The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Find Hope and Banish Cynicism... Coming Sept 9
Episode Date: September 2, 2024It's hard to stay hopeful sometimes. Things can look pretty bleak and divided, especially around election time. But if you're losing hope in your fellow humans, stop and listen to the science. Other p...eople are kinder, friendlier and more co-operative than you might think. Using insights from his new book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, Stanford's Jamil Zaki joins Dr Laurie Santos for a special season to show why we shouldn't be so cynical about our fellow citizens and why being more open and trusting can help us live happier and healthier lives. The series begins Sept 9.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Pushkin. to conflicts around the world, things can sometimes feel pretty bleak. There's the childish nickname,
the crazy conspiracy theories.
Did you see Barack Hussein Obama last night?
He was taking shots at your president.
Especially around election time,
it seems like we're all divided and angry.
If the only political conversation you have
is your Uncle Chad screaming at you about politics,
he just wants to get in an argument.
He just wants to shit on you. But it's not just all those Uncle Chads and polarized political fights.
It feels like we're losing faith in one another and in our own agency.
Nothing I do will matter. Nothing anyone I know does will matter. So
I wish I didn't have to hear about this. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos. And in our new season of
The Happiness Lab, we'll look at why we're all feeling so cynical these days and what we can do to fight these nasty feelings.
And we'll get inspiration from one of my favorite new books, Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.
It's by famous Stanford psychologist and my good friend, Jamil Zaki.
Thanks, Laurie. And hello, Happiness Lab listeners.
I've been studying the science
of kindness for decades, but even I get a little cynical sometimes. Cynics don't just assume that
things are bad, but also that there's nothing we can do to improve the situation. I actually hate
politics. Our politicians are not afraid of us. They aren't worried about winning our vote or
if we like what they're doing. But research shows that cynicism hurts us in almost every way scientists can measure.
Cynics are prone to depression, loneliness, and unhappiness.
They even die younger than non-cynics.
If cynicism was a pill, it'd be a poison.
So I got inspired to fight it.
My new book, Hope for Cynics, tells the story of how we got into this predicament
and how we can find a more hopeful path again,
listening to the science about what people are really like,
which is often better than we assume.
Over the course of this new series,
Jamil and I will meet people who learned about the dangers of cynicism
and are trying to do something about it.
We know this doesn't feel right.
I think we all know that something is wrong
in our culture, in our politics,
and that we need to do better and that we can do better.
And it'll be quite a journey.
We'll head to a Caribbean island
to meet some of the world's meanest monkeys.
And we'll cross the Siberian wilderness
to find out how wolves help one another out.
Closer to home, we'll meet a 20-something
who led a campaign
to fight a 200-year-old law that was harming our community. There was no guarantee we were going to
be successful. If anything, everybody told us all the reasons we would fail, and yet we were willing
to try anyways. And we'll talk to a CEO whose optimism about his employees led to a radical
new business model. I have never seen anything like this. We're asking people to do a month without pay.
They did it out of compassion for their fellow team members.
And the feedback we got, all of a sudden in this world
where everybody was falling apart, they felt safe.
Just like my book, this new series will be full of surprises.
We'll hear what Dr. Martin Luther King taught America's psychologists
and what
people often get wrong about Darwin's ideas of human nature. And we'll see study after study
showing that it's possible to find hope in one another because most people are better than we
realize. My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot of us are actually looking for a way
to disagree and still be in relationships
with each other. Our new season on Finding Hope will launch on September 9th. But Jamil's fabulous
book Hope for Cynics is out now, so you should grab yourself a copy wherever you buy your books.