Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Hope for Cynics with Jamil Zaki

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

Is cynicism getting in the way of our progress? In “Hope for Cynics”, Stanford psychologist Dr. Jamil Zaki, explores how cynicism is keeping us hopeless and inactive, which prevents us from creating real, lasting change. Zaki shares his ideas on how to escape the “cynicism trap” and become critical thinkers capable of hope and trust. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you joining me today. My guest, Jamil Zaki, has written a book that I think some of y'all might need. It's called Hope for Cynics. And I love this book because Jamil Zaki regards himself as naturally prone to cynicism. And he has done a complete study of this topic and I think he has so much wisdom to share for you and the people in your life. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon

McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. Thank you so much for being here. It's my pleasure. You have a book that is very needed and necessary at this moment in time, and I bet you are keenly aware of why we need hope for cynics. I know why I needed it, I'll tell you that much. I wrote this book because it's something that I was struggling with. Cynicism is a long-standing problem for me, and I guess I wanted to explore what it was doing to me and what I could do about it. And I quickly learned that this is by no means

just a problem that I face, but one that is nearly universal. Yeah, no, not at all. I hear frequently from people how difficult it is not to descend into cynicism, that it's something that people have to, like, actively fight against because it seems like, no matter what I do, nothing changes. No matter who I fight for, nothing changes.

Like I tried that thing and nothing happened. You know, either people tend to fall into like conspiratorial thinking or they tend to feel like this sense of nihilism of like nothing will ever change or like everybody's corrupt. You're probably very intimately familiar with all of the different ways that cynicism sort of rears its ugly head But from your perspective, why are people susceptible to cynicism? Why are humans prone to cynicism? That's a terrific question And there's a lot of reasons that we are susceptible to cynicism One is just the ways that our minds work

One is just the ways that our minds work. We, as a species, have what's known as negativity bias. That is, people pay way more attention to threatening and negative information than they do to the good stuff. So, for instance, we look more at threatening information than positive information. We remember negative events more than positive events. And we make decisions more based on what we don't want to lose than what we do want to gain. And you can imagine why negativity bias could have served us in the past. You know, 200,000 years ago, if you were focused on a predator on the horizon,

you might survive more than your friend who's blissed out by the sunset on the other horizon. So there is a sense in which it is useful for us to pay attention to negative information, but I think that can go too far. Something that helps us in a small dose can hurt us in a larger dose. And one reason that I think we now have become more cynical

as a culture over the last 50 or so years is because that ancient instinct to pay attention to the negative has been combined with a hypermodern media ecosystem that feeds us whatever information it takes to keep us clicking and scrolling and watching, which is often just as much bad news as the news can give us. I think that's a really important point that we have this sort of like evolutionary, biological, sort of imperative that has kept us alive over the millennia.

You're exactly right. The person is like, wow, listen to the birds chirping. Too often that person was next in line for whatever, the saber tooth tiger, the wolf on the horizon. So we've self-selected over the millennia to like the people who had the most keen ability to scan the horizon for threats. They were the people who survived. So we also have this sense of like survivorship bias that being negative, being cynical about

the incoming threats actually helped keep people alive. I think just to add to that, I think that we still see cynicism as a form of safety, right? Yes. And there's a lot of ways that our culture has come to actually glamorize the cynical perspective. One is that we imagine that, hey, if I don't count on anybody,

if I am pre-disappointed in everybody I meet, if I have very low expectations, then I won't be hurt. That's a way of staying safe. The problem is that, yeah, if you are cynical and don't trust anybody, you might not be betrayed. You're also going to be hurt very slowly by the fact that you will live a smaller and more diminished and lonelier life. So there's the sense that cynicism keeps us safe when in fact it's quite dangerous for our health, right? Cynics end up suffering from more depression, anxiety, isolation.

They do worse in their careers because they can't trust the people that they work with, and this actually makes us sicker. So cynics, for instance, suffer more heart disease and even die younger than non-cynics. So again, what keeps us safe in some contexts when we turn it into an entire worldview can be remarkably dangerous for our health and well-being and for our culture. That's a great point too, that our perception of what keeps us safe ultimately ends up hurting us in the long run. This idea of like grief being the evidence of having loved, right? If the idea that cynicism protects us from ever having those kinds of emotional wounds. I'll never have to

grieve the loss of a friend or a partner if I never have one because they're going to screw me over anyway. The only person I can depend on is myself. You've lost out on the opportunity to ever have felt loved or to love. And that has very real and negative mental and physical health repercussions for people like you just mentioned. That's right. And I think one thing that's really tricky here and that again perpetuates cynicism is that if you love somebody and are betrayed, you feel that betrayal. It lives on in your heart and mind for years or decades. But if you don't ever count on somebody, the missed opportunities, the love that you could have had is invisible to you.

So there's a way in which we have an asymmetric way of viewing the world. We see when we trusted and it was a mistake, but we don't see when we didn't trust and that was a mistake. So it's hard to learn the ways that cynicism is actually costing us. It's hard to see those costs because they often come in the forms of missed opportunities, which again, are invisible. Do you think some temperaments are more prone to cynicism?

Are some people born more cynical than others or is it entirely a nurture instead of nature? It's a great question. There is some evidence that cynicism is heritable. What does that mean? It means that there is a genetic component to it. For instance, identical twins tend to be a little bit more similar in their levels of cynicism than fraternal twins.

But that if there is a genetic component, it's pretty small. We're talking about a quarter or less of people's levels of cynicism. You asked about temperament, and I think that more than temperament, our early life experiences matter a lot. People who are insecurely attached, who learn early in their first year of life that they can't depend on their caregivers, for instance, or don't feel safe in their environment, those folks are much more likely to grow into adults who have trouble trusting. Now that is not to say that any of this is a life sentence. A lot of cynicism comes from our experience and as adults we have the privilege of being able to choose at least some of our experiences

and so there is lots of evidence that we can choose experiences that rebuild our capacity for trust and help us, as you're saying, escape this cynicism trap. So when you found yourself sort of prone to cynicism, were you thinking to yourself, I got to figure out how to get out of this situation? Or did you set out trying to research why you were right to feel cynical? Like, what was the sort of impetus for you starting this kind of work?

It's been a long journey for me. I've been studying some version of, I guess you could call it human goodness for the last 20 years. My lab studies empathy and generosity and social connection and because of that I sort of become an unofficial ambassador for Humanities Better Angels. People ask me to write or speak for them when they want to feel good about our species and I think that there's a stereotype that whatever you

study you must be good at as well. That research is me-search in some way. And so people often assume that I must be this bubbly, sunny individual. But actually, this entire time, I've sort of harbored this difficulty trusting people, this inner cynicism. And for me, that comes from my early life. We were just talking about insecure attachment, and I had a pretty chaotic

childhood and family background. And I think that imbued me with this sense that, wait a minute, you can't really feel safe unless you're protecting yourself. I think it took me years or decades to even realize that this was a problem, but I've been working on it for a long time. When it really came to a head for me was in the early pandemic during lockdown, because I found myself really unable to believe in people. I was, like so many others at home, experiencing humanity mostly through my phone and laptop. And I think I just realized that I was so gloomy about our future and about our entire species, and I knew from my own science that was just an inaccurate perception. I knew that people are caring and want to be connected,

and yet I couldn't feel it. So I said, well, gosh, if I'm having this trouble connecting with human goodness, and this is what I study, this is what I do for a living, imagine how hard it must be for other people. So I guess to answer your question, I got to this topic not by wanting to prove why I was right to be cynical, but by exploring what I saw as a problem, a disconnect between the way that I felt and what I knew to be true. You mentioned as an adult, we have the ability to sort of choose a different set of experiences than we do as a child where our experiences are foisted upon us. How does one even begin to conceptualize escaping this trap of cynicism? Because asking somebody to set aside their cynicism is in their mind,

akin to asking them to set aside their bulletproof vest and trust that I'm not going to hurt you. When you have spent your whole life believing that this is keeping me from being shot, it seems almost like too big of an ask for somebody who has spent their whole life carrying this bulletproof vest around. How does one even begin to unpack this idea that setting aside cynicism is worth doing?

I think that the first place to begin is with compassion, right? The last thing that we need when we're encountering somebody who feels cynical is to be cynical about them or judgemental for the way that they feel. I don't judge myself for having felt cynical based on the way that I was raised in my early experiences and I wouldn't judge anybody else either. The way I see it is that people need to want to change though. They need to first realize that this is a problem in their life. Once they do, then they can start to make those changes, and there are lots of steps that they can take.

One place that I draw a lot of wisdom from is cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a great and really popular treatment for mood disorders, like anxiety and depression. The idea, and we can extrapolate to cynicism, is that oftentimes, a person who's suffering from depression will come to huge black and white bleak conclusions about their life and not ever test those conclusions. They'll say, I'm worthless, people hate me, I should just stay home. And because of that, they withdraw from the social world and never get any of the data that they might need

to realize that those conclusions weren't warranted in the first place. I think of cynicism a little bit like social depression. You have these huge conclusions about people. Most people are just out for themselves, they would betray me if they got the chance. And because that causes us to mistrust people, we never get to learn whether our cynicism was right or wrong in the first place. So in CBT, a therapist might ask a depressed person, hey you are saying that nobody likes you. What evidence do

you have for that claim? They might push this person to defend what the depression is telling them. I try to do the same thing with cynicism. Once a person realizes that they want to get out of the cynicism trap, I say, why don't you try to fact check your cynical thoughts and feelings? Why don't you try to provide evidence for the way that you feel?

And oftentimes we quickly realize that cynicism is not based on evidence, but is really just a series of assumptions. And once we realize that we can start to unpack those assumptions and move beyond them. I'm Jenna Fisher and I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

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Well we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. That's a great point that too often people do not ever even give themselves the opportunity to test their hypothesis. And it occurs to me that this way of thinking, either it's related to cynicism or it's related to like, nobody likes me or these sort of untested inner beliefs about themselves and how the world works, that, and correct me if I'm wrong here, there's an element of an arrogance that my way of thinking is absolutely correct, despite no evidence to support it. And again, this is not in any way meant to cast dispersions. It's not a

judgment. We would not extend the same sort of thinking to its logical conclusion in other ways, that everything you think is true, right? No, I think that's beautifully put. And one way of thinking about cynicism is that a cynic has very little faith in people, but a lot of faith in their own assumptions about people. Yes. And I think a lot of us operate that way. We make decisions sometimes not based on evidence,

but based on our vibes or our gut instinct. And I think oftentimes people trust their instincts, frankly, too much. You know, like, yes, we have negativity bias, so it's easy to focus on times that we've been hurt and to forget times that people have treated us well. So we have this instinct that we shouldn't trust other people moving forward. Well, guess what? We also biologically have instincts that we shouldn't trust other people moving forward. Well, guess what? We also biologically have instincts that we should prefer people who are our same race to people who are a different race. We have instincts that we should judge people more harshly

if we are hungry than if we've just had lunch. It would be ridiculous to trust those instincts. And I think a lot of times, we confuse natural parts of our mind with a correct or morally right way of living. But actually, just because something has evolved doesn't mean that we need to accept it or live according to exactly the instincts that evolution has granted to us. We can thank our evolutionary past for keeping us alive this long, but also make

our own decisions about what we value and the type of culture and society that we want to build. And personally, I think that a really important step to that is, again, not trusting or mistrust so easily, and instead being what I would call skeptical, right? So if a cynic is like a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity, looking only for evidence that people are terrible and ignoring evidence that people are really wonderful, often a skeptic thinks more like a scientist. They say, well, I'm not gonna assume that people are great.

I'm not going to naively trust the people who I meet or in my life, but I'm not going to assume that people are great. I'm not going to naively trust the people who I meet or in my life, but I'm not going to assume that everybody's terrible either. I'm going to evaluate each person and each situation as it comes to me. And skepticism, again, is this mindset that can spring us from the cynicism trap. Because I think a lot of times people believe, you put this really well in order to not be cynical I need to kind of set myself up for betrayal Why do people think the only option other than cynicism is naively trusting others?

but I want to offer skepticism as a third path a way of learning from people connecting with them, but still keeping ourselves safe an Agile and sharp way of moving through the social world. That's a really great way of putting that. It's not a two choice binary that like either I trust everybody, I set down my bulletproof vest and let everybody shoot at me, or I never have human interactions.

Like those are not the two options that are available to us, that we can learn to trust people who have demonstrated themselves to be trustworthy. To your point, a scientist should have a naturally skeptical orientation. You don't rush to judgment. You create a judgment based on where the evidence leads you.

That's right. But in order to be skeptical, you also have to have an open mind. That evidence might lead you somewhere you don't necessarily know that you're going to end up there. And that's a healthy way to interact with the world. It's not one or the other. That there's a method to learn new ways to interact with the world. This is a really powerful point you're making.

And I think it gets to why skepticism is so hard and why it's so valuable at the same time, which is that it requires us to be humble. It requires us to realize that our perspective is not the only one and that there's lots that we don't know about the world. And in fact, our deepest assumptions could be wrong. But this type of humility is the only path to learning and to wisdom. And so skepticism requires us to move out of two types of safety. One, the safety of never trusting anybody, which is a sort of very shallow form of safety that actually hurts us in the long run. But the other is the safety

of our own beliefs, right? It's really tricky and really painful sometimes to let go of the assumptions you've had, the instincts that you feel have kept you safe. But evolving and growing means sometimes being willing to do that work to be brave enough to change. I heard somebody say once that when people say, well, I just don't trust anybody, that person said, you actually do trust. You trust implicitly your own beliefs

about the other person or about the world. Who you're trusting implicitly is your own beliefs, which you've just demonstrated can be faulty. We have implicit beliefs about the world that are sometimes wrong and sometimes immoral. You know, our knee-jerk reaction to people who are not like us, that sort of evolutionary biology which can be overridden by our large brains, by our prefrontal cortex that allows us to override those sort of more base instincts and to learn new ways of interacting with the world.

But it really gave me pause to think about this idea that like, no, no, you do trust. You just only trust your own viewpoint of the world. One thing that comes out of that formulation is that when we trust our own viewpoint too much, we end up more wrong. And in many cases, cynicism is a form of just cognitive error. I'll give you an example. When people are told about a cynic and a non-cynic and asked, which one of these people do you think would do better at a variety of tasks?

70% of people think that cynics will be smarter than non-cynics. 85% of people think that cynics will be smarter than non-cynics. 85% of people think that cynics will be socially smarter, that for instance they'll be better able to tell who's lying and who's telling the truth. The idea here again that cynicism is a sort of wisdom. This is what researchers call the cynical genius illusion and it is just that, it's an illusion. Data demonstrate that actually cynics do

less well on cognitive tests than non-cynics and they're worth at spotting liars than non-cynics. Why is that? Well, to exactly your point, when we start to trust our assumptions about people too much, we stop paying attention to the evidence. So a cynic will assume that everybody's on the take and as a result won't realize or learn how they can actually differentiate somebody who's lying from somebody who's telling the truth. So oftentimes trusting our assumptions makes it impossible for us to become less wrong, which I think the journey to wisdom is one of trying to be just a little bit less wrong each day or each week.

Yeah, the fastest way to be right is to stop being wrong faster. Yes, exactly. Exactly. But that also requires you to admit that maybe you were wrong, at least to yourself, which is real challenging for some people. I want to talk a little bit more about building cultures of trust, which is something you discuss in your book. First of all, what does that even mean? What is a culture of trust, which is something you discuss in your book. First of all, what does that even mean?

What is a culture of trust? Well, we've talked about how cynicism is not something that is mostly genetic. It's about our environment. So we've been talking so far at the level of the individual. What makes me cynical? How can I try to start questioning my cynical assumptions? But as leaders, whether we're leaders in a family, as parents, or on a team as a team captain, or as the CEO of a company,

or in government, we don't just respond to culture, we create that environment. And so one question that burns inside me is how can we, in whatever place we lead, create situations, environments where cynicism becomes less the automatic response and where people are able to trust and be vulnerable to one another? Yeah. And that's the million dollar question, right? Is how do we move these ideas beyond the individual? Because if you grow up in a cynical environment,

if you're taught by your parents either directly or indirectly, you can't trust anybody but yourself. Either your life experiences teach you that or your parents overtly tell you, don't trust anybody. And we know that ideas can be contagious, right? We know that ideas of how the world works are contagious, which is why some people think the earth is flat and, you know, like all kinds of wackadoodle things. Ideas can be contagious.

And so it's not cynicism or optimism, that there is a middle sort of third path, which is skepticism. How do we start spreading those ideas? Is it first by changing ourselves and leading by example? What about people who are not already prone to cynicism? How do we start spreading these ideas? Well, I think that for leaders, there's a whole bunch of things you can do. One is you

do need to lead by example. In order to have other people trust you, you need to trust them first in many instances, right? And actually, what we have learned from the research is that people are a highly reciprocal species. They give to us what we give to them. So, if you trust somebody, the likelihood that they will reciprocate, step up, and A, be trustworthy, right? Try to meet your expectations, and B, trust you back, increase enormously. For people in leadership, I think that's really important.

Give trust in order to get it. Another thing that I think is really important is for people to surface the values in their community. I work a lot with companies and school systems, and hospital systems, and they ask me, hey, Jamil, can you help us build a culture that is more connected and collaborative? I say, yeah, sure. Let's start by

anonymously surveying everybody about how much they want that. So I ask people two questions. One, how much do you want a more collaborative and cooperative culture, let's say at your workplace? Then I'll ask everybody, what do you think the average person at your company would say in response to this same question? And every time I've done this, you get two

fundamentally different answers. People desperately want more collaboration, so people are answering nearly at ceiling on this question, but they don't realize that everybody else wants that too. So they imagine that the average person is not that interested in collaboration and connection. So there are these two realities, one that lives in real people and the other that lives in our cynical imagination. And so one way to build a culture of trust is to get people to actually witness one another, to see what the people around them want and to notice how much common ground they have in their values and their goals. And then a third thing that we can do is try to build cultures that are less inherently competitive. One of my favorite studies took place about 10 years ago in southeastern Brazil in these two fishing villages.

One of the fishing villages sits by the ocean. So fishing there requires large boats and heavy equipment, and you have to work together. The other sits by a lake where fishermen strike out alone on small boats and compete with one another. So economists went to these villages to measure how trusting people were, and they found that the longer that fishermen worked on the ocean collaborating with one another, the more trusting and less cynical they became. But the longer they worked in this competitive environment of the lake, the more cynical they became. I think a lot of us inadvertently build lake fishing villages where people feel like they have to fight one another to get ahead. And if you do that, you're much more likely to make cynicism spread. So a question for any of us who want to build culture

is how do we emphasize people's ability to work together instead of competing against one another? You talk in your book too about something that I think is a really interesting thing, which is this concept of moral purity and calling people out and publicly shaming people for inappropriate behavior. And you say in the book that call-outs can hold power to account and expose injustice.

They can also splinter social movements. And you say change spreads across people like a wave. Some wake up to new ideas before others, but that when we bludgeon people who fail to keep up, they increase the chances someone will double down and continue. And man, if I have not seen that a million times, like, oh no, not the double down.

The way that we approach people who are perhaps not behaving in the way that we think is appropriate in modern society really does matter. And the way that we approach them can either increase the amount of cynicism in our culture, or it can help to sort of cool that down. Can you talk a little bit more about this modern moral purity that we have? I'm not sure it's only modern. I feel as though moral purity tests have always existed. Puritanism, of course.

But it's evolved. The internet has evolved it. I do think that's true. And I think cynicism is all-purpose. It is nonpartisan. You can be cynical and from any part of the ideological spectrum. And I think that one way that cynicism presents itself among progressives is that it is in sort of

what we might call progressive amnesia. That progress covers its own tracks. And it's easy to forget that what I feel now is not what I thought 10 years ago or 15 years ago, right? So I know my thinking on so many subjects has evolved, but I don't feel like I was a bad person 10 years ago or 15 years ago, right? So I know my thinking on so many subjects has evolved, but I don't feel like I was a bad person 10 years ago and I'm a fundamentally more moral person now, necessarily, I just have more information, right?

But we often forget that. So if we see somebody who has a view that maybe we had five, 10 years ago, but we don't hold any longer, instead of viewing that person compassionately and saying, well, maybe they just need to catch up, we end up judging them and saying, well, this defines this person and boxing them out of our cultural conversations. I suppose the term for this is often cancellation, right?

We try to get people out of the public sphere and we say, I don't wanna talk with that person that would be platforming them. That type of call out culture, I think can be quite destructive in that, A, it's based on a very cynical premise that people can't change. And B, it probably raises cynicism in the people who feel attacked and makes them feel less

like they should change. My friend and the brilliant activist Loretta Ross talks about this all the time and she says there is an alternative. Instead of calling people out, we could call them in. So call ins, she refers to as call outs with love. This is not the same as just accepting whatever people say, even if it's offensive or harmful, but rather you can say, hey, I know that you're a good person.

How do I reconcile that with what you've just said? It's less a judgment of a person and more an invitation to them, to reconsider what they've said, to add more perspective to them. Will it always work? Absolutely not. But Loretta and I see this as a much more holistic way of not just being kind to people with different views from ourselves, but creating a broader tent, a wider tent for people who

might want to consider their views and maybe evolve and grow. I love the chapter in your book too called the optimism of activism. I have long thought that the best way to stop feeling despair is to stop moving your mouth and start moving your hands and feet. Like try doing something, do any old thing. We think that activism, that we need to organize the Montgomery bus boycott. You know what I mean? We think like that's what activism is, that we need to create these large scale freedom rides. That's what activism looks like, that it's big, and it requires us to devote our whole life to it. And this is not in any way meant to diminish the incredible impact of those kinds of activism. But activism can also be something

that you spend 10 minutes doing. I say this all the time too, that activism is not arguing with people on the internet. That is not activism. It makes you feel angry so you feel like you're like, well, I did something there. I had some kind of impact there. Nope. Zero Kids got dinner that night because you yelled it's a stranger on Facebook. You know what I mean? No public policies were changed because you called me a name in the

comments on YouTube. So, can you talk a little bit more about sort of the optimism of activism? What does that mean and why is it important? Well, first, I just want to co-assign what you're saying that I think your perspective on activism in general is really lovely, right? That it comes not through always grandiose actions, but rather through the habits of civic engagement and openness and change that we bring to our lives. When I talk about the optimism of activism, I'm actually channeling one of the greatest activists of all time, Martin Luther King Jr., who gave a talk to the American Psychological Association in the 1960s,

and he criticized psychologists. He said this much more elegantly than I'm about to do in this paraphrase, but he said, you all care way too much about happiness. You focus too much on being well-adjusted. But there are some things that we should never be adjusted to. We should never be adjusted to a culture of inequality or bigotry or violence. And he encouraged and said instead that we should be creatively maladjusted, that we should not accept things as they are.

We should be very dissatisfied with injustice, for instance, but that we should envision and understand that a better future is possible. A lot of people believe that being hopeful is naive and privileged, and being cynical is sort of moral because cynics are radicals who see problems in our culture. But if you look at the data, the opposite is true. Cynics do see problems, but they don't see any solutions. And if you think that our broken systems are a mirror of our broken nature, then why ever

do anything? And it turns out that cynics, for instance, vote less often, they protest less often, and they sit on the sidelines of social movements. Cynicism is not radical. It's a tool of the status quo. By contrast, being hopeful, understanding that, yes, there are massive problems in our culture, but many, many people want something better,

want the culture that is more egalitarian and peaceful and sustainable. That belief in each other now can generate a hope for the future. Not the same as saying, hey, everything's going to turn out okay, but saying things could get better and my actions matter. I think that that emotional alloy of being furious and dissatisfied with the status quo,

but knowing that something better is possible, I think that that is what can charge us, sort of charge our batteries for the type of everyday social engagement that you're talking about. That's so good that cynicism is a tool of the status quo, that if you look around and you think this is all terrible and nothing will ever change, that limiting belief system is exactly what will keep it that way. Yes, that's beautifully put.

Cynicism in so many parts of our life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you give up on possibility, those possibilities go away. And this is part of why I think it's so important to hold on to hope. To me, hope is not naive or pie in the sky. It's practical. It's what keeps us energized and keeps us fighting for a future that most of us want by allowing us to see it more clearly. LESLIE KENDRICK When the reader finishes this book, Hope for Cynics, what is it that you hope they take away and sort of tuck in their pocket?

MICHAEL The last thing that I want is for people who are cynical to feel judged by this book. I am right there with you. I think that the conclusion that I'd love people to draw from this book is that oftentimes cynicism, although natural, isn't right. And I mean that in a bunch of different ways. It's far less accurate than we think. It's far less accurate than we think. It's far less wise than we think. But in that bad news, there is great news, which is that overall, when you look at the data, people are more generous, more open-minded, friendlier than we realize they

are. And so in essence, hope is not putting on a pair of rose-colored glasses. Because of negativity bias, because of the tricks our brain plays on us, most of us are wearing mud-colored glasses right now and most of the time. So hope is simply a matter of kicking those off and witnessing each other more accurately. Thank you so much for being here. I loved your book. I did not feel judged by it. And I really think that so many people are going to benefit from reading Hope for Cynics. Thank you so much for being here. I loved your book. I did not feel judged by it. And I really think that so many people are going to benefit from reading Hope for Cynics. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is delightful. You can buy Hope for Cynics wherever you get your books. If you want to support your local bookshop, you can head there or you can head to bookshop.org. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show?

That helps podcasters out so much. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.