Dark Net

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 porn is

it actually hijacks our brain reward circuitry.

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.

What if you could have a pill

that makes you your best self?

Unifiram, Modafinil, Flmodafinil, Adrafinil...

This one here's Sunifiram.

Pretty much anything and everything --

you can buy it on the Internet.

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.

We created the Internet.

He hits the bar and gets an immediate reward.

Now the Internet is recreating us.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Many of us have been hooked on porn

since we were little kids -- 11 or 12 years old.

We went through puberty on porn,

and we actually learned about our sexualities from porn.

Growing up, masturbating to porn 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 porn addiction.

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?

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

These guys are part of a group

struggling with Internet porn 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.

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 porn recovery community-based website

that offers tools and support

for people who are trying to quit porn.

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 porn 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?

All right. I'll do that.

Sweet. Let's go.

Alex's NoFap website has over 170,000 users.

Sofyan is one of the youngest, and has been struggling

with porn addiction for half his life.

Seriously, there's like a bunch over there.

I stumbled across it around 8 or 9.

I was looking for Dick'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.

I started wanking and then watching porn

and finding more stuff, and it sort of escalated.

It was Sofyan's first fix.

I've seen it get more extreme.

It got hard core.

It totally demolishes, like,

your realistic expectation for women.

We all know how one click leads to another.

Most of us have seen some kind of porn 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 pornography.

I have been, like, addicted to this

for, like, over 10 years.

But it really starts to fuck with your head.

These guys are just the tip of the iceberg.

Multiple porn 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.

I think everyone here probably wants

at least one burger and one hot dog.

Yeah.

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?

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.

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.

Nootropics are cognitive enhancers.

Cognitive enhancers are any compounds

that increase any aspect of cognition,

whether that's creativity, stamina, mental resilience.

In 2014, they founded an online start-up

that sells nootropics.

Even though these drugs can be sold legally,

they're not approved by the FDA as actual mental enhancers.

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 drugs."

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

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 drugs.

And this DIY drug study

offers dealers like Geoffrey and Michael

the ultimate in insider information.

But the Internet supply chain of smart drugs

stretches far beyond Silicon Valley.

In the swamps of Alabama, Chris Mercer runs

his new online business from his kitchen.

I'm trying to jump into the business.

I don't have a lot of advertising budget.