Kevin Anthony 0:05
Welcome to the Love Lab podcast, the place to be for honest and real talk about relationships and sex. Whether you’re a man or a woman, single or a couple, this is the show for you. I am your host, Kevin Anthony, and I am here to help you have the relationship of your dreams and the best sex of your life.

All right, welcome back to the Love Lab podcast. This is episode 343 and it is titled men’s sex hacks to create lasting relationships. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about a lot of the things that I talk about on a regular basis, things like, you know what to do with low sex drive and Ed, but we’re going to cover so much more about men’s sex sort of problems, and then what kind of hacks we can use in order to solve those problems. And if you’re watching on YouTube, you can see already that I have a guest with me, who has been researching this for a long time and has coached 10s of 1000s of men in these issues. And so I think we’re going to have a really fascinating discussion today. And I always love for you my audience to hear the types of things that I talk about, but from other points of view. And so that’s what we’re gonna do today.

But before we do that, of course, a short word from my sponsor, Power and Mastery, 3.0 Power and Mastery, 3.0 is the latest version of the popular men’s sexual mastery course. If you are struggling with erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, or simply want to increase your skills in the bedroom, then power and mastery is for you join the exclusive club of men who have taken their sexual performance into their own hands and become sexual masters. Mastering your sexuality is a key component to becoming the man she has always dreamt of and craves. Don’t leave your sexual performance up to chance or the throw of the dice. Become a sexual master today by going to powerandmastery.com and joining the exclusive club of men who have taken their destiny into their own hands. That’s powerandmastery.com. Okay, my guest today is Matt Cook. He’s a full-time health researcher and has dedicated his life to helping other men with health or sex issues. He has coached over 80,000 men and written best-selling books on men’s health, Healthy to 120 and Romance to 120. So welcome to the show, Matt.

Matt Cook 2:27
Oh, hey, thank you so much.

Kevin Anthony 2:29
All right, we are just gonna dive right into it because I got actually, quite a few questions and things that I want to ask you about and get your opinion on. The first thing is, you talk about the fact that men are approaching sex in ways that are opposite to what leads to long-term relationships. Can you explain a little bit about what that means? How are they approaching things or sex specifically that is not taking them in the direction of long-term relationships?

Matt Cook 2:59
Yeah, it’s a kind of cliche that the person that we’re with, the woman that we’re with, she it becomes boring, she becomes less attractive the longer we’re together. And this is such a big issue, you know, this sort of wearing out a sexual attraction, that it’s attracted all these gurus out there. And you know, what their general answer will be is like, bring something else in the bedroom. You know, start doing bondage, or start doing anal or this or that. So, you know, vacation sex there, it’s all about new things to try, and that’s supposed to spice things up. But what they never say is that that new stuff becomes old very quickly, and also, a lot of people don’t want to do those things necessarily. So it doesn’t really solve the issue of the relationship kind of wearing out and people losing attraction for each other.

And I found that this was happening to me, and I couldn’t have been married to a more wonderful woman, and it was maybe around 25 years into marriage. So I found that since then, as you said, I’ve coached about 80,000 men. And there are certain milestones in a relationship, one year, seven years, 25 years, these tend to be somewhere around there where people start kind of looking around and deciding to ditch the relationship, perhaps, and to try something new, they just feel that they’re not in love with their partner anymore. The sex is boring. The relationship is boring. You go, you see so many novel beautiful women on, you know, on your phone, real life, Tiktok, blah, blah, blah, you know, you go, comparing that to my wife, to my girlfriend, of that, you know, I’m sort of interested in trying some new stuff. Maybe I’ll find someone else. Maybe I’ll start dating again, you know, maybe I’m missing out. So life is only so long, and I’m gonna miss out and I’m gonna die without having experienced this, that or the other thing. Sexually, right?

This is kind of what goes through our minds that happened to me. So that’s when I discovered that there are basically two different tracks that we have in our brains that are built in. Just like when you boot up a computer, there’s some software built in. So the computer boots up, we have a default; we sort of have these two tracks. One of them I call the dopamine track. Dopamine is the hormone of want, wanting more, wanting a different woman, wanting a different position, wanting a different act, wanting a different car. And the thing about dopamine is we need dopamine because it gets us up in the morning, and it gets us to eat, and it gets us through the day because we have to want stuff, you know, to get going. The trouble is that we’re always dissatisfied. We’re on this dopamine track. And the dopamine track with with in sex and relationships, is being unhappy, not liking what we have, wanting more, wanting what we don’t have. And actually, it’s a track that has served us well because you and I are here, which indicates, without doubt, 100% success of our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents. Wouldn’t you agree they’ve been very successful? Or we would have been here. We wouldn’t be here, right? Very successful. That’s generally on this dopamine track, wanting this woman because she’s pretty.

And then, you know, society says you should get married before you have sex. That’s not true anymore, but you know, then you go through certain things, and it was just natural for people to lose attraction and interest each other. And no big deal. That just happens. Well, it doesn’t necessarily happen because I discovered that there’s a second track that’s also built into us, which I call the oxytocin track. Oxytocin is a hormone produced in the brain, somewhat in the testes or the ovaries for women, mostly in the brain, and they call it the love hormone. It’s a little bit of an oversimplification, but when you have oxytocin, and you build it up, you actually are more in love with somebody. You see her as being prettier. You see her as being more attractive. You just love her so much.

And so I found that how we have sex can put us on this dopamine track or on the oxytocin track. If we’re on the dopamine track, we grow unhappy. There’s literally a cycle where we become unhappy, especially as men after ejaculation, or women after orgasm, we become unhappy with our partner. We start wanting other people. But the oxytocin track, if we’re on that, having sex a little differently, then we’re more attracted to our partner. We’re more in love with our partner, and it produces this amazing feeling that you hear, you know, everybody says they want. It’s kind of like the, you know, being so in love feeling. But rather than that, just being when we first meet, it can be 40 years later. That’s how I feel about my wife, and we’ve been together 40 years. And it’s not because of our special relationship, it’s really hormonal.

Kevin Anthony 7:54
So that dopamine track would be the, let’s try something new. Let’s have vacation sex. Let’s, you know, try some 50 Shades of Gray, or something like that, right? Yeah, what would sex on the oxytocin track look like?

Matt Cook 8:08
Well, the one thing I’ll just talk about is some very specific things. So one thing is lots of kissing. I see this again and again. People sort of forget that they really were kissing a lot, and then they stopped kissing, and maybe they still have sex, but they’re not really kissing. They’re not really having intimacy. And I remember a woman who was, you know, paid for sex, and she said, I’ll do all sorts of things with men, but I won’t have them kiss me. That’s too intimate. So to build oxytocin, to be on that track, you got to kind of bring back kissing. Another thing that you do is bring back stroking each other, cuddling, staying very, very physical, very, very important. We kind of drifted apart.

And then we sort of end up like, if you’re in a traditional track, many times you’d have the kids, and there’s taking care of them, and there’s all the different things in life and career. And we end up like, maybe we go to sleep, but we’re not cuddling. We’re not really putting that time in stroking and cuddling each other that builds oxytocin, just like kissing builds oxytocin. And there’s how we actually do have sex. The whole model of sex that we have as men and women really is, it’s about the orgasm, and it’s about, as I say, sort of climbing the mountain. You know, as we get more and more aroused, we get really close, then we have the orgasm, then it’s down the mountain, and we’re done. And as men, we know we get a lot of times sleepy. Sometimes we want to sort of detach. I remember, you know, some men will, they just want to get up and leave. Honestly, there are all these different reactions. Well, those are actually hormonal also. Are you familiar with the Coolidge effect? I’m sure you are. Kevin, the Coolidge effect.

Kevin Anthony 9:48
I don’t know that particular term. No, please explain.

Matt Cook 9:51
It’s named after President Coolidge. And the bottom line is that when we have an orgasm, we’re more. Being attracted to other people and not our partner is part of a cycle following orgasm, which lasts around seven days for men and women, probably shorter for men, longer for women, maybe three or four days for men, seven days for women. The Coolidge Effect is being more interested in other women after an orgasm, and women are more interested in other men’s African orgasm. And if you think about it, what nature has done is it’s played these little tricks on us because it wants our reproductive success more than anything else. Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy, but nature wants you to have reproductive success because that’s the key point in continuing the survival of the species. That’s why we’re here.

And so if we have sex, and then there’s another woman. I go; maybe I’ll sneak around and have sex with her too. She’s super attractive. They had this study with with rats, and they have a very satisfied and satiated male rat that has had sex and ejaculated with several females. That rat is no longer interested in sex with the females in that cage. Now, you take that male rat that just had all these orgasms is fully satiated. You drop that male rat into a cage with new females. Guess what? The male rat becomes aroused again and wants to have sex with new females. That’s the Coolidge effect, and it’s exactly the same with people.

Kevin Anthony 11:17
I find that very interesting. I have never personally experienced that. And my experience with women is that, you know, if you really fuck them well, and you just make their eyes roll in the back of their head, and they just like, Wow, I’ve never experienced anything like that. They are all over you and stick to you like glue and want more. So, yeah, but you know, it also depends, I think, on the type of sex that you’re having, right? Because, you know, as you sort of alluded to earlier, is that the way most people have sex is, you know, they’re probably not doing a lot of kissing, they’re not doing a lot of foreplay, they’re not doing a lot of, you know, touching each other, cuddling, all that sort of bonding type stuff. You know, the studies tell us that, you know, the average man lasts, you know, two to five minutes, or three to seven minutes, right?

So if you’re having that kind of sex, I can absolutely see that as being the case. But if you’re having, well, you know what some people in the industry would term gourmet sex, or, you know, like the kind of sex that I’m teaching people to have. I don’t see that as being quite the same issue for those people. In other words, if you’re having So, for instance, like one of the things that you just talked about, like, hey, people stop kissing, right? And they’re not touching each other anymore, and then they’re losing interest because they’re not connecting in that way, those ways that are stimulating the oxytocin. One of the big things that I teach is something that my wife came up with the term, which was called the constant state of arousal. So teaching couples, when they’re having these issues, to not try to go from where 0% turned on, and now we’ve decided it’s date night, and we’re trying to have sex. And now we’re trying to go from zero, you know, up on a scale of one to 10, up to a six, seven or eight, instantly, right?

So the idea is, every day you should be touching each other and kissing each other and, you know, flirting with each other, grabbing each other’s general whatever it is, right? To constantly stoke that fire a little bit. So you don’t really have to go from a zero, you’re maybe a little bit turned on all the time, and you’re only going from a three to a six, right? It’s a much shorter distance to go. And so I think if you’re doing those things, and then you’re having, you know, the kind of sex that lasts for 3040, an hour, hour and a half, right? And you’re having multiple orgasms and things like that. I don’t see that necessarily as being the same issue. That’s why I’ve never really experienced that. Because I don’t, I don’t do the two-to-seven-minute thing.

Matt Cook 13:53
I have, I have kept a journal about it, and I definitely think it’s a real thing now, I think that a couple of things when you’re early in a relationship, there are these honeymoon hormones where you just can’t get enough each other, which keep people together, typically, maybe up to eight months or 12 months. By that time, it really starts to wear off. And if they have the frequent orgasms and very sex, that very intense sex, then it’s even stronger, actually, but hopefully by then you’ve become sort of companions, friends. There’s other things that you do, and like you said, you’re flirting all the time, not just in bed. And there’s a lot of other pair bonding behaviors that kick in that can help cement the bonds, despite the Coolidge effect.

But I do find with hot sex, it’s very it is very strong. Obviously, we don’t act on it. I don’t act on it. And I found that there are certain things that can, you know, each time can be stronger or weaker, but it’s generally present in this, in this orgasm cycle, for sure. So my focus has been. On having 30-45 minute sex twice a day. And, you know, just not having an orgasm myself as a man most of the time, because if I don’t ejaculate, I can have essentially, these sort of multiple orgasmic feelings that could go on for 30 or 45 minutes if I ejaculate that all, it’s over. And then I have these to sort of fall out from the from the orgasm. And I don’t know, you know, if you’ve noticed this, if you keep a careful journal, my emotions are a little weird that day, I may snap at my wife, and I’ll think, God, I don’t feel that great. But what’s going on. And I remember, oh yeah, I came today. And so it can be, it could be intense for a few days, actually.

So I think that cuddling and lots of physical contact helps limit this. But I think it’s very real. And for men, I find that if we don’t ejaculate each time, if we sort of schedule, that we have this very intense sexual interest all the time, and that can not only help us be much more attracted to our partner, but it also helps us excel in business and acquiring material things, because their sex drive for men can just propel us as men. I think of it as being on the rapids of a river in a boat. It can carry us into all sorts of success in life. We’re very fortunate to have that. And if we build it up and increase that sex drive, it’s not only good for more sex but also for achieving our other goals in life.

Kevin Anthony 16:32
Oh, yeah, absolutely. This is a huge component that I teach all the time, which is, you know, I say you can call it chi Jing, prana, life force. Energy, universal energy, sexual energy, whatever word you want to use, and many cultures have given it a word. There is an energy that moves through us, right, that we call lots of different things, one of which is sexual energy, and how we use that. You know, we can use it for sex, of course, but we can use it for other things as well, like putting it towards our careers or our work. And so, as you were correctly saying, if you’re not constantly dissipating that energy by having ejaculations all the time, you can take that energy and put it towards other things, right?

Matt Cook 17:13
I mean, it’s an amazing thing. Even a man who doesn’t have a partner can use masturbation this way. That’s sort of an edging. I always, I always suggest people not use video porn. I think video and porn is quite harmful. But if you’re looking for a partner, you can build up a higher sex drive and a higher amount of sexual energy, or chi, whatever you call it, and women are more attracted to you. And it’s so much easier finding a romantic or sexual partner, so much easier, yeah, just as a natural thing, because you’re not just spending all that energy.

Kevin Anthony 17:44
Absolutely and, you know, it’s interesting because this is so typical of humans in general, right? We swing from one side of the pendulum to the other, right? Which is that, you know, you’ll hear the camp say that, Oh, it doesn’t matter how often you ejaculate. Go do it 10 times a day if you want. No big deal, right? But then you got the other the other side, which is kind of more like the spiritual side, was like, No, you must never ejaculate. You must always keep your life force energy. You’re literally killing yourself if you’re ejaculating, right? And it’s like, okay, now wait a minute, because on that side, they’re basically telling you to abstain from sex because no fat movement, yeah, because they don’t want you to ejaculate. And so, yeah, one of the things that I have said for a long, long time, and it sounds like you agree with, which is you can have sex all you want and build that energy, you just don’t have to ejaculate every time you have sex, right? So you don’t need to abstain and sit here and try to save all of your energy, and at the same time, you don’t have to ejaculate every single time if you’re having sex twice a day.

Matt Cook 18:45
Yeah, I’ve tried it. It’s it kind of wears me out, man. So what I’ve recommended, and I’ve done 1000s of men who have thanked me for this, is they schedule it. I kind of like every four days, every seven days, every 10 days, every three days, the rest of time. I want to have sex as often as possible. I don’t want to come. And so when I started this, I would get what they call vasocongestion, blue balls. You know, I would feel like I kind of worked myself up to the member of the mountain near the top of the mountain, ready to come, but I’m not going to come. So my pelvic floor got very tense, and I would have blue balls, and then I’d have to come or masturbate to ejaculate, which does fix that problem. So I said, How do I do this without getting that so I did a lot of things. I would have sex without ejaculating, and I have some ice water next to the bed, or I’d go into the shower stall and pour ice on my balls. Different things that I’ve tried. And that does work, actually.

But what I did find the best thing was I would do root focus. I’d focus on the root, which is where the penis enters the body. It’s kind of like you’re kind of like around your testicles, or the the premium, which is, you know, between your anus and your balls. Basically, you didn’t have to worry about it where it is too much. But you just put your focus on that area. Yeah, it relaxes that area. And then I practice that. When I’m driving or with people or anytime I want, I just practice it. It’s like a meditation, really. And then when I’m having sex, I just focus on my root and I relax in that area, and I no longer get blue balls that I discovered by relaxing that area and focusing on it with part of them, I could bring this pleasure up and have this whole body orgasmic feeling for a half an hour or 45 minutes, not quite as good as a full orgasm, but about 70% is good, and it would last. It could last an hour. So yes, who wouldn’t want that?

Kevin Anthony 20:33
You just hit on something really important. I have been teaching for well over a decade. Men do not ejaculate all the time. Yeah. And the first thing a new man always says when I when I approach this topic is, what about blue balls? I’m gonna get blue balls, yeah, to which I always say, well, blue balls don’t really exist, so don’t worry about it, but I’ve had it, and it’s really painful. It’s like, okay, let me explain to you what you’re actually experiencing, yeah. First of all, of course, anybody listening, your balls don’t turn blue. It’s all right. Let’s just get that out of the way, right?

The second thing is, is all it really is, is a congestion of energy. So if we want to talk about it in esoteric terms, the way the Taoists would talk about it, or the way Tantra would talk about it. It’s the fact that you’re building up a significant amount of energy, and it gets stuck in your first and second chakra area, right? And so, therefore, you feel that pressure, that energy that needs to go somewhere, do something. So what you’re describing is by focusing on it, one, you’re paying attention to that energy, and so that energy that’s causing contraction in that area, by focusing on it, you’re learning to relax it. So you could focus on it, you could meditate. You could do breathing exercises. But the other thing you mentioned is you figured out that you could move that up through your body.

So what you’re actually doing is taking the energy that’s congested down there in those first and second chakras, and you’re literally moving it up through the rest of your body, or if you want to talk in esoteric terms, through the rest of your chakras, if you like that that model and that terminology, but it’s moving that energy through your body, and of course, that relieves the pressure, So you don’t experience the sensation of blue balls, but you also pointed out rightly, which is, you’re not just removing the tension. You’re actually experiencing the pleasure of that energy moving through your body.

Matt Cook 22:33
So, so pleasurable, so great. And it’s not 10 or 15 seconds. It could be an hour. We do twice a day. You know, we’ve been married for 40 years. Who’s ever heard of something like that? Which is that we’re crazy for each other. And that’s everyone I teach. When they do this, they say the same thing is that women just love it. Men love it. It’s absolutely incredible. So my model of this is that we’re playing in a lake, and there’s a waterfall on one end of the lake. I like to use metaphors. When playing near the waterfall, it is really fun. Playing really close to the waterfall is super fun. Okay, the closer we play to the waterfall, the more pleasurable it is. But then, the likelihood of going down the waterfall and having an orgasm is also higher. So you learn how to have very high levels of sexual arousal, playing close to the waterfall without coming. And that I call pleasure centering, that bringing the pleasure up in my whole body is very easy. And so, you know, I used to say there’s a scale of one to 10, and one is when you’re little roused. 10 is when you come. You know, there’s a point of no return, like around nine or nine and a half. Now, I don’t know, maybe it’s a scale of one to 10, but I’m on a 20. That’s like way off the scale.

Kevin Anthony 23:47
Yeah, well, your scale is a different scale than most other people’s, but what just happened? But I understand that because, because that’s, that’s the way I have experienced sex for two decades now, right? And so I’m so glad that you’re talking about that. Because one of the things that men always say when you start approaching this topic with them is, well, you know, how do I have any pleasure if I’m not ejaculating? Right? Right? They put all of the focus on the end destination of ejaculation, and it’s sometimes difficult to get them to understand exactly what you just said, how much better it could be. And then when they do choose, if they so choose to ejaculate, there’s so much energy there that it’s even more intense later on, quick, you know, like, like my wife used to call it the genital sneeze, right? Whereas if they just kept that energy and chose when they wanted to, and, you know, didn’t have them super close together, like every time they have sex, it would be so much more intense and pleasurable for them.

Matt Cook 24:54
It takes a while when you start this to feel more because at the beginning, you don’t. Feel very much because you’re not being as rough as you were, because you don’t want to come and so you feel like hardly anything. And I found that women also, but we’ll talk about men, their penis becomes desensitized. This could be, for example, for men who are circumcised in our country, a lot of men are. I have been in my generation, everybody was sadly and then, and then you have no foreskin to protect delicate glands, and you’re wearing underwear, and all day long, it’s shapes, and you end up having this build up of keratinization that lowers sensitivity. So that’s one issue. So when we start having sex this way, we’re not moving as much. We hardly feel anything. It takes some time for us to get accustomed to these exquisite nuances. Then we’re having all these pleasure signals that we didn’t pick up. Now, we start picking them up, it becomes incredibly pleasurable, but it can take a few months to really, really feel that pleasure. Don’t you agree?

Kevin Anthony 25:57
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and there can be physical reasons for that, and a lot of it is, is people just aren’t used to feeling their bodies, especially men. I mean, we as men, we know how to feel our bodies when it comes to like, doing physical things, like you know, we know how to, like, lift weight and feel our body that way, but these more subtle, energetic realms of energy moving through our bodies, we’ve largely numbed out to that. Yeah. So it takes a while to sort of re-sensitize to what it means to actually feel subtle energies flowing through our bodies. And then once it’s one of those things, it’s like, you know, they often say, you know, once you see it, you can unsee it. Yeah, you’ve heard that expression before. Once you’ve become aware of something, it’s just always present. It’s the same thing. Once you’ve awakened this energy and you’ve learned how to feel it, it’s always there. It’s like it really, actually does change the way you go about life and sex and the way you perceive those things.

Matt Cook 26:54
And nowadays, it’s very common for boys to get into porn and be very heavily into porn. And I, unfortunately, even though I’m older, I got into porn very early. And since I’ve worked with so many men, I found that if people get into porn early, they get very wired to masturbation. It’s much harder to have a pleasurable encounter, a sexual encounter with women. For a lot of men, I had a student, particularly one that I remember from a few years ago, who had had sex but never had an orgasm inside a woman. And we worked together for about a year of coaching, and then he everything was just fantastic, but he had wired himself to porn so much that ordinary intercourse just seemed boring and didn’t help him this get off.

Kevin Anthony 27:40
This is, as I say, a big, big problem today. I actually work with a lot of men who have erectile dysfunction, yes, their premature ejaculation. Both of those problems are directly tied to their porn usage.

Matt Cook 27:58
And the earlier that men get into it, or boys get into it, the worse it is, generally. And unfortunately, we’re in a generation where a lot of boys and girls are growing up with so much porn that they’re just wiring the porn. And these are the adolescents. And early 20s are when these circuits in our brain sort of settle in, and our sort of sexual ways and methods sort of get solidified for the rest of our lives, and if we wire ourselves to porn during those very, very important formative years, then we have a very tough time having pleasure with a partner and we and you can see the result, the birth rate has been falling dramatically, and especially in countries that are really into porn, like Japan and South Korea, Even worse, and it’s very hard for the adults to ever get out of it.

Kevin Anthony 28:44
Yeah. So it’s a huge problem. And you know, this is actually a great segue into some of the other problems that I want to talk about that especially young men are experiencing today. But I do need to pause real quick for a short break, and when we come back, I want to talk about some of those problems, and I want to talk a little bit more about that porn use and how that is affecting their ability to have good sex, and also how that is affecting the quality of their relationships.

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Okay, so we were talking about the issue of porn and how that is negatively affecting men’s relationships. Porn, obviously big. Problem. I see it all the time. It’s something that I work with a lot of men on, and I also see other problems that are sort of mixing with the porn to create this, you know, sort of perfect storm of problems that are really negatively affecting men’s performance in the bedroom. So one of the things I see, and I’m curious what your take on this is, is that one of the reasons it’s hard to say, like, which came first, the chicken or the egg, right? But we have persistent porn use, but we also have a lot of young people now. They’re not dating, they’re not meeting, you know, women or young girls, if they’re young, they’re not socializing in those ways. The only real socializing that they seem to get is through social media, and so they don’t have real, actual connections. So they resort to porn, but then also because they’re doing porn, and they’re stuck in the virtual realms of porn and social media. They’re not going out and meeting people, and it seems to they seem to perpetuate each other, wondering what your take is on that.

Matt Cook 31:11
I think that social media replaces face-to-face relationships. It takes up a lot of time, and it satisfies part of our desire to socialize with other people in a very intense way, just like porn is much more intense than real sex. In a way, social media is more intense than the kind of thing that goes on when you’re, like, hanging out with somebody, you know, the kind of you could go a couple hours. It’s not the same density back and forth. It is that when you’re when you’re on social media, and so your brain wires to this intense, fast social media or intensity of porn, and it displaces your it just pushes aside your willingness even to get out and talk to people. It just doesn’t seem boring. It seems boring. And I work with people that young people, a lot of times, they don’t even want to get on the phone, they don’t want to make a call, they don’t want to talk to a real person, and so you’re you really have to, how do you get them to go out and start dating and talk to women and approach girls? How do you do that when their needs are being met with porn and social media? Enough, right? Isn’t that the big conundrum?

Kevin Anthony 32:18
It is. But you know, interestingly enough, you started talking about the pathways, with the dopamine pathway and the oxytocin pathway, but the porn and the social media is only hitting the dopamine path, right, right? So it’s kind of like the analogy I like to use on this is, you know, back in the day, all of our soda had real sugar in it, right? And then they decided, Oh, well, that’s not good for us, so we’re gonna put these fake sugar substitutes that make your body think it’s getting sugar, but you’re not getting sugar. It’s kind of the same thing they, of course, later on, they found out that, you know, all these artificial sweeteners actually made you fatter because your body thought that it had sugar, but it didn’t. So it would cause you to have more intense cravings later on, so you’d end up eating more junk food down the road than you would have if you just had the actual sugar soda. So it’s kind of like the same thing, like you’re getting this dopamine hit over and over and over again, and you think that you’re satisfied, but you’re actually not satisfied, right? So there’s a craving for what’s missing, but because you’re not getting the real thing, you just keep going back for more and more of the dopamine, more and more of the dopamine, more and more and more and more social media, right?

Matt Cook 33:28
Yeah, it turns out that social media makes people less and less happy and increases our feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction. So the answer really has got to be the things we’re talking about. You have to kind of slowly, maybe not all at once, but start hanging out with real people, at least as a start, you know. And when you do have sex the first time, I always suggest that it’s better to do some, and you can, you could talk about this up front. It’s better to sort of spend a few hangouts with somebody instead of jumping right into bed. I think I’m jumping right into bed. It’s not that I have any problem with it morally, but I think it’s bad for the relationship. I have met people that have had sex on the first date or whatever, but I find that you hang out and then you kiss, and you’re holding hands, you’re hugging and then you go to bed and have sex. Maybe the third date works way, way better.

Kevin Anthony 34:29
Yeah, I tend to agree with that. This is I actually do a lot of coaching with women also. One of the most common questions I get from women is, How long should I wait before I have sex with them? Right? And so my answer to that question is always this: there’s people that tell you it should be X number of dates, then there are people that tell you it should be X amount of time. And I said there’s a problem with both of those. So, let’s say they tell you you should wait until the third date. Okay, well, I know some people who’ll go on three dates with the same person. One week, okay, you’ve known this person a week, right? But then there’s people that say, Well, you shouldn’t have sex with them until you’ve dated for at least two months, okay?

But how many dates did you go on in two months? They went on three dates, right? You know, everybody’s life is busy, right? So, and then how much conversation were you having in between that, right? You know. So the idea is, is that I tell people, you should have sex with the person when you’ve had enough time to get to know something about who they are and establish some trust, yeah? And once you feel like, okay, I kind of know who this person is. I don’t expect you to know everything about the person, but I have a sense of who this person is. And I’ve been on enough dates and spent enough time with them that I feel like there’s a level of trust here. And you know, then we can go so with that, how long, how many dates that is, or how long that is, that depends.

So, for instance, you know, my wife and I, we it’s funny, before we went on our first date, we made the agreement that we were not going to have sex on the first date. First date that we talked about, that we’re not going to have sex on the first date we were bursting. We discussed exactly then we have the first day. And like, you know, pretty deep into the date, she goes, Can I change my mind? To which I said, Yes. The reason why is that we had known each other for four years before we started dating. We already had, we already knew who each other was. We already had an established level of trust, right? But that’s not true these days for most people because most people are doing the online dating thing right, and they barely know this person. And you know, of course, they’re also on a lot of sites like Tinder, which is notorious for people that just want to hook up, right?

Matt Cook 36:43
So there’s also the hookup culture. If they went to college, yeah, it’s just a big hookup culture. So it doesn’t serve people very well, though, honestly, for if you’re interested in finding somebody to be happy with and really be in love, it’s really better to wait a bit.

Kevin Anthony 36:58
I completely agree. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m agreeing with what you’re saying about I think you should wait.

Matt Cook 37:03
It was just sort of a more nuanced explanation. I agree with that exactly.

Kevin Anthony 37:08
Are there any other problems that you see young people have today when it comes to sex that is potentially negatively affecting their relationships, because we’ve talked about social media and porn news, man, but there are some.

Matt Cook 37:25
Yes. I mean, the biggest problem that young men have now is that they have low testosterone levels. It’s an epidemic. I mean, testosterone levels have dropped, and a lot of men actually aren’t even particularly fertile. They’re not particularly well virile, I guess the word is, they’re not easily able to impregnate a woman, even if they wanted to, because their sperm count is low and the motility is poor. We have this epidemic of it. Now, I know we had BuzzFeed that site, these young men that were editors of it, had their testosterone tested, and they put it out there in public. And you know, a lot of older guys, 70 or 80 years old, have much higher testosterone levels than these young men have, okay, shocking as that is, and I think it’s the social media horn, I think it’s all of that, but I think the testosterone really has to be addressed. I don’t mean that men necessarily need to take testosterone, but they do need to do some nutrition and some exercise and physical stuff, and you can increase testosterone by not having a lot of ejaculations but having a lot of sexual arousal.

Kevin Anthony 38:32
Yeah, so I didn’t necessarily mean to interrupt you, but you started going into exactly what I wanted to ask you, which is, you’ve spent an enormous amount of time as a health researcher. So this is this, all these topics right here are well within your wheelhouse, as far as the research that you’ve done. And that’s what I wanted to really ask you, is like, okay, what are some of the reasons why testosterone levels are so much lower today than they have historically been? And then, of course, what can men do naturally and or maybe, you know, if natural is not working, you know, there is some science that can help. What can they do to raise those?

Matt Cook 39:07
So to a great extent, there are two hormones to be thinking about here. There’s testosterone, and there’s cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that is secreted normally we have a cycle. It has to do with blood sugar. It has to do with inflammation. When we’re sleeping, our cortisol levels will rise, and in the early morning, it’s going to be much higher than when we wake up at breakfast. Cortisol levels fall towards lunchtime, and it increases. We should have a cycle of cortisol. If our cortisol is chronically high, we can see it in our bodies. We’ll have a belly, and we’ll have difficulty working out. We’ll have there’s a certain type of body type, which pretty much you can see just about any man, especially men who are middle aged, they have high cortisol, and that is what kills testosterone, honestly.

So you want to have a lifestyle where you’re lowering cortisol, and that will cause. Your testosterone to be up, to go higher, and a lot of it is the high stress of social media. Doesn’t feel like it, but it’s actually a very stressful loneliness kind of thing. And I think that all these things tend to lower cortisol, not getting the proper exercise and not having the proper nutrition. I know I’m gonna a lot of people disagree with me, but I’m not a big fan of carnivore or keto diets for this because I think they raise cortisol. I found that having adequate carbohydrates lowers cortisol. And then if you’re weight lifting, if you’re doing resistance exercises, doesn’t have to be very long, 10 or 15 minutes of heavy weights, just doing some warm up sets and then some heavy lifts, dead lift, squats, bench presses, just some very, very basic exercises can really help build muscle, and muscle will actually create more testosterone.

Kevin Anthony 40:56
I completely agree with everything that you just said.

Matt Cook 41:00
Okay, you’re not a carnivore guy, because I lot of guys will tell me they’re just as fad around these low carb carnivore diets, which is crazy, and they don’t even look very good.

Kevin Anthony 41:09
I don’t think they do. I’m not a big fan of any of the fad diets. Honestly, I think that the best approach to nutrition has always been the traditional approach, which is a balanced diet of healthy fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. I remember some of my listeners know this because I’ve talked about it on the show, but in my 20s, I worked as a personal trainer, and I studied to get my personal training certification under a US Olympic strength and conditioning coach. And so I had a pretty good pedigree. I used to work in a fairly high-end club where a lot of, like, wealthy people would come and pay us a lot of money to train them. So, so, you know, even from back in those days, there were, oh, God, what was it? The South Beach diet. There was a whole bunch of wacky, crazy diets.

Anyway, I remember one time I was actually working as a manager at this health club at the time, and I get a call from one of the members, and she wanted to ask me some nutrition questions, and she kept telling me she had no energy for her workouts, and she just she wanted to know what to do. And so of course, I’m asking her some questions, and she was on one of those, you know, super like, almost no carb diets, all protein. And I said, Well, there’s your problem. No wonder you don’t have any energy. Your primary source of energy in your body is carbohydrates, and you’re starving yourself, literally, right? And she just didn’t want to hear it. She couldn’t hear it. She was just like, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I need somebody here who knows what they’re talking about.

Matt Cook 42:43
She didn’t like her message. She wasn’t ready for it.

Kevin Anthony 42:45
No, she wasn’t ready for it. That’s exactly right. So, yeah, I mean, I completely agree. Just just getting a balanced, healthy diet, and part of the carbohydrate, or carbohydrates are part of that, we’re starting, of course, to see some people come out and talk more about this. Now, I noticed that Dr Mercola, who’s very well known, has really been talking about the importance of getting quality carbohydrates in your diet.

Matt Cook 43:11
Dr Mercola. He even wrote a book about how wonderful high fat diets are, and he completely changed his mind my friend Georgie dinkoff, he had him on as a guest a few times, and he and to give him the credit, he completely changed his mind when he saw facts that he hadn’t been aware of.

Kevin Anthony 43:27
Yep, I watched the interviews with Dr Minkoff, and I’ve read some of that stuff, and yeah, it’s very fascinating. And you’re right. It’s one of the things I’ve always appreciated about Mercola. I’ve followed him for 20 plus years, is that, you know, he may not always be right, but when he finds out new information, he’s absolutely open to it and willing to shift and change with the information.

Matt Cook 43:47
And I really, I really think that this cortisol versus testosterone thing is a really, really big deal for two reasons. Number one, because higher testosterone is very protective against heart disease and helps build bigger muscles. If you look at in nature, you have a male lion, and they don’t work out. I’ve never seen a lion work out, but they have big muscles. That’s because they have testosterone. Okay, so that’s one reason, and another reason is that it helps your body to avoid this doughy pot belly look that middle-aged guys get when their cortisol is chronically high. So you’re going to want to raise your raise one and lower the other.

Kevin Anthony 44:28
Yeah. What’s interesting, too, is that there is an inverse relationship. So in other words, the higher your cortisol level, it actually depletes your testosterone. Exactly. So yeah, as you know, my listeners should know at this point. You know, cortisol is what we call the stress hormone. The more stressed you are, the higher your cortisone level spike, right?

Matt Cook 44:47
And, of course, testosterone is more likely to turn into estrogen when there’s high cortisol, so you’re going to have high estrogen. And that leads to, you know, gynecomastia, man boobs, low sex drive. Just feeling blah about life, so everything kind of goes together. And if somebody just starts to see this and they try to get rid of porn, I have found, I’m not sure what you feel, but I want to ask you, I find that for men who are getting away from porn, if they can get into just written erotica, it’s a lot better than videos. What’s your opinion about that?

Kevin Anthony 45:22
Yeah, I would agree. It’s definitely better than videos. And so for some of my clients, they can go basically cold turkey off the porn, right? Yes, but some of them really struggle with that, yeah. And so when that’s the case, then, then we try to sort of walk them down the ladder a little bit in.

Matt Cook 45:40
It’s sort of like the nicotine gum when people are trying to stop smoking, yeah? It’s right, it’s like, it’s not as good as quitting, but it’s better than the smoking.

Kevin Anthony 45:49
Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, one of the essential practices that I teach men when I’m teaching them how to last longer is a what I call the mindful masturbation practice. It’s a version of edging right exactly, maybe a little bit more nuanced than what you normally read on the internet. But one of the problems is, is that when they go off porn a lot of times, then they start having Ed issues, right? Yeah. They’re like, I can’t do the practice because I can’t actually get an erection because I’m not using the porn. You’re in the flat-line period. Yeah. And so in cases like that, that’s where we’ll often try to sort of walk them down the ladder a little bit, rather than just like, boom, cold turkey.

Matt Cook 46:29
Yes, and then the other thing I mentioned about sensitivity. I mentioned a physical issue with sensitivity for circumcised men, but also for men that are intact, men will generally lose more and more sensitivity as they get older, unless they do something to reverse it. I think one study showed maybe 20% of the feeling that men had when they were 20, when they’re 60. In other words, they’ve lost 80% of their sensitivity. They don’t realize it. And and this is a big issue, actually, and we developed sort of a very simple technology we call vascular Maximizer, which fixes all that, and maybe takes a few months, and it also creates much longer lasting erections, much much more feeling, more sensitivity, more vascularity, so all that that can be reversed.

What I have found is that if people have no erections, which applies to men who are diabetic, type two diabetics, who have been on medications for a while, there’s all sorts of medical conditions around a lot of different pills, and they haven’t had an erection for six months or a year, they get this scar tissue called penile fibrosis, which is reversible, but They’re not going to get erections until they fix that. So, you know, over the years, I kind of figured out some things that fix that. So a lot of times, I’ve worked with guys that have really bad ed, and I’ve had it for many, many years. Have them get over it.

Kevin Anthony 47:53
Yeah, ED is a huge problem these days. You know, I’ve been doing this work a long time. My wife had been doing it for years. Even before I started, she worked with 1000s of men over the years with erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation and that sort of thing. And when she first started doing her practice, the average age of the guy that was coming in, you know, complaining of Ed was for sure, over 50, primarily, 60 and above, yes, and over the years, then she started seeing guys like in their 40s, and then in their 30s, and then now, literally, in their 20s. There are young men in their 20s who can’t get an erection, and that just blows my mind. Because, I mean, in my 20s, I was literally a walking erection. I was erect all the time.

Matt Cook 48:43
It’s just because of the dopamine track that all the triggers that are everywhere we’re constantly getting us sort of a spurt of sex hormones, if you will, in our brains. And after a while, regular things don’t do it for us. We’re just desensitized to sexual cues.

Kevin Anthony 48:59
It’s funny. I saw a commentator, a political commentator, but they were, for some reason, talking about this particular issue. They basically played a TikTok video that some guy put out there. And honestly, it was a very funny video. But basically what he was saying, he was commenting on this. He was saying that basically, he sees so much ass on social media that it’s taken the fun out of looking at ass. Like, in other words, it doesn’t turn him on anymore. It was very funny the way he said it, though, because, you know, he had a bit of an accent. He’s like, I go on Instagram his ass, tick tock. It’s ass and everywhere it’s ass. Y’all took the fun out of seeing ass.

Matt Cook 49:44
That’s right. Yeah, I teach men to defocus their eyes. I look away. I’m fine with looking at a real ass on the street or on the beach. That’s fine, but I don’t want to get wired to pixels, so I look away from sex scenes and anything that’s not real. If it’s arousing or interesting, I’ll. Go away. That’s helped a lot. That’s helped a lot.

Kevin Anthony 50:03
It is kind of interesting. I sometimes have to realize that, you know, I can’t always look at like, compare myself to other people. I spend very little time in social media. I don’t really like social media, and so like, I don’t, I don’t other than work accounts. I only have one social media account, like most people have, you know, every social media that’s out there. I don’t I have a Facebook account. I’ve had since like, the beginning of Facebook. That’s, like, my only social media, and I barely spend any time on it. I have social media accounts for my work and my business, but I don’t use those to cruise social media. So I don’t see a lot of this stuff, right? And so, you know, sometimes it’s a little hard for me to relate, but, but then, you know, I talk to the average person, and I see just how much of it they are exposed to on a regular basis, like day in and day out, and it’s all day long, too. And it’s like, wow, now I can really understand better why people are having these problems?

Matt Cook 51:01
Well, it’s that tick-tock guy that’s exactly right. You see this all day. You get a little bit aroused with pixels of watching other people have sex, just visualizing, thinking about it, and fantasizing about it, and then you don’t have the same level of interest in the real thing. Our bodies don’t respond the same way.

Kevin Anthony 51:17
Yeah, yeah. It is a huge problem. You know, fixable. It’s very easy to fix. Yes, oh, yeah, absolutely fixable. But, but a huge and very prevalent problem. You know, another interesting thing too is, aside from social media, because you were talking about the porn use issue, another big problem that I see with clients a lot of times is, you know, porn is just the absolute ultimate exaggeration of all things sex. So all women have big boobs, all the men have giant cocks. You know, everybody’s muscular, you know, the makeup and the hair and the lips with the filler, and then everything else, right? And so I’ve noticed that, you know, men who tend to spend a lot of time in porn, and you, you said this earlier, right? They get used to that, and then they look at real life, and it’s like going from Technicolor to black and white, you know, because they look at real life and they’re like, they’re just not attracted to it anymore, because it’s not the crazy giant boobs and, you know, the perfect ass. And you know, all the over stimulation that porn tends to be.

Matt Cook 52:26
And so that’s the leap of faith that someone has to take care, is that if you build a box of toast, that woman will become beautiful to you, and she’ll be the most beautiful woman that you can imagine. That’s what I found. Completely true.

Kevin Anthony 52:40
You’re absolutely right. And the other thing is, too, is like, it’s you really do have to realize that what you’re seeing there on that screen isn’t real. I had Eric Everhard on the show years ago. He’s like, one of the all time, you know, most famous male porn stars. And one of the things that we talked about was how porn it just isn’t anything close to real life, you know. So he’s in an interesting place, or at least he was back then. I don’t know what he’s doing these days, but aside from being a very well known porn actor, after acting in porn, he got into producing porn and so, or directing, I guess, directing and producing. So what we talked about was like, he’s like, look, if I want to film a scene, you know, of a particular sex act, he’s like, the right way to do that sex act, to have great sex looks terrible on camera. So we intentionally have them do it in ways that you would never really do just because it looks good on camera.

Like, the perfect example is, it’s like, if I want to, if I want to film a scene of a man giving oral sex to a woman, he’s like, Well, real oral sex. Your face is buried in there. You can’t see a thing. It’s like, but porn oral sex, you know, he’s two inches away with this crazy long tongue and doing all this stuff that’s like, you know, the point simply being is, is that porn is in is an exaggeration, and most of what you see, not just the people, but the acts themselves, are not real. And so you can’t go then to real life and expect real life to be like that because that’s not real, right?

Matt Cook 54:12
But it does seem like if, until the oxytocin is built up, it seems like such a drag real women, they have all these things on their skin, and their boobs sag a little bit and all the rest of it. You know, it seems like I want that. I think that’s the problem today, really, with a lot of young people so much wired they’re wired to porn, and they’re wired to watching other people have sex with idealized bodies, with idealized sexual positions, that real life seems boring. It does.

Kevin Anthony 54:39
And, you know, the other thing they have to realize is that when the lights are off and the camera filters are not in front of them and the makeup isn’t on, those women have stuff. They have marks on their skin too, and they have wrinkles, and they have all that stuff. So, yeah, it’s just you have to really shift your expectation, right? You can’t. Be, you can’t be comparing real life to some fake fantasy.

Matt Cook 55:03
But if you, if you go, if you get rid of the porn completely, maybe you have some written erotica to get there. There’s a flatlining period where you do lose interest, your dick is dead. You can’t get an erection. But that passes after a few months. If you have, if you’re dating and you have women in your life, that’s way faster you can get over porn, way faster, and then the women start seeing really interesting, really attracted you and really amazing, your whole view changes because it’s so hormonal.

Kevin Anthony 55:34
I completely agree. Well, we are about out of time. I want to give you just the last moment. If there’s anything else that you want to want to share, any other advice or, like, you know, hacks that we haven’t talked about that could be really helpful for men. And then, of course, let people know where they can find out more about you.

Matt Cook 55:53
I do have one thing that we hadn’t mentioned, and I’ll just say two things. Number one is don’t underestimate eye contact. Eye contact is very intimate. And rather say is, hey, look at me and look right in her eyes. I think it’s incredibly arousing, erotic, and intimate to have eye contact. If you are gonna have an orgasm, or you have orgasms, look in each other’s eyes. It’s incredibly intimate.

And the second thing that I really suggest people do in a relationship is schedule sex, because it’s better to have a schedule where you know and always stick to the schedule unless something really dire happens, because you know you’re gonna have sex Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, you’re not going to it’s just much better. We have sex every day, but it’s much better to schedule it and know you’re gonna have it and say you’re not. It takes the pressure off. And before I was doing that, I was always trying to basically manipulate my wife into bed, you know what I mean by that? Just kind of get her, you know, to lie down with me, and one thing leaves another, and I kind of seduce, which could be fun now and then, but it’s a lot of pressure, so the scheduling took away all the pressure. And I always recommend people do it.

Kevin Anthony 57:02
I completely agree, just two things. So one is, somebody was asking me the other day, you know, what is Tantra? And I was giving them an explanation for what Tantra is, and they said, Well, how does one get started? To which I said, Okay, here’s an easy way to get started. It was literally to do an eye-gazing exercise, right? Oh, yeah, right. Because what I was trying to explain to them, everybody thinks Tantra is, you know, just about sex positions and, you know, crazy, this, that or the other thing. Sex is only one small portion of Tantra. Tantra is really about how we live a quality life. And when it comes to sexuality, when we’re talking about sex utilizing Tantra, it’s about the connection with the person, much more so than it is about the actual physical act. And so I said you want to get started in Tantra. Start connecting with your partner. And the best way to do that is to sit down and just stare in each other’s eyes.

Matt Cook 57:56
So you’ll find it extremely difficult at first. Yeah, very difficult, absolutely. So I wrote a book which I want to give away to your audience. It’s called masculine Maximizer. It’s an e-book. It’s going to be out on Amazon soon, and we’re going to charge for it, and it has a lot of the things that I’ve learned over the years. If people want to go to my website, it is dailymedicaldiscoveries.com. You’ll be asked to provide your email address. I’ll send you a copy of the book, and you’ll also get our newsletters, and those of Dr McGill, who works for me, and they’re really all around mental health, and they’re wonderful, so daily medical discoveries.com and I’ll make sure you get the e book as well.

Kevin Anthony 58:38
That link will be in the description as well. Then the second thing you said, so it was eye contact and schedule. Schedule. Yes, that was the other thing I wanted to follow up on, which is that my wife and I used to tell all the couples that we worked with to schedule a date night and schedule sex. And then, of course, you’d always get the push back from people like I wanted to be spontaneous and blah, blah, blah, to which I would always say, would you rather it be spontaneous and have no sex? Or would you rather schedule it and have sex? The choice is yours. Yeah. So, yeah. Great advice. I completely agree. Those are things that I often teach people, as well. All right. Well, I want to thank you, Matt, for coming on and sharing your knowledge and expertise. Like I said, I really appreciate when people come on and like, you know we talk in the pre interview, so I have an idea of, you know where you’re at and what you’re going to talk about, but I never really know you know what the guest is going to say.

And so I think it’s great to have somebody come on and let’s talk about these subjects, because I have my opinions, you have yours, and let’s see where we meet. And it’s always great to hear other opinions. And you know, obviously, I would say 99% of what we talked about today, we were totally on the same page with, and so I think that’s great. It’s not that everybody has to agree with me, but. But what I like for the audience to hear is they’ve heard it from me, they’ve heard it from you. They’ve probably heard it from 50 other guests on the show. It’s like when you hear the same things repeated by expert after expert after expert, you get to see that there’s, there’s a there’s a truth here, right? Yes. And given this industry and all the noise that’s out there,e around you know what you need to do as far as sexuality and how to solve your ED and take this pill or do this thing? Right? I think it’s really important for people to really get to see that there is a, there’s an underlying level of truth to these teachings that just works.

Matt Cook 1:00:38
That’s right. Well, they’re also science space, and you can experience them yourself.

Kevin Anthony 1:00:42
Yeah, absolutely. All right, Matt, thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. All right, everybody, that’s all the time I have for this episode, and I will see you next week.

I hope you like this episode of the Love Lab podcast. If you enjoy this show, subscribe, leave me a review, and share it with your friends, and for more free exclusive content, join me in the passion vault at https://www.kevinanthonycoaching.com/vault/. That’s https://www.kevinanthonycoaching.com/vault/. Thanks for listening, and remember, as Celine used to say, you’re amazing!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai