Rewiring Your Brain for Hope: How to Overcome Cynicism with Dr. Jamil Zaki | 1197 | Dave Asprey

Being pre disappointed, being cynical is safe only in the way that house arrest is safe. Right? I mean, sure, you won't get run over by a bus if you stay in your room for the rest of your life. Yeah, but what will you lose? And it turns out that over the long term, people who can't open themselves up be vulnerable and trusting, yeah, they might be betrayed less often, but they also lose the ability or the opportunity, let's say, to feel real connection with others.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Man. Today is going to be such a fun episode because we're going to talk about cynicism. You may have heard me say, historically, two trolls, that skeptics die something like six years ahead of people who are not skeptical. And I've done so much work on myself at 40 years of Zen and in caves and monasteries around the world to not have a glass half full or half empty, but to just have a glass with some stuff in it and to not judge it. And being not a Pollyanna where, oh, everything is so good, but also not being the inverse of that, where everything is so bad. This has been a path for me because I grew up in a family of skeptics. My grandparents subscribed for many years to the Skeptic Inquirer, which is a magazine that did what Snopes does or any of these other hater websites. Like, we'll take down everyone who doesn't agree with whatever. So I grew up a cynic and a skeptic. And how would you like to learn from a professor of psychology at Stanford University and a director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab who is an expert in cynicism and skepticism? I know I would like to learn. And Our guest is Dr. Jamil Zaki, who is that man? Jamil, welcome to the show.

It's great to be back. Dave.

Man, last time we talked, you were. You were in a little Covid closet. And let's open with that. How did you stop yourself from becoming very cynical after this government response to Covid and destruction of all these businesses, including a couple of mine? Like, did that leave a mark on you or did you overcome it?

I did not stop myself from being cynical during the pandemic. In fact, I failed completely in that task. And the reason that I started working on this book, Hope for Cynics, is to figure out what was happening inside me. As you know, Dave, I've studied the science of empathy, compassion, kindness for 20 years.

So you're kind of a stud that way. I Love that you're putting numbers and research behind these things that are generally the focus of religion and spiritual practice around the world. Like you're, you're changing the world by making it safe for cynics to at least consider what you're talking about.

I hope so. And certainly I think sometimes that my work is just adding another angle to wisdom that people in many spiritual practices have had for thousands of years. But you know, it's also this work on human goodness made me a kind of ambassador for our better angels. People bring me in to speak or write for them when they want to feel good about our species.

Yeah.

And yet during the pandemic and lockdown and all the isolation and sadness that came with it, I felt like just because I studied something and knew all about it didn't mean that I felt it. I felt this real split between my outer and inner worlds. You know, I would, I would be brought in and give a browsing talk on empathy and how great people were. And as soon as the zoom screen went black, I would go back to doom scrolling. I felt like I was secretly much more cynical than I was letting on. And I thought, well, man, if I, a scientist of human goodness is having a hard time believing in human goodness, what are the rest of us going through? And that set me on this journey to understand why it's so hard to have faith in one another, what that's doing to us and what we can do about it.

Why is it so hard?

Well, part of it is the way that we are wired.

Yeah.

Human beings experience what's known as negativity bias. We pay lots more attention to threats in our environment than to the good stuff. We pay more visual attention. Right. We look more closely at threatening versus positive information. We remember negative events better than positive events. And we make decisions more based on what we don't want to lose as opposed to what we want to gain. And you can see why that would make sense from a almost survival perspective. You know, 200,000 years ago, the person who was worried about the saber toothed tiger probably did better than the person next to them who was blissed out by the sunset.

Can I share some thinking with you? I was going to bring this up later in the interview, but it feels like this is a good framework that our audience understands.

Please.

That supports what you just said so thoroughly. I definitely was a skeptical, cynical guy when I was younger. And also a lot angrier. Funny enough, those go together, don't they? But since I studied mitochondrial biology and I'm a, I'M a computer hacker and a systems engineer kind of guy. I realized all life on the planet has to follow basic rules. And these are basic rules that have to work for bacteria, not for complex life forms. And it turns out it doesn't matter if you're a tree or a slime mold or a person, number one. If it's scary, run away from, kill or hide. Different life forms, like trees will make bark or make toxins or make spikes. Right? Or a jellyfish will sting you. Or bacteria make toxins or form biofilms. In humans, you know, we form tribes and we make weapons and all, but it's always fear is number one. And that makes sense because if something eats you, your species may end from the point of view of a bacteria, right? So fear that there's our negativity bias explained evolutionarily. And the second thing that all life has to do is eat everything that's food. They're off words of fear. And then food. And this is why. And people eat all the pizza and all the cheesecake at the same time, right? Because you're the basic building blocks of your body. Single cells and subcellular things. They're wired to do that whether or not you're in there. In fact, they do it before you're in there. So fear food. And then, let's see, we'll have to reproduce to keep life around. So fear, food. What's the other, the third F word?

Romance.

Romance is not an F word. It's fertility. I know you're about to drop an F bomb, but you're from Stanford. You guys don't do that over there, except when you're drunk. Just kidding. So, fear, food, fertility. And then the fourth one that all life does universally is friend. Right? But they do these in order. And the fifth one in my framework is forgiveness, which is to evolve and to let go of unnecessary fears so that you're more effective and efficient as a life form. And this works for any life form, including us. And what that leads to, though, is this idea that, you know, we. We do these things. I don't think it's me doing that. I think it's my operating system doing that. And it's doing it kind of against my will and invisibly. And the more I gain awareness, the more I gain consciousness, the more I can laugh at the way my body responds to the world. And I don't identify that as me. It's like I have a split personality. Like, there's an automated system that does all the animal stuff, and then I get to choose whether I believe what it shows me or not. But man, that's been an enormous amount of work and it's allowed me to drop the cynicism and replace it with discernment so I can feel something and then decide if that's real. Is that a good framework? Does it, does it support what you're talking about? I'm looking for holes in it.

I've. I have so much to say in response to this first. What you're describing reminds me of the first time that I trekked through the Amazon many years ago in Peru. And I remember going through this little tributary and all of these plants, these, this dense plant life everywhere, and noticing that their plants grow so quickly that you could actually see them interacting with one another almost like a stop motion film. And the interaction was incredibly aggressive. You could see plants attacking one another, trying to suffocate one another. Even the vines that seemed harmless if you looked closer had tiny syringe like spikes coming out of them. It was just this battle. And I thought to myself, wow, this is what nature is like. If you juice it enough, if you give it enough fuel. But of course, there was also so much fertility and, you know, I mean, whether you want to call it friendship or not, so much collaboration in that environment as well, right down to slime molds, all the way up to mammals. Right. And so there are these forces in us, these default settings that we all have. I think that what you're describing though, is how awareness of our default settings can help us overcome them or at least counteract them when we want to. There's something in psychology that we call the naturalistic fallacy. The idea that because something is natural, because it's evolved, that somehow means it's good for us. Right?

That's not what nature looks like to me.

Exactly. I mean, natural and good are not the same thing all the time. And, you know, we have so many default settings.