If You Think God Isn't Real, You Need To See This

Key Takeaway

Treat your feelings as data, not as proof. Today, when a strong emotion or belief arises, pause before acting: take several slow diaphragm-led breaths, label the reaction as a biological state, and ask what evidence supports your interpretation. You cannot always control the first thought, but you can choose which thoughts to repeat. This small gap between stimulus and response helps you avoid impulsive decisions while using practices such as prayer or meditation for calm and perspective.

Episode Overview

This episode examines psychedelics, prayer, religious faith, free will, and perception through a debate between biological and spiritual explanations of human experience. Tom Bilyeu argues that people are always having a biological experience shaped by neurochemistry, while Andrew Huberman describes how faith and prayer have brought him peace, meaning, and a release from trying to control everything. Both emphasize that frames of reference and repeatable practices can profoundly shape how people feel and behave.

Full Transcript

Transcript of If You Think God Isn't Real, You Need To See This from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go. Easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer. Really? I hit $200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good. Offer's worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. Ever wonder who's out there making the world go round?

It's truckers. Who unites baristas with coffee beans? Truckers. Who unites dogs with their favorite shoe toy? Truckers. That's why Progressive offers truckers even more protection with Cargo Plus coverage to keep truckers moving right along. Quote truck insurance today in as little as eight minutes at progressivecommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Coverage subject to policy terms, limits, and conditions. Not yet available in California, New York, and Virginia. What is the right frame of reference that you should have if you want to live your life well?

Is God real? What does it mean, the way that life brings us these miracles, these surprises? What does it mean to all of us? And if you fail to understand that, you will live your life in a lost perspective. And I feel that a lot of people look at the things that life served them, and they have a very confused response. And so we're going to take a look at this one. I had a pretty strong reaction. Took DMT in a faraway land where it was very legal.

Because, you know, I sit here and talk about these things in psychedelics. And I actually did work in a psychedelics company for about a year. But it was deeply, deeply fascinating. And 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 psilocybin and then I did DMT.

And it was really just... Well, I've not done DMT. You've never done DMT? No, no, I've done clinical 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. All right. Everybody needs to be very cautious with taking any substance that alters your mind. First of all, what I find is people take said substance with total disregard for what it might be doing to your brain. But let's just say for a second that it's perfectly safe from a health perspective.

People get to the point where they're not able to replicate the insights and arguably the most important part of this is they somehow believe that they have transcended their biology. So you're doing a thing that is interrupting, changing your biology. And the interpretation of that is actually there's a realm beyond my biology. That to me is the weirdest interpretation of this. Now, I understand everybody's going to say it's because I have not done this. I've micro-dosed psilocybin. So fair enough, I've never done a macro dose.

And it is entirely possible that on the other side of this, I somehow have an experience that is so profound that I too become convinced that I've transcended my biology. But I seriously doubt it. From a cause and effect perspective, what you're doing is manipulating your neurochemistry. So I don't know why people manipulate their neurochemistry only to come out the other side and say neurochemistry doesn't matter. It's super wild to me. Tom, would you ever do psychedelics, DMT, mushrooms? Have you? What's your drug use history?

I would consider it. I've resisted it up to this point because you're doing something extreme to your brain. And I do have certain fears. But yeah, I could see. I think it's probably more likely that I do it at some point than I don't. But I'm not rushing out to do it. And when I say like psychedelics, I'm talking like heroic doses. Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Because I've already done micro-dosing. Got it. DMT is extreme. What you do? Psychedelics, whatever. DMT is probably the one that I would be the most likely to do because they're so short-lived.

Yeah. It's like 15 minutes. Yeah. So yeah, my bigger thing would be being stuck in some trip that is not fun for nine hours. I know somebody that did either LSD or acid. I don't know if those are one in the same. But they did one of those. Dude, he felt for like a week. He said, life doesn't feel real. And he was like, if I feel like this forever, he's like, this is a real problem. Now, thankfully, it wore off. But I remember thinking, yo, that's scary.

And so he was like, it altered something so profoundly. And he was like, for the first 72 hours, there was no declination. And so he's like, if I feel like this forever, man, he's like, I'm 100% nihilistic now. This is just nothing matters. Nothing is real. And I was like, yo, that is not something I want to play with. And given that people can have psychotic breaks if they're in risk of it, at risk of it, from too much marijuana. So I'm just like, the thing that we consider ultra safe, safe, safe can do that.

I was like, something that people are like, listen, profound, useful in a lot of circumstances. But don't treat it like candy, because it can have some really negative consequences. I'm pretty hesitant to just run out and do it. Got you. Terrence McKenna always said, like, set and setting are important. How you take it and where you take it is the matter. You know why? Why? Because you're having a biological experience. And if the neurochemistry you have pumping, you're already in a bad mood, you're already feeling negative, it's not like the drugs just completely wash that away.

It can be the context that informs that instead of a good trip, this is a bad trip. Which is why people started mixing MDMA, which it just pumps the feel good chemistry, that it meant you were more likely to have a positive trip. So if I did it, I would probably also do something like that to just bias it towards something positive. Typical. Be going in therapy during and therapy coming out of combination MDMA, psilocybin. Do you know what? It's one of the things that made me think a lot about religion, was having a DMT experience where what I experienced felt indistinguishable from this reality in terms of the vividness and the realness of it.

And me just pondering this concept that a tiny little inhale of smoke could completely change my material reality. So therefore I concluded that my material reality is literally, I mean, tell me if my logic's wrong, is a small amount of chemicals. Yes, literally. Your entire reality is a small amount of, it's not just chemicals, but it's neurochemical, electrical combination, your biology, it's the wet works that exist between all of our ears. So if you think about the reality of what's going on inside of your brain, you live in the matrix.

Whether you live in the matrix simply because the brain exists and it is creating a representation of the world out there, it is not seeing accurately what is out there. Remember, we only see 0.0035% of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. So we are living life by a bunch of shortcuts known as heuristics, we're using algorithmic approaches to the world, we are not interfacing with the world as it is. And this is one of the things that I think really messes people up. The thing that I want on my tombstone, literally, if I'm gonna offer the world any idea or help popularize any idea, it is you are having a biological experience.

And when people start trying to divorce themselves from that, they make their life entirely impossible to navigate. And this is one of the biggest problems that I see people having is, for instance, in a populist moment, what people end up doing is they mistake their emotions, which are merely the neurochemical firings in their brain, they mistake it for a representation of truth. I feel badly about this thing, therefore, it must be bad. There's nothing you can say to convince me because I feel a type of way.

And so why would I even listen to this? It's obviously bad, I feel bad. It destroys relationships, it destroys people's ability to think through a political problem, it destroys people's ability to think through economic problems. $5,000 check feels good today, it must be good. And instead of thinking through the rational cause and effect of what's actually happening, they forget that they're having a biological experience. This is, it's gonna rub people the wrong way, this is not a spiritual thing, this is a biological thing. Now, it doesn't mean that there isn't some elevated realizations that we can have.

It is utterly fascinating to me that we all have the need to kneel before something, that religion obviously plays an evolutionary role, those things are utterly fascinating. When you look at them through the lens of biology, it is far more profound, far more miraculous than when you try to divorce yourself from it and say what DMT showed me is that there's actually a plane beyond this. That's where I think people start breaking down in terms of their worldview is nonsensical quite literally. Being uninterrupted. Does that make logical sense?

Yeah, so I think about this way too much. I guess we are gonna talk about psychedelics, reality and religion. Couple short statements about this. I'm fascinated by this, so I'd love to hear you talk more about it, but here are a couple of ways that I think about it. In a non-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. That's not a way to trivialize it, it's kind of a way to think about it.

Now, there's a lot that gets lost in that you're guiding because the reality is that your mind influences itself. This was a big part of what my whole mindset era was about, was getting people to understand that you can dramatically influence the way that you feel by the thoughts that you think. And so making sure that you're taking control of that process, not letting it just happen to you, that you're actually making a very conscious decision. The way that I say it is, I can't stop myself from having the first thought, that's just gonna come.

But what I can do is stop what I repeat. And so taking conscious control of your psychology is critically important. There are two ways that you can change brain function, behavior, and chemistry. One is mechanical. I can breathe differently. I can get a massage, right? By the way, taking control of your breath is one of the most life-changing things that you can do. Learning to breathe from your diaphragm is utterly fascinating. This is what I think a huge portion of the benefit that people get from meditation is simply learning to breathe from your diaphragm.

As Huberman is intimating there, what you're doing is it's a mechanical process that has like stimulatory effects in the body that over the long periods of time of evolution have been designed to allow us to reduce our excited state, to move out of the sympathetic nervous system, fight and flight, to the parasympathetic nervous system where it's rest and digest. You can mechanically move yourself from one to the other simply by breathing from your diaphragm, interrupting negative thoughts, and just breathing. It is utterly fascinating. And when you learn how to do it, if you're anything like me, you will end up thanking evolution, the universe, whatever, for creating that hook that you can leverage just by breathing from down low in your belly, by drawing the air into your lungs using your diaphragm instead of breathing high up in your chest.

It has a neurochemical effect. It is utterly fascinating. I could poke myself with a knife, okay? So there are mechanical forces that change our physiology. And then there are chemical forces, pharmacology, things we eat, and chemicals within us, serotonin, et cetera. That's really it. There's no other thing. In many ways, you're... Preach, brother, preach. There's no other thing. Your life is impacted by what you eat, how you sleep, how you're breathing, your exercise. Get those things wrong and your entire life goes off the rails. Get them right and everything gets better.

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 because you realize the stress response 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 in 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 ability 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. Okay, so what I think he's getting to here is, one, he's making a cognitive error, and he's seeing this as something that's outside of our biology and psychology, which quite literally nothing exists outside of your biology and psychology, not for you in terms of being able to experience the world.

But there is, I think, an evolutionary answer to a question of how you get humans to cooperate in large groups flexibly, and that answer is what we call religion. And that has placed inside of us this tremendous reward for communing with that thing that we see that's beyond ourselves. So the people that did that who could share that sense of awe, that could connect over, I mean, in the early days, obviously, it was not a monotheistic god. It was things around you, the sun, the moon, the changing of the seasons, the hunt, whatever.

And so you have this entire pantheon of gods. It just felt like there's gotta be some force that's causing these things to act. And I mean, in some ways, there is. It's basically physics. But as you experience physics, you experience it as these individual relationships. I have a relationship to water. I have a relationship to the sun. I have a relationship to the crops or to the animals. And so all of that then feels like, oh, these are individual forces because you don't understand chemistry yet.

You don't understand physics. And so from an evolutionary standpoint, the people that had that big response and shared that response and started doing things like, no, there's a right time to go on a hunt because that's when the god of the hunt wants us to go on that. Or love is an important thing. There's a god of love that's trying to drive us together. And so it's worth overcoming the difficulties that come from that. And those created more stable societies. And so we're literally selecting for people that are able to bond over that to transmit values using that proxy.

And we all now, in a monotheistic world, we all look back at people that believed in, you know, the Pantheon. of gods, the pagans, and we think, ah ha ha, how ridiculous that all is, not realizing it's the same evolutionary mechanism that makes us interpret the world through this shortcut which is, I know there's something bigger than me because I can feel it. Now I will say, I know there's something bigger than me because I don't understand physics, and so at a minimum, physics, the universe, whatever you want to call it, there is a process that was put in place that it works in a way that when you learn it, you actually unlock powers of the universe and you can do things that you couldn't do before.

So it is a very real thing. Now when people hold that frame, I think that they're less likely to get themselves in trouble than when they take the shortcut and they take a religious frame because then eventually somebody writes it down in a book and then people start saying, well, you can only do this this way because that's what God said, and when that book was written a couple thousand years ago and just offhand happens to mention slavery and it's all good, no worries, you start getting or stone somebody to death or whatever, it starts to derange a little bit, and so we start running into problems.

We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about the last time you got stuck in a phone tree. Hold music, a robotic voice asks for your account number, then a person picks up and asks for it again. The machine heard you, but it didn't understand a word. Now put yourself on the other side of that call. If you run a business, that's what your customer is dealing with right now. Well, that's where Eleven Agents comes in. Eleven Agents is a platform for AI voice and chat agents that actually listen, understand, and resolve the issue.

If you run a business or handle customer operations across support, sales, or marketing, you can start with a demo at elevenlabs.io slash impact pod. See how Eleven Agents can fit into your workflows and help build experiences that your customers will actually love. elevenlabs.io slash impact pod, E-L-E-V-E-N-L-A-B-S dot I-O slash impact pod. Let's talk about quints. I ordered a few things from them recently, their fleece joggers, a couple of their tees, and the quality was the first thing I noticed. I guarantee if you guys pick it up, you are going to feel how soft and well-made it is.

Something that holds up instead of falling apart in a month, that's the whole idea behind quints. It's premium materials, built right, priced way below what you'd expect. The tees, the joggers, their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, all of it runs 50 to 80% less than comparable brands. Not because it's cheaply made, because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. Find your next fall favorites at quints. Download the quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com slash impact pod. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's quints, Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash impact pod. Let's talk about what it means to actually be visible in today's day and age. When you build something public, whether it's a business or an audience, anything on social media, you become a target. This is something that legitimately keeps me up at night because our data isn't just on the obvious broker sites. It's on old news portals, public forums, obscure directories, places you would never think to look. That's where Incogni's exposure scanner comes in.

It hunts down your personal information across the wider web, not just the 420 plus broker sites Incogni already removes your data from automatically. They can't harm you if they can't find you. Go to incogni.com slash impact and use code impact for 60% off an annual plan. Try it risk free for 30 days. That's incogni, I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash impact and use code impact. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. But if you come back to, wait a second, there is this thing that allows me to access a drug-like quality, a sense of awe and wonder, but I realize what it's coming from and so there are things that I need to align myself with in order to experience that, whether that's being calm, whether that's doing something like a loving meditation where you're imagining like a bubble of love and acceptance expanding out from you to your family, to your friends, and then to everybody in the world, and that really gives you this sense of expansion and calm and peace and joy.

Hey, love it. But understanding it's a physiological process that you're putting yourself through to tap into something that is evolutionarily gifted to you. I for one am somebody who likes to know how the magic is done. When I see how the magic is done, it's more interesting to me, not less. I get that for a lot of people, they're going to hate the way that I approach this, but I think it saves us from certain derangements that we are captured in right now. Thinking that there really is this thing beyond you and that these emotions are essentially being given to you as a source of truth or something from an all-powerful being outside of yourself is how we end up in a populist moment going, we need revolution.

I really want to get to, how do you explain miracles? Things that aren't in the physiological, things that aren't in the biological, things that defy science. There aren't any. There's never been a miracle in life. Never once. Really? Never ever. That's mind-shocking to me. Okay, cool. The only quote-unquote miracle is why is there something instead of nothing? That's it. Everything else is a law of physics we don't yet understand. Why is there something instead of nothing? Yes, that question is truly perplexing and is the thing that reminds me I do not understand what this is.

If Jesus waltzed up in the room and was like, bro, you know that there's something you don't understand and miracle, miracle right before your eyes, I'd be like, oh shit, crazy. Now that would obviously have to be the most extreme thing because my first assumption would be, oh, I'm schizophrenic. But assuming you could somehow get me on the other side of that. But these one-off cases of people dying, coming back, cancer disappearing, all those things, they're just secret medicine that people don't realize, biology we don't understand.

That is correct. Chemistry that hasn't been explained yet. There's always something that comes back to us. Nothing has ever happened outside the physical that I can't see, measure, or test. Well, that you can't see, measure, or test, many things happen that you can't see, measure, or test. But I'm saying in the fullness of time, you'll be able to, assuming that we continue to grow more intelligent, get better tools, yes, what I'm saying is life is deterministic. It operates on a set of principles. Nothing ever violates those principles.

Now there are things we don't understand about those principles and they act in some pretty crazy ways that we just don't get yet. But yes, there are no such thing as miracles in life. To be very direct about it, like at the point where I decide to really embrace the idea of faith, of a God, that there are powers outside of human understanding that can be very useful. Everything got better. But just to be clear, there's a difference between outside of human understanding and outside the laws of physics.

It relieved me of the pressure to control everything internally and externally. I find it not just intriguing, but absolutely captivating that a force outside of us, some people call it God, the universe, 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. 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 obvious. Okay. So I love Andrew Huberman more than you can know, Andrew, you know I love you. This is the wacky thing that you say in all of this. Why do we think that it could come from a computer? Let me give you the answer. This is somebody over-indexing again on the artificial and not the intelligent side. The reality is once you get to the intelligent side and you can actually just start understanding what the laws of the universe actually are, not our shortcuts, it's roughly something like actually understand, then the intelligence is the very thing that allows us to begin to develop a better understanding of this.

Now ultimately, the understanding of it is only useful in as much as it makes the experience of it better and more interesting. So at the end of the day, you're having a biological experience. So you're going to go on an emotional roller coaster. If as we understand the laws of the universe, it simply allows us to kill each other, that would be wholly uninteresting. If it opens us up to a deeper sense of awe, a deeper sense of connection, if it helps us navigate some of the trickinesses of the world, then that would be awesome.

But here's where I think people start really disconnecting. The world is very, very complicated and some of the discrepancies that we have with people are not going to be solved by somebody waking up to, oh, the world doesn't work the way that I thought it did. The discrepancies, for instance, when they're theological, I find that that's an easier conflict to talk about. So if people believe in different gods, they believe in different oughts. So they believe from a moral standpoint that things ought to be, and they believe diametrically opposed things.

So they're not arguing about what is, they're just saying what ought to be. They say, I understand your position, I understand you believe it ought to be that way, but this is my position and I believe it ought to be this way. Understanding the fundamental physics of the world is not going to help people out of that scenario. The only thing that will help people out of that scenario is if you can change the fundamental way that that feels for them as they think about it.

Now, some of this is just where they were raised, so if they're prone to an increased level of religiosity and they're raised in a fundamentalist household, you put that together and it's sort of weapons-grade religion, if you will. And when two weapons-grade religion people see different things, they're going to end up colliding. So the only way that those two people are not going to collide is if you go in and edit their genome such that they are less likely, they're less prone to the religious. So no matter what, because if we all have a god-shaped hole in our heart and that person is prone to religiosity, they don't have to believe in a god, they can believe in communism and Marxism, whatever, and you see people get just as fundamentally religious about that.

Or it could be climate science, they get fundamentally religious about that. Or the economy, they can get fundamentally religious about that. But you have to diffuse that tendency towards religiosity. It isn't about like, oh, I finally understand something from outside myself. You're having a biological experience. That new understanding is still going to be interpreted through the way that you as a biological creature process that information, and it's going to drive you to behave in certain ways. This is, I think, a fallacy that people make of like, no, no, no, if you just understood, you would respond differently.

This is where I'll say, go and find a spider sexually attractive. You're not going to be able to do it, and you're not going to be able to do it because you're trapped inside your biology and you are hardwired to find them repulsive. So it just is what it is. And what I think he's getting at here is he is a person that has a very expansive, sort of loving, welcoming personality, and if other people felt what he feels when he kneels before this thing or encounters this sense of awe or recognizes that there's something bigger than himself, if everyone felt what he feels, the world would be a better place.

That is almost certainly true. But the question is, how do you actually get everybody to feel that? You don't, unfortunately. What evolution has learned is you can't have everybody be the same. You need these competing different personalities that hold each other in dynamic tension that unfortunately sometimes explode into cataclysmic violence. There's going to be one person that fucks spiders that's going to blow up your whole obsession. It's not. Because listen. It's an actual thing. It's paraphilia. Okay. So it's just going to be somebody that's like, I love spiders, Tom.

What do you mean? Free will does exist. No, no, no. If you said to me, hey, Tom, I have an 11-year-old and you've got to get them to only be able to have an orgasm when spiders are crawling on their legs, that we could do. But if you bring me a 40-year-old who right now hates spiders, I'm not going to be able to get you to the other side where they're suddenly like, oh my God, like this is the hottest thing ever. I only want to marry a spider.

So and look, will there be exceptions at the edge? Probably. But then that would be that human sexuality is more complex than I'm giving it credit for. It is not free will. So that's where I just want to make sure to give you an idea. What I would do with a 14-year-old is begin to associate neuronal connections between sexual arousal and introduce the spider. So I'm doing a biological act. The same thing with the 40-year-old. What I'm saying is somebody can't just go, I'm now going to decide to find the spider attractive.

What they would have to do is walk down a biological process of reinforcement. And then you're just proving my point again. But I feel like women decide they want to be lesbians. I've seen people change sexuality and stuff later on in life. So nobody wants to be sexual to a spider. So that's why I'm like, you can use that existence, but that's a 0.1% of people who even want to do that. I will happily go down that path if you want. What I'm saying is that is not stepping outside of biology.

There is an evolutionary reason. It's a hypothesis. I don't think anybody would say it's a thesis. There's a biological hypothesis about why women are more likely to be bisexual than men. And if you think about it, women are far more tied to communal needs. So they've got to group up as women, raise the kids. So they are not interacting with the world through a physical dominance lens. They express their dominance, their aggression, their violence through social means. Okay, so you've got a creature then that's got to be able to have these ways to self-soothe.

Don't think about humans for a second. Think about us coming up over millions of years of evolution. The fact that the clitoris is on the outside is utterly fascinating. because the only way to get them pregnant is to penetrate them as deeply as possible to be up against the cervix, which is why men have the evolutionary impulse to thrust as deeply as possible at the moment of orgasm. Okay, so you've got, I need to make this thing have a baby, and then there's the weird twist of, but the clitoris is on the outside.

Why on earth would we do that? And one hypothesis is that women can actually smooth over social frustrations with other women by accessing the clitoris and soothing each other in either a sexual or sort of pseudo-sexual way. And you see this in the animal kingdom. So from that perspective, the fact that a woman would be like, there are no men left in the village, they all just got killed in war, but I need somebody to help me raise this kid. Thank God my clitoris is on the outside.

I don't need a penis. I can group up with another woman. We can have a more deep connection. We can have the sexual bonding and raise this kid together. And so it would make sense for a woman to just have a deeper degree of flexibility in the first place. And then on top of that, that it could express later in life in the way that for a man, it's typically by the time he's 14, his sexual fetishes are on lock. And so, and this is where I expect this debate to kind of rage.

I think people are gonna find that even male sexuality is malleable to some degree, but it's really an early life phenomenon thing. So it does matter sort of what way you nudge your kid in early age. Debate, debate, debate. That is not me saying this is true, and I know it to be. I'm just saying I'd be a little surprised if they don't find that to be true. So, but it does appear that male sexual proclivities get locked in around the age of 14. So they're then gonna carry that into adulthood, and they won't show flexibility as an adult that they didn't have at the time they were 14.

So if at 14, they're like, hey, I feel bisexual, that's probably gonna carry with them their whole life. But if at 14, they're, you know, pegged over onto the straight spectrum, that's probably where they're gonna be forever in a way that women might find themselves surprised to actually, no, I do find that women attractive. Anyway, that was a real fucking tangent. But hopefully. I got there because you said we can't change what we're sexually attracted to. I immediately went, well, people wanna be sexually attracted to other people.

I wanna be clear, clear, clear on what I'm saying. You aren't going to be able to exit biology to change what you're attracted to. If you're going to make a change of any kind, you're gonna have to do it through a biological process. I'm saying you can't use, quote, unquote, free will to just suddenly be attracted to spiders. It won't work. You'd have to go down this super loopy process of trying to reinforce, reinforce, reinforce, hijack certain biological processes in order to get there. Why is the male G-spot in the butt then?

What's the evolutionary explanation for that? I have a feeling that that is probably rightly contested as being a G-spot. Having had a proctal exam, I'm not like, yo, this is dope. So it's- Was his hands not moisturized enough? I mean, maybe that's part of it. Maybe his hands were too big or too small. I guess it's all possible. Welcome to the news show, guys. Yeah, so that, and listen, you can't rule it out, but I have, so at one point, I mean, this is way TMI, but at one point I had a prostate infection, which you can actually get, which were not fun, by the way, and so they have to like palpate your prostate.

It is not a fun thing. What does palpate mean? It's a touch, and it is not, it was not an enjoyable experience for me. Now, that could be pure context, and maybe in the right context it'd be lovely, but I've never found myself with that impulse. So I have a feeling that this is probably, okay, so this gets into something called lordosis. So there is, God, these are better understood as hypotheses, because I've not looked far enough to know if they're actual theses, but at one point I read a study, whether this was really studied well or not, I cannot say, but so women have a, it feels good for them to arch their lower back.

Now, the reason that that would feel good is in certain sexual positions, arching your back gives the man the ability to penetrate the deepest, and so you would understand why evolution would essentially reward or hardwire women that have the desire to arch their back. The study said, again, whether this was well-researched or not, I can't tell you, but the study said that gay men have the same impulse to arch their back, their lower back. So it could be cross-wiring, that there's something, given that men pass through the female before they become expressly male, so at first you develop a vagina and a clitoris, and then it develops into the male genitalia, which is how you can get cross-sex people.

So anyway, it could just be cross-wiring with that, that there's some sort of remnant of that. I have no idea, though. That one I haven't explored deeply enough, but my gut instinct is it would be something like that, that one, it would be contested, that most people aren't gonna be like, yeah, that's my favorite thing, and that for the people that are, it could be some remnant of that, but I don't know. Right, why would we think it would come from anything that humans and only humans could do?

To me, embracing the notion of a God and having faith, which, by the way, is about having doubt but still doing the things, the practices, prayer, to me, one of the most liberating and educating thing, not just about stuff of God in 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? I really wanna know, what God dost thou believe in?

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 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 talk a little bit about that in the book, but I observed it out there too, not just in my own life, that 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 because 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.

What? That is literally a direct contradiction. He's saying once you realize that the brain is in control, once you realize you can poke this and you get a given response, once you realize that there is a tumor, a bad thing growing in the head, and you remove it and that saves our life, that you realize that it isn't all biology. What? Those are literally exact opposites. You don't think that there's like, because everything is so deterministic and something is so real set, and if something is so deliberate, that it couldn't just be accident or random or spontaneous?

Because accident, random, and spontaneous usually doesn't create systems as complex and as detailed as what we see in the world today. The only argument that you could make is that, okay, everything is good and proper random. There is nothing but randomness. But in the randomness, in this local pocket of the multiverse, what we call the laws of physics are simply random distribution, and so this is the most likely universe that we see around us, and so humans are most likely to respond in this way if they have brain matter that's structured that way, but they're actually not tied.

It's all correlation. Okay, but that is like the least Occam's razor thing I've ever seen in my life. That is adding a layer of bizarre complication to something that we have no evidence for whatsoever. So yeah, what we see is cause and effect as far as the eye can see, and so to take from that, oh, but really this could just be, even though I can directly predict that if I remove somebody's brain, they die instantly, that the brain wasn't actually keeping them alive, it's like, meh, that's super weird.

There's something else, but I'm not sure that it all comes from us. It's sort of hard to explain. The best way I kind of wriggle out of this is that 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 computing, and he's a theoretical physicist, right, and I asked him to explain quantum mechanics. I go, yeah, 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 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 is in like the meditative communities. Agreed, man. It drives me nuts when people say quantum as if it means magical or it's some sort of proof. That's wild. Others too, and he goes, people throw this word around because very few people actually understand quantum biology. There's gaps, 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 gonna have faith in a higher power, God, you have to depart this notion that your logical brain can go from A to B to C, and boom, you're there.

I will grant him that. There, again, why something instead of nothing, I cannot do a logical track to that. I cannot find any answer that doesn't require some sort of just logic completely lets go, and I just have to accept that it is, so yeah, totally agree. 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 that you don't know all of this?

There's no math to prove this thing that I call the existence of God. There's no math, and it's not worth torturing yourself over. The math either exists or it's not real, so math is the computation of the universe running itself. If you have something sitting outside the universe, which you almost certainly have to because why something instead of nothing, then it's just all bets are off at that point. There's no way for us to grapple or even interact with what that thing is. We can only interact with the output of the system.

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 opening the aperture of your beliefs just for a moment, going, maybe I'm gonna just believe in God for 10 seconds. See what that's like, and I started to experience beauty and experience peace around not trying to control things that obviously were not under my control, not just within me but in other people. All right, here's what I love. He's changing his frame of reference, and merely by changing his frame of reference of deciding to believe in God, it makes his life better.

Now, there's something incredibly important to take away from that, which is how you decide to look at the world is going to determine the quality of your life. Einstein is, whether it's apocryphal or not, he's often quoted as saying, the most important decision any person will ever make is whether they live in a friendly or a hostile universe. Now, what's brilliant about that is he's saying it's a decision. You decide. There's evidence for both. You decide whether this is a universe that's working for you or a universe that's working against you.

Please don't think that I'm saying that believing in God may not make your life better. It may make your life materially better. What I don't want people to lose sight of is that ultimately what you're doing is with that belief, you're having an influence on your biology, and ultimately, the influence on your biology is the part that matters so that people can stop themselves from getting swept away by fundamentalist ideology, which can take people into some pretty dark directions that has to do with broadcasting my religion onto other people, and that's where I think we run into real problems.

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 seem almost completely unrelated, and the answer would come in that thing. All these kinds of things are absolutely true and wonderful and need nothing more as an explanation other than that's how the subconscious mind works. It is processing things in the background, and so when it sees something that triggers that cascade of thoughts and gives it the thing to interact with that it needs in order to put the final piece together of the puzzle, it feels like, oh my God, this completely unrelated thing, it was sent to me by God, but the reality is what's happening in the subconscious mind is we are a action-reaction species.

Something happens, and then we react to it, and that's why I say we have no free will. There's no way to extricate yourself from that sequence of cause and effect, and so your brain oftentimes needs to see some sort of new stimulus in order to come up with the answer, and that's why talking about something can be really helpful. Reading a book about something can be really helpful. People will often say that some of the greatest solutions to problems come from polymaths because they have multiple things to draw from, so in architecture, you might draw from your art background.

Your art will draw from what you understand about architecture, and same with medicine, right? Artists also learning so much from dissecting a cadaver. It's like you're taking in these different disciplines, and they feed into each other. This happened to me when I went from Quest Nutrition into the world of comic books because I could see that the distribution method in comic books was so ridiculous, it was bound to fail, and that's why I ended up getting out of comics because I was like, until you guys solve the distribution problem, this whole industry is just gonna be a mess, and I wouldn't have known or understood that had I not just come from an industry that had extraordinary advancements in distribution that were, I mean, 50 years more advanced than what was going on in comics.

It was insane, so having those different points of interaction will feel like, oh my God, I've been handed this thing from out of nowhere, but it's really, that's what your brain does. It connects these far-flung ideas. is it's actually one of the reasons that people like to meditate is you get in a calm creative state where literally you can map what's going on in the brain is areas of the brain that don't normally talk to each other start talking to each other so it's not a silencing of activity in the brain it's actually an increase it's pretty fascinating 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 nearly three 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 i'm 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 had 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 really show that if you stimulate certain brain areas people perceive things a certain way regardless of what's happening out and so you're saying that you're having a biological experience a world 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 like that's wild i turn it off and you 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 that is such a brilliant description of exactly what's going on when i'm talking about you're having a biological experience this is what i'm trying to convey once you understand that then you can begin to parse your reality a little bit better because you understand that this is an approximation that you're constructing this world and just like in the matrix it's very easy to get lied to it's very easy to see something that isn't really there this is exactly what happens to people and i'm i'm gonna wrap this up by saying this the reason that i wanted to go through and show this is we are living in a time right now where everybody is convinced that that matrix that simulation that's going on inside their brain is real and they're mistaking a simulation they're mistaking interpretation they're mistaking frame of reference for objective reality and it is being weaponized against them and people that understand that know how to control that approximation that simulation that plays in their brain and point them at something that benefits that person and all of us have a responsibility to ourselves to be able to get outside of that as much as possible and actually see things for how they really are which is that i'm interpreting the world i'm not seeing it directly and if one interpretation takes me to a better place then it's wise to lean on that interpretation because it's actually going somewhere more honorable that it's taking the world in a better place if we head in that direction but if i think that because i feel something it is real and i'm losing sight of what's actually happening which is i am trapped inside of my biology and my biology controls not most of what i see it controls all of what i see and even if you believe that there is a god god built it that way for whatever reason and so that is the reality that we face and it has upsides and it has downsides the human experience is incredibly beautiful and incredibly tragic in equal measure and so understanding that we are prone to beauty and we are prone to uh the horrific and each of us as i say the line between good and evil runs through every human heart because such is the nature of biology it paints things like in group out group it makes you prepared to be violent and to other people that are in the out group to dehumanize them all of those things are in your biology and unless we start altering that biology we have to deal with the way that that really works and if we can do that we've got a much better shot of getting to the other side of this populist moment but if we don't realize that and we don't start actively broadcasting hope seeing hope inside of ourselves saying this is where i want to go and turning it into a plan they say that hope is not a plan yes but hope is necessary to get you up to get you to say okay cool this is where i want to go map out exactly how we're going to get there and then get there and hopefully not succumb to a lot of the traps got it cool all right we have any super chats we good we've got one super chat left let's hear it harmonious reason says where do you sit in regards to grand designer versus natural evolution and that's $50 super chat hey thank you for the $50 super chat thank you very generous uh grand design versus what natural evolution oh uh well so if grand design is like basically god did this so we're a product of evolution yes but we're a product of a designer i would say there's no evidence for that so either god is a horrible engineer or um we are just made by the blind watchmaker and if you want but one example if we were designed by god the vagina would open painlessly like a trunk door to let the baby out rather than fucking torture the woman it is uh ridiculous that that thing has to like squeeze down to deal with a penis that a man can actually carry around we're not supposed to be giving birth on our backs that was some creep dude in the 20s that made that normal if you when women have birth like squatting and standing up there's no ripping i don't think anybody's like no if you stand up like this is easy i don't think anybody's saying that given that child birth is one of the most dangerous things you could do from a historical perspective like that's pretty bad engineering like hey ladies the only way to push the survival of the species forward is to have kids but by the way i'm going to kill 50 of you that do it what so terrible let me roll up my sleeve guys i got this i can do better i could do this better come here here's the thing i couldn't do it better because there would be unintended consequences that i would create but if there was really a all-knowing god could an all-knowing god do better yes an all-knowing god can do better than 50 mortality rate before uh modern medicine who's the guy from the odyssey uh what's his name uh the main character from the odysseys odysseus that was real odyssey odysseus of you no i just said the humility because i'm saying i don't i don't think i can do it i'm saying an all-knowing god this up bro do it or do it over start over i'm saying he doesn't exist i need i need uh trunk keys on vaginas i need to be on the inside i need men not to check my a-hole just to make sure i don't have cancer i have notes god it it well so one if we could make the anal checking far more enjoyable that would be lovely uh as that unfortunately becomes the thing drew has not accurately represented my beliefs i would just like the record to reflect here uh but yeah this stuff is important it matters boys and girls so make sure you're thinking through it well truckers aren't just moving goods they're making sure bakers get their chocolate chips and hotels get their tiny soaps but truckers can't do this if they're not on the road that's why progressive has over 360 heavy truck employees to help truckers stay on time and on track quote truck insurance today in as little as eight minutes at progressive commercial.com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates you're listening to this podcast so i know you've got a curious mind here's a helpful fact you might not know yet drivers who switch and save with progressive save over nine hundred dollars on average pop over to progressive.com answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by in fact 99 of their auto customers earn at least one discount visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates national average 12-month savings of 946 by new customers surveyed who saved with progressive between june 2024 and may 2025 potential savings will vary