[0:00]it has no romance to it. It has no dimension to it. It's almost as if the two humans involved in it or however are like machine parts, right? They're not human anymore.
[0:11]And there's no emotion involved. There's no kind of spiritual connection. It's depressing. It's really really depressing.
[0:25]One of the um sort of adjacent points here about purposelessness, about loneliness, about the struggles and plight of young men in the world that they face and and young women is the conversation around pornography.
[0:35]If you go on many of the social media apps these days, you will be exposed to pretty explicit pornography, whether you you were searching for it or not.
[0:44]There are certain apps in particular where even if I'm scrolling on my feed, certain things will pop up and I go Jesus Christ, like, you know, I'm at work here.
[0:53]Um, and I was thinking about this more broadly because the studies show that about, I think it's like 80% of men and about 40% of women in the United States use pornography.
[1:01]And I wondered if you had a view on how it robs us of the of the hard work it takes to form romantic relationships.
[1:11]Um and if the act of consuming pornography is robbing us of the desire for the real thing.
[1:17]Well, it it's it's an addiction and you have to understand that you are being manipulated that you are being programmed.
[1:25]That these people have figured out exactly the kinds of things, the kinds of images, they're going to hook you and you're being played. You're a fool.
[1:36]They're playing with you just like Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook knows all the algorithms to hook you to his to to the news feed.
[1:44]You're being played by the by the images. They know how to create and keep you always wanting more.
[1:51]Just like fast food has all these tricks to constantly you be eating their Doritos or whatever it is, okay?
[1:58]But the other thing is, um, so I'm not going to preach and moralize about pornography from a prudish aspect of it because I'm not a prude.
[2:10]But I have a chapter in the book that I'm writing on the Sublime on what I call love Sublime and the act of loving not God, not the universe, but another human being an individual, man or woman, gay or straight or whatever it is.
[2:30]And how sublime that is. And what it is, is in that relationship, the boundaries between the two of you are allowed to melt and you're your ego can soften and you can feel their world and they can feel your world and you have a connection that for a social animal is the highest form of connection.
[2:51]It's superior to a religious connection, I'm sorry. Um, and what it requires is we we have the expression falling in love.
[2:59]And it literally is falling. It's like you fall, fall, fall, fall, you're open and you're vulnerable, and you're letting yourself fall.
[3:10]And when you're not what stops you from doing that is you don't want to be hurt, you don't want to be vulnerable, right?
[3:17]Because if you open yourself to someone else, you're likely to get hurt.
[3:23]And so the moment there's a disagreement between you, or there's a moment where a friend says something nasty about this person you're interested in.
[3:32]You stop falling, you cut it off, and that romantic thing ends and dies. But if you get past that and you allow yourself to open up completely, and you just keep falling, falling, and falling, and falling.
[3:44]This incredible thing can happen. And I describe it to you and I describe it what the dynamics of that and examples of that and why for a social animal, it's like the ultimate experience.
[3:57]And so pornography is completely robbing you of that because love of another human being is a sense of enchantment, right?
[4:07]There's like this this spark that's happening, this electricity, and it's obviously sex is involved, so it's a very physical relationship as well, but it goes beyond that, it also has a kind of spiritual component, right?
[4:21]But it's a sense of enchantment where the world becomes alive to you. Everything is beautiful in the world in those moments, right?
[4:30]And pornography is disenchanting you from everything. It's making it all mechanical and ugly and and it has no romance to it.
[4:39]It has no dimension to it. It's almost as if the two humans involved in it or however are like machine parts, right?
[4:47]They're not human anymore, and there's no human emotion involved. There's no kind of spiritual connection.
[4:53]It's depressing. It's really really depressing. When I see it, I feel really sorry that I experienced this and I feel really sorry for the people who are in that industry.
[5:08]I find it really really ugly and alienating. Now, I'm not as I said a prude and I and and I could watch a move a great movie with a love scene in it, and it's very exciting and beautiful.
[5:22]But the seduction element, the element of I saw a movie recently, a Japanese movie by the great director Ozu from the fifties.
[5:32]And there was a man who's married and he was about to have an affair with this woman who was kind of seducing him.
[5:40]And they had this kiss, I was getting by turn on, but I was getting really excited.
[5:49]It was so full of emotion and energy, and it made the sexual element so much more powerful by the element of romance, by the element of something kind of transgressive.
[6:00]There was no nude bodies, there was no sex you ever get to see.
[6:04]But the lead up to it and the nature of the emotions involved made it to me deeply, deeply exciting.
[6:12]And if young men particular can't have that experience if everything is so mechanical, is so computerized.
[6:19]It's going to be like AI, it's going to be like AI sex, you know.
[6:27]Then you're losing your soul. You're losing your capacity for really falling in love for really having that kind of dimensional experience, which by the way, can be extremely physical.
[6:37]And it can only last for three months. I'm not saying it has to be twenty years with one woman or one man.
[6:43]It could be for three months, but it enriches you, it created it makes you more human. It's not just pornography.
[6:47]There's too much of that in in social media as well on on other levels.
[6:53]You have to understand what it means to be a human being, first of all, and we're physical animals.
[7:01]We can't be in our heads all the time.
[7:04]We we think with our bodies, right?
[7:07]We we think with the chemicals mixing in our bodies. We're very physical and we're social animals to the core.
[7:14]And that social animal, what makes us superior is that we connect.
[7:19]I can kind of look at you and I can maybe understand what you're feeling, what you're thinking, and we can have a discussion and our ideas can go back and forth and connect and go to higher levels of understanding or lower levels of disagreement.
[7:33]But that's what it means to be a human being. You're not this fucking AI machine. You're not a bot.
[7:39]You're not an algorithm. You're not a little piece of data that Mark Zuckerberg can mix with.
[7:45]You're you're a human being with a body with physical problems, with hormones, with emotions that are coursing through you.
[7:54]And you have to become a physical creature, which means doing things in the world, taking action, working, building a business, doing things with your hands, you know, exercise, meeting people.
[8:06]Be inside of your bodies. And when you're in pornography, you're disembodied. You're not in your body.
[8:12]You might be wanking off as far as I know, you know, probably are, but you're not really inside of your body in any meaningful way.
[8:21]And so it's like, my hope, if there's any hope, is that and there's seeds of it in the world now.
[8:30]Where young people are going to start getting disgusted with this because the human spirit is still very powerful.
[8:38]And it's still like, I don't want to be like this, it doesn't feel natural, it doesn't feel right.
[8:44]At some point my hope is in 20 30 years after I'm probably dead, there'll be a movement where people are going to be so against this that they're going to go in the opposite direction.
[8:55]They're going to be returning to what it means to be a human being, they'll be a rekindling of interest in our past, in the primitive past, in the pagan past.
[9:03]Things I'm writing about in in my book right now, and I've seen things like that sometimes like in the New York Times, they had an article a few weeks ago about a group of young people in college who hate social media and absolutely refuse it and will not, it's like almost like a fraternity or sorority.
[9:16]They will not allow anybody into their group who ever looks at their phone. And I go, yay, yay, right on brother.
[9:26]I could if I'm in college right now, I would join that. Not that I think everything is evil.
[9:30]I have my own phone, etc.
[9:33]But if I were young, that sense of this is a nasty world.
[9:38]I want to return to what it means to be a human being. I want to spark a movement, a revolution that goes back to that.
[9:42]I hope that that's going to happen. I hope that's in the cards.
