or crack or meth killed so many of my friends man Me saying that was a big jump But that is the truth The truth about porn check this out over 80 over 90 percent of Young men will get caught up in a long-term excessive uses of masturbation That is going to happen. That is not unique That is not something which makes you different or screwed up or whatever and actually after several months or years You grow out of it. Okay, but you will sit in that tension of being carried away with it for a while 90% of Men will experience one or more sexual dysfunctions in their life including premature ejaculation inability to get an erection sustained an erection You know sexual anxiety before and after sex, but all these big things well happen, right? And they're different for everybody, you know and in different situations elicit them All right, those who experience these problems long-term and those who experience these problems and They seem to grow bigger and they do go on for years and they're not stopping Are all a specific group of people and if you're one of these people, that's fine All right, there's nothing wrong with you because of that You just have to take a different route and this was actually for me, right? You know, I am one of the one percenters. It's usually a good thing in this case But it's still a good thing just wasn't at the time But you had sexual trauma. You had heavy cultural or social oppression wrapping around sex and your viewpoints on sex and relationships All right, so that means the more shame and repression that you had Man Like you would be more likely to get carried away with this stuff. All right, so porn addiction is ruining your life Porn is an epidemic amongst young men. It's destroying your sex lives. It makes you hate women It makes you hate yourself. There's all these terrible things, right? They're rewires or neuro pathways yet you've tried everything you did it all But the interesting thing is the poor results don't come till six months down the road two months down the road or whatever It is and you read all about all this science all these authorities speaking on it What would that mean if it doesn't work for you? That means more shame And I can't tell you how many guys come to TSL the sexual life saying this didn't work There's a guy at the last 21 convention. He said man, I got carried away with this. I'm so glad I'm a part of your groups Because I went to a therapist and again not all therapists are bad But they're just not aware of what it is to actually be a sex addict and this guy wasn't a sex addict But they told him he wasn't it just it made him nuts. He couldn't do it He couldn't keep up with the pace of or lack of pace of not masturbating not watching porn every time he did it He felt terrible. There was no answer. So despite the general message about addiction It is almost always used as a tool to propagate something to self promote You know to use is a political tool But it does nothing for people that are having a problem with addiction Think about that and that's why it would piss me off every time I'd see those TED talks those fucking assholes I mean they could be great guys did not speak to me did not speak to me They did not speak to my friend who when she had 15 years clean and I had a year would show up at a restaurant I was broke as fuck and she'd give me her free meals Then later on when I had six or seven years relapse and she put a fucking gun to her head and her ex-husband's backyard It didn't speak to that You know, it didn't speak to all of my friends that did that shit man. It's so it's just crazy, right? You know, but but what were they speaking to a bunch of people who had sit to me sit with me at a dinner table Conversation or to think that they were all intellectual telling me that oh, well, you know rats in a cage You know the interesting statistic about that which it actually shows a great thing rat city, right? We've all heard about it put the rats in a place where they can hang out and play and you know, they don't kill themselves doing heroin or Cocaine, but you put them in a cage. They do it to the point of death Well, what do human beings do and actually human beings do it less than the rats because the rats still ten percent of them were addicted to drugs or kept doing it Human beings 1% 1% 3% right put human beings in a cage What do they do look at jails and drug use it's hard to tell to stay clean in in jail So another thing that we hear about is neuroscience and this is actually a really really cool part This was the thing I was most excited about talking about because we always hear about the neuroscience And we've heard a couple speakers talk about it, but we really break it down here now when you are in the phenomenon of addiction So remember we said we're going to talk about the natural phenomenon and then the disease and disorder of addiction and there are two really different things All right, so the natural phenomenon to addiction what happens is your brain lights up I love hearing that too, but it doesn't just light up. It works in this crazy complex way We're just going to isolate four areas of it here. You got to kind of be aware of it but these things light up not in just this one-set way and these ways that are just Amazing and totally diverse and crazy and it's awesome But we're going to look at the amygdala which actually stimulates emotions So anytime you get a surge of feeling something that's the amygdala and then it happens so fast the rest of the brain tries to interpret it This is the striatum which does a whole bunch of stuff But what we're talking about it here is that it pumps dopamine it regulates how much of that feeds all of this We're also going to talk about the accumbens which the accumbens is that thing which says right now do it now when you get tunnel vision When you can't stop thinking about one thing you're going to think or you're activating this little guy there And then the orbital frontal cortex. This is awesome This is what makes human beings human sock was talking about it Nick was talking about it But this whole area and this is just the orbital frontal cortex is in the brain for strategy makes you think This is the difference between us and pretty much any other animal because mammals all have this reptiles don't But a rabbit or a rat or a mouse can get by with an accumbens go now and an amygdala But a human being has this other thing where we can think strategize way the differences between Think about what's going to affect us in the future and so on right so much of the point where if we lived in a Cold environment we could build a house so much to the point when we talk to somebody We may have social urges to talk to them But we could think and weigh the scale of that and then have personality and conversation all these different things And so what we're going to talk about is how these things interact with each other when we're going through The natural phenomenon of addiction, so we're going to talk about these three things the trigger The high and the void All right now Let's move on to the trigger So the trigger is that thing which that thought or that action that? Stimulates that obsessive thinking and we've all been there We've all been here with so many different things, but the first thing that happens You know so maybe we're watching porn or maybe you're a drug addict and and you you see somebody on the street Or my friend was just telling me the other day was like man I was driving to work and I was at a red light and it was like man This light is taking a little bit longer than normal and then all of a sudden something about the amygdala goes boom boom boom go You know neuro pathways are a little bit exercise and all that sort of stuff We could talk about that a little bit later and then all of a sudden stride I'm boom dopamine starts to get a physical change in his mouth It starts to water or maybe you're watching pornography or you're sitting in front of the computer like me and you're typing stuff And you're going crazy and your brain's just nuts nuts nuts like wire and moving moving moving moving kind of like you're in a cage And then all of a sudden you're like well wait a minute Oh fuck man, I should watch some porn Jesus Christ And then all of a sudden my hands start to shake my heart beats a little bit faster my mouth salivates I start to smell different things I get a physical change happening all drug addicts talk about this physical change What's you get this awareness of when you're going to you know man? I'm gonna I'm gonna get loaded man It's before we put the drug in the body or anything like that And then there's a meaty scene an obsession and this is really cool right so the accumbens then comes into play And it's like no now now you can't think about anything else perhaps if I'm in front of the computer I'm already tunneled vision there, but now it's like well wait a minute. No, I got to do it I got to know I got to work. I got to get this done man. I've I'm under a deadline But fuck dude if I just fucking god man, and this is this is the other part I start to strategize right and that's where this The prefrontal cortex comes in but the orbital frontal cortex more specifically starts going you know what I can do this No, this is me. No, there's nothing wrong with this There's nothing absolutely wrong with this and and I'm gonna do it and perhaps You know Maria's calling me from downstairs, and then I just don't even think about it I just say I'm busy. I got to work on this. I got to finish this right that's the strategy coming around I don't want to lie to her But when all these things are happening these things happen and they're normal and they're natural And so we're moving through this and then we get ritualistic I sit there and I'm in front of my computer and I move things to the side of my chair back because I don't like to sit in A certain way when I'm jerking off and I want to see the certain screen in this way and all these things are happening Right these all the stuff that happens from coming from our groups because we talked about this a lot or perhaps I'm setting up to load up a needle. I get the right spoon. I light it in the same way I get it hot in the same way, and I start to move in this ritual I can only use the same tourniquet if I'm in a trap house or whatever And that's a house where a bunch of people do drugs and sell drugs out of is that I'm gonna be in a certain area I'm gonna go in my room. I'm gonna most likely end up in the smallest corner of the house You know wanting more and then at that point I haven't even gotten involved in the action yet But I'm powerless towards it And so the secession of things happen right where the brain gets hyper stimulated and starts to move within enough with within itself and You know all of a sudden we've got to do it You know we're powerless towards it or we're totally in it and we want to do it It would just make sense to do it Right, it's the right thing. We're not weighing the scales of morality We're not thinking about what our therapist said and the problem is we see a therapist once a week And we don't have a group to go to or maybe twice a week And so then we start to get high the addictive behavior takes place when the addictive behavior takes place This is awesome. We get height and focus man from the point where I'm going through the trigger and I'm watching porn Or to the point where I watch porn Totally different person totally different human being why why? Man different thing the amygdala says something else. It's like holy shit Look at that man remember last time and the chick with the tits and da da da da and all of a sudden I started drinking off I get into a sexual state. I need intensity man. I need diversity I wasn't even thinking about some crazy whatever it is interracial stuff or animals or whatever shit you're into But all of a sudden this makes sense. No, I'm gonna do it And this was an interesting thing because as many of you guys know my first girlfriend I had sex with like five times. I walked across the street at a gas station She got kidnapped and gang raped by a bunch of people and all of a sudden four or five years later I'm watching rape porn and I'm one of those guys and I and I'm like I would never want that would never right now I'd be like no, I do not think that's good, but all of a sudden. I'm like god this is amazing Oh my god, I'm just like those guys this has to be I can't talk to anybody about this It's got to be a secret immediate desire for more. I need more. I started. I need to collect things I need to start I have scarcity coming through why because all these things are going like hey Dopa means coming dope means coming if you don't sustain your erection If you don't sustain your high if you're running out of cocaine if you're running out of heroin fuck I got to use this but I got to start calling my dealers to get more or whatever or one of the shitty things which happens if you Just happened to me that you guys may not be able to relate with but you buy some heroin and it's China white But it turns out to be cocaine you put it in your body like oh fuck man now. I'm all high if I'm wired I'm gonna stay up. I'm gonna stay up and I'm gonna wait till 9 a.m. So my dealers dealers awake and I'm gonna call them and then I'm gonna trade this out I'm gonna sell somebody and then then I'm gonna get the heroin right Guess what happens you just stay up all night doing the cocaine and then you're out and you're like fuck It's just terrible thing But you have that scarcity in building and strategy and all this stuff is tunnel visioned in because the accumbens is going crazy And the orbital frontal cortex is is in this tunnel vision But it's going like no we need to do this and this is gonna happen and it's gonna happen in these ways And all all sorts of stuff is gonna happen and we're gonna tell this person this story and it's amazing I don't know if you guys have ever talked to a drug addict, but they're like no no look You can you can call and check with my sister. She's got it down This is not a big deal and just just leave like I need the money now And it's it's not for anything that you think it is but it's totally cool or one of my favorite scenes from drugstore Cowboys The guy has a no shirt on and like boxers and a trench coat and he just shows up the door And he's like yeah, man, so we got to do this It's great great. I start I start hoarding I start I start hiding different things Especially if I'm watching porn I'm going like no man. I want to watch this again. This is mine This is gonna be mine right now and that's actually part of this ego part man That orbital frontal cortex that does so much for us naturally. We're going no I own this man I'm gonna save this, you know, I have a relationship with it. This is something that's happening yet Even though I'm not looking at the outcome and this is an interesting thing about compulsion studies is that when I look at the outcome And I'm in a compulsive state. I don't care about the outcome. I care about it getting done So it doesn't actually have purpose or meaning in a motion with me But it has a ritual of having to be able to finish the job much like if you see a brake light on a car You pump your brakes, right? You know, you I'm sorry you react to that But you start doing that with your life and all these complex things and then the best part is is the ritualistic end Anytime I got fucking high man. I didn't care necessarily where I was I wanted to be in a corner, but I wanted to pass out in a certain way and at first Maybe that had some sort of benefit. This is a real thing man Like I'm still comfortable sleeping in these positions to this day and it's years and years later, right of where I Would pass out to make sure that I wasn't gonna choke on my puke I would pass out in a certain way where it felt the feeling that I was kind of attached to and all these things meant something But the same thing with pornography. I was gonna strategize how I was gonna come how I was gonna end this all And I wished I could have held on to it longer But if I'm gonna go if I'm gonna go it's going to happen in this way Very very very important to look at now this part is the interesting part the void And this is what really is going to make the difference The void happens as soon as we're done All this calms down all this chills out all this orbital frontal cortex area into the prefrontal cortex Starts to be active again, and it's like what the fuck and the reality of it is is this is so overwhelming Possibly because it's an earlier part of the brain possibly because of trauma possibly because of just the situation is so intense that This can't interact All right, and so we heard about that too in some of the previous speeches So that orbital frontal cortex goes what the fuck or the prefrontal cortex is like what is going on? Holy shit. I'm late for work. Oh, man. Fuck this thing happened Jesus Christ And all of a sudden there's this this empty feeling that gets interpreted by shame a lot Why because we're alone. All right, and and then we start to have regret and we go man I told why was I doing that fuck? Why did I do that again? I can't believe it. I said I wasn't gonna do this and And I know I got carried away and it's just it's crazy. It's like a drug It's horrible and I started to get disgusted with myself I started to get depressed and this is the point where we sweared off forever where we go I am never going to do this again, but we forget We forget that just two minutes before this that was not in our mind And that's very important because we often think this is the story of addiction When this is really the story of a natural path of addiction okay, so Right here. We have the natural phenomenon of addiction. We just went through that experience and I know a ton of you guys have felt it and Been through those whether it was through a drug or whether it was through porn or You were at a rally or you were at a church event or you were in a flow state Or you just wrote something it made total sense. You were feeling that high. Here's the difference The social event socially acceptable The high of writing something socially acceptable, but I'll feel the void with that because the next day when I can't write the same I'm like no man. I got to do more. I got to do more. Oh fuck. I can't do it Oh, geez and all this like depression and shame comes into play because I can't perform like I did the day before when I created something like really awesome, right? You know or let's say we go through a sporting event now This happens all the time to me and jujitsu But socially acceptable. There's no reason so when I feel the void when my brain calms down We're all chill and there's other factors in there But the voids there if you experience this if you experience this natural phenomenon That does not make you an addict and all the propaganda says it makes you an addict Right? So that's a very common thing our brains were made to do that our brains were made to feel that Okay, and if we talk about it with each other like I said in the experiment Even with guys who've gone into full-blown addiction and sex addiction is crazy and when you talk about sex addiction I'm not talking about jerking off to porn. That's a part of it I'm talking about prostitution yourself prostitution yourself for a place to stay you're going in and compromising your sexuality in extreme ways So that you can get what you need or even feel good just because it's a novelty or something new You know, I don't see a lot of young men doing that I see a lot of young men doing this natural phenomenon when they talk about it a lot of it gets relaxed So what the fuck man? What's up with this 1%? What the fuck happened to me? You know, why did this happen? Why did this happen when you know, it was like I was that guy I smoked pot and I drank with my buddies, you know, and then a couple years down the road I'm fucking Odean in my parents house and they're waking me up and not figuring out what the fuck's happening and calling Ambulances all sort of shit and I'm getting my stomach pumped and I'm in a coma for six days And I end up in a rehab and what happens when I make it three years clean Then I turn 20 and I'm like, you know what I really wasn't that bad because I wasn't that bad, you know I mean, I was only fucking 17 years old. How much shit do you actually have and? Start drinking again start doing whatever drugs and slowly but surely creeps up and all it gets it gets nuts, man And man, let me tell you let me tell I used to go to So I'm a 12-step recovery guy But there's plenty of different ways to get clean and I used to go to these meetings and these guys used to say Like you asshole, I spilled on my time more than you drink and I'd be like, okay I sure proved those fucking assholes wrong man Jesus Christ by the time I was 28 a bunch of my in fact in my last speech that I gave at the 21 convention all my pictures from 2003 2004 even 2005 with all my old band members and friends that were in Dallas Fort Worth I couldn't use them because I didn't want to have pictures of my dead friends up there You know that we were just all fucked up. It was it was awesome. It was great, man There's so many good stories about it, but all of this You know this this thing about addiction where it moves into a disease or a disorder And like I said some people have a problem that disease word and I'm fine with that as long as we can talk about it more You know, I actually agree on the neuroscience guys that the good guys break it down and talk about it Just being a disorder But when your life revolves around that right when your life is they getting and using and finding ways and means to Get more and you are obsessed with it, okay? In order to get this we have to understand the void There's way more to it than this but this is a short speech because it all ties in so what happens when I get done This is Sam done jerking off done jerking off. Usually I'm alone, right and all of a sudden my brain calms down Nothing's there and responsibility comes back and I go fuck man Jesus Christ the first thing I feel is shame I go shit dude. I did this again God man because masturbation is this thing I've been doing since I was nine or ten or whatever age I was and it never felt good I always try to control it and I can't and I'm alone Right. I'm isolated and I start to feel guilty and these things happen and you know what well I could jerk off again or maybe I could wait tomorrow or maybe this is a repetitive thing and I did it You know once again, and it's like fuck man. This is a pattern and all of a sudden It's like God dude. There's consequences You know maybe my girlfriend left me or maybe I ended up in jail or maybe I had to jerk off in a Bathroom like George Michael or something like that or whatever it was I just wanted to take things to whatever level and I got a consequence now man a cop busted me And I have a sex offender status and I start to build this belief. This is me I have tried everything in the world. This is me. This is who I am man There's a side of me that isn't that isn't this which I go out in public and I shake people's hands And then there's a side of me that is this and Jesus Christ man like fuck if they only knew I would be fucked if they only knew They'd be disgusted with who I was and I'm disgusted with who I am But I can put on this face and feel good about myself for a little bit We're gonna polarize ourselves here so we can function through life and then it becomes the norm You know man I'll tell you this man when you get using this the best part about drug addiction if you are a drug addict and you Don't die you have one of the best gifts because you cannot fake this with porn with eating with gambling I'd even say a little bit with alcohol You can fake this shit. You get a DWI you embarrass yourself in front of friends No, man You cannot blur that line if you are doing drugs you become the norm. This no longer is a high There's no longer something to where you're going like oh man, I'm gonna you know for five minutes I'm gonna just have my way or for two hours. I'm just gonna disappear and feel nothing. It's great This now becomes a point where you're alienated from people Your friends your lifestyle everything revolves around that and instead of getting high you're maintaining how many times have you guys been there where you jerk off to porn and It doesn't work anymore and for me I jerk off 10 11 times and I couldn't come like literally I like you I say this joke jokingly all the time But foam would be at my dick There was no ejaculation there was somewhat of an orgasm but it meant nothing and how many times have I been there where in This is one of the most fucked up things because you're hating yourself You're getting high you're holed up in your fucking bathroom, and you're doing whatever drug and it does nothing to you Nothing you put dope in your body, and you don't even feel normal. You're still in pain You're still sick, and you feel nothing That's maintenance and when you get there When you get there, and it sustains that's no longer a void. That's a way of life And when it's a way of life that is when you are an addict and that to me is the disease Or the disorder of what you say with addiction all right, that's when we cross that line and Man it's interesting what gets us there You know some of the things that they say like people's amygdalas are a little bit more receptive when we have Trauma in our youth when we had You know some sort of abuse when we felt different when we felt alienated in fact There's all these social studies, and of course social studies can get reinterpreted and misinterpreted and used in all these screwed up ways but people that commit suicide Generally have a feeling where they don't have a vision of their future where they don't have a Backbone does they feel alone? You know they feel Separate you know the everything you know about addiction is wrong the Ted talk He's like give an Attica hug how many hugs I got I got a lot But where I needed that hug was perhaps way back in my youth and what I really fucking needed was I needed a way to Stop but then get hugs from people who actually understood me and wanted to listen to me and not some yuppie motherfucker at a Conversation saying oh, yeah, yeah, that's great. You know I read this thing and it's amazing You know they put these rats and it's like I get what you're going with it cool Yeah, and so just to just to put this in here This this slide I I don't really know how to talk about and we'll see where I go with it But you know obviously this means my buddy Matt. It's my buddy Robert It's my buddy Haseeb seeps kind of a famous guy Google me. He's probably pissed off I put him in here, but this was part of our JKD group. We worked with that achin who's a Guy who's spoken here, and it was awesome man. We beat the shit out of each other That's what we did all the time. This was in August 2013, and we were we were gonna train that day and that day this guy Fucking split my face open man I have this huge like gosh, and I should have put the picture in there, and I remember I was like no Let's keep I got all mad at him. I was like what the fuck did you do man? He's like man. I just I'm sorry I just did what we were doing, but you know you get punched the face and laid out You're like you get mad about it like as if it was their fault when you do this And you know this guy got his eardrum ruptured and his spleen ruptured that day We were like Ed actually was like you guys are being pussies, and we just took it way too far Robert somehow doesn't end up hurt, but I mean we beat the hell out of him and Haseeb neither It was just me and Matt were the two dumbasses, but me and Matt both drug addicts right and to share the story a little bit more how this all worked was Matt and I were training partners and martial arts for many years and It turned out that he was in recovery as a kid, and then he never told me this He was always like you're in that like recovery thing, and they talk about God And I'm like dude no and he was an atheist, and I'm pretty close to that too I was like no no, you know it doesn't work that way or whatever We talk about it if you want and one day he gave me a call he said man I'll can you take me to rehab like I'm dying like it like this is too crazy, and I took him to read I picked him up I took him to get all the things that you need to get into rehab you had to take a tuberculosis test Which he had he also had hep C and he was an IV user and you never would have thought that I mean look at this motherfucker This guy's healthy as shit right if he was all strung out on cocaine and one thing that he would do was he did the weirdest thing And I never got this, but this is the ritual. Okay. This does not make sense This is the dumbest thing, but it does not make sense. I can't believe it, but drug addicts do stupid shit, right? He would go and buy a crack and put it in like a little bottle of Lemon juice and then the baking soda and all the other shit separates the cocaine And then he would stick a syringe in and suck it up You don't have to cook cocaine when you're doing it and he shoot it up He also had the most impressive Track marks that I had seen it was crazy And he was one of those guys that would shoot up shoot up shoot up shoot up shoot up to the point We'd get these abscesses and these massive infections and he actually got they took him in to get his arm amputated And they saved it But then his other arms all fucked up and his legs and all this other shit He was just like a through-and-through user man and Matt an awesome guy Man one of one of my closest friends many of you guys met chants reminds me a lot of Matt We always talk shit say all these like crazy PTSD stories Matt had typical story heavy abuse as a kid all the sort of stuff and just could never get it right and He was clean about three months here We beat the shit out of each other. He got prescribed an opiate, you know Which is which if you need an opiate you should take an opiate because then you're gonna end up in too much pain You can't control it and then you have to break and take something and then that kicks off the whole addiction thing in any way What happened was is we were hanging out one Saturday night And I was with Maria and I was with him and I had to get home to Maria And it was like 1 a.m. And we wanted to pick up chicks He had this girlfriend and they were breaking up and he's early and recovering I'm like, let's talk to these girls. So we talked to these girls and they're like all about him He was good-looking guy and he was like, no, I can't I can't I can't can't do it I'm gonna go home and the funny thing is the other guys He went to rehab with one was sick and the other one broke his foot that day And he'd have this support system of where he called people so I get home It's 1 a.m. And the phone rings and he's like dude and I was a sponsor and he says dude Steve I need help I said man, sorry like you you gotta you gotta call some other people man I'm with Maria and Maria's there and she's saying, you know, it's 1 a.m. I miss 1 a.m. You know, and I Said look call me in the morning do all the stuff you got to do but hit up those other people They're all probably hanging out at Epoch, which is like an all night coffee shop in Austin and He texts me Monday that was on Saturday and he said man. I got to talk to you I call him up and he said I didn't make it All right, and I'm like, okay. It's cool. Well, let's let's fucking hang out cool Man pick me up dude my daughter, you know, like I'm gonna die dude. I'm gonna die I can't tell you how many times I'm doing cocaine and if I do cocaine my heart's gonna explode It's it's too out of control like I'm gonna die. Please help me show up to Matt's house Matt. What's up? Knock on Matt's door nothing nothing nothing nothing. He's like, oh man text me. Sorry my dad came to get me Da-da-da. It's all good. Da-da-da and leave, you know, I know what's going on here, man Here just take my credit card take my credit card and hide it from me That's a horrible position to be in by the way, and he calls me up the next dude There's an emergency, you know call my sister or call my family. They'll tell you what's going on and all this sort of stuff, right and You know Eventually I just said look I'm gonna give you back your fucking credit card Do what you got to do but check yourself back into rehab get that physical separation from it and He called me on a Friday. I was teaching a workshop And I just gotten back into teaching workshops because I took a break like a lot of guys do and he says dude come and help me Leave my workshop and it was just about start actually 11 a.m. Go to help them doesn't answer Then doesn't answer doesn't answer says his brother's coming to pick him up I go back go on my workshop at 2 p.m. That day I get a call from his ex-girlfriend who tells me Matt is dead and I called up Ed and I said Matt is dead And he's like fucking a that dumb motherfucker and that took 11 days For him to relapse and kill himself on that shit and I bring up that story That's a common story, but we were really good friends and like I said, I know somebody that dies all the time and And it sucks every time it does but this one really really rocked me because we were close and we beat the shit out We heard each other man We cried and pained together and I knew his whole family and what he walked away from man was it was a huge thing And we all do that and it fucking sucks man And so when I hear different people talking about addiction and they don't include a story like this man It's crazy and here's one of the counters to it, which is which is really important is that There's a lot of things unsuccessful about recovery You know, I'm a member of a 12-step organization. I love it changed my life There's a lot of good things that those things can do, but there's also some things that they could learn from the neuroscience There's also a lot of things that they could learn from people who are really looking at this stuff and I wish that bridge built All right, but there's one thing off all the disease word or there's one thing off Like they get something wrong with the rat city or Carl Hart didn't an experiment which hey man I'd like to hear more about but where he gave people crack cocaine a Pharmaceutical grade and they could either do another hit after they had done a hit in a lab or next week They could get ten bucks and they all chose or overwhelmingly they chose the ten bucks So he's like well people aren't powerless over drugs He asked any drug addict and I think his point wasn't that like oh, yeah, drugs are simple or easy It was it was more that there's a difference that we need to look at But that difference and I'll tell you right now from people knowing crackheads Is you want to do crack where you can do crack? I don't want to fucking do it with some nurse giving it to me and all these people Analyzing me and all this other shit that makes you feel uncomfortable And so you know I think about this stuff because addiction is such a beautiful thing in my life Like you know Matt left behind a big family He left behind a lot of people and so many other people that did that and man my life was fucking hell My life was fucking hell and when I talk about them perhaps we could talk about it privately I remember at the 21 convention in 2012 in Melbourne I kind of pissed off because some guy was bitching about his horrible life with you know having some problems And I was like man, you know what it's like for year after year to fucking put a drug in your body and go I hope I end up dead. I don't really want to take the action to kill myself But I don't give a shit you know the beliefs that deal with that You know if you had those things if you woken up with your pants down and blood all over you And you don't know what the fuck happened to you, you know have you been in a situation where Man you you get the shit kicked out of you and you're left and you end up naked on a road In those beliefs that happen over and over again doesn't just happen once And that's your life and you're telling me that you had it so bad as a kid fuck you man I called my buddy from Melbourne. He goes Steve these guys just don't understand But that was my life and there was a lot to it and it was fucking hell But it was one of the most beautiful things in the world because it gave me the rich perspective of Being able to have things so I have things today and those of you may know I came in here This is two hours of sleep. I have this amazing woman who sometimes is really bitchy to me and really aggressive and I got these awesome kids that sometimes pick their nose and cry all night and Last night when my wife came in here. She was breastfeeding her kid She's trying to wean them off and he's he's in Texas and we're in Miami and she had the anxiety and flip out and man That sucked I was up all night with her and that sucked and anytime I did get any sleep I had nightmares about how she was ruining my life and my speech and all this stuff And that's easy thing for me to be mad about and get mad about but man That's part of being alive and that's part of a cool thing about being alive Not because I got something not because I had a shitty past Not because I weigh the scale in my head But because I had a shitty past and I had all my freedom taken away I know how to make a choice and live with a choice and not enough people live with a fucking choice today And I forget that a lot of times You know, we're all crazy, but we're not all crazy on the same day, and that's why we meet up, right? So there's no excuse. You know my buddy was sharing the other night and he said I've done some horrible things, man I've done some things that would land me in prison for the rest of my life, and I know that life I've done some shame flacks And I would think about this with Matt because Matt had a horrible childhood You know we talked about that, but he had a truly he was forced to kill his own dog and drink its blood And he was raped over and over again Yeah, like and I thought he was lying after he died asked his dad and his brother about it, and they were like no, that's true But he had this excuse man. He had this is excuse That said that kept him from freedom that kept him from feeling good And I'm not talking about feeling good and having things like I said before I'm talking about Whether he was in jail whether he was in whether he had mental problems because of this whether he had some physical Disabilities which he did because of his drug use He could still have his freedom and you could work for it and that's where I came from and that's the story of addiction If you do make it there is that you can have it and it's hard, but you can have it you can totally fucking have it And if you don't think you can man Let me let me that's what this is for you know let me help you so here's an interesting thing guys We talked about neuroplasticity a little bit Here's an awesome thing if you have a problem with porn if you have a problem with drugs The brain rebuilds itself scans with addicts who are in recovery for a while Developed new strategies and this this part of the brain actually became bigger and more developed So that orbital frontal cortex prefrontal cortex to deal with stress To deal with having peace and sustaining those things now I know a lot of addicts and we got a lot of anxiety So they still got a lot of problems, but there were more things built our brains changed I haven't had my brain scanned. I don't really want to but our brains changed To deal with these things better. That's awesome. That's amazing And here's an interesting thing about our brains changing what changed them most and this is one of the things about addiction in in my porn Experiment which was so true Was that when we were in the state of our addiction they changed we heard some guys talking about what's the equivalent of? Cognitive behavioral therapy here, which is effective and good But that's when you write stuff down you analyze and you make decisions from it If you're not doing that when you're in the act of trauma or the high or the trigger It'll take a much longer time that you'll still get there It'll take a much longer time, but here's the beautiful thing if I go I can watch porn You know, I can do these different things or perhaps I'm using drugs and I haven't totally crossed that threshold I won't do them now, but you know, that's just today. Maybe I might do them later But if I can go you know what? Alright, I'm feeling this. This doesn't make me a piece of shit. I'm getting carried away I'm in the natural phenomenon of addiction and I'm gonna lose power to stuff or the natural phenomenon of obsession And I can calm down and I know I'm gonna pop out of it My wife is upset last night and she is in panic like I had never seen ever It was crazy This is gonna pass You don't need to react and I react a lot and if I react I go okay I can fix this I can learn how to be responsible with my life. That's cool I want to put this up here because a lot of people talk about neuroscience, but Carl Hart said You know, we see all these images of the brain and we think all this stuff What does that tell us about human behavior? Nothing Science is far far away from understanding what happens to the brain in addiction But we're continuing to try and I do applaud that man That's an awesome awesome thing But when people start quoting neuroscience and all this sort of stuff man take them You know, you got to get the behavioral side of it too. So the solution check this out if you're a guy That you know is entered into that form of that phenomenon of addiction you've felt the high you've felt the void all those things But you haven't really crossed over man join a group join a men's group go to the sexual life comm slash addiction You can join our men's group. It's amazing. Some of you guys are on it the Austin men's development group We talk about this stuff There's tons of guys who are recovering sex addicts recovering dirt drug addicts on there There's people that are talking about dating and health and fitness. It's amazing You will have an openness and an honesty. The other thing too is is that you're going to Actually, you'll have opportunities to show up on our calls and all these different things and you'll get to see it If you take the therapeutic option, all right, this is good. It's not bad But going to therapy once or twice a week isn't the same as interacting with peers throughout that time Okay, and if you are somebody who has entered into a complete chemical dependency or true sexual addiction You need to one want to change you need to have the desire to stop and number two You need a physical separation from your drug But if you polarize it you will fuck yourself if you say porn is bad if you say drugs are bad and you sustain that you Will break It's the worst place to be and at some point you got to love it. I love drugs I love being a drug addict. It's one of the best things of my life But you need that physical separation at first that could be a rehab that could be friends That could be and I've gotten clean in all sorts of different ways because I've relapsed a ton of times You need to support community that could be a 12-step community that could be a group I could be whatever it is, but you need peers who have more experience than you have the same as you and who are new Because you don't see growth in yourself Which I know what we're all looking for you see growth and other people and you're like man. I was that guy I've come somewhere and You need self-work down the road You know just getting clean or just stopping is not enough You need to work on yourself you have to and that's what has happened to me I think that's one of the biggest criticism about 12-step guys be in because the nature of it Which I appreciate is that all you have to do is be clean and I appreciate that I don't want to change that about it Well steps are good awesome stuff But I found so much from discovering stuff about myself and working on myself in other areas in any case I need to say it. We're out of time Email me Steve at the sexual life or go to the sexual life comm slash addiction and you can find out how to contact me I'll answer everything and if you have questions for me. We'll answer them afterwards Just one last thing if you're an addict any addict any addict Okay, you can stop using you can lose the desire and you can find a new way of life And if that's the only thing you remember Man walk away with that Thanks