01x06 - Rewire

[bunniefuu]

narrator: The Web transforms us. We become data... code... uploading our very selves... ...to a place we call the cloud. But this cloud is grounded in hardware, a chaos of code. But with the right tools, you can find the signal in the noise.

The thing with p*rn is it actually hijacks our brain reward circuitry.

Sofyan: It made me this selfish, pleasure-seeking bastard, pretty much.

When I first found it, it just -- it was like some kind of a drug, almost.

Brandt: What if you could have a pill that makes you your best self?

Mercer: Unifiram, Modafinil, Flmodafinil, Adrafinil... This one here's Sunifiram. Pretty much anything and everything -- you can buy it on the Internet.

Andy: With the rise of the Internet, this population has, all of a sudden, found a venue by which they can interact very successfully.

What we believe is that people without this might be wired differently.

Mission accomplished.

Bam! Stamp! Boom.

Message will self-destruct in 30 seconds.

I better move out of the way of that boom.

narrator: We created the Internet.

man: He hits the bar and gets an immediate reward.

narrator: Now the Internet is recreating us.

[mouse clicking]

Like rats in a lab, we keep clicking, we keep connecting, we feed the Internet our data, our desires, our selves, while it feeds on us...

stimulus, response. The Internet is an experiment on our collective brain. Will it improve us, empower us, or fry us?

Sofyan: This is definitely really exciting, to finally meet people in person going through the same struggle and connecting, sort of having some common ground.

So that's a first. It's definitely exciting.

Alex: And what we're doing is we're inviting a few of the users out to kind of have a really personal, intimate, small group in the middle of nowhere.

There's gonna be no Internet connection.

There's even barely gonna be any cellphone reception.

Hey, man.

Hi.

Sofyan, right?

Yeah. Nice to meet you.

Sofyan: I'm 17. I guess I could say I've been addicted since the age of 9. I feel like it cheated me of my youth and so many years of connection, of being just alive, pretty much.

I mean, it's just terrible.

[woman moaning]

Alex: Many of us have been hooked on p*rn since we were little kids -- 11 or 12 years old.

We went through puberty on p*rn, and we actually learned about our sexualities from p*rn.

Growing up, masturbating to p*rn is pretty much all I did. It would go up to 14 times every single day.

I still, to this day, have a scar on my penis from doing it a little bit too vigorously, a little bit too often.

So I have some battle scars from my p*rn addiction.

Sofyan: I wish somebody told me why it was bad. They just said, "Don't do it."

And, as a kid, it's like saying, "Do it."

So, guys, are you ready to pitch some tents?

man: I need to hook this on to the hoojimagogger, right?

narrator: These guys are part of a group struggling with Internet p*rn addiction.

Yeah, so we want to get to this side, 'cause there's, like, wasps that like living over there.

Oh, goodie! Wasps.

They're used to connecting with each other online, anonymously, but these five guys, including Sofyan, are meeting face-to-face for the first time at Reboot Camp.

Alex: We are kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Does anyone here not have a cellphone signal?

Zero bars, one bar.

One bar!

So, I'm the founder of a website called NoFap, which is a p*rn recovery community-based website that offers tools and support for people who are trying to quit p*rn.

I named it "NoFap" because the phrase "fap" represents the sound that masturbation makes in old comics.

There would be a character masturbating, and next to it, there would be, like, these little phrases, and it would say, "Fap, fap, fap, fap, fap!"

Kind of like...

Sounds like that.

I'm gonna take the red one. It matches my eyes.

The process of abstaining from p*rn and masturbation, or even sex altogether, we call this "rebooting", and what we mean is you're essentially rebooting your brain back to default factory settings.

How about we go get some firewood, get ready for dinner?

man: All right. I'll do that.

Sweet. Let's go.

narrator: Alex's NoFap website has over 170,000 users. Sofyan is one of the youngest, and has been struggling with p*rn addiction for half his life.

Seriously, there's like a bunch over there.

Sofyan: I stumbled across it around 8 or 9.

I was looking for d*ck's Sporting Goods, but I just put in "dicks"... and it came up with, like, a bunch of women, and they had their shirts off and stuff.

[woman moaning]

I started w*nk*ng and then watching p*rn and finding more stuff, and it sort of escalated.

narrator: It was Sofyan's first fix.

Sofyan: I've seen it get more extreme. It got hard core.

It totally demolishes, like, your realistic expectation for women.

narrator: We all know how one click leads to another. Most of us have seen some kind of p*rn online. It makes up a quarter of all our online searches, and every second, over 28,000 people are logging on and getting off.

I have an addiction to p*rn.

I have been, like, addicted to this for, like, over 10 years.

But it really starts to f*ck with your head.

narrator: These guys are just the tip of the iceberg. Multiple p*rn recovery sites, including NoFap, have surfaced online, and nearly a million users have signed on to seek help.

You think you're rewarding yourself, but after that split-second rush and you snap back to reality, you remember it was really a punishment.

Alex: I think everyone here probably wants at least one burger and one hot dog.

man: Yeah.

narrator: The challenge for Sofyan and his fellow "Fapstronauts," as they call themselves, is to log off long enough to reboot their brains back to normal.

Those look good.

Not bad, not bad.

But what if your goal was to push your brain beyond normal default settings and make it extraordinary?

Woo: I think it's a natural human instinct to always want to strive to push their own limits. In Silicon Valley, right, the edge now is mental performance as opposed to sort of physical performance.

And if you use Silicon Valley as sort of the mental analogue for professional athletics, right?

These are sort of professional mental athletes.

narrator: With mantras like, "Thrive or get out," "Smarter, faster, better," and "Work-life balance is for losers," how can you compete in Silicon Valley? Michael Brandt and Geoffrey Woo, two Stanford grads, are marketing and selling a solution.

Woo: Nootropics are cognitive enhancers. Cognitive enhancers are any compounds that increase any aspect of cognition, whether that's creativity, stamina, mental resilience.

narrator: In 2014, they founded an online start-up that sells nootropics. Even though these dr*gs can be sold legally, they're not approved by the FDA as actual mental enhancers.

Brandt: Nootropics sometimes gets compared to drug use in sports. I think that drug use in sports is cheating because it's breaking the rules of a man-made system that says, "You can't do dr*gs."

I think when it comes to being smarter, there are no rules.

narrator: The promise of a better brain is all over the Internet. Searches for the term "nootropics" have increased over 800% in the past five years. On Reddit, a growing collective of brain hackers are serving as both scientist and lab rat. They're sharing thousands of online conversations about their experiments with smart dr*gs. And this DIY drug study offers dealers like Geoffrey and Michael the ultimate in insider information. But the Internet supply chain of smart dr*gs stretches far beyond Silicon Valley. In the swamps of Alabama, Chris Mercer runs his new online business from his kitchen.

Mercer: I'm trying to jump into the business. I don't have a lot of advertising budget. I have product, and I'm willing to give it to you cheaper.

That's the beauty of capitalism, you know?

This Phenylpiracetam -- this is actually used by the Russian astronauts on the space station.

Pretty much, it starts with researching the compounds.

Adrafinil, Modafinil, Flmodafinil, Adrafinil... This one here's Sunifiram.

It's one of the newer nootropics -- a little more controversial.

Just putting the word "smart drug" in and seeing what comes up, and there's hundreds of them at this point.

Increases wakefulness, concentration, focus, thought process. Unifiram... Adrafinil, which is a very popular drug on Wall Street.

That's also used with pilots to keep them awake.

[beep]

I buy it, and then I re-sell it on the Internet.

narrator: Chris and other distributors can get away with selling these dr*gs as pure chemical substances for research purposes only, including NSI-189.

This is the last that I have of it as I'm waiting on another batch.

It actually re-grows the neurons in your hippocampus. So it literally grows your brain and makes it bigger.

So if everything works out with it, you're looking at your first cure for any brain disorder.

narrator: Chris claims NSI-189 is a brain cure-all. Credible scientists do not. Not yet, anyway. The drug is undergoing clinical trials. But what if a brain disorder turned out to be something to cultivate, not cure -- not an impairment, but an enhancement?

man: I'm processing the page from Firefox.

The data is in Chrome.

Andy: Right.

narrator: Every employee in this room has autism.

Andy: They can persevere over certain tasks over long periods of time. Many people have a truly gifted memory, okay, allowing them to retain very large amounts of information, ability to see patterns in data and systems.

man: Most of our time is spent sitting, working at our computers, which just seems like the perfect thing for me.

I once heard someone say everyone in Silicon Valley is on the spectrum.

man: Was Steve Jobs thought to have been on the spectrum?

Luby: Oh, yeah. Except that he was too mean.

Aspies are not mean.

Aspies are nice people.

Well, there are exceptions, but...

I know plenty of people on the spectrum who are mean.

Mean?

narrator: Andy Aczel and his wife, Luby, run The Specialist Guild, which trains and gives tech internships to people on the spectrum.

This is the Android 2.3, which they also want us to test.

Andy: If you want to revolutionize things, then you need to get people who are totally different from you.

I think people with autism fall into that category.

Why don't Justin, Aaron, and Colin work on that today, and then Nicholas and you do the Android app.

narrator: Autism is clinically defined as a brain-development disorder characterized by difficulty in social interaction and communication.

I was using the mobile data, but I think that might probably drain the battery faster, so...

narrator: But advocates of a growing neurodiversity movement believe autistic brains are a normal variation of human genes and have valuable traits and advantages.

Andy: From an intelligence perspective, they are perfectly capable. They manifest a very strong focus and determination and single-mindedness, but they find overall interaction with people very confusing.

Okay, everybody, screens down, please, so you don't get distracted.

It's important for us to discuss the way that we lie.

And what was a charitable lie?

Nicholas, give me a charitable lie.

Of course that doesn't make you look fat.

Yes.

I guess that's a lie to avoid hurting someone's feelings or something.

Yes.

Here it says that we have an easier time when we're spatially distant.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's 'cause seeing eyes makes it really difficult to lie.

Yeah. Okay.

Andy: When you are on an instant chat or an online forum or what have you, there is no body language.

So you're not confused, and they learn all the tricks that people use on the Internet to express their emotions and what have you -- emoticons, whatever.

narrator: Icons in place of emotions, screens in place of people. Even so-called neurotypicals can go a whole day without interacting with a real person. No bank teller, no grocery cashier, no sales attendant. Virtual office, virtual friends, virtual sex. There are even apps that use your geodata and social media to help you avoid people you'd rather not see -- Cloak, Split, and even one called Hell is Other People.

Andy: Your PC showed up.

Nicholas: Excellent.

Looks like the one we ordered, so...

Waiting for this for weeks.

You want to take that out?

Andy: My wife, Luby, and I have a son who is on the autism spectrum.

I think we can maybe take out your hard drive from your other machine while it's doing the updates.

Do you want to do that?

Yes, let's do that.

My son, Nicholas, has very good friends of many, many years that he constantly interacts with on instant messaging or chat.

Oh, yes. My parents weren't sure about me... connecting with friends this way, although now they... are not as worried.

They understand I'm an adult... and I can handle it.

I talk with friends online about being on autism spectrum. I talk to them about music or about politics or about entertainment.

Andy: Whether or not the M.I.T. guys purposely invented the Internet to be able to talk to other nerds or not, the interesting thing about it is that it's not just for nerds.

It's for everybody, really.

And you can find someone to connect to.

narrator: After their training, Nicholas and the others in The Specialist Guild hope to land a full-time job in tech. Across the country, another young man with autism has reached that goal.

Patrick: Hey, everyone.

man: Hey, Patrick.

narrator: Patrick works for SAP, the third largest software company in the world.

Patrick: I may come off as a little monotone or stiff even though I don't intend it to be.

But, first thing, we meet with George.

First thing, we meet with George.

Understood.

I consider myself very high-functioning on the autistic spectrum.

I'm always thinking of something a mile a minute.

There's just so much information that's processing. I can point out certain details that, you know, other people would overlook. Good morning, everyone.

narrator: If it wasn't for Jose Velasco, who heads a job initiative at SAP for people with autism, Patrick might still be at home, unemployed.

Rather than just go through a résumé and ask you questions about what you have done, we're gonna build robots today.

We're gonna have fun.

Velasco: People with autism oftentimes have issues with expressing themselves. Perhaps they don't have the ability to look at people in the eye, okay, which is one of what they call "an interview k*ller," right?

I'm trying to get him to turn the right direction.

We're able to learn more about people because of what they do rather than what they say.

It took me all day to get it to do that much.

It's the little things in life.

I think that if we look at history and look at the great innovators, most of them were outliers.

Victory!

Victory!

narrator: Today, Patrick is moving out of his childhood home.

How we making out, buddy?

Good, Dad. Yourself?

Oh, just great.

After living with his parents for nearly 30 years, he is able to get a place of his own.

Does it fit in there okay?

Yep, it fits good.

I am gonna miss this old place, Dad.

Patrick: I mean, it's been the only home I've ever known for, you know, the longest time.

Mm-hmm. It is.

But it's a great change for you.

You always have my unconditional love and support.

You know that, right?

Absolutely, Dad.

Thanks so much.

You're welcome.

[Sighs] Is there anything else we have to move?

[Groans] I got it, buddy.

Patrick: I think one thing that I am really looking forward to, once my place is fully set up, is the fact that I would like to invite some friends over.

Won't be much longer.

Also, I think, down the road,

I would like to have a girlfriend.

I would like to have someone that I could be with.

And if that should blossom into something more that would lead to marriage, I'd be perfectly fine with that.

narrator: Someone to be with. That's what these guys struggling with p*rn addiction seem to want, too. But Sofyan and others fear they are no longer capable of real, human relationships.

Sofyan: Watching p*rn -- it affected me in a lot of ways that I didn't even realize, looking back. I just thought it was part of being a teenager. It made me sort of isolate myself, and I carried around this cloud of shame almost.

I couldn't look people in the eyes.

It's been like five years since I skipped rocks.

Aw, come on, dude. [Laughs]

Alex: You would think p*rn addicts would have, like, really strong arms, right?

narrator: There is no diagnostic classification for Internet p*rn addiction, because it's too new and hasn't been studied enough. But those suffering report a detachment from real people, brain fog, and a desensitized penis -- to the point where a 17-year-old kid can't get a hard-on.

Sofyan: My penis sort of turned into a turtle.

It just like went into the shell and wouldn't come out.

Like, it just wouldn't -- I couldn't get an erection, and then I was like, "What the hell is going on?"

narrator: And it only gets worse. At some point, vanilla p*rn, you know, digital missionary style, doesn't offer your brain the same dopamine rush. You go looking for the hard stuff... and the Internet satisfies. Sex acts on p*rn sites are getting more extreme and violent, but at the same time, the people in p*rn are looking more normal. An analysis of over 40,000 p*rn actresses in the past 15 years reveals the stereotypical blond, busty p*rn star is now competing against a brunette with smaller breasts and larger hips -- just like the girl next door.

I think a lot of it has to do with p*rn the women that they see in everyday life.

They want to imagine their boss or their neighbor or some girl that they're too scared to talk to have sex.

man: p*rn has such a searing effect, you know? There's no connection there anymore with women. They're basically like a living masturbation toy.

I just felt like there was a monster inside of me, you know, and I didn't want that monster to be there anymore.

Courting a woman and all this other stuff -- it's hard, and every girl is different.

And I would love it if I could just, you know, snap my finger and get what I wanted, but that's not how it is, but with p*rn, it is how it is.

So why not do that?

I mean, there's other parts of a relationship you can strive for, but sexually, I can find anything, sexually, on the Internet.

I can find it in p*rn.

Sofyan: My rock bottom was just, like, pretty much every single negative side effect you can think about, and hating myself.

That was probably the worst part of it.

man: I hope it's gonna be my final reboot, but I'm kind of a really pessimistic realist, and I'm going to say it's probably not.

Alex: After my first 30-day reboot, I went right back to p*rn. I was hardwired to it, and separating my brain from Internet p*rn was the hardest thing I've ever done.

narrator: It's one thing to not watch p*rn in the middle of the woods, but after Reboot Camp is over, it's back to the real world, and that means the Internet.

Alex: All right, guys. Hands together.

all: One, two, three --

f*ck p*rn!

f*ck p*rn.

All right guys, goodbye.

Thank you so much for coming.

man: Yeah, it was great.

Yeah, it was a pleasure meeting you.

I'm becoming the human that I was meant to be.

Now I'm going out and I'm meeting people and I'm doing my small part to change the world, and none of that would have been possible if I was still using p*rn.

You don't know that I used to skateboard a lot?

No.

I knew about your scooter.

[Laughs]

Yeah, back in middle school...

narrator: Alex has been p*rn-free for over two years, and is now in a committed relationship.

Sofyan: I guess I've always been craving sort of like a deeper human connection. Never really sat down and just shared myself completely with someone and, like, see each other's souls sort of.

Sort of metaphorical.

man: I think we're the loneliest generation that this world has ever seen.

Patrick: Screens have a time and a place... but if we continue to rely on it too much as a crutch, it's only going to hurt us more as a species.

We lose a bit of that humanity.

narrator: Tap, click, get your fix. But when the pleasure fades, what's left? A craving for more.

Today I'm on day 6 of what I would guess would be somewhere around my 45th and final attempt.

I confidently say this is my final reboot, and I know, you know, you can laugh.

Everybody says it -- "All right, this is the last one, I swear."

narrator: 10 days after the camping trip, Sofyan relapsed. He's trying to quit p*rn again, and is on day 5 of his 46th reboot.

♪♪