How to Restore Your Faith in Humanity | Dr. Jamil Zaki x Dave Asprey

We genuinely feel good in service to others. It puts us in a flow state.

Absolutely.

And we forget it all the time. What's the best way to remind ourselves that humans are good and want to help?

This is a great question. And I think that we've talked about thinking like scientists. I think a great way to remind ourselves of what people are really like is, is to act like scientists as well. You know, the monk and author, one of my favorites, Pima Chodron, says we can treat our lives like an experiment. We can interrupt the usual cycle of thought and explore more actively. That's a paraphrase, by the way she writes. She writes so much better, so much more eloquently than I speak. But. But this is what I try to do. I do what I call taking leaps of faith on other people. Now, this is not, you know, sending my bank information to a prince who's going to wire me $14 million. It's not being naive or Pollyannish or being taken advantage of. It's taking calculated risks again, to show that I believe in people. You know, Ernest Hemingway said, the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. But it doesn't just teach us about people. When we trust them, it changes them. One thing that we haven't talked about today is self fulfilling prophecies. It turns out that people become who we think they are because who we think they are affects how we treat them. And how we treat them affects how they treat us in response. So cynics, because they start out with this bleak assumption, treat others in contemptuous and mistrustful ways and bring out their most selfish side when we practice hopeful skepticism instead, we treat people like the folks we hope they are instead of the people we fear they will become. And as a result, we bring out their best. We witness human goodness all the time and it is there whenever we want to see it. You know, my friend Dacher Keltner studies awe, this emotion that we get when we experience vastness.

Yeah.

And feel like we're part of something greater than ourselves. And you might think of awe as, okay, I'm looking at the Milky Way on a dark night or a mountainscape or a grove of redwood trees. But in surveys of thousands of people, Dacher asked them, what made you feel awe today? And the most common response was what he calls moral beauty, the everyday kindness of other people. So you're asking, how do we get better at witnessing this again? I want to say we just pay closer attention, right? We give people chances. We think and act like scientists. Again, this is not about being naive. It's about being aware. And, and when we are aware, that goodness sort of bubbles up from every corner of our lives. I'm not saying that everybody is great all the time at all, but we underestimate how much of it there is around us all the time.

It turns out that gratitude and awe are necessary for deep forgiveness. And when I have people go through my 40 years of Zen program in Seattle, you know, five day, mostly executives and celebrities and people, in order to let go of some belief that that was put in there without your consent when you were young, the thing that opens the door is recognizing gratitude and feeling awe. And lately I added ketamine as an option to that program. You don't have to. People have ketamine like, experiences without it. But ketamine ramps up the awe, and it ramps up neuroplasticity when it's used or medical supervision. And that leads to a question for you. What is the role of psychedelics in seeing human goodness?

You know, there's. There's a lot of data coming out on this, and I. I won't pretend to be an expert in that entire literature. I know that there are some studies that find that therapy with psychedelics and in particular MDMA can in essence, open us to perceiving other people. I don't think there's work on cynicism in particular, but focus us on perceiving them empathically. And my sense is that the more clearly you see people, the more you witness their goodness. So one could extrapolate and say, well, maybe there's a connection there. But again, I don't want to get out over my skis as an empiricist here, but I think that intuitively you can see the connection pretty clearly.

Since I moved to Austin a couple of years ago, I've gotten to know a few groups of friends. And I'm. I'm someone who has friends all over the world because I travel extensively to speak on big stages and, and for my work in the world. And I'm really inspired. These are people, one group I'm thinking of in particular in their early 30s, where they all. I don't know how kind of became conscious communicators. And this is a dozen plus people. And they're all real with each other because somehow they cultivated trust in that friend network. And there's some of the happier people, and they all have their struggles and.

All, of course, but it.

It's so inspiring to me. I didn't have that at that age where people were just so real because they learned how to have a trusted group of people where they could just show up and be themselves and not have all the. All the drama and pain and fear. How would you advise young people to build a trusted group like that? Is there a process? Is there a learning? What's the trick?

Wow. I think that one thing is to be more open to initiating relationships. The more people we connect with, the more we can find who our people are. We can find our tribe. I think that a second piece is, again, this is a type of social risk taking. But one thing that I think we see in our social network studies of Stanford is that there are certain people who have what we would call betweenness centrality. This sounds like the wonkiest phrase. What does that mean? It means that they connect people who are not otherwise connected, that they are social bridges between groups. And I think that finding your people, finding a trusting community requires the bravery, the courage to not just have isolated relationships that are great, but to bring those people together as well. Community is an active practice. It's not something that happens to you. And so the more ownership we can take over our communities, the more active that we can be as stewards of those communities, the more likely they are to cohere and come together.

There are people who are super connectors or have that superpower of creating community and safe spaces. I'm thinking like Joe Polish, who's been on the show in a group of 500 entrepreneurs who genuinely, it's amazing the kind of experiences. Or JJ Virginia, who does entrepreneurship for health, who's also been on the show and taught me how to be in the New York Times for the first time, I'm genuinely helping people who have that special ability to just know all this stuff about all the people and match people with the right ones. So one thing that I wish I'd have known earlier is it's possible to find people like that and then join their tribe. If you have good discernment and you realize, okay, if that's not your superpower, you can find a group and join it, or you can make your own very. I'd say in my early 20s, I went about. I maybe had a group of six people where I worked really, really hard on that. And I realized that's probably not my superpower. And some of those are still really close friends today. But the amount of work for me to make a group cohesive is very high. For people for whom it isn't work at all. It's just natural and inherent in them. Those seem very rare do you have any data or thoughts how common are these superconductors?

Well they're they are relatively rare but Charles Duhigg my friend and author of this great book Super Communicators yeah would argue that any of us could become super communicators with the right effort. Now he wouldn't say it's easy but he would say there are techniques that we can use in our interactions. The that I say actually connect a lot with hopeful skepticism things like being really curious about others asking. He finds that super communicators ask ten times more questions than the average person that they validate and they try to draw out themes in the comments that multiple people are making during a conversation trying to actively generate connection and deepen communication in real time. Again I think this takes work and maybe it's easier for some people than others as a default but Charles would argue strenuously that if we want to be better connectors we can work at that.