Snapshot · The a16z Show
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.
Where this was said
At 25:10 · 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.
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.
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.
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