"Intelligent, brutally honest, and hopeful"

EXPERIMENT

Like your life depends on it!

Professor David Reiley, research scientist by trade and curious experimenter by nature, examines (with your help!) how we form our beliefs and how these beliefs shape our lives.

In this captivating performance, David examines the power and importance of experimentation and beliefs through a series of personal stories on topics including love, baseball, phone sex, and Magic: The Gathering.

You'll think about your beliefs in a way you may never have before, and you may even start some experiments of your own.

David's belief is simple but radical: we all carry mistaken beliefs, and unless we question them, they cause us to make bad decisions without realizing it. If we learn to think more like scientists, we can identify those mistaken beliefs, understand ourselves more clearly, make wiser choices, and create better lives. On stage, David doesn’t just share his experiments — he invites audiences to imagine their own.

EXPERIMENT is an interactive, thought-provoking stage show that dares to ask the question...
How do we choose what to believe? And how do these beliefs affect our lives?

David's one-man storytelling show draws on the same tools he used as a scientist — careful observation, deliberate experimentation, skepticism, humility — and illustrates how he has applied them to his personal life.

With humor, vulnerability, and intellectual curiosity, he shares what he’s learned from observing his emotions and running experiments in love, honesty, failure, and starting over.

David Reiley

David Reiley has spent his career seeking truth — first as a scientist, now as a storyteller.

As an economist, he pioneered the use of real-world experiments to understand how much various factors can influence people's economic choices, such as digital advertising, charity solicitations, and the bidding rules in an auction. He worked at Yahoo!, Google, and Pandora (now SiriusXM), taught at the University of Arizona, and built a course on experiments and causality at UC Berkeley.

But in 2025, after leaving his job in tech, David turned his curiosity inward. He created Experiment, a one-man storytelling show where he demonstrates how thinking like a scientist has enabled him to solve problems in his personal life.

Blending science, humor, and raw honesty, David brings audiences along on his most personal experiments — in love, family, and the ability to correct our own beliefs when we turn out to be mistaken.

The scientist behind EXPERIMENT

Resources

In EXPERIMENT, I share some of the wisdom I've developed based on my life struggles. To help you better understand the influences that helped me grow, i'm sharing a few resources from folks whose teachings have helped me figure out how to live a better life.

Since my show often inspires interest in personal growth among those who attend, I will be sharing a much more extensive list of resources from my personal-growth journey with audience members after they have seen the performance.

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was my favorite TV show as a young child. I believe Fred Rogers was one of the wisest, kindest people who has ever lived. He had particular wisdom about teaching children to feel their feelings, and to understand the key distinction between feeling an emotion and taking an action. A number of episodes are available to watch online, and I think they still hold up well, for adults as well as children.

Cosmos, the 1981 TV series by Carl Sagan, influenced me tremendously when I was in fifth grade. Sagan, together with his wife Anne Druyan, have a beautifully poetic way of talking about the universe, and how humans have practiced science to learn more over time about how the universe really works. These episodes inspire in me a tremendous amount of awe, wonder, joy, and curiosity - and I feel very grateful for those feelings.

The Waking Up app, by Sam Harris, helps me with mindfulness: becoming more aware of the present moment and my own thoughts and feelings. The app has a huge library of guided meditations and talks about philosophy that might help us live better lives.
Sam's Making Sense podcast also regularly helps me understand the world better.