Science & Health Benefits of Belief in God & Religion | Dr. David DeSteno

[Andrew Huberman]
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

[Andrew Huberman]
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. David DeSteno. Dr. David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, and an expert on the science of morality, religion, and the health benefits of belief in God and religion. Many people, perhaps most people actually, view science and religion as mutually exclusive. Today, Dr. DeSteno explains why that view is actually incorrect, and he also shares the data showing that religion and prayer have tremendous mental and physical benefits. We discuss the brain mechanisms that often lead people to embrace faith in God and religion, and we attempt to tackle some of the big questions that often come up around science and religion. For instance, can the existence of God actually be proven? Can it be disproven? If not, how should we think about miracles, the origin of life, and the afterlife? So, small questions like that. We also discuss where the line between rituals and suspicions resides, and what distinguishes religions from cults. He also shares that despite the fact that more than 100 new religions surface every year, that was surprising to me, very few are able to last. That was not surprising. He also shares amazing data on when and how people lie for personal gain, and the simple practices that convert liars into truth-tellers, and that make people more empathic overall. To be clear, Dr. DeSteno is not promoting religion. He's a scientist, and his approach is to study, in an unbiased way, how belief in God and religious practices can benefit individuals and groups. Thanks to him, it's a remarkable conversation that I also believe is important, especially in this time of rapidly evolving AI technology and social media. I learned a ton speaking with him about science, God, and religion, and I'm certain that you will too. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. David DeSteno. Dr. David DeSteno, welcome.

[David DeSteno]
Thanks for having me, Andrew.

[Andrew Huberman]
For so many people, the idea of science and religion, or science and God, are opposite one another, and maybe even, um, mutually antagonistic to one another, depending on who you're talking to and how it's framed. Uh, that makes sense, I think, to a lot of people, religious or not, just because on the face of it, science is supposed to be about disproving hypotheses. And religion, in most people's minds, is based on belief and faith in things that are difficult to disprove. Um, not impossible, perhaps, but difficult to disprove. And people go back and forth, trying to prove the existence of God, trying to disprove the existence of God. This is going on for, um, many, many thousands of years.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
To start, I just want to know, what is your view on the compatibility of science and, let's just say, belief in God? Because religion and belief in God are somewhat separable.

[David DeSteno]
Sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
And we'll get into that. Uh, but to keep things simple,

[Andrew Huberman]
what do we know for sure about the compatibility or lack of compatibility between what we call science and a belief in God?

[David DeSteno]
To me, the question of belief in God, and you're right, it gets in the way of this. Because people will say, "Well, if I believe in God, then I can't embrace science." And, and I think that's wrong. But let me start at the beginning and say, well, I think the question of, "Does God exist?" isn't a useful question. It doesn't mean it's not an important question. As you said, people have been debating this for millennia. But it's not useful, because as scientists, we can't prove it. Any scientist who tells you they know for sure God doesn't exist, you shouldn't listen to. Um, the reason I say that is,

[David DeSteno]
oftentimes, we, you and I, as scientists, live by the data. We run experiments. And what's behind any experiment is, we try to manipulate a variable and we see if it produces a change. When you're talking about God, you can't do an experiment. And so, you know, I'll say the, the

[David DeSteno]
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You, people hear that a lot and it sounds like a cop-out, but in this case, it's not really. So, if I'm testing a new drug, I can have people take the drug and see if it combats a pathogen. And if it doesn't combat a pathogen, I can say, "All right, well, it doesn't seem to be working in this experiment." Any one experiment can fail for lots of reasons. Maybe people didn't take their medication the right way. Maybe it only works for a certain type of people. And so you can try it again and again in different cases, and you can kind of build up a sense of, is there evidence here that this drug works or doesn't over time? And if it doesn't, in any case, you might say, "Eh, maybe there's nothing there." With God, you can't even run the experiment. So, I'm a psychologist, and so most of what I do is I bring people into my lab. I study how emotions change their behavior. And so I'll bring people in and I'll create two groups. Um, I'll balance gender and ideology and intelligence and all of those things. And to one of them, we'll change their emotional state, and I'll see if it'll do something.

[David DeSteno]
With God, you can't run an experiment. You can't manipulate God, if God exists, right? People say, "Oh, Dave, I prayed for X, Y, and Z, and it didn't come true. So therefore, God must not exist." And I'm like, "Well, do you know the mind of God?" Maybe God only helps people God likes. Maybe God only helps people on every third Tuesday. Right? I don't know. And if I can't manipulate something about the mind of God, then I can't infer causality if God exists or doesn't exist. And so I think this question of, "Does God exist?" is one science can't answer. I mean, I'm happy to say as a scientist, I see no empirical evidence that God exists. But without being able to run an experiment to prove it, it's beyond the realm of science. And all it does is polarize us, right? It polarizes people into the camps that you're saying.But I think most people, the ones on- on X, are fundamentalists who are shouting, "Science is bad," or hardcore new atheists who are saying, "Religion is bad." I think most people live in the middle somewhere, and most people accept the view that there could be something there, and they're not in tension. And I think for a lot of history, that was it. I mean, the Catholic Church

[David DeSteno]
funds research. They have a wonderful observatory, uh, to look at astronomical behavior. The Dalai Lama funds neuroscience, right, to understand how the mind works. And so we had Francis Collins on the show, one of the, you know, great geneticists of our time, and for him, there's no tension. He says God... He's a believer. God created the human mind so that we could learn about the wonders of God's creation and how the world works. They don't need to be in tension. So for me, I have to put that question to the side. What I'm interested in is the data that we'll talk about that shows engaging with religion makes life better for people, and why is that.

[Andrew Huberman]
I definitely want to go into all the practices that people can embrace, should they choose, that can indeed, according to the research, make life better, not just for them, but for many people.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
To ask a second version of the first question again, I'm wondering how you reconcile the argument that I've often heard, where someone will say, "Okay. Well, it's creation," and someone else will say, "No, it's evolution." And someone will say, "Well, who created evolution? It must have been God that created evolution." And... Or we could be talking about the origins of the universe. Um, my dad's a theoretical physicist, and, uh, we've talked about this before. And, um, you know, they say, "Well, okay, so you have the Big Bang theory," and then, uh, but, you know, we had to start from some place. And then, okay, well, then you had, um... You know, this, uh, soup of- of things that, when combined, started to create some sort of order that built on a structure which buil-... Okay, well, then what started that? And- and basically, it- it seems to me, whoever is willing to stay in the argument longest- ... and- and- and peel back the layers further and further-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... they don't win, but they're sort of last person standing in the argument.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And, uh, you know, I'm sure this has been debated formally, um, and I'm sure it's been debated formally for centuries, if not thousands and thousands of years, and here we are, 2025, and people still debate this.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And we're seeing a resurgence in res- religious belief. You also see that on X, you see it on social media.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
You see it lots of places, and I think there's also great interest in science, in belief in science. So the question I have is, you know, if it's merely a matter of who's willing to peel back the layers furthest, um, I don't think we're ever going to get to an answer.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
But is there some sort of, uh, rational argument, or irrational argument, that one can either choose to adopt or not choose to adopt, that it c- at least can give an individual a sense that they've arrived at an answer for them?

[David DeSteno]
Sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
Right? Because seems to me that it's either you take the stance that, well, if it can't be disproven, then there's a possibility, and if there's a possibility, there's a possibility. Or you take the stance, unless you can prove it to me, forget it. Um, I'm- I'm not going to believe that." And it just becomes an endless cycle of- of humans arguing with humans, which is maybe what God wants.

[David DeSteno]
Well, you know, you're, you're hitting on the point there. This is why I say it's not a useful scientific question, because when you can raise a finding, say evolution, which we know is true, um, and then say, "Oh, well, maybe that's the way God works." If you- if you keep creating a carve out to explain something, it becomes very difficult to make a strong case, right? I mean, scientists live by falsifiability. Can we falsify something? But if you say, "Oh, yeah, okay, that falsified, but there's a reason why that falsified, because God did it a different way," it becomes just, as you say, an endless debate. So when I was a- an undergraduate in college, I was always interested in the questions of, you know, what does it mean to be a good person? How do you flourish? How do you find happiness? And I was trying to decide between being a history of religions major and a psychologist. I ultimately decided to be a psychologist 'cause I could get data, and not just argue about the things that you're saying. But what I've realized over time is that the things that we're finding that make life better for people, these traditions, they- they couldn't run randomized control trials, but they had intuited long ago. And so for me, what I like to tell people is, "Yeah, religion is about belief, but it's also about what you do," you know? And so yes, there are lots of people who really don't believe in God. There are lots of Jews who are atheists, yet are deeply engaged in their practices, and it tends to make life better. So let me- let me tell you why I think it's rational. You can make a rational case to believe this. So, the thing you're hinting at comes from something called Pascal's wager, Pascal being one of the greatest mathematicians and- and philosophers. And he argued that

[David DeSteno]
if God exists, and you choose to believe in God, you can have everlasting life, right? This is... Pascal was Christian, so this was the Christian God that we were talking about. And he said, "By nature of being born, you're forced into this bet. You have to play the game. Should you be religious or not? Well, if there's a chance that you could have everlasting life in- in a pleasurable way, even the smallest chance of that outweighs any joy you'd have on Earth." So if you chose not to believe in God, yeah, you might have a more libertine lifestyle here, but the joy you would gain from that pales in comparison. And so it makes sense from a decision theory, right? The expected value of happiness is larger if happiness is infinite. And so Pascal said, "You should believe in God." But people say, "Well, what if I believe the probability that there's everlasting life is zero?"... or what if there's, I choose the wrong religion? There are lots of religions out there or the wrong god. And what Pascal realized at the time was that you could solve this problem if religion also brought benefits in the here and now too. And what we're seeing is it does exactly that. So let me give you an example. Epidemiological data show that people who engage with religion, not just say, "I believe in God," but actually engage with faith, over a 15 to 20 year period, it cuts all told mor- all caused mortality by 30%. Cuts death due to cancer and cardiovascular disease by 25%. Reduces anxiety and depression. Increases people's sense of meaning and feeling that their life is flourishing. This is what brought me to my kind of

[David DeSteno]
mission today of trying to find and, and, and curate conversations between science and religion. You can't argue with those data. Now, for a long time people would say those studies were done cross-sectionally, right? And so you would say, uh, you'd look at people who are going to services and people who are not, and you'd find people are healthier when they go to services. So you could say, "Oh, religion makes people healthier." But there was an important alternative, right? Maybe the people who were really sick or really depressed can't get out of bed to go to services, right? So th- that was always an issue. Now there's wonderful work by an epidemiologist, uh, Tyler VanderWeele from Harvard School of Public Health. He follows thousands and thousands of people longitudinally, 'cause you can't run a randomized control trial. I can't say, "Andrew, tomorrow, if you believe in God, I want you to stop." Or, you know, "Dave, tomorrow, you don't believe in God, start going to church." Ethically, you can't do that. But what you can do is follow people through time as they become more religious or stop becoming religious, l- leave the faith, et cetera. And that's what he finds. And it's not just community, you know. Ano- another kind of criticism though has been, "Well, Dave, you know, these health benefits, it's just community." If they joined a bowling club, right, to use Robert Putnam's analogy of bowling alone, they would get the same health benefits. What you see in the data is that the effect size, which is basically the degree, how much bang for the buck you get. Yeah, being in, in community, joining clubs, having tighter social networks makes you healthier and happier. But the effect size is larger for religious community, right? They're doing something in those communities, and I think it's the practices they do that matter. And even among young adults where we're seeing increasing levels of anxiety and depression, even private practices, things like prayer and meditation are showing up as ways to, to buffer those and protect against them.

[Andrew Huberman]
Do you observe those effects across religions? Are they the same for Christianity, Judaism, for Muslims? And, uh, and also we could talk about the subdivisions within each of those.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, it's a good question. So these aren't my data. These, these are data from Tyler VanderWeele and other folks. Um, they haven't examined every religion, but when they do look across some faiths, it's, it's a pretty stable finding.

[Andrew Huberman]
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[David DeSteno]
Okay.

[Andrew Huberman]
And, um, he... I- I'll never forget this conversation. He said, uh, you know, uh,

[Andrew Huberman]
he said he was an atheist. Uh, I had questions about that. Um, I believe in God. I should be, uh, you know, uh, just clear about that now. Um, back then, I wa- I was probably a bit more, uh, in the question of that.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, but deep down, I, I would have written in my journal, I, I believe in God. I have since I was a kid, I, and I do now. Um, he said, "Well, there's this..." Um, he described it as a celestial teapot, and he gave me this, this example of the celestial teapot, which was for him a rational argument as to, um, why he was atheist. Um, I looked it up. It's not called the celestial teapot. It's called Russell's teapot, so he got it wrong. Russell was right. So, here it is, and, and I'm paraphrasing here from something I pulled from the internet, but I verified this is, uh, accurate to Russell's teapot. "Russell's teapot is an analogy formulated by the philosopher, uh, Bertrand Russell, to illustrate the philosophic burden of proof lies on the person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others. So, Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context reli- of religion. He wrote that, uh, if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot too small to be seen by telescopes orbits the sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong."

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, this sort of brings us back to, uh, the first, uh, part of our conversation. You know, what do you think about this? People are walking around with Russell's teapot in their mind, saying, you know,

[Andrew Huberman]
"It, the burden of proof is on the person making the assertion, not on, um, other people to, uh, to carry a belief because it can't be falsified."

[David DeSteno]
It depends on your philosophy of science. Um, for me, I, I tend to think about this, so I'm a psychologist, so, you know, William James, the father of psychology-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[David DeSteno]
... had a real interest in, in religion, and he phrased this slightly differently. He had this notion of something he called an overbelief, and an overbelief is a belief for which the evidence is lacking, not... It's not disconfirmed, right? But it's lacking, but which nonetheless

[David DeSteno]
feels right and leads to positive outcomes. And for him, if those two criteria were, were true, then it is rational to embrace that belief, and that's how he basically, uh, came to embrace religion. And so I think, again, you know, where we are is, is either of those philosophies-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[David DeSteno]
... can be valid. You have to make a choice. It's, one is not more valid than the other. It's based on your philosophy of science. And for me, the question is always gonna be one of faith, right? You know, there are a lot of people who are trying to make a case, uh, I'm thinking of, of, of Ross Douthat's book, Believe. They're trying to make a case for, i- that it's rational to believe in religion because, oh, it's called the, the fine-tuning argument. Look at all the parameters in the world for, for gravity and, and other, um, um, physical coefficients. If they weren't tuned just exactly right, life could never have evolved here, and the probability against them being tuned just exactly right is low. And then people say, "Well, sure, but there can be hundreds of millions of other universes, right?" That we don't... In the multiverse, and so it's not that weird that we have here. And so I just, I think

[David DeSteno]
it's never gonna be the case that you're gonna have proof. You know, these arguments, these philosophies can bring you up to a certain point, but to take that final step of belief or disbelief, it's faith one way or the other. And again, it's why I think scientists need to stay in their lane. You know, even Richard Dawkins, right? The most famous atheist around, will say he cannot be absolutely sure that God doesn't exist, yet he acts like he does and he urges you to not believe. And so for me, I think let's not do that. You know, I, when we talk about these practices, how they lead to health and well-being, I can't tell you if they are divinely inspired from a creator who cares about its creations and kind of gave them a roadmap or a user's guide to make life better, or if they're cultural adaptations of people figuring stuff out over millennia.

[David DeSteno]
But we don't need to answer that

[David DeSteno]
to have respect for them and to study how they work and to see what we can learn from them. And if we're not willing to do that, we're slowing down the science of human flourishing, in my view.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm. In a similar vein, I think, um, in the position that I found myself in the last few years of doing public health education-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... and public science education, you know, I, I've embraced for a long time the idea that there are behavioral tools that really help, things like meditation-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... breath work-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, certainly exercise, um, maybe even deliberate cold exposure, heat exposure-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... sauna, et cetera. I also embrace prescription drugs and-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... their utility in some instances, right?

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And I embrace certain over-the-counter compounds. We call them supplements, but they're, um, compounds that nowadays more and more people would say, "Yeah, maybe taking some vitamin D." People are maybe taking omega-3s. Maybe they're not. Maybe they think anything that a doctor doesn't prescribe is, or that your mother didn't prescribe is, is not worthwhile. But I take the view that all of these are, uh, are useful for promoting health. I sort of, um, take the same view when it comes to, uh, the notion that, uh, religious belief or, uh-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... stro- or even strong belief in God, praying, et cetera, could be useful. Now, to me, these aren't mutually exclusive. Um, and I think for some reason, and it may be generational, uh, I do think that there's a certain generation-... um, above, uh, m- mine that for them, if a pill was not prescribed by a doctor, it must be snake oil. And

[Andrew Huberman]
that's crazy if you think about the fact that, you know, in the 1970s and '80s, there was this big movement to try and get meditation into universities.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And those people were kind of shunned, psychedelics.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm. They were working with the devil. Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Shunned. People were, were fired.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Now, I can, um, tell you that tens, if not hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being used to study psychedelics-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... in laboratories at major universities like yours and mine, and a bunch of others in the US and around the world. So what was once considered sorcery, um, and pseudoscience often becomes the topic of a discreet study. Of course, with controlled conditions, you get better understanding of what those things can and can't do.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But I think we're arriving at the time where religion and science are going to start to be, um, looked at, uh, with scientific rigor. And I think that's going to bring about more acceptance of God and religion in terms of how the mind works and, and well-being.

[David DeSteno]
I agree with you, but let's, let's talk about that older generation 'cause you're right. I have many in my family too, who, you know, if the doctor doesn't prescribe it, don't take it.

[David DeSteno]
But even during that time period when those folks were younger, the pharmaceutical companies, I make this argument in my book, the pharmaceutical companies

[David DeSteno]
had technology to make all kinds of drugs, but they didn't know where to look. And so what did they do? They sent people to traditional cultures around the world to find substances that say, say, the traditional cultures say can help people. They called it bioprospecting at the time. Um, and you know, sure, a lot of those didn't do anything, but some did. And from those, we've got, we've found wonderful chemotherapy drugs, drugs that reduce pain, et cetera. And we wouldn't have done that if we didn't

[David DeSteno]
let go of our arrogance that some of this traditional wisdom might not be valid. And so what I argue for is a terrible word, but instead of bioprospecting, I call it religioprospecting, right? We should go back to these traditions, find these practices, do exactly what you're saying, study them in terms of the scientific method, which I fully support and believe in as a scientist, and see what they do. And we're finding they can do a lot.

[Andrew Huberman]
Tell us about some of those findings, because they're really striking, um, in terms of what specific practices and belief systems, um, can do in terms of improving our physical and mental health. And I'm curious as we have that conversation, if you could emphasize where sometimes it's a positive effect, a, a new positive thing created-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... as opposed to where you personally might, uh, view the data as more pointing to, uh, when one does those practices, it doesn't allow the brain to go into its default pathway of worry, et cetera.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
'Cause I think most people can accept that stress is bad for the brain and body. Excessive stress is bad for the brain and body.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And so anytime we replace a thought or a behavior with something, you potentially are removing the, the possibility that that default state was stress, right?

[David DeSteno]
Sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
So I, I, I'm asking you to do this now because I think that positive effects in science, um, sometimes seem obvious. Like, oh, you, you know, maybe pray for a certain number of minutes or meditate, you get an effect. But there's also a question of what, what the opportunity cost was. What, what weren't you doing in that, uh, five minutes-

[David DeSteno]
Sure

[Andrew Huberman]
... that might have, that might have been detrimental?

[David DeSteno]
Sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
And there's a reason I'm setting it up this way, um, that we'll get to a little bit later.

[David DeSteno]
Okay. Let me, let me give you two examples. And I, and I'll start with one that actually really started me down this road. Um, I had a student, uh, named Paul Condon, who's now a professor at, in Oregon. And he was very interested in, in meditation. And even if you read the New York Times or The Atlantic, it'll tell you, "Oh, meditation will lower your blood, blood pressure. It'll increase your standardized test scores. It will increase your executive control." Does all those things, and that's great. But if you talk to the monks, they'll say, "That's not why it was created," right? It's probably apocryphal, but, but, you know, the, the saying goes that the Buddha said, "I, I teach one thing and one thing only, which is the end of suffering." And meditation was a tool that the Buddha believed would help people do this. And so when we looked around... I'm a social psychologist, so I study behavior. There was no evidence of this, and so we decided we were gonna put this to the test.

[David DeSteno]
And so we recruited people who had never meditated before, and they were either put on a, on a wait list or they came for eight weeks to, uh, a sacred space on campus where they were led in meditation at the, at the feet of a Buddhist lama. And she created, you know, practices for them in MP3s, so they can go home and practice. After eight weeks, we invited each of them individually back to the lab. And we told them, "We're gonna measure your memory. We're gonna measure your executive control, basically your ability to override your, your own impulses." That wasn't the experiment. The experiment actually happened in the waiting room to the lab. So when you come into the lab, there's a room with three chairs. And, um, people were sitting in two of them, and these were actors that we hired. You know, these people coming into the study thought they were just other people waiting in the room. And so there was one chair left, and so the person would take the last chair. About two or three minutes later, a person would come down the hallway, also an actor who worked for us, who was on crutches and wearing one of those, you know, boots you put on your foot when it's, when it's broken. It wasn't really broken. Looking like she was in, in a good amount of pain. She came into the room. All the three chairs were taken. At that point, um, she would kind of lean back against the wall, let out a little whimper of pain. And what we wanted to look at is, would somebody help her? Now, the two actors in the chairs, we told, "Do what you do when you're on the subway," right? "You don't wanna give up your seat. Don't look at the person. Thumb your phone. Ignore them." Right? So we're creating a situation where people aren't helping. And our question was, would the person who was in the study, in the third chair actually help this person?In the control condition, people who weren't meditating, about 15% of them got up and said, "Oh, do you want my chair? Can I help you? Can I hold something for you?" In the meditation condition, it was close to 50% of people who did this, right? We tripled the rate at which somebody felt compassion for somebody else in pain and was willing to help them.

[David DeSteno]
That's a pretty big effect in terms of behavioral science. So that was a small study, so, so we've replicated it. We've also done it in a, in a situation where someone is, is provoking you. So in this situation, people who had been meditating or not came to the lab. And there's a paradigm that's designed to evoke anger. And the way it works is you create a, um... You spend five minutes to write a story about your life's goals. You have to then present this to the other subject, who they didn't know was an actor for us. He listens to this and he says, "Really? That's your plan? That doesn't make any sense," right? And this was a, a, a, um, paradigm developed by an anger researcher named Thun- Thun- uh, named Tom Denson. And we know it creates, you know, the HPA axis anger response, and so it's really well-validated. And people either meditated, or in this case, the control was an active control, they had done Lumosity brain training for, for a while. Um, and what we found is that those who ha- they were then given the chance to cause punishment to this person. I don't, I won't go into it all, but they thought there was a way for them to cause this person pain. The people who didn't meditate were willing to cause this guy a good amount of pain. Now, it didn't actually happen, of course, but they thought it would. Um, those who had meditated

[David DeSteno]
refused to cause him any pain.

[David DeSteno]
They still said what he did was wrong, and they wanted to talk to him and tell him what he did was wrong,

[David DeSteno]
but they thought that creating more pain and suffering was not the way to go about it. And so for us, you know, right here was evidence that these practices make you kinder, make you more compassionate. The other way, what does it save you from in terms of stress? This isn't my work, but there's a lot of work on prayer. And so when people pray, especially if you're reciting formal prayers, not so much if you're just having a conversation with God, but if you're saying the rosary or you're reciting, you know, Hindu sutras or any formulaic prayer, what it typically does is it reduces your respiration rate. Not only does it reduce your respiration rate, but it also tends to increase the duration of the exhalations. And this is for meditation as well. What does that do? I mean, you talk about breathwork a lot on your show, right? What it does is it, um,

[David DeSteno]
increases vagal tone, reduces heart rate. It puts the body in a state where it is

[David DeSteno]
not expecting, um, threat or challenge in the environment, where it wants to engage and be more open to socialization. It reduces cortisol responses. And so what it's basically doing there is, yes, you're saying the words, but it's reducing the stress in your body. And even if you're praying about things that are bothering you, things that you're sad or anxious about, by saying those prayers over and over again, stuff travels up the vagus, right? And so by increasing exhalations, by slowing the respiration rate, it's telling your mind, "You're safe. Things are okay." And then thereby it's reducing the stress. And so when you look at that data from Tyler VanderWeel that I mentioned on young adults who pray, why does it reduce stress? It's basically a way of increasing vagal tone in that, in that moment.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[David DeSteno]
And it helps you sit with the ideas of the things that are bothering you while physiologically your body's telling you you're safe.

[Andrew Huberman]
Thank you for reminding everyone that signals travel up the vagus-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... in addition to the vagus nerve c- uh, controlling slowing of the heart rate when you exhale, because I think we hear a lot about the vagus pathway, and, um, most people get it wrong. You got it exactly right. Um, there's a lot of information flowing out from the body. And that actually helps answer the question that was, um, in the back of my mind heading into this conversation, which was, um... Well, I'll, I'll tell by way of anecdote how I arrived there. Uh, my high school girlfriend was Greek Orthodox.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
A lot of Greeks in our family. And it, it wasn't like

[Andrew Huberman]
that movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But it wasn't dissimilar either.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
To go over there, you know, and Greek Easter and, like, people were breaking plates and all the festivities. But one thing I learned spending time with people in the Greek Orthodox community is, um, there's a lot of prayer-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, in their family. Uh, there were also a lot of use of worry beads.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, you know, these, like, beads that people would, um, would use.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Not unlike spinners, right?

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, but, uh, often while reciting prayer. This was more in the older generation in, in her family and, and friends. Um, and there was also a lot of superstition. That comes up in that movie. But there was a lot of superstition, so I asked her, I was like, "Why, why all the superstition? Uh, why the worry beads?" And she said, "Oh, because, um,

[Andrew Huberman]
that replaces what the mind would be doing-"

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
"... if you weren't manipulating these beads and, and, um, carrying out, you know, kind of superstitious activities." Like, the superstitious activities, as long as they don't t- take over your life-

[David DeSteno]
Right

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, replace the things that are much worse. Darker thoughts, m- more terrifying ideas about

[Andrew Huberman]
terrifying things that, that you don't want to happen. So it's about, it's about replacing-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... a- all of that with, uh, with

[Andrew Huberman]
repeating themes, literally loops of, of thought-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... that, um, of course they could break out of and in- interact. I'm not suggesting all Greeks are like this, by the way.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
I love Greek culture. I love the food. I love the, I think they're wonderful people. Um, but it's very interesting that, at least within that culture, they've adopted su- quote, unquote, "superstitions" are somewhat accepted.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Again, they're somewhat generational. Um...... worry beads and prayer and ritual, you know, and all these things sort of blend together seamlessly. Like he wouldn't say, "Oh, you know, they're over there using worry beads, then they're doing superstitious activities or, um, or reciting things in a superstitious way." But, you know, it's all kind of blended into the culture in a way that they seem like very happy people.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
I must say. Very jo- joyful a lot of the time, a lot of the time.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, I mean, I, the way I like to think about these rituals that, as you're mentioning is they're really sophisticated mind-body practices. Like, you know, we're- we're a culture that wants the life hack. Gimme the life hack so that I can study more. Gimme the life hack so that I can save money or lose weight. Rituals are like sophisticated

[David DeSteno]
packages of life hacks, where a life hack is like playing a single note on a piano, a ritual is like a symphony. So let me give you an example that kind of picks up on what you're saying. So one other thing that cuts across everybody's lives, unfortunately, is that we have to, we will grieve at some point. We will lose somebody and we will have the pain. Um, and so I was interested in looking at, at mourning rituals, right? And what is one thing that almost all religions do when somebody passes? You- you eulogize this person, and it seems normal. But when you think about it, it's kind of strange, because if I just lost a job that I loved or if my wife just decided she was going to leave me, I wouldn't want to think about daily how wonderful this person was or this job was because it would increase the pain. But with someone passing, it does the opposite. So George Bonanno, who's one of the nation's leading, um, bereavement researchers at Columbia, he says one of the biggest predictors of who can move through grief successfully, and by that I mean it doesn't get too intense or it doesn't go on too long that it becomes paralyzing, is who can consolidate positive memories of the deceased person? The better you are able at doing that, the more you'll move through grief successfully. And then you talking about superstitions, you know, if you look at, at the Jewish mourning ritual of, of Shiva, and I won't say this is a superstition, but there are elements to it that some people think are strange. Like when someone passes, you cover your mirror. Why would you cover your mirror? Well, there's lots of research in psychology that shows when you look into a mirror, whatever emotion you were feeling becomes intensified. So if you're happy and you look into a mirror, you'll feel more happy. If you're sad, you'll feel more sad.

[Andrew Huberman]
Those are solid data?

[David DeSteno]
Those are solid data from like the 1970s or '80s.

[Andrew Huberman]
Interesting.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. And so, um, they would give people emotional inductions. They'd have group who would look into the mirrors and groups who didn't. They would then measure their emotions after. Always goes up.

[Andrew Huberman]
Selfies.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
I'm just saying. Just kidding.

[David DeSteno]
And so by simply covering mirrors at a time when you are feeling intense sadness and grief, it reduces that. They also, and during Shiva you're supposed to reduce self-focus. So you're not supposed to shave, you're not supposed to wear your best clothes. There's work coming out showing that reductions in self-focus, in focusing on you and your needs, actually reduces grief. It's also the case that

[David DeSteno]
every day during the seven days of Shiva, your community has to come with, come to your house and, uh, prayers are said in what's called a minion, which is a minimum of 10 people. So people come and they will say prayers together, and while they're saying prayers, they're kind of, you know, swaying in unison, saying the same words in unison. That's something in psychology we call motor synchrony, right? What is motor synchrony? It's simply moving your body in synchrony with someone else. So in my lab, we've shown that if we bring people in and we have them engage in motor synchrony, so, you know, let's say you and, you and I, Andrew, don't know each other. We sit down. Um, you put on earphones, I put on earphones or headphones, and in front of us is a little sensor. It's really not a sensor, but it looks like a little pad. And we play tones, and you're supposed to tap that sensor every time you hear the tone. And in some conditions, we have these people who have never met, hear simultaneous tones, so they're tapping in unison. In other cases, they're completely random, and so they're not synchronized at all.

[David DeSteno]
Through a whole

[David DeSteno]
set of shenanigans that I won't go into, what then happens is, is one of the persons is, is put in a situation where they need help to complete a task or they're gonna be stuck there for a long time and not get credit for this study. If we had tapped in unison, people report feeling more connection to this person. They report feeling more compassion for their plight, and by 30% more, they're willing to go help that person, spend their time taking on some of that person's burden. Now, if you ask them why did they do this, they'll say, "You know, I, I feel like I must know this person. Like maybe he was in my class last semester or maybe it was that party I was at." But that action of synchrony, right, is a cue to the mind that these two are joined. We kind of see this if you see flocks of birds or you see schools of fish, you kind of see a greater whole even out of individuals because they're moving together. And so it's an ancient marker to the mind that we are joined. People don't have insight to that, but yet they feel that connection and they can't explain it, so they create a story for it. What happens at Shiva when you say these prayers? You're surrounded by at least 10 people who are doing them in synchrony with you. What is that gonna do? It's gonna increase the empathy and the compassion you feel. It also happens just in religious community in general. Like I talked earlier about why are the effects for religious community better. What are you normally doing? You're singing together. You're praying together. You're sitting and kneeling together. That's a subtle signal to the mind that you are more connected, and it will increase your empathy for each other.

[Andrew Huberman]
Having been a summer camp counselor in college, uh, it was incredible to see the transition between the first day kind of shyness and awkwardness of the kids, and then you get them singing together or, or hanging out around a campfire one night. By the next day, it's almost like they'd known each other for a year.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, the, you know, there were other factors at play there, uh, but it's remarkable. And, um, I, I believe...... that nervous systems link up relatively easily if they're given the right, um-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, they're gonna train with each other. Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... right op- the right opportunity. Uh, it's just inherent to our species and to, you know, schools of fish have lateral lines. They measure each other's, uh, electrical signals without, uh, without trying. I think humans, uh, we, I think we overemphasize the, the extent to which this happens through speech.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I think it happens a lot more through bodily-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... things and, um, we had an expert in, uh, the evolution of human speech on here a few years ago, Erich Jarvis, who's a, a, a, uh, cl- uh, excuse me, not Columbia, The Rockefeller. I almost insulted him- ... in New York. He would never say that. Um, and Eric, um, is a very accomplished dancer in addition to the, the incredible science he does. And he told me that people now believe, based on genetics, anatomy, and more, that song evolved prior to spoken language.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Which makes sense. And so, song and dance were the more, um, evolutionarily ancient forms of language.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And speech came out of that. So, it makes sense that we would, that we would bond that way. Um, you mentioned, um, people, uh, sitting shiva i- in Judaism. What other sorts of, um, activities, uh, in other religions that you see around grieving seem to serve this kind of purpose? I've been to an Irish wake. That was definitely a different experience. People laughing and telling s- uh, jokes and stories. There was some crying too.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, certainly grieving was happening, but in a very different way. Um,

[Andrew Huberman]
I believe you grew up Catholic, is that right?

[David DeSteno]
I did, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Okay, so what about some of the other forms of grieving in other religions?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, so, uh, you know, it's funny. Um, f- friends of mine who are Jewish will always say, "Yeah, we, we do death well." And I don't think it's true. As I look at it, the practice of shiva, to me, has

[David DeSteno]
all of the right pieces. And, and for me, so like, eulogizing happens in all faiths. And what I like to say is there are convergences in these, right? If you're, if you're a cultural anthropologist, you're seeing convergent evolution in terms of the cultural things that we can do to put our bodies in the right, in the right way. Uh, or if you're a person of faith, you can say, "Well, you know, God cares about God's creations," and so we're all embodied in the same way, and so the same practices are gonna matter. But some groups may have figured things out more than another. I think, I mean, eulogizing is the big one. At Irish wakes, at some Irish wakes, they do cover mirrors. They have a completely different theological story for why they do it.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. Why do, what do they say?

[David DeSteno]
I think it's something about

[David DeSteno]
keeping evil spirits away. I, I don't know. But in, in Hindu ceremonies, they do it as well, in certain Hindu ceremonies. Um, and so, I think it is, it is, uh, always about coming together. In, in, in Chinese, uh, grieving rituals, there is this focus on ancestor worship. And so, when someone dies, yes, they go to a different domain, like heaven, but there, what they do is they keep the relationship going. So, there's something called, uh, they call it, uh, I don't know what the word in Chinese, but it's called ghost money. And so, what you can do, uh, if you wanna honor an ancestor and be in connection with them, is you can go to the store and it's this paper money that looks like real money, but it's not real money. It's paper currency, and you, and you burn that. And as the smoke rises, it goes to them where they are, and they can use it to buy stuff. You can buy cell phones that are kinda origami shaped as paper, burn that, and it goes to them. And that might sound strange, but what it really does is a way of keeping that relationship there, of not totally losing that person, of having that positive memory, and

[David DeSteno]
still feeling like you have them in your life. Because one of the biggest difficulties of humans, you know, we're social creatures. When we experience loneliness, when we lose someone, it is painful psychologically. It's also bad for us physiologically if it goes on.

[David DeSteno]
Well, anything that we can do to feel like that relationship is still maintained, as opposed to just loss, helps us avoid the stress and loneliness that comes with it. And so, that's another kind of grieving ritual I've seen.

[Andrew Huberman]
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for more than 13 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been drinking it every day since. For the past 13 years, AG1 has been the same original flavor. They've updated the formulation, but the flavor has always remained the same. And now, for the first time, AG1 is available in three new flavors, berry, citrus, and tropical. All the flavors include the highest quality ingredients in exactly the right doses to together provide support for your gut microbiome, support for your immune health, and support for better energy and more. So now, you can find the flavor of AG1 that you like the most. While I've always loved the AG1 original flavor, especially when I mix it with water and a little bit of lemon or lime juice, that's how I've been doing it for basically 13 years, now I really enjoy the new berry flavor in particular. It tastes great and I don't have to add any lemon or lime juice. I just mix it up with water. If you'd like to try AG1 and these new flavors, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. Right now, AG1 is giving away an AG1 welcome kit that includes five free travel packs and a free bottle of vitamin D3 K2. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim the special welcome kit of five free travel packs and a free bottle of vitamin D3 K2.Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs. Eight Sleep has just launched their latest model, the Pod 5, and the Pod 5 has several new important features. One of these new features is called Auto Pilot. Auto Pilot is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It also elevates your head if you're snoring, and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. The base on the Pod 5 also has an integrated speaker that syncs to the Eight Sleep app and can play audio to support relaxation and recovery. The audio catalog includes several NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, scripts that I worked on with Eight Sleep to record. If you're not familiar, NSDR involves listening to an audio script that walks you through a deep body relaxation combined with some very simple breathing exercises. It's an extremely powerful tool that anyone can benefit from the first time and every time. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com/huberman to get up to $350 off the new Pod 5. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $350. We're talking about God and religion. Um, how separable are those in terms of-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... the, uh, benefits of belief? So for instance, uh, has the experiment ever been done to find a group of people who pray regularly to God, but not in the context of any one specific religious practice? Maybe they identify as Christian or Jewish or whatever, um, but they pray regularly. They'll tell you, "Yeah, I pray every night," or, "I pray every morning," versus people who, um, really adopt prayer, as y- as you mentioned before, not as just a conversation-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... with God and listening. I always think of prayer, it can be two things. It can be a conversation with God.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It can also just be listening, which some people-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... might say, "Well, that's just meditation," but, I don't know, maybe you ping God with a question and you see what comes back.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. No, there are-

[Andrew Huberman]
This kind of thing

[David DeSteno]
... there are forms of prayer that are-

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah

[David DeSteno]
... just deep listening and sitting in silence. Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm. Versus, uh, reading the Bible.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, versus, uh, reading Torah or scripture of any kind.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, what, what's known about that?

[David DeSteno]
There have been studies, as I've said, that, that look at prayer, um, in general for formalized prayer. I mean, there is a sense that... So two questions. Let, let me deal with the first one first, which is there a difference between God and, and religion? So,

[David DeSteno]
because the US is a Christian country, I think most of us, when we think of religion, tend to think of it in terms of Christianity, where, where belief, where the creed is really important. In most of the world, religion is more about what you do than what you believe, right? It's what are the rituals? How do they infuse your daily life? Um, and that's why, you know, as I said, there are, there are many Jews who are atheists. There are many Hindus I know who are atheists, yet they engage in the practices and they get the benefits from them. So I think those two are, are separable. There are also people who believe in God yet don't go to any services and don't practice at all. Say, "Oh yeah, I believe in God, but I don't engage in this." And when you look at the health benefits for those people, they're not there. You ha- you have to be actively engaged in the practices. So I think those two can be separated. Um, in terms of, um,

[David DeSteno]
prayer,

[David DeSteno]
so remember I was telling you about the motor synchrony stuff. There is... And how it makes you feel more compassion toward other people. There is work that shows that y- when you do motor synchrony on its own versus motor synchrony in prayer, and so these are studies where people were just listening to music and dancing together or moving together, versus where they were, uh, chanting together, um, chants that are meaningful to them and their faith and that set forth principles of the faith, what you find is an increase, a greater magnitude of the effect of the, uh, motor synchrony when those

[David DeSteno]
meaningful parts of prayer are included. Why is that? As I said before, it's a mind/body practice. So the moving in time, the motor synchrony, is putting your body in a state where it's more receptive to messages about community or coming together as opposed to feeling tense where your body is saying, "No, no, no, there's a threat here," but your mind is saying, "No, Dave, be good and reach out to these people." And so in that sense, combining the creedal elements, the belief elements with the practice leads to a greater effect than the practice on its own. You see the same thing with meditation, right? Meditation, we're all sitting at home with our apps, right, by ourselves. That's not the way meditation's supposed to be done. Traditionally it was done in a sangha, in a community. And as you said before, why is that important? Because as we're breathing together, our respirations are in training upon one another, and it's creating that sense of synchrony to build community. So I think adding the

[David DeSteno]
message elements of what religions value to the mind/body practice puts you in a situation where you get a synergism. And this is what worries me when we try to extract certain elements. So, psychedelics is one great example. Um,

[David DeSteno]
psychedelics traditionally, w- with ayahuasca or psilocybin, were taken in the context of a ceremony, where you had a shaman who through chanting or drum beats or whatever it might be, created a situation where the body was very relaxed and felt safe.... and then at that point, you would take the psychedelic. And we had Michael Pollan on my show, and when he said, he- he told me, he said, "David, the one thing that's really important when you take psilocybin is you have to feel supremely safe. Because when that moment of self-dissolution comes or ego death comes, it can be beautiful or it can be terrifying. And if you don't feel safe, it can go the wrong way." And, you know, the data show about 25% of trips are bad. About 8% are so bad that they necessitate some type of mental health intervention. And so, you have the shaman with you. You have the experience of ego death, you see whatever you're going to see, and that person helps you reintegrate that and make sense of it. So, you know, at- at Hopkins, where they're doing great work, they don't have a religious shaman, but they have a guide, right? The guide is with you. You form a relationship with this person during your trip. The person is there with you. They'll put their hand on your hand. They'll... They're there to help make sense and keep you feeling safe. They're doing the same role as a shaman. But if you're in Brooklyn, you know, dropping psilocybin with your local Brooklyn hipsters without the container around to keep you safe, there's a good chance you may have a bad outcome. And so for me, you know, long an- long answer to your question about prayer, I think

[David DeSteno]
we have these containers of the rituals and the ideals of the religions that work together synergistically. And when you extract those, the question is, will they work as well, or if not, is there actually even, in some cases, a danger?

[Andrew Huberman]
A couple of things. First of all, um, yes, psilocybin can be terrifying. I can attest to that, uh, as can LSD. Um...

[David DeSteno]
Did you have a bad trip or...

[Andrew Huberman]
Well, I- I- I don't recommend this, but when I was young, uh, far too young, I experimented with psilocybin and LSD, had some good experiences and then a couple of really bad experiences that led me to just basically write them off-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... for a long period of time. Then later, um, revisited that in the proper context with

[Andrew Huberman]
therapeutic support there.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Completely different experience.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But still, p- psilocybin, terrifying every single time. But the integration piece is really critical.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm. It's critical.

[Andrew Huberman]
Critical, critical. Uh, we could have a- a long conversation about psychedelics, but, um, I'll just mention now 'cause I'll come back to this i- in a little bit. Uh, a friend of mine who's, um, quite religious, he's Christian, quite religious, and very versed in the Bible-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... studies the Bible, um, is very skeptical of psychedelics or even, um, concerned about people's use of psychedelics. Uh, not because they're quote unquote "anti-Christian," but because there's this idea, uh, that during psychedelic journeys, that evil forces actually can see into your unconscious mind.

[David DeSteno]
Hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Now, that might seem like a wild and crazy idea. We could also talk about psychedelics as like which serotonin receptors they happen to be-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, activating. So, we could like, we could move around the- the- the topic from different perspectives. But it is interesting in the sense that when people talk about psychedelic journeys, you just did, I am, it always seems to be this divergent road. You can either have a very meaningful and positive experience, or it can include elements that are terrifying, that if not integrated properly, can be, uh, potentially destructive.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, the idea that maybe certain, um, components of religion, uh, would see it as hazardous-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... assign that to evil spirits, devil, et cetera, isn't- isn't outside what we've observed scientifically or clinically either, so.

[David DeSteno]
No, that's true. And I, and I think you may know this better than me being a neuroscientist. I think some of the most recent work on psychedelics suggests, to use a poor metaphor, what it's basically doing is, is loosening the mind, right? It- it- it reopens up periods of- of critical learning.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[David DeSteno]
And so things that have become kind of rigid and reified in your brain, suddenly there's flexibility again. Um, and so the messages that you're getting at that time can have much more influence and situational influences, um, than they would at any other time. And if you don't have that safe container for the religion, yeah, it can take you in really problematic ways. But what I find interesting about it, you know, is- is people often talk about that- that moment of, when it's good, of- of ego death as kind of being this transcendent experience, where you feel this sense of connection to everything and- and- and great love. And if you look at mystical traditions where they're all designed to kind of get you to this point, there are what are traditionally called right-handed roots and left-handed roots. Right-handed roots are the ones that are kind of deeply embedded in religions that we normally don't see as much because they're for people who are kind of living a- a contemplative lifestyle. So, Christian traditions have them, Buddhist tradition more- we're more familiar with, et cetera. And so you can, by virtue of engaging in long practices of meditation, building your skill over many years, get your mind to that point where you can have this sense of ego death. Left-handed traditions, they're the quick and easy way, right? So, rather than learn the practice, you can take the drug, uh, and- and get there as well. And so it's... What's interesting to me is that they're both roots and religions themselves, even outside of the chemicals, have a way for those who want to follow it to gain this transcendent experience. But they're always a little more worried about the left-hand roots for the reasons you're saying, because they don't have the practice and the guidance long term, and they can go badly for people and lead you to problematics. But that I can see people interpreting as-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[David DeSteno]
... demonic influences.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it's also worth knowing that sometimes people can have a very good experience on psychedelics-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... but without adequate integration or-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... if the frequency is too high, um, sometimes issues can surface, uh, weeks or months later. It's not always just that they-

[David DeSteno]
Right. That's right

[Andrew Huberman]
... have a bad experience. And I'm generally optimistic about psychedelics as a clinical tool.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
I'm hoping they will get FDA approval soon. I'm hoping that they're...The FDA approval will require proper therapeutic support-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... in order for them to be used clinically. But, um, nonetheless, uh, psychedelics are

[Andrew Huberman]
adjacent to religion and belief in God, I think, because, as you pointed out, they tend to recede the waterline on the conscious mind-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... and bring us into these unconscious states that I think a lot of people do achieve through prayer and through meditation. But as you pointed out, it takes much longer. The reason I brought up this notion of evil spirits-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... is that many religions have a component of good and evil. And we tend to assume that those forces are presented as things outside of us. You know, you have a God and a devil, right? And they're, they're battling one another. I have to assume that some of that is borne out of the idea that we also understand that the human brain has circuits that, uh, hold the potential for good and the potential for evil. And those exist in all of us.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
In some people, there's enough top-down inhibition or enough, uh, that comes from good, you know, good parenting and good childhood experiences and so on, um,

[Andrew Huberman]
or just default wiring that makes, uh, people behaving terribly, very unlikely. But lots of experiments done in the wake of World War II, in your field, your field of psychology, were focused on, um, demonstrating really, that under the right conditions, most anybody can engage in evil behavior-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... or at least sadistic behavior. Uh, we don't talk about those experiments so much lately because, um, they're not politically correct. But the, was it the Milgram experiments? Is, these ones that are... Which were the experiments, I think they were done at Yale, where people-

[David DeSteno]
The Milgram experiments, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Where they, where... The Milgram experience, where people literally believed, um, that they were causing intense pain in others-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... and they would get people to ratchet up to, um, the point where they were inducing, um, extreme pain on others. Um, to the point where people later were shocked, no pun intended- ... uh, that they themselves had been, had-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... had done that. Had, that they had been, um, the person controlling the amount and intensity of that much pain-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... over someone else, for no other reason except that they were told to. Um, now I realize those experiments are a little bit controversial.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, but I think there have been enough demonstrations that humans hold the potential to do bad things to other humans-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... under the right conditions, that we can accept that the human brain at least has the wiring to go there.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
What are the data on this notion of

[Andrew Huberman]
good and evil? Why do religions present good and evil outside of us? Is there any evidence that a bias toward accepting that there's good and evil in us is helpful? Um, because I can think of, you know, when I think about Buddhism, for instance, I think about love and kindness meditation.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I think about, um, mindfulness.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I think about eliminating suffering. When I think about the New Testament, I think about a loving God. I-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
We hear about Jesus as a, as being of love and-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... and forgiveness and, and redemption. And then y- of course, we have the Old Testament, which is a lot less forgiving.

[David DeSteno]
A lot less forgiving.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, what are your reflections on good and evil-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... and religion and how they can serve us, um, in terms of our beliefs? Or, I don't know the data, um, for people that want to reject that, is there an advantage-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... to rejecting that?

[David DeSteno]
There's a lot there. So first, the question of, of why do I think religions think about it as outside of us? So one of the things I teach is, is moral psychology. Why do people do good or bad? And what the r- data has shown us over the past few decades is that people's moral behavior is a lot more variable than anyone would ever predict. Um, and because of that, because but most people like to think of ourselves as good people, when we do something wrong that's objectifiably wrong, we feel like something came over us, right? And so it's easy to say there is an evil force outside that was guiding me. What we're learning now is that a lot of moral processing within the brain happens kind of below your conscious awareness, and I'll give you an example of that in a minute. So it feels like it's coming over us, so therefore, maybe it's some other force. But the point you raise is a good one, right? We did not evolve to be saints. We did not evolve to be sinners. We evolved to be adaptive, right? Uh, to basically be able to reproduce and, and pass on our genetic material. Because we're a social species, we need to cooperate with each other, and therefore, most of the time, when people can see what we're doing, we're gonna try and be good because we don't want a reputation for being a bad person. No one's gonna cooperate with us. But if you're in a situation where you can have your cake and eat it too, that's adaptive. You're gonna take it. And so as an example, we do studies on cheating in my lab. And we, uh, have this situation where people come to the lab and we say, "Okay, look. There's two tasks that need to be done. One is short and fun, takes about 10 minutes. One is long and onerous, takes about 45. You, uh, are in the role of, of, of decider. You can pick which one of these you, you want to do. Most people think the fairest way to do it is to flip a coin, because whichever one you don't do, the person behind you is gonna get stuck doing." And everybody says, "Yeah, that makes sense." And so we give them a little, um, a little device that's a computerized coin flipper, so they can hit the button and it comes up heads or tails. The reason we do that is so we can control which side comes up. Heads, you get the fun task. Tails, you get the bad task. 100% of people, when you ask them and, and y- and you say, "Um,

[David DeSteno]
if you lied about this, 'cause you're gonna be in the room by your- by yourself, if you say you got heads when you didn't, is that morally wrong?" Only time in my life I get unanimous data. 100% of people say, "Yeah, that's morally wrong."

[Andrew Huberman]
That's encouraging-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
... that they say that.

[David DeSteno]
Well, yeah, wait. And so then we put them in the room and we say, you know, they, they, uh, know they can decide how they want. They know most people say, "You should use, use the coin." They say, "You should use the coin."... guess what percentage of them? So, we, we know they lie because they come out and they basically say, "Oh, I got the easy task," and we let them go do that. We know the coin came up tails because we rigged it. What percent of people do you think lie to us?

[Andrew Huberman]
I don't know.

[David DeSteno]
Depending on the study, it's usually like 85%.

[Andrew Huberman]
85%?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, yeah. Now, there are situations where we tell them, "You can't decide. You must do what the coin tells you." And there, still about a third of people cheat.

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh my goodness.

[David DeSteno]
Right?

[Andrew Huberman]
Seriously?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. And so... And we've done it with money. You can get more money on the coin flip higher or lower. But what's interesting is when you ask people later why did they cheat, they will create a story 'cause no one likes to think of themselves as bad. So, they'll say things like, "Well, yeah, normally I wouldn't do that. But, you know, I had an appointment later, and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't late and I thought that that longer task might be a problem." Or my favorite one was... Because the bad task was like logic problems they had to solve, one person said, "Well, you know, the guy who was sitting next to me in the waiting room and I knew would get the one that I didn't choose, he was an engineer. So, I thought he would like the logic problems that took a lot longer to do." Right? And so, people are creating these stories. And so, what... The, the point of this is that, um, if it was public, no one would ever cheat. Like I... You know, when I go on TV people will say, "Can we do one of your cheating experiments?" And I'm like, "No. No one's gonna cheat when they're like, you know, have the TV cameras on them," right? But when you can get away with it, your brain changes the computations of what's valuable. You will cheat because it's adaptive to not exert extra energy you don't have to if there's no reputational cost. And so, people do. Where does religion fit in this? Well, there's wonderful work. This is by, uh, Dimitris Zygalotis, who's a professor at UConn, um, where he has people in different cultures do a similar thing, and he has them play a game where they can cheat somebody else out of money. And they either do it in a restaurant kitchen or in a temple. The rate of cheating drops dramatically if you're doing it in the temple. Why? Because suddenly you're reminded, "Oh my goodness, God cares about this, and I... There's gonna be a price for me to pay if I do this." And so, that's, that's top-down. But it also works from the bottom-up. Right? We know that the brain's computations of what we value is, is often done below our conscious awareness. It is influenced by lots of things, including feeling states. So, one thing we study in my lab is gratitude. Bring people into the lab. We have all different ways of making them feel grateful, but the easiest way is, "Count your blessings. Take five minutes and count your blessings." We then give them tasks where they can cheat in this way. Those who have counted their blessings, cheating is almost non-existent.

[Andrew Huberman]
85% to zero?

[David DeSteno]
Well, in that study, they were told they had to do what the, what the coin said, so... What the coin flipper said. So, the average cheating rate was like 25 or 30%. It went down to 2%.

[Andrew Huberman]
Wow.

[David DeSteno]
Right?

[Andrew Huberman]
Still a, a marked change.

[David DeSteno]
Still a marked change. Uh, and I'm sure in the other one it would drop. If we did it the other way, it would drop dramatically too. We find that, uh, when we give people the opportunity to help someone else who is asking for help, a stranger they don't know, if they feel grateful, they're much more likely to do it. And we can do it in such a way that we can titrate the level of gratitude they're feeling to the amount of help they're giving. And so, what's happening here is

[David DeSteno]
religions cultivate, they curate our emotional lives. What do people do when they pray? A lot of prayer... The most common prayer is a prayer of gratitude. If you are experiencing gratitude more frequently in your day, it puts you in a position where you are being nudged from the bottom-up to be more willing to be honest, patient, generous, and helpful to other people. And so, what's going on? The gratitude that you're feeling is putting your body in a state where you... The brain wants to be more pro-social. At the same time you're praying, you're getting the message, "Hey, you should be more pro-social." And so again, it's a synergistic effect to push us in that way.

[Andrew Huberman]
When it comes to discussions around religion and religious practices, you can see a lot of, uh, commonalities among religious practices. We need to kind of take a step back-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, whether or not it's around gratitude or it's around, uh, grieving, uh, celebrating birth of children-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... et cetera. Um, there's a lot of discussion nowadays how, at least in the United States but I think elsewhere in the world as well, people are more isolated.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, people are feeling, um, probably p- more pulled into their phones, really.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Uh, there's an interesting, uh, picture published recently, or a series of pictures, I forget exactly where, but we'll provide a link to it, where, um, someone took pictures of... Real pictures of humans in a natural environment-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... in cities, et cetera, but deleted the phone... O- the phones anytime they were holding their phones. And everyone's just staring- ... at their palms at the beach with their kids.

[David DeSteno]
Uh-huh.

[Andrew Huberman]
Their kids like... Kids on the subway. I don't know if there was a subway one, but it's just every- we're all staring at our palms-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... all the time. It's a very bizarre point in human history.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, the question I have is, when people pray, uh, when people have a belief in God, uh, presumably they feel less alone.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's... It certainly makes me feel less alone, uh, to pray. In fact, um, at some point, I found anyway, that if you pray regularly, that you never feel lonely. You never feel alone because you realize that people come, people go. Ideally, they... Uh, you don't lose people close to you quickly or too soon, but everyone dies eventually.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But your relationship with God, if you have one, is a permanent thing.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
From the... It- it's just the... And the more you lean into that c- component and have faith in that, the less lonely you feel, ever.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's kind of remarkable. And, uh, you know, in this age of like AI and digital twins and smartphones, where everyone's got at least one smartphone, um, I, I think this is not a, a, a trivial aspect to all of it. I mean, the, the notion of not being alone is so fundamental to feeling safe as a human.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, um, I don't know what the research on loneliness and religion says, um, but oftentimes, we hear about these things in the context of community. What about-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... the, um, the mental health benefits of feeling like you're not alone because you really believe you're not alone.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. I mean, so the, the data show that people who engage with religion report much less loneliness. And it's, it's probably both, right? It is, usually they're engaged in a religious community that causes deeper social bonds. But I think you're right. It, it does... Believing you have a relationship with God

[David DeSteno]
allows you to feel like someone is always there. And, you know, there, there's an important difference, right? Being alone is not the same as being lonely, right?

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[David DeSteno]
You can be surrounded by a lot of people but not feel a connection to them. Um,

[David DeSteno]
with God, from what we can tell, there is this sense of having

[David DeSteno]
a relationship with someone who has your back, right? A friend that in, in essence you can count on. Um, it's interesting, in a lot of evangelical traditions, there's a lot of emphasis placed on having conversations with God. So, I'm not sure how you were raised, but for me being Catholic, it was more like you would, you would pray and you know God was there. But a lot of these evangelical traditions, there are trainings that people go to to be able to listen for God. And I'm not as familiar with the steps of those, but there really is this sense to kind of train yourself to be able to hear God or sense God by you. And it's not for me to say whether this is true or not. I don't know. Remember, I'm a scientist, and so when I talk about these things, I'm not trying to reduce them in any way. I'm saying, "Look, we're embodied creatures. We have a brain. If I see God or hear God, my occipital cortex is gonna light up." Doesn't mean it's er- it's reducible to the neurons in there. It just means that's what it is. And so, it's not for me to say whether they're actually hearing God or not. But this emphasis on forming a relationship with God that is kind of two ways is a big part of the faith. And those people report feeling a lot less loneliness. And I think it's a way of solving the problem that we're sensing right now in this, in this society, which is growing loneliness, a growing sense that no one values you, right, no one has your back. I was

[David DeSteno]
talking to Robert Waldinger, who, um, right, was the head of the Harvard Study on Adult Development, and I'm sure you've heard him say one of the biggest predictors

[David DeSteno]
for, uh, health is good personal relationships. But it's also having what he calls that 3:00 AM friend, right? It's that friend that you know you can count on, that's not going to be like, "Uh, Andrew, yeah, I can't help you move today. Sorry, I got something better to do," right? And with God, even though God's not going to basically show up and help you move, if you believe and have faith in God, and you feel you can connect and converse with God, God's that 3:00 AM friend. He's there when you need it. And so I can clearly see that helping people. But

[David DeSteno]
in terms of the data, we don't know w- We know religious people are less lonely. We don't know how much of it is the sense of God or how much of it comes from community. It's probably a combo.

[Andrew Huberman]
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics and tests for PFASs or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood. Function not only helped me detect that, but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, I'd been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, N-acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say, by taking a second Function test, that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test. The problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by Function's simplicity and at the level of cost. It is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function. Yeah, and people will sometimes talk about being able to really feel him. That's usually the language that's used.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Uh, I mean, people close to me are, like-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... really got it up seems like more and more these days. And, and I have some friends who are, you know, um, who are clearly atheists.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And I have friends that aren't. But this notion that you can feel God-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... right, as a presence, not just, um, you know, s- like some being that you're in conversation with.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's, it's in, obviously an internal feeling, but then people often, I've experienced this, will, will experience it kind of around you as well.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And then, of course, I can step back and go, "Okay, well, that's my insular cortex," and, you know, the-

[David DeSteno]
Right.

[Andrew Huberman]
Like, of course, right? But the, the argument that, um, anyone who believes in God or religion would make was, "Okay, well, how did that all get placed there?"

[David DeSteno]
Right.

[Andrew Huberman]
And then, and then we get back to the beginning of the conversation.

[David DeSteno]
No, that's right. Right. It's just like-

[Andrew Huberman]
We're peeling back the layers of the onion-

[David DeSteno]
Right

[Andrew Huberman]
... and saying, "Well, who put that there?" And, um, it, it's actually probably, um, appropriate to raise, uh, the, the words intelligent design.

[David DeSteno]
Um, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
That was popular a few years ago.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's kind of disappeared now in the-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... at least in the media. Um, I studied the visual system and I worked on a number of other things, but in the context of the visual system, this is very, uh, relevant because, um, eyes are incredible in their ability to extract-... Light information.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Obviously. And to allow us visual perceptions. Um, and the evolution of the eye is kind of the linchpin argument for those that, uh, believe in intelligent design.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
They always bring up that, you know, "The eye couldn't have developed this way."

[David DeSteno]
Right.

[Andrew Huberman]
And I, I could tell you all sorts of things about evolution of the eye, 'cause I've spent a lot of time with this literature, uh, about how some eyes developed with the photoreceptors on one side of the retina and the others, and the-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... photoreceptors facing outward. And, and, you know, and there are a bunch of different solutions to how you take light information and create perceptions of the outside world.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But if you were to look at any one of those, whether or not it's in a, a, you know, a crustacean that just needs to see light and dark, or v-, uh, or a, a s- some species that only needs to see if something's moving or stationary versus us, we have very high resolution vision, or a, a hawk that has twice our acuity, you'd say, "Yeah, it's a pretty spectacular thing."

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Three cell layers, couple hundred different cell types, and you can create this rich experience that we call visual perception. You can close your eyes. You can imagine things that you see. Incredible. It's

[Andrew Huberman]
a good thing for the intelligent design folks to hang their hat on.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And yet anyone that studies evolution of eyes can tell you, "All right. Let's start here. PAX6, the gene, leads downstream to OTX2, to..." You know, and you can literally march someone through the logic that it's all genes, transcription factors, and proteins, and you get an eye. In fact, there are people building eyes in dishes now from one cell. You can take that cell, proliferate that cell, give it the right transcription factors, you can build what pretty much looks like an eye. So, I feel like the, um, the complexity argument-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... not the spirituality argument, is sometimes used-

[David DeSteno]
Sure

[Andrew Huberman]
... to push back on the idea of God and religion, and I'm just wondering what your thoughts on that are, and, uh, because it's slightly different than saying, "Who, what came first?"

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's just saying, you know, "How could you get this?" And that's how I think where society lives right now.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, people who believe that you could only get that complexity through God, and people who believe you could only get that complexity through biology.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And they're just sort of clash-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... even though, um, we don't hear about intelligent design quite so often these days.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, but it is related. I mean, this is, this is kind of the fine-tuning argument again, as, as opposed to kind of physical concepts we're talking about, the evolution of the, of the eye or of the body. Um, let me say,

[David DeSteno]
to me, the scientific method was the greatest, one of the greatest discoveries ever, and I'm grateful for it being a scientist. I do not believe in intelligent design. Um, but we're in one of those situations again where people can interpret it different ways. You know, there is every reason to believe the eye could have evolved in the way it did, and there were probably lots of different mutations that didn't benefit things, and then by probability, those all went away, and the ones that did kind of went forward, on and on. Um, I think for some people, what it really is, is this sense of awe, right? When you see something that is so spectacularly complex like the eye, you're kind of awed by it. How did it evolve in just this way? And so that emotion itself, the experience of awe itself actually makes people more open to supernatural experiences. So, this is wonderful work done by a student of mine, uh, now a professor, um, at St. Olaf, uh, Carlo Valdesolo, and what he showed is that when you

[David DeSteno]
allow people to feel awe by showing them natural beauty, like pictures of the Grand Canyon or wonderful sunsets, or however you're going to induce it architecturally,

[David DeSteno]
people suddenly

[David DeSteno]
give more probability

[David DeSteno]
to the idea that there is something beyond them, right? And so here again, you're seeing the combo. You're seeing, "Well, this, how could this ever form? I'm in awe of it. Oh, I'm feeling that emotion that makes me more open to the idea that there is in fact something beyond." And it seems to feel right. And let's face it, most people, if you're not trained scientifically, you don't really understand how to think probabilogically. And I'm not saying that's a problem with people, it's just part of our business, right? We, we have to learn how to think that way. Um, and so it just seems like so completely impossible that this one out of a trillion thing could happen. But if you think about how many other steps were taken, how many other different ways the lines could have gone in the genetics, they probably did, and they probably didn't work. And so they're left bi- It's kind of like the argument, "I never wore a seatbelt and I'm alive." Well, you are, but a lot of the other people who didn't, aren't, right? And so you can't prove it that way. So for me, I think, again, it brings me back to this issue of why I just don't think it's a relevant scientific question, because you can't prove it one way or the other. And so it's always gonna come down to faith. And so even people who make intelligent design arguments, ultimately, I find them not persuasive, because as you said, we can work our way to it. And then how do you prove there's two routes to get there? How do you prove which one it was? It's an article of faith.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. Uh, well, I personally believe in evolutionary theory.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, me too.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, and I also believe in God, and I don't think they're mutually exclusive.

[David DeSteno]
Well, this is the other problem, right? People say, "Well, I know

[David DeSteno]
what God is and what God did." If there is a God and the way God created the universe and did things, none of us have any conception of that, and it's probably beyond our brain's ability to understand what that is. And so for me, like you, I, I don't see any tension. It, the tension comes when you become very tied to actual texts, right? And, and, and positions of people interpreting what they think God did or what they think God said, and that's where you run into problems.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, I feel like the word that keeps sneaking up in my mind is overwhelm. I mean, we, we could think of awe as a...... positive experience. It usually is. But it, in some sense, you have to wonder whether or not, uh, some of the, where one inserts belief in God versus belief in a, in a scientific process-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... again-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... not mutually exclusive-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... but, um, has to do with where they sort of draw the line of overwhelm, or where the line of overwhelm arises for them. Because when I look at the Grand Canyon, I don't know much about geology. Uh, I have some sense of how it got there. But it is kind of overwhelming, right?

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I can't just zero in on one, you know, kinda layer of sedimentation and, and know the story of that. Which makes perfect sense why there are, you know, millions of layers on top of it. And then, of course, you would get that.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Th- th- that wall within the Grand Canyon. Whereas, I can look at an eye, um, whether or not it's in a cuttlefish, which have very interesting eyes by the way, W-shaped pupils, um, or a old world primate eye like ours, and I can say, yeah, I, I, you know, if you had a couple hours and you were having trouble falling asleep, I could tell you the story of how, uh, the photoreceptors wired up with the bipolar cells-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... or the ganglion cells, and how it tells your, your brain everything from time of day to the, the color and contour of images in the room.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Like, we understand that.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So there's no overwhelm for me.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. Yeah. That's fair.

[Andrew Huberman]
Whereas if I try and think about... Or, or brain development. I mean, I teach fetal development. I mean, it's amazing. Two cells, sperm and egg, and you get a, if all things go well, you get a baby. You get a human. And it's kind of like an, uh, an overwhelming experience, but-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... we understand a lot of how that happens. It, it still is miraculous.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It does seem like a miracle. So we assign these words like awe or miracle-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, to things that I think they sort of are at the line of, of overwhelm for-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... what our brain can comprehend. And for different people, it's different. Now, as I say that, it almost sounds like I'm drawing a, like a distinction between those that can have knowledge and-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... can handle and tho-, um, a concept, and those that don't. And I'm not. Because if you were to, uh, for instance, uh, present me with, um, well, a, a natural scene. Like, I love Yosemite. I go there, I'll go there soon to watch the meteor shower. I don't know how th- all that works.

[David DeSteno]
Right.

[Andrew Huberman]
I've got colleagues and friends who know pieces-

[David DeSteno]
Right

[Andrew Huberman]
... of it, and it, it, it's much better for me to just experience that and think about how people thousands of years ago saw the exact same thing. And it becomes a, a spiritual-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... religious experience for me.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It, I, you f- I will anticipate, we'll see how the, how much cloud cover there is this year. But I will feel connected to, to people-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... to God, et cetera.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
So, d- you see?

[David DeSteno]
No, I think that's-

[Andrew Huberman]
Like, I feel like there's a line of overwhelm feels big.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Likewise with grief.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Birth of a child.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, there's something that, like, fills us with... I don't know what you call the emotion. Maybe it's, uh, it, it... But it feels like a, a welling up of, of, like, neural activity, chemical activity.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And we kind of go, "This is a spiritual experience."

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
But that's also because I can't break it down.

[David DeSteno]
That's true.

[Andrew Huberman]
And I don't want to.

[David DeSteno]
No.

[Andrew Huberman]
You know?

[David DeSteno]
And that's, and that's in some ways what awe is. You're hitting on it exactly right. It's a sense of, of not being able to fully comprehend, feeling small in the presence of it. But I think the point that you're making that I wanna make sure isn't lost is when you can understand it,

[David DeSteno]
still doesn't mean

[David DeSteno]
it's not miraculous.

[Andrew Huberman]
Right.

[David DeSteno]
Or that God, if you're a person of faith, didn't set that process in motion. And this is, again, is, is why I th- think it's really important. It's like, when we learn to explain something, we get an insight into

[David DeSteno]
the power of creation. By creation I mean following evolution, not God created the world in six days creation. But as a lot of scientists who are people of faith will say, that to me is awesome. I appreciate the, the awe of creation, that it, it happened this way. It doesn't negate my belief in God because I can explain it. God put us here with a brain to learn and to understand how God's creation works. Um, and so I think

[David DeSteno]
your point about overwhelm is right, but I wanna make sure people realize that it doesn't mean that when you can explain it-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[David DeSteno]
... it's reducible.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. I agree. I mean, I, I, um, recently started raising coral. And I'm, like, in awe of coral.

[David DeSteno]
Hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And it makes me feel no less, um, uh, in touch with the, the incredible diversity of life and, and no less in touch with... And, and all the mechanisms, but no less in touch with, uh, notions of God or spirituality.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
The, the two seem to blend for me. But they di- that wasn't always true. In one of Richard Feynman's books, he talks about the fact that someone once challenged him with the idea that, "Well, you know, if you can understand all the elements of a-"

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
"... of a rose or..." I forget what the example was. You know, doesn't that, um, you know, at the quantum level, doesn't that diminish your experience of it? And he said, "No. To the contrary, it enriches my experience of it."

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
I don't know if he was a religious person or not. Something tells me probably not, but who knows?

[David DeSteno]
Probably not. I don't know.

[Andrew Huberman]
And then, you know, and I like the anecdote about, um, Steve Jobs, who unfortunately had said on his deathbed-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
... you know, uh, he, he was a spiritual person, into meditation, and obviously strongly, uh, uh, oriented towards technology also. But his final words, I think, were, um, like, uh, "Wow. Wow."

[David DeSteno]
Hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And I think we are all kind of, um, captivated by notions of the passage from-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... from life to death. Like wh- what is that? What comes next? Um, none of us still here know, uh, for sure. And I do wanna raise this, this issue of fear of death.

[David DeSteno]
Sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
As a... I mean, philosophers have talked about this. Psychologists have talked about this. I mean, the one thing that, um, I think lives in all of our brains, um, conscious or not, is a fear of death.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Huge religions are geared around the idea that this life is not the last life.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
What is known about people's belief in afterlife-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... being able to calm them about fear of death. I've heard it argued, and, uh, we'll talk more about addiction in a moment, that all addiction is fear of death or gambling or both. Um, and it's all gambling addiction.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Some people gamble in casinos, other people gamble in other ways.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
But that is, if you really start peeling back the layers, it's all fear of death. The e- the death anxiety being the one thing that binds all of us. So, afterlife, fear of death, heaven, hell.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
You know, break it down for us.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. So what we know, right, is that, um, if you look at, uh, anxiety around death, it's, it's kind of a, um, an upside down you, right? So people who really believe in an afterlife, they have the least anxiety about death, because they feel like, "I'm going someplace good." People who firmly reject any form of afterlife, they're a little more anxious than the believers, but they're less anxious than one other group, right? 'Cause they're like, "Oh, I'm gonna end up in the ground. Okay, don't like it, fine." The group that is the most anxious about death are the people who don't know. Because they're like, "Oh, wait, is there an afterlife? And if there is, did I do what I need to get into that afterlife?" And so those folks are the ones, because they're struggling with the belief, like, certainty, right? We know the bo- the brain likes certainty one way or the other. And certainty that things are gonna be good is better than certainty that there's just an end and there's no suffering. It's just an end. There's no hell you're going to. But the people who don't know, they're the ones who are the most anxious. And so, um, I think for... I think, I think, um, the reason a lot of religions talk about this, well, there are multiple reasons. One is because it's just inherently strange to think that you're a conscious being and one day that consciousness is gonna end. And so that's scary. But it often gets tied into a way to shape people's behavior, right? Religions use that fear as a way to guide people, right? You better

[David DeSteno]
be a good person or your karma is gonna be bad and your next life is gonna be in a worse position, or you're gonna go to hell and have pain for some period of time or perhaps everlasting. And so it takes on this moral tone, and that fear is very motivating, right? We know from the psychological literature, if you want to get somebody to do something, fear is a great way to motivate them.

[David DeSteno]
The problem with that is, is if you're constantly afraid of it all the time, your body is in a state of anxiety, and that's not healthy for you. And so, um, I think a lot of faiths try to kind of reinterpret

[David DeSteno]
fear of death in a different way. Death isn't always bad. So one thing you'll find in a lot of faiths is they ask you to contemplate your death. So in, in Buddhism, there are meditations that are focused on thinking about yourself dying. There's even these intense forms of meditation, I forget the actual

[David DeSteno]
word in the original language, but they're basically called corpse meditations, where people, the monks will meditate in front of a decaying corpse over days as a way to study that you can actually see and experience what will happen to you. In, um, Christianity, right, there's this sense of contemplate your death. On Ash Wednesday, which is the start of the season before Easter, uh, in many traditions, the priest will put ashes on your head or the minister will put ashes on your head and say, "From dust you came, to dust you will, you will go." It's a reminder that you're gonna die. In Judaism, it's interesting, even on their New Year's, which is Rosh Hashanah, that's a celebratory day, there's this prayer they say in, in temple called the, uh, Unetanneh Tokef. And part of that is, who's not gonna be here next year? Look around. Some will die by floods, some by famine, some by illness, some by fire. And again, it's a reminder that life is ephemeral. And so the trick with this is, if you can think about your death not in a morbid way, not in a way that you dwell on it, it's actually quite useful. So the one thing we know in, in psychological science is that as people age, their values change, right? When you're young, you want the new iPhone, you want to go on a great vacation, you want to get ahead, all of these kind of bucket list things for, um, that you think will make you happy. As you begin to age and you can see the end on the horizon, people's values change. Suddenly, they value time with loved ones, service to others, kind of things that build a legacy, right? Um, interestingly, if you look at the literature, those are the things that really bring happiness at any age. Those are the things that, experiences of people you love, service to others, make you happy. And so

[David DeSteno]
as we age, we come to realize that. Work by the psychologist Laura Carstensen at Stanford shows that if you have people contemplate their death when they're young, temporarily reorients their values toward the things that truly bring... Suddenly, they'll start caring about that stuff. And so the idea of contemplating death that is a part of almost every religious tradition, if you do it

[David DeSteno]
for a short period of time, and not in a morbid way, but daily, actually points you toward the things in life that make you more happy. And so

[David DeSteno]
if you then become a person of faith, y- you also believe that the end is gonna be good for you as well. And so you don't have that anxiety. And so I think religion and death is a complicated thing. There is fear of death, but there's also a way to use

[David DeSteno]
the idea that life is ephemeral to help us find happiness sooner than we typically do.

[Andrew Huberman]
On a related note, I think one of the most interesting things about the human brain, aside from its ability to change itself-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... plasticity, is how much control we have over our perception of time.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And when I say perception of time, I mean our ability to contract or expand our window of perception. So, just like we can contract and expand our visual window, um, we can contract and expand our perception of time. So, um, in a conversation like this, it's a fairly compact, I'm thinking about just the now.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
... if I were to take a walk this afternoon and I wanted to think about, you know, "Who walked on this beach-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... before me and, and before them, and who's gonna come after?" I can start to, um, see a bigger time bin, as we call it, time window. And then the significance of any one thing that's happening in the current moment becomes much smaller. Uh, I think about this a lot. And there's a wonderful book, um, that's not available in audio form- ... called The Secret Pulse of Time, that, that gets into how this, uh, expansion-contraction works.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But, um, I feel like thread through every religion and every religious practice is an attempt to reconcile the, the, uh, the need to feel, quote unquote, present-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... to live in the now, to do good deeds now, to not do bad deeds, to, to, um, be, uh, grateful. All, all of that, uh, socially connected, but also to link us to something larger that is

[Andrew Huberman]
basically designed to humble us.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
That we're, we're not as important as we think.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, no one problem is as important. Um, even the biggest challenge in the world is, um, this too shall pass. Maybe not in your lifetime because you're thinking about it until your last breath. Let's hope not. But no one else is gonna be worried about it afterwards.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So I don't quite know how to formulate this question, but what I'm asking is here, um,

[Andrew Huberman]
perhaps, again, it's, it's the notion that if one thinks really about the fact that we're gonna die-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
We're all gonna die. There are people who are claiming they're not gonna die, but they too are going to die. There's a lot of overwhelm in that. If you really go into that and you re- you know, if you're attached to y- your present life and the present moment as the most important thing.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But if you can access ideas and feelings around the fact that, you know, you're part of a continuum.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, you're connected to people in the past that had the same fears. That alone makes you feel a little less, a less, uh, it seems a little less futile. So the question I have is, what do you see across religions that allows people to bring themselves some peace around th- the reality that they're going to die, that is, um, really about connectedness, uh, not just with other people, but in time? Um, the Buddhists, um, seem to have mastered this through a daily practice of meditation.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
In other religions, it seems it comes about through what we call holidays.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, you know, each year on the same days, roughly, we go through the same practices that kinda links up year to year. It breaks up the, the moment-to-momentness of things. D'you see where I'm getting with this?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
I'm sorry this isn't a better formulated question, but I, I think about this all the time. I still don't know how to talk about it because there really isn't a language for this time elasticity.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, anyway, I love your thoughts on, on this, if, if, uh, if you would.

[David DeSteno]
I have a friend who's a rabbi. And not being Jewish, one day I said to her, "So, you know,

[David DeSteno]
why do you still pray in Hebrew? You know, in, in Catholicism we don't pray in Latin anymore. Like, we pray in English."

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. Good point.

[David DeSteno]
Right? And what she said was, "I mean, part of it is, is, is, is, is to keep the culture, but part of it is, too," she says, "it is sometimes an amazing experience when I stop to think that the words I am saying now

[David DeSteno]
have been said by Jews for thousands of years going back. And those same words will be said, hopefully, thousands of years going forward. And what it does is it situates me in this sequence of time. And I know that the challenges that I'm facing have been faced by people before and will be faced by people afterward. And in that experience, I feel part of something greater." And I think, you know, one thing we're seeing now, you keep hearing on, um, on the news, uh, how, um, people are leaving traditional faith, and they are. But there's a subset of people who are actually going back to more Orthodox faith, traditional Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism. And what they'll often say is there's an appreciation in these forms, whether it's still the Latin mass or other types of things, for things that have felt true and universal through time.

[David DeSteno]
And when I worship that way, I feel that connection to humanity and this sense that we're all in this together. And they find and feel a sense of, of deeper purpose. Like, things just aren't relative and, you know, changing here and there depending upon people's norms and morays at the moment. And so, you know, there's no work that I can think of that points to this, but I think the phenomenon you're describing is one that is very, um,

[David DeSteno]
felt by a lot of people, especially if they engage in practices that have a longer tradition going back.

[Andrew Huberman]
Because I think the human brain's ability to distract itself into task or moments or recreation or drug itself, um, so that you don't pay attention to the passage of time, this is why I do think that a lot of addictive behavior, but also just a lot of, um, what we call kind of unconscious

[Andrew Huberman]
stuff, like scrolling or-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... you know, or

[Andrew Huberman]
eating food that's not good for us even when we're not hungry, like, these things are just a... You know, I have a, a friend and she said, "You know, yeah, I'll get lost in, in audiobooks sometimes." I said, "Well, audiobooks are great. Reading's great." She's like, "Not the way she's using them," right? To just get lost, as a way-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... to distract.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
We don't know how to sometimes deal with, um,

[Andrew Huberman]
quiet. Why not? Is it 'cause we feel alone? Well, if not, then I think it's like this... I think it is really a fear of death.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, along the lines of addiction, I find it interesting that, um, in all the different, uh, sectors of, of 12-step programs, which I think the data now show can be very effective-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... uh, not for everyone, but they can be very effective for a lot of people. One of the requisite steps is giving over to a higher power.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
... in that step, it sort of, uh, spells out that the human brain, one's own brain is not capable of handling it all. Right? It also, i- it says, "Listen, you're not supposed to be able to do this alone."

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
"You're not even supposed to be able to do this with a community. You need something else first. The community is important, but a will to change is important, but you need help. And the one piece that you can't get away with is trying to do it without some notion of higher power."

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And 12 Steps are very careful not to dictate if that should be Christianity, Judaism-

[David DeSteno]
Right

[Andrew Huberman]
... or Muslim. It's sort of all-encompassing in that way. But it can't just be you and your brain-

[David DeSteno]
Right

[Andrew Huberman]
... and your, and your will.

[David DeSteno]
Right.

[Andrew Huberman]
And it not, and it's not you, your brain, your will, and your community of other people who are rallying against this, this thing you're trying to overcome. You have to give yourself, uh, give o- over some degree of power.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, this is the Serenity Prayer, right? Like-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... you, you're acknowledging what you can't control. And I find that to be remarkable, right? Um, some people have accused 12 Step of being a religion or a cult. We'll talk about cults in a moment. But I think therein is, uh, like, this acceptance that, like, we're ... The, the human brain is amazing-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... but it can't do all the things that it needs to do on its own. That, for me, is one of the most convincing reasons to have a belief in God.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Because I know a thing or two about the brain. I certainly don't know everything, and it's really good at a lot of things, and it's really dreadful at a lot of other things.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And it's completely incapable of other things. And there are lots of, quote, unquote, "energies" in the universe.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I mean, there's energies coming out of the sun that we can't see or perceive that act on us.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
So this notion that there would be energies in our universe, I know this sounds kind of mystical and woo and New Age, but literally, radioactive energies and energies-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... that we can't see but have an impact on us-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... that's not just something to debate. That's, that's real. Scientists will agree that's real. So

[Andrew Huberman]
I, I guess for me, the, the leap to God and religion doesn't seem as far-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... anymore. It just seems, like, it's like right there.

[David DeSteno]
I mean, things that we, you know

[David DeSteno]
... 30 years ago, if someone told you the way quantum mechanics work, you would have thought they were insane. And so, um, I think we have to have some intellectual humility that there are forces in this world, as you're saying, that we don't

[David DeSteno]
have access to yet in terms of our conscious awareness. But nonetheless, they can act on us. Your point though, I think, about, um, the 12 Step programs is an interesting one because they, they do work for a lot of people. And what the data show about kind of giving over some control, believing in a higher power, is it actually is, uh, useful for avoiding addiction. So people who are engaged with religious practice have some protection against, uh, addiction. The rates are lower. Um, but when you

[David DeSteno]
surrender to a higher power, a lot of people resist this, and they think the idea is problematic because they interpret it as meaning you're like an automaton. You're just gonna give over everything-

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm

[David DeSteno]
... to God and not be a thoughtful person. That's not what it means for the people who actually do this, right? For the people who surrender to God, what it means is, "I'm going to try and do the best I can, make the best decision I can, live the best way I can, but I realize that I can't control everything, including my own behavior all the time. So I'm gonna do the best I can, and then I'm just gonna give it over and hope that God, trust that God will help me." And that does two things. One is, again, it, it provides this sense that you have a friend. There's someone else who cares about you. You're kind of like a junior partner with this person working toward the goal. And that, I'm not exactly sure why, I don't know if any of us knows exactly sh- why it works, but that reduces stress and anxiety a lot, because, I mean, we like to think in this world that we're optimizers, right? I'm always like, "I wanna buy this car. Well, let me research everything about this car so I can make sure I get the exact right car." Or if I'm trying to d- make a decision about my health, I'm gonna research everything I can. But, you know, at a certain point, the tyranny of choice, too many, too much information can drive us nuts. And so for you do the best you can but then trust in something else, it reduces that stress, and I think ultimately then makes it easier for you to achieve that goal down the line because you also feel like someone else is counting on you. I mean,

[David DeSteno]
I don't go to the gym. I should go to the gym. You know, the one time in my life when I went to the gym? When I had a workout partner who I know if I didn't go was gonna be like, "Dave, you have to come. I'm counting on you." And so, you know, there's that added element too. And so I think the idea of surrender doesn't mean you're not thinking intelligently. It doesn't mean you're giving over control of your life. It means you're accepting a partnership with someone else who's gonna try and help you. And again, not for me to say if that's true or not, but I think that's how it works for people.

[Andrew Huberman]
We've been talking about God and, to some extent, religion. How many

[Andrew Huberman]
new religions are there? I mean, why don't we see new religions? I mean, obviously there are subdivisions, right? I know, you know, Mormons, um-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... LDS as they're, uh, called. Um, often, um, you have Orthodox Conservative and Reform Judaism. You have Catholics and Protestants, and you've got Seventh-day Adventists and ...

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Forgive me for not, you know, subdividing, um, other religions, but you get the idea. But-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... how often is there a new subdivision and how often is there an entirely new religion? And since I haven't heard of these new religions, um, how come they don't stick?

[David DeSteno]
It's a good question. In fact, for one episode of my show, we were interested in this because I didn't know the statistics. And so we invited on a scholar who studies this, and she kind of shocked me because she said that every year, there's between 100 and 200 new religions that form. Now, the definition there is a little loose, right? Some of those religions we would call cults. Some of those religions are, you know ... There's a person in Canada who put a Kleenox- Kleenex box on her head and said she's, you know, getting messages from some alien race. And-

[Andrew Huberman]
Did that happen?

[David DeSteno]
Something like that happened. I may not have the details exactly right, but yes. But most of them, the reason you don't hear about them is because they're flashes in the pan, right? For a religion to stick, there's two ways. One is somebody in power, right? You can think about in the old days, the emperor said, "This is my faith. You all will now be this faith." Um, but in the modern world, that's, that's less. It tends to be the case when they speak to some need. Uh, and that is their practices and their ideology address someone in, in, in a new way.

[Andrew Huberman]
Hmm.

[David DeSteno]
Um, the people who are leaving faiths are not becoming atheists. They're looking for new ways to be spiritual. Because let's face it, most religious institutions, they're human-based institutions. They have moral failures, right? And we know that there has been abuse and discrimination and misogyny and all these things attached to faiths. And hopefully we can talk about that 'cause I, I don't want people to think that I'm saying religion is always good. Although on average I think it is. Um, it has to speak to you, and those are few and far between. Right now, what astounded me is where people are having profound spiritual experiences is at Burning Man. So most people think of Burning Man as this kind of debaucherous party in the desert. Which for some people it is. It is. But, uh, this is, uh, work by the neuroscientist Molly Crockett at Princeton. She went to Burning Man. She was a Burner herself, but, but-

[Andrew Huberman]
It's coming up soon. Are you going?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, no. God no. I hate the heat.

[Andrew Huberman]
Y- do you know that, uh, this year ticket sales are up by a significant amount compared to even a few-

[David DeSteno]
Really?

[Andrew Huberman]
... even, um, before the pandemic?

[David DeSteno]
No, it w- it doesn't surprise me that I didn't-

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. A number of friends, um, who have never gone before contacted me in the last week are like, "A- are you going?" I've never been.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
I mean, I-

[David DeSteno]
Are you gonna go?

[Andrew Huberman]
Uh, no. This year I'll be abroad, but, um-

[David DeSteno]
Okay. Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... you know, uh, it could happen. Uh, I'm, I'm somewhat curious.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, but-

[Andrew Huberman]
N- not this year.

[David DeSteno]
What she showed is that there's a segment of people there that report having profound spiritual experiences. Now, if you think of Burning Man, right, it's, it's, it's one of these what we would call a liminal space, right? It is everything that's normal in life doesn't happen there. People go, they take different names. They wear different clothes. You are exposed to an environment that is relatively harsh in the desert. And people who have gone tell me the only way that you can really survive is you have to depend on other people. And they have this thing there called the,

[David DeSteno]
is it the culture of giving or gifting? I, I forget the actual name. But there's no money at Burning Man. Everything is basically through the kindness of others and exchange. And so people are in this environment where their normal life, their normal clothes, their normal identity is stripped away. They're experiencing the harshness of the elements, of the heat on the playa. And they experience that they can exist there because of the kindness of others. And people who interpret it this way, Molly finds, report not only feeling this profound kind of self-transcendent experience, but when they come back, it stays, and they actually tend to be more pro-social. And so some religions have realized this now. So a friend of mine named Alex Leitch, who's an Episcopal minister, runs a camp. 'Cause at Burning Man, there are all these camps. And his camp is called Religious AF. I don't know if I can say that word on the air.

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Far worse has been said.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. Right, right, right.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah.

[David DeSteno]
Religious as fuck. And so-

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. Yeah.

[David DeSteno]
... and what they are there and is, is, is it's, is it's he's there and he told me the reason he founded this is because when he first started going, he said, "I never

[David DeSteno]
felt God as palpably, the presence of God as palpably as I could feel it there." Because there were just people ministering to each other and welcoming each other and being kind to each other in, in a, in a way without expectation. And so he runs this camp, and there are a lot of people who used to be Christian who are experiencing this and, and coming to the camp and, and refinding their faith. Because in that moment, they're having those transcendent experiences that you normally don't get when you're just sitting in church sometimes. There's another group. I forget the... I think it's called Milk and Honey. I don't remember. But they have a 1,000-person Shabbat for, for Jews there, and it's, it's this incredible experience people report. And so I think for a lot of people, they're looking for those spiritual experiences, and things like Burning Man are a way to do it. And then they have, what do they call them? Little Burns or Remote Burns, right?

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[David DeSteno]
Throughout the year, they'll come together at different times and do this. And so I think what you're seeing is a desire of people to kind of fill that God-shaped hole in, hole in their heart, to feel that. And for a lot of them, kind of the staid religious rituals that we're kind of getting now aren't doing that. And so I could see something evolving out of that, but who knows where we're going.

[Andrew Huberman]
Interesting. Um, you know, The Grateful Dead and people that follow The Grateful Dead came close to meeting some of the major criteria for a, a religion, right? I, growing up in the South Bay area in the late '70s and '80s and early '90s, I mean, Grateful Dead would come play at Frost Amphitheater. They'd play at Shoreline. I mean, yet people literally following them around the country. It had elements of... I'm gonna offend some people. My sister was, uh, kind of into the... she didn't follow them, but she was a Deadhead. Um, I mean, it had elements of, of cultism or in the sense-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... that people were, quote unquote, "giving up their lives and going." But then people who did, did that would say, "No, that actually was not giving up life. That was accessing life."

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
You know, for them.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And then of course, I have some friends who are colleagues at Stanford who are, who were serious, quote unquote, "Deadheads," but that was only during the summer. So they were- ... like part-time, part-timers. Um, y-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. Yeah. Kinda like Burning Man, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. Few bands, however, uh, at least in the United States, and they were international, right? Um,

[Andrew Huberman]
had that kind of following.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, usually when we hear about followings where the main characters have beards-... um, and there's, uh, drugs involved.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, and not every Deadhead was into, super into drugs. I know some that were totally, uh, straight edge, actually.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, and they actually used to have, I should just mention, AA and NA meetings at-

[David DeSteno]
Okay

[Andrew Huberman]
... at shows, so people could go who were in recovery. Um, but, you know, cults generally include some, um, like over-symbolized leader.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Like, their face, some, you know, something like the, the, the skull, the like, steel, I think it's called, like, steel your, steel your face. Is that what that thing is called? And then there's Jerry, who's kind of like the, the main... Jerry Garcia was like the, the main one, right? And then this idea that you would do certain things and not do certain things. Yeah, it's elements of a religion.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, and, but cults, like the ones that we hear about, like the Heaven's Gate cult that thought that they were gonna live forever. They committed mass suicide during the Hale-Bopp comet.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Hale-Bopp came through and they were all, they, they killed themselves. Or the Branch Davidian thing in Waco. You know, you usually have someone who believes they are special. This was not true for the Grateful Dead. You never heard Jerry Garcia saying that-

[David DeSteno]
Right

[Andrew Huberman]
... he was like the Messiah or something. But with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, you, y- there, you had that, um, a, a self belief that one is extra special. You had people really changing their whole life structure. And then oftentimes the, you have crime.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
You end up with something happening internally where people are being exploited.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And then that's like obvious cult, or mass suicide, or, um, Jonestown or something like that. So, you know, the line between cult and new religion is extremely thin.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um,

[Andrew Huberman]
so it makes sense to me why not many would break through. Um, and so I have this question. Do you think that the existence of Christianity, Judaism, the Muslim faith, and Buddhism kind of tiles what the human brain needs in terms of options? Oh, and atheism and agnosticism. Like, if you, you take those, it sort of like tiles the various, um, like anxiety states that the brain has, and you go, "You know, we don't really need another one." Right? Like, all the things are handled. Grief, birth, enough celebrations each year, enough kind of, um, ideas and flexibility about the afterlife, enough, you know, moral structure internally. Not such a huge time commitment for this one, but, you know, if you're an Orthodox Jew or you're a very serious Buddhist, that's a lot of time.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
That's a lot of investment in ritual and meditating.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
But, you know, you can be a, a really like a darn good Christian by going to church on Sunday and-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... praying each day and doing some Bible reading. Like, you know, that's compatible with, with a bunch of other things. So you don't have to give up your whole life to invest in it.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
You get, see what I'm getting at here?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
It could be that, that the, that humans as a species have, uh, have figured this out. And then someone will say, "No, God figured it out," right?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
That this is what we need, it fills in the gaps. It seems unlikely that we're gonna get a bunch of other religions.

[David DeSteno]
I think so, but, I mean, f- let me talk about the issue of cult versus religion. I think you're absolutely right first. Cults primarily have the idea of this charismatic leader, which is why you often kind of hear this notion it's a cult of personality. It's usually somebody who thinks they're special. You have to worship that leader. And when somebody thinks they're that special, things often go wrong with, with where they're going to lead people. Um,

[David DeSteno]
regular religions, though, can have the same problems. I mean, the thing I like to say is when you look at religious practices, a way to think about them is as spiritual technologies, right? They're technologies, mind-body practices that can move hearts and minds. They can move them for good, they can move them for ill, right? It depends upon the motives of the people who are using them. So, you know, people always say, "Dave, religions are the source of all war." Most wars aren't fought about, fought about religion. There are some that are like, "Hey, I disagree with your interpretation of the scripture." Most of them are about land and resources, but religion gets pulled in. And what we know is that when you are feeling

[David DeSteno]
threatened... So, the Bible, as you said, is a book of many voices. There are beautiful passages in there about mercy and kindness. There are other passages in there about dashing the heads of your enemies' babies against rocks, right? To punish them. And so what we know is that when people feel more threatened, their conception of God, this is work by a psychologist Kirk Gray and Joshua Jackson, their conceptions of God become more aggressive and punitive. They believe that God values vengeance more. And if you ask them to recall verses from the Bible, they're gonna recall the ones that are about smashing the babies' heads as opposed to being kind and, and, and merciful. And so this is why you can see things like Christian nationalism form, and you can see, if you go to some of these events, you'll see pictures of Jesus holding an AK-47, right? Because our mind, to be adaptive, as if we're not evolved to be saints or sinners, when we feel we're threatened, we want to fight against that. We will use religion to justify it. And so the point that, that I want to make sure all your listeners know is, I'm not saying religion is good, it's a technology that can be used for evil. You know, even Richard Dawkins will say the same thing about science, right? You want to find a way to cure people of maladies, science is your friend. You want to find the best way to annihilate a bunch of people most efficiently, science is your friend. And so for me, the reason I, I spend this time talking about religion is I know it can be used for bad, but if you look at the data on average in people's lives, yes, certain institutions have caused people to be abused, discriminated against, et cetera, and we should combat those. But on average, whether it's a gift from God or a cultural adaptation, it helps us live better. For the most part, I agree with you, that is there's a lot of convergence in the practices of the faith 'cause in some ways we're all the same body and brain and it helps us solve those. Um, and-They're all pretty large a- and have their followings, and they're attached to the culture you're raised in. But I think that times of flux, times have changed, and I kind of sense we're getting in one of this n- one of these now. I don't mean, like, end times, but I mean things with technology, things with norms, the way that we have been living. Our economic practices are changing really rapidly right now, and people are becoming, at the same time, more disillusioned with some of the traditional faith. And so for me right now, this seems like a period where there could be a reorientation.

[Andrew Huberman]
Mm-hmm.

[David DeSteno]
And the ones that are gonna happen, that are gonna come, are the ones that speak to people. You, you mentioned AI. There have been churches, they haven't stuck yet, but I, I could see this happening, where they're built around an AI. The idea is AI will become so knowledgeable that it will almost basically be an omniscient super intelligence. Omniscient 'cause it can know everything about you through what you do online, and super intelligence because it can solve problems better than humans can. And so there are people who are thinking about churches around AI. Will it stick or not? I don't know. But to the extent that they... A new faith can let people feel that presence of God, can solve some of their problems by helping them feel connected to each other, reduce anxiety, reduce stress, it wouldn't surprise me if something else comes now in this kind of moment of flux we're in.

[Andrew Huberman]
I don't know if you're aware of this. Um, most people probably aren't, but, uh, the person who holds the world record for highest IQ-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... this has been verified by Guinness. I know because they posted the Guinness certificate to their account on X. Um, I follow this person out of interest.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, uh, is a self-declared, um, Christian.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Ver- very much, um, um, aligning their platform as the highest IQ in the world, and, and by a huge margin-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... uh, I should say, um, with their understanding of the Bible and why Christianity is the, the, the best answer to-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
... holds the best answers to everything. I, I should say I don't align with ev- e- everything they post, and so I-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... just wanna be clear about that. But it's very interesting to me, um, that you have people who are using technology, like social media, as a way to platform traditional longstanding religions-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... and merging that with kind of, uh, modern notions of intelligence, right? IQ tests aren't the only, uh, way that we gauge intelligence, of course-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... but I think most people place enough value on people who have

[Andrew Huberman]
high, extreme IQ to, to, to, um, interpret it a certain way.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
I wondered, until I realized this is actually a person, at least to my knowledge, I wondered, like, is this an AI thing?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And now there's video, so he'll-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
He's in Korea.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
He'll, he'll, he speaks English and he'll, he'll talk about this.

[David DeSteno]
No, but you're-

[Andrew Huberman]
You know?

[David DeSteno]
... you're seeing it similar in Silicon Valley right now. Like, I think, I think Peter Thiel is embracing Christianity even he-

[Andrew Huberman]
Really?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh, okay.

[David DeSteno]
Even Elon Musk who's... I don't think he says he believes in God, but he says Christianity is a force for good in the world. And-

[Andrew Huberman]
I recall him saying there's, there's got to be something there in terms-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... of energy in the universe.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And when that question was posed.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, and so I, I think you're seeing this among a lot of tech sophisticates. I don't have the good answer to why, but it is... Your, your point is well taken, that is, intelligence... How religious you are does not correlate with intelligence, right? There are really brilliant people who embrace the idea that there is a God and there is a creator, and there are some that aren't. And I think it's because those people realize, like I was saying before, that

[David DeSteno]
if you're a person who is really rational and is really intelligent, when you look at the data, there's nothing to refute it. And so again, no one sees evidence of God in the world scientifically, but we also realize we can't rule it out. And when they have

[David DeSteno]
whatever their own inner life is, if they feel they have that connection, why reject it? And so I, I, I think it's important to realize that it's not a marker of poor intelligence.

[Andrew Huberman]
Unless, uh, there's something I'm not aware of, the person holding the, uh, Guinness-confirmed highest IQ in the world is certainly highly religious.

[David DeSteno]
Yes.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, uh, so we know the, uh, the boxes are checked, uh, probably all-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... all up and down. There are probably atheists that have very low intelligence and atheists with very high intelligence-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... and Christians and Jews and Muslims and the, and the Buddhists, and the, and the whole business. I think one of the reasons why certain religions get tacked with, um, stereotypes, um, are the, the kind of avatars that we see in our mind when we think about that religion. So for instance, um, Buddhism, you think about the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama seems, um, like what most people think about the Dalai Lama... Um, well, prior to this recent kind of controversy, I thought the Dalai Lama is just kind of like a, just a happy-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... just happy, all-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
... ev- good with everything, right?

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
The, um, even the, the, um, style of clothing is very kind of, um, generic across monks. When the Dalai Lama's walking around, like, you know, all in these orange robes and they look pretty, pretty peaceful and happy and-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, so people, I think, assume that, okay, well, um,

[Andrew Huberman]
if you wanna feel like that, Buddhism would be a good idea.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Right? Um, whereas other religions tend to, uh, have a bit more of a outw- their brand is a bit more varied in terms of the emotional tone.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
As you may... We talked about Christianity.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Certainly Old Testament, New Testament.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
What do you think about the branding of religions? Because I feel like it's one of the most important factors that either draws people toward or away from a religion.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Whether or not the person is speaking words of love, universal love, love only for if you join in, acceptance, forgiveness-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, condemning. I mean, these are the, the things that people resonate with-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... or that serve as separators, and I think, um...They're also the things that make us look at some people and go, "That person freaking crazy."

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Like- like, I mean, you didn't really have to see David Koresh speak for more than a second. You didn't-

[David DeSteno]
Yeah

[Andrew Huberman]
... even have to know about all the criminal stuff going on.

[David DeSteno]
He had the crazy eyes, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. Like, the guy's crazy.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Right? And he- and his glasses made him look like Jeffrey Dahmer also. And, like, they're... I don't know what's up with those glasses, but, um, you know, like, this guy's, like, eerie.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
You wouldn't, uh, you wouldn't let him near anyone you care about. So, there- there's this kind of branding issue that I think is important, um, at least to discuss, because I think when people hear religion, their mind y- goes to that.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
They're not thinking about the- the practices necessarily. They're thinking about the brand.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah, I mean, if- if you're not familiar with a religion, same as if you're not familiar with a product, what's gonna drive you is the stereotype of the brand. But I think the more you look, you realize that those are problematic, um, for good or for ill. So, you know, you raised the point about the Dalai Lama, and, you know, my original reaction when I first saw it was exactly the same as yours.

[David DeSteno]
But, you know, even Buddhism, uh, a religion that is built on the idea of loving kindness and ending suffering, you know, in Sri Lanka right now is being used to justify kind of a genocide against certain groups, and the monks themselves are taking up arms, right? And that... People are shocked when they hear that because any religion can do that. So, the- the danger in religion is always that by increasing community for those who are part of your religion, you can be increasing the distance against those who aren't part of your religion, which is why at heart, the true message of religion is not to make it us versus them. It's to increase the moral circle of concern, such that it includes everybody. You know, the Bible talks about you should honor your father and your mother and be good to your family, but more than that, if you're counting the number of times it says who to be good to, it says, "Be good to the stranger. Be good to the stranger in your land." And then so it's expanding that moral circle, but my point is that, you know, people now say, "Oh, look at the Christian nationalists. I would never wanna be any part of that," right? It's all, if you're a person on the left, it's all people who are conservative and looking to control people's lives. And so the branding is a big problem, but it, I think, obscures the complexities that are going on in different faiths. But you're right. That's gonna be the thing that's gonna draw you or repulse you, even if it's not accurate.

[Andrew Huberman]
We know from medicine that the more similar that your doctor, uh, looks to you and the people you know, the more likely you're going to take their advice.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, I think similarly, the- the more different the- the dress of a- of a religious figure, uh, the more different their haircut, the more different they speak, the less likely you are to, you know, join up with them.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It feels f- far away. And so it's going to be interesting to see in the years to come how people gravitate toward or repelled by religion in general or specific religions, given that now pretty much everything is visible to everybody, right? You know, it's- it's not sufficient for somebody to- to just post things in texts. Y- They have to actually speak in video, I believe.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, you have to see them. You have to kind of like... Uh, and so, um, we used to talk about scripture, right? But now religious figures are we expect to see them directly.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, and I think there's going to be less shrouding and less separation, and it'll be really interesting to see if people, um, are, uh, drawn to or repelled from people. I don't know what to predict.

[David DeSteno]
I don't know either, because you could think about it as

[David DeSteno]
they're making themselves more accessible to the public and to the masses. But again, there was something also sometimes when they held themselves as separate, as- as- as more holy, more knowledgeable, more someone not like me who- who knows more than I do, who I can trust. So, it's- it's a good point. Um, I'm not sure which way it's gonna go.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah. There's something very true about the time we're living in now, which is very different than just 20 years ago.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Which is now, the more famous you are, the harder it is for you to control your reputation.

[David DeSteno]
That's true.

[Andrew Huberman]
Because the real you has to be visible, and any flaws are also going to be, uh, visible at some point. Um, whereas 20 years ago, the more famous you were, the easier it was to maintain your reputation. People could really shroud themselves.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And, um, they could create mystique.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, and this is true in every area, not just in terms of celebrity and fame. This is true for politicians.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, this is true, I think, for religious figures. Uh, even my friends from the, you know, um, special operations community have said, you know, a lot of the mystique that- that empowered them to do really difficult things, um, a lot... You know, movies have been made about their community in ways that has been, um, semi-destructive, actually, to certain aspects of the work they needed to do. And so I see a lot of parallels here. And so it's going to be interesting if we start to embrace that some of these religious figures also are gonna be flawed, right? I mean, the Catholic Church, you know, had the veil pulled back on a- a subset of Catholics. Certainly wasn't all, but a subset of the, uh, people in the Catholic Church doing horrible things.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Um, but there's still a lot of Catholics in the world.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Right? People who understand, uh, Catholicism were able to say, "That's not what Catholicism is about."

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
"In fact, we're about the exact opposite," and were able to, I think in- in... By now, they've reasonably dissociated themselves from that, right?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. I mean, there still are ongoing debates, and what will happen now is you'll- you'll have people who are coming up for higher positions within the church, and it'll look back and show where they... Even though they didn't do anything, they were covering things up. So, the echoes of that go on. But, you know, the point you raise is- is a good one. I think it's going to hit certain religions more than others. So, there are certain religions where it's really important to have an intermediary, like in Catholicism, right? For you to get certain sacraments-The priest is the mediator, right, because the priest does this transubstantiation, allows the- the- the bread and wine to be turned into the body- body and blood of Christ that you then receive. Um, in many other religions, the role of the minister or priest or reverend isn't as important, right? There's direct experience. I can experience God directly in my prayers or through my practices. And so, I think a lot will depend on

[David DeSteno]
whether you need that mediator or not. And I think there is this push among some people to want that direct experience, to not be

[David DeSteno]
hindered or have the baggage of the institution upon them.

[Andrew Huberman]
Couple of questions for you-

[David DeSteno]
Hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... uh, if- if you're willing. Um, do you pray?

[David DeSteno]
I'm one of those people who prays

[David DeSteno]
at times

[David DeSteno]
where I'm feeling the stress. So, prayer is not a practice of mine. I always feel like when I say this, I'm like the doctor who smokes cigarettes, right? It's like, "David, you tell people prayer is good." Um, I'm still kind of working out my belief system. You know, the- the show I do, How God Works, is really as much of a journey for me as it is for everybody else. And so, I- I believe in the data. I believe this stuff is good. I was raised Catholic. I was an altar boy. I left the Church. Where I am now, I'm trying to figure it out. But what I try to do is embrace practices that I think matter. So, I embraced this practice of gratitude, right? Rather than praying every day to get it, I find ways to cultivate it daily and see how it changes me. Um, I try to meditate. Am I good at it? No. Do I think it's beneficial to me? Yes. And so, I'm trying to figure out which spiritual community, if any, I fit in. I like to say I'm an agnostic. You know, 20 years ago, I would have been an atheist. Now, I realize, I'm humble enough to say, "I don't know." I've seen or felt things that I can't explain. Does that tell me anything? I don't know. But I'm on this journey to- to find out, and I hope, you know, I take my listeners with me on that journey.

[Andrew Huberman]
Do you believe in miracles?

[David DeSteno]
Depends how you define miracles. I believe that there are things that happen that we cannot explain. And being an agnostic, I'm willing to say that those could be due to some unseen force, I just don't know. But I believe there are

[David DeSteno]
things that happen beyond our understanding and beyond our ability to predict.

[Andrew Huberman]
Well, in addition to your book, um, and your podcast, um, if somebody is interested in exploring these questions, they want to live in the question, which it sounds like you're doing, right?

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
You're living, very much so, living in the question, um,

[Andrew Huberman]
of, is there a God? What- what role does God play, um, in one's life, et cetera. If somebody's interested in exploring those questions, in addition to reading your book and listening to your podcast, which they definitely should do 'cause I think it provides a really, um, elegant framework for how to approach these things, um, what else do you recommend? Um, y- you know, you are in a position to make recommendations, um, understanding that people will make their choices, uh, either way.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah. I mean, so- so, let me take off my scientist hat for one moment and- and just talk to you as me and what I believe. Um,

[David DeSteno]
if there is a God, I believe that it's a God who would care for all of God's creatures, that there wouldn't be one religion that is right. And what I've seen in enough different faiths, the ones that- that have lasted a while and, um, meet people's needs, is that they provide ways to live better lives. And so, I would say, try on different ones. See what resonates with you. I mean, people convert, people leave, and I think really, there are multiple routes to God if God exists, and there are multiple ways to use His wisdom to improve your life if God doesn't exist. And it's okay to sample. It's okay to try. It's okay to ask your questions. But what I want to urge them to do is, please don't just assume that there's no rational reason to think about religion. And the best piece of advice I can give you is- is- is advice that a wise rabbi once told me. And the Hebrew, I'm not gonna pronounce it correctly, but the Hebrew saying is- is, uh, "Naish v'Nishma." And that basically means, "We will do and then we will understand." And this comes from when Moses, in the Book of Exodus, was coming down from the mountain with The Ten Commandments, and he was teaching the Israelites about it. And they're like, "What? I don't quite understand this. But okay, I'm gonna do it." And sometimes, it's in the doing of the practice, that the understanding comes later of why it's important or how it can help you. If you have to work out all of the logic first, it can be an impediment. And so, try.

[Andrew Huberman]
Thank you. I appreciate that, and I know everyone will appreciate hearing that.

[Andrew Huberman]
I want to thank you for the work that you're doing in your laboratory-

[David DeSteno]
Oh

[Andrew Huberman]
... and teaching, um, and the fact that you're writing books about hard topics. And that you're coming to those hard topics, you know, uh, you have tremendous support out there, of course, um, but, you know, it's a bold thing for a scientist, um-

[David DeSteno]
Don't do it before tenure. That's the thing That I am, yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
Yeah, that's what I said about starting a podcast.

[David DeSteno]
Yeah.

[Andrew Huberman]
And that you're taking the time to come here today, to teach and to educate. You have your own podcast and your book. We'll provide links to those in the show note captions, obviously. And, um, I'm a huge fan of your work. Today's conversation really reinforced for me a number of things. Um, one, how important it is to live it in these very important questions, regardless of where one lands or happens to be, regardless of what religion you were raised with or lack thereof. And also, that, you know, there are a lot of questions that bind humans-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... um, and a lot of them are scary, like...And what happens after I die? You know, what, um... What's the meaning of all this? Um, you know, is there a God? Those, those sorts of things. And, I, I feel like you're providing a very useful roadmap for people to continue to ask those questions without telling them what to believe, certainly-

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm

[Andrew Huberman]
... nor who to believe, nor, um, if what they're hearing out there is correct or not. But you're, you're giving people a roadmap for how to pose really good questions.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
And I think the fact that, um, the data clearly show that there's benefit to practices... We keep coming back to this, uh, as you just did, with the practices, and in the doing, there's a lot of information. Um, I, I hear a tacit message also that, you know, one shouldn't be worried that you're gonna, like, get swept down the, the, um, the path of, of lack of self-control.

[David DeSteno]
Mm-hmm.

[Andrew Huberman]
It's, it's actually about having more agency, um, in, as one asks these questions. So, thank you for doing the work you do at every level. You work at so many different levels, um, to explore these ideas and to educate people. Certainly, I've learned a ton today, and I know our listeners have too, so...

[David DeSteno]
Well, thank you for having me on. I, I appreciate the opportunity.

[Andrew Huberman]
Oh, thank you. We'll come back again. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. David DeSteno. To find links to his research, as well as to learn more about his books, including his most recent one entitled How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep, to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There, you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms. So, that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab Podcast. Again, it's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available, completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. David DeSteno. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

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