If YOU Think God Isn't Real, You NEED To See This transcript

Uh, you did, you took DMT? >> In a faraway land where it was very legal. Cuz, you know, I sit here and talk about these things and psychedelics. Now, I actually did work in a psychedelics company for about a year, but it was deeply, deeply fascinating. And I The reason I was compelled by it is the efficacy as it relates to mental health and the studies being done out of London around things like, you know, psilocybin and ibogaine and DMT treatments.

And I just thought, wow, you know, it's unbelievable some of the clinical data. I'd love to learn more. So, I did a yeah, psilocybin and then I did a DMT and it was really just >> I've not done DMT. >> You've never done DMT? >> No, no. I've I've done um clinical um MDMA and psilocybin. I think I'm done with that, not because I had a negative experience, but I got what I wanted out of it. And um I found it to be immensely beneficial. >> So, the psilocybin or >> The the combination of therapy going in, therapy during, and therapy coming out of of combination MDMA psilocybin. >> Do you know what?

It It's one of the things that made me think a lot about religion. >> Mhm. >> Was having a DMT experience where what I experienced felt indistinguishable from this reality in terms of the vividness and the the realness of it. And me just pondering this this concept that a tiny little inhale of smoke could completely change my material reality. So, therefore, I concluded that my material reality is is literally But I mean, tell me if my logic's wrong.

Is a small amount of chemicals being uninterrupted. Does that Does that make logical sense to you? >> Yeah, so I think about this way too much. I guess we are going to talk about psychedelics, reality, and religion. Um couple short statements about this. Uh you're I fascinated by this, so I'd love to hear you talk more about it, but here are a couple uh ways that I think about it in a non um dismissive way. Most all of biology is just compartmentalized chemistry.

So, whether or not it's the flow of electricity along neural circuits to generate tenacity, for instance, or learning, you're just guiding chemistry in particular ways. Okay? That's not a way to trivialize it. It's kind of a way to think about it. There two ways that you can change brain function, behavior, and chemistry. One is mechanical. I can breathe differently. I can get a massage, right? I could poke myself with a knife.

Okay, so there mechanical forces that change our physiology. And then there are chemical forces. Pharmacology, things we eat, and chemicals within us, serotonin, etc. That's really it. There's no other thing. In many ways, you're absolutely right. It's compartmentalized chemistry and mechanics and other chemicals are what control that chemistry. And I think organizing one's thoughts sometimes in that way can be helpful cuz you realize the stress response it is really just a bunch of chemicals happening in certain places and so on.

I personally am intrigued about the idea of things outside of our conscious understanding and biology that maybe things like DMT give us access to or maybe just prayer gives us access to or faith gives us access to. And it comes from my recognition both as a neuroscientist and just a human who's been alive for 50 years and some change that our biology and psychology, let's mold those together, are extraordinarily good at accomplishing certain things.

But there are certain things that are outside the abilities of our psychology and biology. And if we are asking our psychology and biology to satisfy something that our psychology and biology simply cannot satisfy, we're going to miss out on a lot of potential meaning in life. And what I to be very direct about it, like at the point where I decided to really embrace the idea of faith, of a God, right? That there are powers outside of human understanding that can be very useful.

Everything got better. It it relieved me of the pressure to control everything internally and externally. And I find it not just intriguing, but absolutely captivating that a force outside of us Some people call it God, the universe, right? Some people might think it's Jesus. Some people might think it's something else. might actually hold some power in how we could potentially behave. Be better. Be Wouldn't it be wonderful if there's this thing planted in us or some of us, which is a question about things outside of us, that if we were to embrace could allow us to get to a better place as a species.

Why would we think that a technology like AI would do that? AI is wonderful, but why would we think that it would come from computers? That's of us, right? Why would we think it would come from anything that humans and only humans could do? To me, that embracing the notion of a God and having faith, which by the way is about having doubt, but still doing the the things, the practices, prayer. Is like to me one of the most liberating and educating thing not just about stuff of God and the universe, but about the human brain. >> Okay, I've got some questions. >> Yeah, I mean it's like we're not meant to solve this on our own. >> Do you believe in God? >> Absolutely. >> When did God come into your life? >> Very early, but I was very good at suppressing the notion that it was real.

Like I would pray in private. I would hide it. And um and not just in bad times. And then I think I lived enough and observed enough hardship. We've talked about some of this on a previous podcast. I talked a little bit about that in the book, but but I observed it out there, too, not just in my own life. That I I started to realize, especially if you stick your hands in enough brains, and you see my good friend Eddie Chang record from the brain of a awake human and remove a tumor and save that person's life, and you also realize that brain areas are controlling things cuz when they're stimulated, that person feels and responds in a certain way, you realize that we're not all meat and potatoes in there.

There's something else. But I'm not sure that it all comes from us. It's It's sort of hard to explain. The The best way I kind of wiggle out of this is that I I brought my dad on my podcast. My dad and I for many years had a choppy relationship. We have a great relationship now. He's 83 years old. He's super vigorous. He loves ideas. He's into quantum you know, quantum computing and he's theoretical physicist, right?

And I asked him to explain quantum mechanics. I go, "Okay, like tell my audience how relativity works." He worked on chaos theory, okay? Tell us how chaos works. And he said, "I'll do that, but you have to understand that one of the most important things about understanding quantum mechanics is that early on you are told and you learn that the human brain can't wrap its head around quantum mechanics with logic, with the with human understanding.

You have to rely on the math." And he says, "Anyone who talks about the quantum field who can't show you the math, can't show you the proofs, is lying." He loves it when people are like, "Oh, the quantum this and the quantum that." It's often as in like the meditative communities but others too. And he goes, "People throw this word around because very few people under actually understand quantum biology. There's gaps in There's some logic, but there's gaps in their logic that the math doesn't line up with.

And the math doesn't lie. So, what he was saying and we were having a discussion about God, and he said, "Yeah, at some point, if you're going to have faith in a higher power or God, you have to depart this notion that your logical brain can go from A to B to C and boom, you're there. But in quantum mechanics, it's the same thing. But on the basis of quantum mechanics you can build stuff. You can engineer stuff in the real world like that red light or a rocket. >> Are you saying but you don't know all of this >> There's no math to prove this thing that I call my the existence of God.

There's no math and it's not worth torturing yourself over. What I believe is worth torturing yourself over. And there's also great beauty in there is embracing the practice of prayer, embracing the questions and like opening the aperture of your beliefs just for a moment going maybe I'm going to just believe in God for 10 seconds. See what that's like. And I started to experience beauty and experience um peace around not trying to control things that obviously were not under my control not just within me but in other people.

And I really started to see what I could only describe as miracles. And by miracles I mean I would pray for some indication of what the right path might be on something where it wasn't clear to me. And then two or three days later something would happen which would like seem almost completely unrelated and the answer would come in that same. And then I just locked in. I'm like listen, I'm a disciplined guy when I really want to be.

I'm going to pray every night before I go to sleep. If I fall asleep I'll get out of bed and pray when I if I wake up in the middle of the night. I've not missed a night in nearly 3 years. I was recently invited up to Stanford to give a talk with Arthur Brooks who's a lifetime Catholic. He's in mass every morning. You know, he and I have very different experiences of God and religion. My family was mixed religion. I got to sit up there and just say listen, I'm going to tell you that I for sure am the person who's least knowledgeable, least versed in this room.

But what I can tell you is my experience with prayer. What I can tell you is what I've observed in myself when I open the aperture for faith. The reason I did that talk is because our former director of neurosciences at Stanford um written to me and said I think you should consider talking to this group and he did some of the most important experiments in the history of neuroscience linking neuronal activity to perception.

He really showed that if you stimulate certain brain areas people perceive things a certain way regardless of what's happening out in the world. >> Mhm. >> Like there's a brain area I could trigger right now and I could show you a movie of a bunch of dots moving up and everyone here would be like they're moving up and if I tickled the right neuron in your brain you'd say they're going down. >> Mhm. >> And I'd be like that's wild.

I'd turn it off and you'd say oh yeah, of course they're going up. Your understanding of the world is an abstraction that occurs inside your skull on the basis of photons that come in through your eyes sound waves that hit your ears, mechanical forces that hit your skin, and chemicals that go in your nostrils and in your mouth and then you create you abstract reality in here. Now, the laws of physics dictate how those things like photons have properties.

Sound waves have properties and those are converted, they're transformed into signals but then you abstract the world with enough accuracy so I can pick up this pen. Okay? And not miss it. At least for now. So if you understand neuroscience that way and then you go we don't see infrared in this room because we don't have the sensors but a pit viper does. Does that mean that there's a god? No, not necessarily. That alone doesn't prove that.

But what it does prove is that we only have access to the physical events in the world that we have the filters within us to extract which is a kind of mealy-mouthed way of saying you can't see it cuz you can't see it. You don't have the sensors. You can throw on infrared goggles and then you can see it but that's a technology. There I don't think there will ever be the god goggles. The emotional goggles so to speak come from this thing that we call faith.

Faith is the infrared goggles of of human understanding about why we're here. And the the challenge for people is I feel like people come in three categories. They they either at least three. They either were forced religion in a bad way, so they hate it. They never had access to it in a way that made them gently pulled toward it or you know, they were like it was like people knocking on their door, it felt like a disturbance and I you know, I'm not against proselytizing if it's done kindly and with you know, delicately.

Or they're absolutely convinced that it can't be, which I look at as sort of a spiritual anorexia. You know, there regions of the brain that when stimulated people get a god-like experience the experience of God, not as themselves, but they feel it. You had this I And so people have said, "Oh, well, then there's a god region of the brain and it's just a brain region. It's just a brain region. That can't be." But we have brain regions Arthur says this much more eloquently than I could.

Their brain regions for thirst, which in the philosophical way, again, this is coming from him, not me, would say, "Well, that proves the existence of water." The thirst proves the existence of water, right? So, I have a thirst circuit for gaining understanding of this thing that we call life and whatever comes after it. And in that thirst I decided to open the aperture to the idea that it's that the thing, the stimulus, the water, the photons, I'm not able to extract that through thought, through my eyes, through my ears.

Just like my dad couldn't come to understand quantum mechanics by thinking really hard about it. You have to do the math. And there are gaps in the in my reasoning here. Like it it's not a perfect one-to-one. But also life's just so much better, man. I don't think anxiety sticks in us very long if we were feeling anxious. You you pray, God, please like help me remove Help me remove this. It's not do this for me. It's help me put energy in me to do the right things today.

Put energy in me to serve people. I prayed before I came in here. Get on my knees before every podcast guest or host, I prayed. I prayed for I just said, "Please help me move my ego out of the room. We all have an ego. Help me move my ego out of the room. I I would hope that people could learn useful information that might help them and that they would propagate that information. Please make sure that I maintain humility, maintain like help me help me strive for clarity.

And I also said, "And help Steven and I do something that we're not predicting that would happen but you want us to happen that we don't understand." And maybe that's this part of the conversation, >> [laughter] >> right? Like you know, I don't know. And the point is not to know. It's also fun as a scientist who loves mechanisms and cells and circuits and neuromodulators. And it's enriching to have a part of life that like I can just explore in.

Like it's I like mysteries. Like science is about mysteries and it's about solving mysteries but it's also about being in awe of the the mystery. And um I'm all in, man. I mean, I'm different all in than other people talk about being all in. And I don't tell people what to do morally. I'm I'm really just trying to navigate my own my own path. But it is it it's like one of the best things that ever happened to me. It's so liberating and life is still plenty hard.

But I love it. >> It seems to be an antidote that a lot of people are reaching for now based on the way that we've kind of designed our lives over the last couple of decades. This sort of individualism, the loneliness, the I don't know, nihilism, the me me me, the material success, the you could say like low-level narcissism of being on social media and trying to cut get as much many followers as you can and we've become islands.

And I I've been thinking a lot about this idea of like God and meaning because it does appear to me that we are meant to be like anchored to, you know, ourselves and our family and then like I don't know our community and then maybe our city and then maybe our country and then maybe the planet and then something above. >> I mean, you're an ambitious guy. Go bigger, man. I'm not trying to push you like >> no, please. >> Bigger the biggest thing is that the that is a non-human force in the universe that wants goodness and can exemplify perfection.

And you and I, if I may, by virtue of being human, by virtue of having circuits that I mean, the famous studies like people get to stimulate different areas of their brain. You know the area that people like to stimulate a lot? The area that generates frustration and anger, that arousal. I saw that result and I was like, "Oh, man, that's disappointing." Why not beauty, get gettingness, or even feelings of being drunk?

Though they found that too, but they were not as interested in that. You go, are we bad? No, we're not bad. We we are wired with an animal part of our brain and we are wired with a conscious, thoughtful part of our brain. And it's a lot of work to ascend, I know that word is like it in the looksmaxing thing now, but like it's a like to ascend as a human to a place where you're living in a controlled and thoughtful and peaceful way with yourself and with your pursuits and you're putting trying striving to put goodness in the world and take care of people and and to do that uh with a little less friction.

I know from experience that comes from trying not to control every aspect of every process and somehow everything just goes much better. So, you know, I people will be like, "Oh, he really drank the Kool-Aid." Like I don't know. I I actually think that this was pumping in my veins from go. Yes, I worked on a lot of topics. Um stress, vision, etc. But I studied neural development for a long time and you know, sperm meets egg and cells start dividing and you get a human.

And um yes, we understand induction factors. I teach developmental neurobiology, cell migration, axon guidance, you know, mesoderm, ectoderm, etc. Great. Like compartmentalized chemistry can give you a human. But there are gaps in our understanding and there's magic in that orchestration that goes beyond what the science can even begin to understand. And it's nothing short of spectacular. You just like Also, who doesn't want more awe in their life?

It's like Dacher Keltner is like the the awe guy at Berkeley. Like he said, yeah, the awe is when you go from small aperture to big aperture and from big aperture to small aperture. That transition induces awe and you can hear it in sound, too. Like when you walk in off the street and you go into like Stanford has this incredible church. Memorial Church is unbelievably beautiful with this giant organ. And you walk in there and people change.

Not just because it's a You like there's this the high ceiling and you're like, "Wow. Like this is incredible." And of course I know humans made it. Like I'm not an idiot. But day aperture to holy aperture. The like these And you can get this other ways, right? I'm not saying you can't get this other ways, but I like the idea that if we dial out really far, >> Mhm. >> that there's something much greater than us. And And I don't know what it exactly what form it takes or exactly what shape it takes or exactly what ways that it um God would exert uh influence over our minds, but >> You don't need to. >> This is the thing that I have to I think I have to come to terms with is I I go, "Okay, this is really interesting.

There's lots of meaning and benefits to my life." You know, if we're just thinking about benefits, right? And then I go, "Okay, so which which which Bible have I got to believe?" And then I start looking at the Bibles and I'm like, "Okay, Noah's Ark." >> Look at a bunch of them. I think one will call to you more than the others. Listen, it may end up being atheism for some people, but when I said um when I said spiritual anorexia earlier, anorexia is the most deadly of the psychiatric illnesses.

It like it's incredibly deadly and it's a something happens to the neural circuits where people with true anorexia feel reward some sort of sense of quote-unquote reinforcement. It's better than reward. Reinforcement from avoiding food as opposed to eating it. So, that's very like runs against our evolution as a species, right? And our health. But the desire for food, as Arthur would say, proves the existence of food, right?

Desire thirst proves the existence of water. And there are atheists who are like, "Yeah, I don't need it. Not for me." And then there are atheists who are who have a kind of spiritual anorexia. It's almost like they get their spirituality is not believing in a god. And I look at them and I go, "Well, you're kind of on the like the same like extreme." It's almost like it wraps around so far that you the the truly religious people and the atheists kind of meet right here.

They both have the same sort of thing, but there's kind of an inversion of the circuit right there. And so, I don't know. Someone will work out the neuroscience or not. I'm going to keep praying because my life is that much better. >> When you when I heard you talk about it, I started praying a little bit. >> Oh, right on. >> Not all the time, but there there's several moments where I thought, "Do you know what? Now would be a good time to just pray." And I don't Someone like you saying that you do it gives a lot of other people permission to try.

And to investigate for themselves because, you know, like if I'm in the Huberman camp, maybe I'm someone that really cares about scientific rigor and precision. And and then if you were if you that you you changed that camp to also be open-minded to spirituality and religion and these sort of other pursuits, I can still be sort of ideologically who I believe I am, while also investigating these other things. So, what I So, it was really impactful for me to hear you talk about prayer because it impacted my it gave me permission, I should say, at some weird level to also investigate.

And yeah, like I report the same findings as you that it [laughter] helps. >> Yeah, it helps. My former chair of neurosciences at Stanford who encouraged me to do that talk at Veritas where I mostly talked about how ignorant and naive I am on these topics. He's a brilliant neuroscientist. He has faith. And I respect him and I respect his mind. I also think there's maybe kind of a fun analogy here that just came to mind.

You know, it happens in every dimension, like audience and podcasters, all right, but this happened during the pandemic with the with the health community and we're seeing that the long tail of that now, but you know, when you're a kid, you think your parents are everything. You think they can do no wrong. And then there's this thing called being an adolescent teenager, and you catch them doing like lying or saying things occasionally or doing things.

You go, "Wait, you said that and and and it's like this and all of a sudden you're like, you don't know anything." >> Yeah. >> Then you gain some hopefully some agency and some velocity in life, and you get to this point where you think you know everything and you accept that they don't, but you're really the one that understands. I think that as adults, we eventually get to the place after that where we go, "Wait, it's outside of me." And then you got to look outside of me and then you go, "No, every like all these adults, we were all they went through it and we went through it." And the real like is going, "Oh, wait.

No, no, no, I'm looking at humans for something that doesn't isn't going to come from human beings. We're all flawed. We're all all imperfect. And so that the notion, the belief that there's there perfection exists outside us and that we can strive for certain things through works, through practices. That's not just compelling, that's just like downright fantastic to me because it you would fully embrace the the woes and the the beauty of being human.

And embracing God is kind of a weird thing. So, listen, more power to the atheist if they if they can pull it off without all that, great, but you know, meanwhile, I'm going to keep at it. >> Amen. If you love the Diary of a CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor, become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.