83% of people on Earth believe in God
Rubin cited a Perplexity search showing 83% of the global population believes in God, yet AI — trained on human data — does not reflect this belief.
Snapshot · The a16z Show
Rick Rubin on AI, Creativity, and The Way of Code
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Jul 1, 2026
Where this was said
The Collective Unconscious and Morphic Resonance
At 27:02 · chapter starts 23:38
When Anjney Midha asks whether Rubin believes in the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, Rubin says yes without hesitation and reaches for Rupert Sheldrake's framework of morphic resonance. [1] — Rick Rubin "When 100 monkeys on one side of an island learned to eat coconuts, the monkeys on the other — with no contact — started doing it too. The s…" 23:57 He recounts the story of an island divided between two groups of monkeys who had no contact — when 100 monkeys on one side learned to eat coconuts, the monkeys on the other side spontaneously started doing the same. The same phenomenon, he argues, explains the 4-minute mile: once Roger Bannister broke it, many others quickly followed, as if the belief in its possibility had been transmitted through some shared field of consciousness. Andreessen proposes a non-mystical alternative: humans are so hypersocial and so attentive to each other that the collective unconscious is simply a practical property of being social animals — a point Jordan Peterson makes about the complexity of human language. Rubin grants the social dimension but insists the more interesting case is the one where information travels without any visible connection, which he takes as evidence of something genuinely beyond current scientific understanding.
The Collective Unconscious and the Hundredth Monkey
When 100 monkeys on one side of an island learned to eat coconuts, the monkeys on the other — with no contact — started doing it too. The same thing happened with the 4-minute mile. Collective belief in possibility changes what everyone can do.
The 4-minute mile: impossible until broken
Rubin cited the 4-minute mile as an example of morphic resonance: once one person broke it, many others quickly could — belief in possibility changed collective capability.
83% of Humanity Believes in God — Why Doesn't AI?
Perplexity says 83% of the world's population believes in God. AI is trained on human knowledge. So why doesn't AI believe in God? Because human intervention — specifically the concentrated worldviews of AI developers — has programmed it out.
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