We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Type is Happiest

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

410.  Are You a Cynic, Optimist, or Skeptic? Dr. Jamil Zaki Shares Which Way is Happiest  Dr. Jamil Zaki–a Stanford psychologist and director of their Social Neuroscience Lab–discusses how worldviews like optimism, cynicism, and skepticism shape our lives, health, and relationships.  -The three lies we tell ourselves about cynicism -Why we need to stop putting faith in people who don’t put faith in people -The quiz you need to know if you’re a cynic -Why hope could very well save your life Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. He is interested in how we can learn to connect better. Dr. Zaki is the author of The War For Kindness and, most recently, Hope for Cynics.

Hey. Hey, everybody. It's great to meet you all. You too. It's so great to meet you. I'm Glennon. I'm Abby. I'm Amanda. Yes, I know. I know all three of you. It's an honor to be talking with you, really. I'm a big fan of the show and of all of you. So it's, yeah, thank you so much for having me on. It means a lot. We're so excited. There's a lot to discuss. I can't wait. Hello, Pod Squad. We have a question for you. Are you a cynic and optimist or skeptic. And also, done to da-da-da, did you know which one of those you are will determine how long you live? We're sort of joking, but not at all. Today we are talking with a brilliant scientist whose new book is a study into the worldview of optimism and cynicism and skepticism. He does not advocate for either side of this debate, but he shows us a lot of data

that shows how our lives and our relationships and the world around us dramatically changes depending on which worldview we choose. Some of us think, because we talked about this before, Glenn and Abby and me, that while cynicism feels unfortunate, like that's a bummer, it also feels like it's sadly more in line with reality, just the way that things are and kind of a smarter way to live

or how people who are smarter think. but you're about to find out a lot about that. That is wrong. So Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He trained at Columbia and Harvard studying empathy and kindness in the human brain. He is interested in how we can learn to connect better. Dr. Zaki is the author of the War for Kindness and most recently hope for cynics. Thank you for being here. This is so exciting for us. It's a total pleasure. Thanks for having me. Oh, my gosh. We're going to talk about so much today. And I would love to start. I've listened to a lot of interviews that you've given. And I was surprised because I didn't hear anyone talk to you about a meal, which we're talking about all the ways to live and how your view of the world determines the actual world.

you live in and the kind of life you have and your happiness and your joy and all of that. And you're a scientist. So it's all data. And it's also about having a beautiful life. And it really, to me, was so beautiful how you grounded all of this in Emil's story because he had such a profoundly beautiful life. Will you just tell us a little bit about him before we start our conversation on the science and what it means for us? Oh gosh. I would love to. I'll try not to get emotional right off the bat. Emil was a friend of mine, but he was also one of my heroes. We both studied the neuroscience of empathy.

And there's not like a million people who do that. So we gravitated towards each other pretty quickly. He in particular was really interested in how neuroscience could inform our understanding of violence and hatred and how we could reduce those. What happens in the brain when people hate, another and how can we use that information to create new paths to peace. He also was potentially the most positive person I have ever known in my life. He just stubbornly saw the best in people and really believed that we could use science to do good. And, you know, I'm friends with a lot of

people who study things like empathy and kindness. And I'll tell you that not all of us believe that everything will turn out okay at all. And, you know, And sometimes talking with Emil, you kind of felt like, where does this guy get off being so optimistic? You know, he had observed hatred on five different continents. He had traveled to places around the world where people were in violent conflict with one another. And yet he was so bullish on our entire species. It seemed like maybe he was just naive or sheltered. But as I got to know him better, it was clear that the opposite was true.

When Emil was born, his mother developed severe. schizophrenia. She was unable to raise him. She lived unhoused for many years. His childhood was enormously difficult. And yet, although she had gone through so much suffering, she was always kind to Emil. The way that he put it is that she walked through darkness but showed him only light. And when he was a teenager, he made the choice during middle school, actually, that he would take her way of living as a challenge, that whatever darkness he faced, he would do his best to spread light. And that's exactly what he did. Tragically, he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2018 and he died in 2020. It was leaving behind a young family and obviously it was just awful.

But even then, he retained his hope. We talked a lot around the time of his diagnosis and he told me that, you know, he of course was sad, but you also felt this ball of plasma, this sense of beauty in the world and in humanity that was living inside of him. And he wanted desperately to share with the time he had left. It was just inspiring the way that he was able to stay hopeful, even as his life was cut short. So, yeah, I mean, meanwhile, here I am, you know, studying human goodness and feeling cynical all the time. And so after Emil died, I decided to see if I could spread his message just a little bit further. He told me in our last conversation that he understood his worldview was unconventional

and that he was more positive in some ways and in some ways startlingly positive despite what he had gone through. And he said, I wish that if this philosophy was like a tube of toothpaste, I could squeeze it out and leave some behind after I'm gone. So I guess I've been trying since then to squeeze out some of, of that emile toothpaste for the rest of the world. You do it beautifully. The book is beautiful.

And I could feel you, but I could also feel Amil incredibly powerfully in the book. So you've done it. You've done it. Beautiful job. Can we start with, because we're going to talk about a lot of things, just can you tell us what cynicism is? And then what we believe about cynicism that is not true. What it is and what it is.

Yeah, absolutely. So cynicism is the theory that people in general are as selfish, greedy, and dishonest. It is hugely on the rise in 1972. About half of Americans believed most people can be trusted. And by 2018, that had fallen to a third of Americans. So it's a drop as big as the stock market took during the financial collapse of 2008. So we're living through really five-decade long trust deficit. and we have lost faith in each other in our institutions. And to your point, Amanda, I think that a lot of this is because in our culture we glamorize gloom. We view it as, I'd say three different things. We view it as smart. We view it as safe. And we view it as moral. And we can break down all of those if you like, but we can just start with the first, right?

We have this view that, hey, if you are not cynical, you must be naive. You just haven't had a chance to be disappointed enough yet. You just don't know what the world is really like. In lots of studies, people will present or be presented with a story of one person who's really cynical and doesn't trust anybody and another person who's really open and trusting. And they're asked, you know, which one of these two people do you think would do better on a variety of different tasks? And it turns out that 70% of people believe that cynics are smarter than non- cynics. and 85% of people believe that cynics are socially smarter, that they'd be able to tell who's lying and who's telling the truth.

In other words, most of us put a lot of faith in people who don't have faith in people, which is sort of like a bit of a tongue twister. And most of us are wrong. It turns out that cynics do less well on cognitive tests, and they're worse at spotting liars than non-cynics. So we view being cynical as a form of wisdom when really, it's just people who have a bunch of assumptions about the world and just look to defend their assumptions as opposed to learning what people are really like. That's so interesting. Wow. How do people

think it keeps them safer? Well, I think all of us have at some point been betrayed or disappointed, right? And the last thing you want to experience if somebody's let you down is being let down again, which by the way is completely reasonable and understandable. I think that a lot of us, and I'll just say myself included as someone who tends to be pretty cynical, a lot of us move from being disappointed, that is lowering our expectations of somebody who's let us down, to being pre-disappointed. The best way for me to not get let down again is to just assume I can't trust anybody. And that way I'll be safe. And it's true. If you don't trust anybody, you probably won't be betrayed.

but you'll also miss out on love and friendship and collaboration and so many of the things that make life beautiful. So you can think of cynicism in this way as like a suit of armor that we put on to protect ourselves from a world of unkind people that ends up suffocating us instead. You say that cynicism is only safe in the way house arrest is safe. That you are safe there, but you're not. not experiencing a hell of a lot when you're there. So they are more wrong more often. They can't tell liars apart from people who are telling the truth. We also have a myth that they're, at least they're probably more shrewd business people, right? They're making more money at least, right? Tell me that.

I'm so sorry to be giving this much bad news to the cynics out there. And again, nothing but compassion and resonance. If you feel cynical, I'm right there with you much of the time. But unfortunately, Amanda, they do not make more money. In fact, cynics earn less money over the course of their careers. And researchers have tried to figure out why that is. And it turns out that cynics, compared to non- cynics, want success and power just as much. But they have a different theory of how to get it. A cynical person will say, okay, if I want to advance in my workplace, if I want to build my business, the way to do it is to defeat everybody around me. Life is a zero-sum competition. So I have to step over or on my colleagues in order to succeed.

And it turns out the data are clear. And as I'm sure you all know, real success, even at a bottom line level, but of course at a human level, requires working with people and building collaboration and coalition and partnership. And so if you immediately in trying to succeed right off all of those strategies, you'll actually fall flat more often than not. What about physical and mental health? Tell us about that if you're a cynic person. We're just getting it all out of the way. Let's let's front load the bad news for cynics. The bad news continues. The train rolls on. So it turns out that cynical people compared to non- cynics suffer enormously. And this gets back to this idea of safety, right? We think that it's safe to cut off connection to people because at least we won't get hurt. But it turns out that we get hurt almost certainly just in very sense.

slow motion, right? One of the things that keeps us thriving is our connection to other people. That's, it's like psychological nourishment. And if you are cynical, if you can't open up and be vulnerable to people, it's like you can't metabolize those calories. And so over time, cynical people suffer for more loneliness and depression, but also for more cellular aging and heart disease. And there's a lot of prospective studies with tens of thousands of people that find that folks who are low in trust and more cynical actually die younger than people who are able to connect more deeply in part because it's those connections that don't just keep us healthy, but literally keep us alive.

How do cynics present in the world? Because we're talking about all the effects. But my friend might be a cynic if. I might be a cynic if. What does this person look like at a dinner party or in the office? Well, they might not be as delightful at parties as other folks, but they might, actually. So one of the most classic tests of cynicism is just a set of statements. And you're asked, do you think each one of these is true or false?

So, for instance, people don't like helping one another very much. False. False. Thank you, Abby. Yes, I agree. Or let's try another one. People are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught. No, false.

Yeah, I think that's probably false. Amanda? Yes, false. Okay, well, we've got a non-cynical bunch here so far. So, yes, statements like these, probe, the more you agree with these statements, the more that you might present as a cynic. But, Glennon, you ask a good question, not just what do cynics think, but how do they act, right? How do they present to other people? And there's a few different things that you might notice.

One is that cynics are less willing to invest in other people, in a very very. variety of ways. So in experiments, they invest less money in other people in sort of economic partnerships. But they also are less willing to confide in their friends, for instance, to open up about their struggles. There's a famous study that was carried out around 9-11 that found that more cynical people turned less often to their friends for support when they were struggling after that tragedy. And so in essence, a cynic might be someone who's relatively closed off. They might also be somebody who tends to appear as pretty judgmental, right? So they often, if somebody acts in a kind way, might say, well, yeah, they donated to charity. That's great.

But they're probably looking for a tax break. Or maybe they're trying to look good in front of other people. And this is where I think cynics can actually be really, if not positive, can be sometimes fun to be around. We all know that snarky person who sort of has that gimlet eye and is always sort of looking at the underbelly of what people are doing. It can be funny and sometimes fun to be around that type of person. So there's a lot of ways that cynics can present, but those are just a few ways of detecting them in your life. And again, most of us, I'm not trying to say that there are cynics and non-synics as categories of people. We can all change. And we all have cynical moments or cynical months or years even. But you do know the person at the table who's going to be

like, the second somebody says something nice, you know there's some of the who's going to, I like what you said, looking at the underbelly of what people are doing. It's always the yabot or the devil's advocate or the Taylor Swift has this line that says, I'll call you out on your contrarian shit. It's like the person at the table with the contrarian shit is what we're talking about. Yeah. A hundred percent. Loads of contrarian shit.

Absolutely. And it's almost like an allergy to human goodness. You know, it's almost like if I hear about a wonderful story about somebody helping somebody else, I just need to say something negative in response. It's almost as though stories of goodness make a cynic feel unsafe in their worldview, right? Disrupt their worldview. Because if you're going to go ahead and think that people are generally awful, you know you're missing out on a lot. You're missing out on the chance to really commune with the rest of our species. So you better be right. So a cynic can be pretty protective of that worldview and threatened,

honestly, by the presentation of do-gooders around them. And they can't take in the do-gooders. Can you tell us this social buffering story? Because that broke my heart for cynics. This is one of the most poignant and saddest studies that I've read. So here people were brought into the lab and asked to give a spontaneous speech about a topic that they didn't know very well, which would freak almost anybody out, right? And it did.

And it raised people's blood pressure by about 20%. And so half of these folks had somebody in the room with them who was a sort of cheerleader. I mean, not literally, but who was saying, hey, you've got this. I know you can do it. Just a friendly and supportive stranger. And for most people, having that friendly person around lowered their blood pressure significantly. So that's called stress buffering, right? I guess the saying is trouble shared is trouble halved, right?

That if you can be with somebody during a difficult time, it's just not as difficult. unless you are cynical. So it turned out that cynics, again, when they had somebody supportive there, their blood pressure was just as high as when they were alone. Wow. So it's almost like if you are cynical and can't open up to people, you are alone even when you're with somebody else. Okay, I wish there was a crystal ball to tell the future sometimes.

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genuinely seen and heard. Better with people. Better with Alma. Visit helloalma.com slash we can to schedule a free consultation today. That's hello a l-m-a-com slash w-e-c-an. I have two questions. One, what is the need that's being met for the choosing of cynicism over some of the others that we're going to get to? And then I forgot the second question and I'll think of it while you answer it. She's so optimistic. She knows she's going to think of it eventually. I believe. I believe as well. Yeah. So I think that it's a really powerful question. And, you know, in our culture, I think that because we've glamorized cynicism, there are some folks. who maybe adopt it in order to seem smart, right? So research finds that if you tell people, hey, I want you to look as competent as possible, they actually start to act more cynically. So they'll remove positive language from their emails. They'll write book reviews that are more negative because they think that being positive just doesn't seem quite as bright.

But I would say that actually the primary siren call of cynicism is not trying to look smart. it and rather trying to be safe in a world that doesn't feel safe. One big predictor of cynicism is what we could call insecure attachment, right? If early in your life you just didn't feel safe in the context of your home and family, it's much more likely that you put up those walls. And again, I say this with zero judgment and just in the interest of transparency and disclosure, that's my experience, right? I had a pretty insecure emotional upbringing.

And I think that's where my cynicism comes from. It took me decades and many years of therapy to come to a place where I could trust people in my life. And that wasn't because I was trying to look smart in front of other people or impress them. It was because I was trying to gain control in a life where it sometimes didn't feel like I had it. Do cynics tend to be more loners versus like an optimist to be more, like in terms of like introvert, extrovert, optimists might be a little bit more of peopley person. Is there any research around that? It's really interesting. So cynicism is less correlated with extroversion and introversion than with another personality dimension called agreeableness. Right. So generally, a cynic would probably

be less extroverted than a non-cynic, but only a little, like the relationship is weaker. What they definitely are not is agreeable. They're not, they're just not as, although they might be fun to hang out with. they're probably not going to react as positively to other people and be as warm towards other people. That's really the personality dimension that tracks it most strongly. So we have cynics. And then can you tell us about optimists and then land us in hopeful skeptics? Absolutely.

I want to separate between optimism and hope as well. Because I wrote a book about hope, came out during an election season. The election went away that a lot of people were not expecting or wanting. And I received about 5,000 emails telling me that I was a ridiculous and toxic person for encouraging hope in this moment. And to which I would say, hey, it's fair. Maybe read some of the writing. No, they don't actually tracks very well if you actually read the book. But those are those negative book review writers.

So you've got to give them an outlet. They seemed really smart when they wrote. But at any rate, I totally understand the sentiment. And the same way that we've glamorized gloom, I think that we've actually stereotyped hope as naive and privileged and even toxic. Right. As though it's toxic positivity, you're ignoring real problem. I mean, look at all the tragedies happening simultaneously in the world. We're living inside this crisis layer cake.

And you're telling me to be hopeful. It sounds ridiculous and even harmful. I think that folks who say that might be confusing hope with optimism. So optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well. And optimists tend to be pretty happy, but they can also be a little bit complacent, right? So if you think a bright future is on its way, you can kind of just sit on your couch and wait for its arrival. Hope is different. Hope is the idea that the future could turn out well, or at least better than it is, but that we don't know.

Right. And in that deep uncertainty, our actions matter, right? Because it could turn out well or very poorly. And so where optimism can be complacent, hope is a deeply action-oriented emotion, right? It guides us to fight for something better. And you see hope really at the core of, for instance, activist movements throughout history and around the world. So hope is not ignoring our problems. In fact, it's facing them head on and saying,

the status quo is unacceptable. But there are many people, maybe most people in the world who want something better, who want greater peace, equality, and sustainability. So I'm going to fight because I believe that that fight can produce something that most of us wants. Yeah. So optimism stays on the couch and just says, maybe it'll be all right. And Hope says maybe it'll be all right and gets off the couch. And so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My favorite quote on Hope comes from, honestly, my favorite writer about Hope, Rebecca Solnit, who says, Hope is not a lottery ticket you clutch waiting for good luck. It's an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Oh, she's so good. She's so good. And when you talk about skepticism, which I love, skepticism is thinking, if optimism is, it's going to be good no matter what. And cynicism is, it's going to be bad no matter what. And that's just the way the world is. Then skepticism is this place in the middle, which is really the only place that lets new information in. Right? Because if you've already decided it's all good or it's all bad, there's no new information coming in. You talk about skepticism as in living and experiencing the world like a scientist would. So talk to us about what

that looks like when you have that view. You nailed it. That's exactly right. So I think that cynics consider naive optimists, people who think everything is great as the opposite of themselves. In fact, I think they have a lot in common. Both groups of people think they know the future. They think they know humanity. And they don't have to do anything because of that. Right. So there's two things. One is certainty about how the future will turn out, and the other is complacency. As we've talked about, a naive optimist might be complacent because they think everything's going to be great. But a cynic also turns out to be pretty complacent. You can think of it as a dark complacency.

Everything's going to be awful, so there's nothing really that I have to do. And you see this, right? I mean, I think we again have this stereotype that cynics would be super moral, that they'd be radicals who would push for change. But in fact, cynics vote less often. They take part in social movements less often. They even vote more when they do vote for like strong man leaders, right, who will protect them from the selfish folks who are all around. And I think that skeptics by contrast have the courage of uncertainty. And when I say, Amanda, that they think like scientists, that's sort of what I mean.

You know, as a scientist, one of my favorite things is not known. knowing how an experiment will turn out. I find it delightful to live in uncertainty and then discover something, usually discover that I'm wrong, at least two-thirds of the time. But I think that one of the things that is hardest in, at least for me, in life, is to accept uncertainty. I think it really takes a lot of courage and presence and humility to know what we don't know. When things turn out badly in the world, when there's some horrible event that occurs,

It almost feels like a knee-jerk reaction to say, aha, I knew this would happen. This is the way that people are. This is all that we have to give. And that can give you a sense of control, again, in a world where you feel like you can't control anything. But that control comes at a cost. It comes at the cost of recognizing so much human beauty

and continuing a struggle for progress and change. I think that's so true. The need for certainty. It's like very egoic, right? Like we are dying to have any kind of sense of certainty. And so we will throw ourselves in either the cynics camp or this optimist camp. And we will live there because that gives us some level of safety. And I guess I'm wondering physiologically the cynics don't fare as well long term.

Is that the same for optimists? Yeah, are they chilling? Or are they more healthy? Like, what is it for the optimists? their physiology and longevity. Yeah, it's a great question. Optimists certainly health-wise do better than cynics. In fact, if you just look at a correlation between optimism and a bunch of health outcomes,

it's mostly positive. But there's a couple of caveats to that. One, optimism is less health positive if you are facing adversity. Right? So so long as things are going well, optimism is... You're like, this wasn't what it was supposed to be. I was told everything would be great. I get that.

Oh, interesting. I was promised that I would have a jet pack by now. Where's my jet pack? So absolutely. Optimism is a health-positive experience, but can be a fragile one if that makes sense. It can be shattered pretty easily. And second, optimists tend to strive less than hopeful people, for instance.

So hope and optimism are both health-positive, but hope, unlike optimism, I guess you could say it magnetizes us towards a future we want through our actions. Hope has some grit to it. Yes. Yes. Hope is a gritty positivity. I love that, Amanda. That's perfectly said. When we were talking about the certainty piece, that to me lands us, it feels like exactly at this crucible moment that we're in right now in the world. Because, and you talked about this so beautifully with Emile, the confusion that a lot of us have between beliefs and values. and why we won't let new information in because we think our beliefs are our values.

And therefore we will go fight to the death for our beliefs because we believe that that's our values and we have to defend them. But can you talk about Emile's view of that and what the data shows about if we got that correlation correct between beliefs and values, whether we'd actually be able to be unthreatened by new information and maybe have some kind of a bridge toward each other that we do not have right now. Yeah. I mean, Emil believed this really fiercely. He really thought that we could connect with people who were different from us on any dimension. And, you know, he was a really active person in social movements. And he would engage with people on social media who completely disagreed with him, but he would do so with

extraordinary good faith, right? I mean, he would talk with somebody where they had completely opposite perspectives and he would ask a lot of questions and it was almost like he was interviewing people. And I remember asking of like, why are you feeding the trolls, man? You know, like, why are you doing this? Do you think something's going to come of it? And he said, well, you know, I think that we so often want to be right and being right feels like the same as being good, like being a good person and being wrong.

and being wrong feels to us like a threat to who we are. But that's not what I really, I don't actually care as much about being right. I just want to live with integrity, right? And for him that meant seeking peace wherever he could find it, you know, creating bridges wherever he could. And that just the way that he talked about that led me to do a bunch of research on, again, the difference between beliefs and values.

And it turns out they're really quite different. So a belief is an opinion you have about the world. a value is what makes you who you are, the things that you care about most, what you want to give to the world. And it turns out that people who are strong in their values, who know what they want, for Emil it was integrity and peace. For other people, it might be other things. It can be achievement, family, a sense of humor, whatever you want. But if you are grounded in those values, it turns out that you clutch your beliefs less firmly, right? You loosen your grip on your beliefs. If you know who you are, then it doesn't matter as much that you be right all the time.

And that allows us to be more flexible and open-minded. Whoa. Mm-hmm. We are all so, we really think who we are as our beliefs. Yep. This time of year, I am always looking for my sweaters. Luckily, Quince has all of the staple sweaters covered from soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like designer pieces without the markup to 100% silk tops and skirts for easy dressing up to perfectly cut denim for everyday wear. I can't tell you how much I'm loving my quince cashmere sweater in this gorgeous oatmeal color. It's become the thing I grab almost every day. It's held up beautifully. It still feels soft and it honestly looks way more expensive than it is. You know how frugal I am. And I've started picking up a few quince pieces for home too.

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No treatment, no roadmap, no support. Not because help doesn't exist, but because the health care system makes it absurdly hard to find someone who actually knows what they're doing. That's where Midi changes the game. With Midi, you're matched directly with a clinician who's trained specifically in midlife care. Appointments happen virtually on your schedule and prescriptions are sent straight to your local pharmacy.

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dishonest okay so the christian church that is what we are taught you said you can become a cynic because of attachment and family, right? The other place we learn worldview besides family is in the religions that we're taught. And I know mine, but so many world religions are literally based. That is what people told me. You, Glennon, and everyone else are bad, greedy, dishonest. You are so bad. There's only one good person and it's Jesus. You can't see him. So shit. Just. So is that seem to be. to be a problem if is that one place where cynicism comes? Religion.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's complicated. So there's very little data on cynicism and religion. The data that are out there are really mixed. Clergy people appear to be less cynical than non-clergy. But there's no strong relationship between the amount of faith or religious practice that someone engages in and how cynical they are. but I completely resonate with your intuition.

And I think that the reason that the data are so noisy is because different traditions tell us completely different things about what we are at our core. Absolutely original sin is one version of, yeah, you're all fundamentally broken. We are all broken. And salvation comes in another world, not in this one. But you think about other religious traditions,

like in Hinduism, we all have the light of God inside us. My kids go to a Quaker school and they're taught all the time about the light that they have to carry and to give and that that is divine. And so I think that there are so many affirming spiritual traditions that really teach us about fundamental goodness and just as many disaffirming traditions that teach us that we are broken to our core. And I would love to see more evidence about how those teachings affect our worldviews. But I really share your intuition that it could matter a lot. Yeah, and like Judaism teaches so much about you are what you do. Christianity, the version I had, was very much the other. It doesn't matter, really, as long as you believe these three things.

And that's how we get, you know, Donald Trump, all the Christians can follow him because it doesn't matter what he does. It just matters that he says he believes a certain thing, which has always seemed to be a real trick to me. I think if we thought a lot about what you just said that like what you believe or say you believe actually doesn't matter what you do, what you want, what you live out is what matters, is what you're saying. And in fact, I think the way that you just described it is much closer to how I land as, I guess, a humanist, right? which is that I don't think people, I mean, I'm fascinated in whether we believe we are good or bad,

kind or cruel, callous or compassion. As a scientist, I will never answer that question. But what I do know is that if human beings are anything, we are adaptable. We mold ourselves to the circumstances of our culture, of our family, of our faith, of our communities. we become different versions of who we could have been over time. And that very much includes whether we treat other people well or poorly, whether we are open or closed-minded, whether we are egalitarian or bigoted. All of these things, I don't think people are born any of those things.

I think we are shaped in large part into who we become. And I do think if you consider humanity that way, just like the future is unknown, human nature is unknown too. We don't know whether people are good or bad. That's so simplistic. In fact, we are complicated and we are creatures that learn more than anything else. And in fact, we adapt even to others' view of whether we are good or bad. So can you talk about kind of how cynicism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and the reverse

that if we believe that people are bad and untrustworthy, that is what they become around us. Yeah. I mean, as we've been talking about, we're molded by our circumstances. And one thing that I think we don't realize as much as we should is that every time you interact with somebody, you are their circumstance. You are their situation, right? And so what you do will shape them. And cynical people, for instance, are much more likely to be. to spy on their romantic partners, to spy on their colleagues or micromanage them, to mistrust their

friends and family members. And it turns out if you treat people that way, they can tell. You're probably not as sly as you think you are. And we are a really reciprocal species, right? So if you treat people that way, they will treat you that way. And oftentimes what you see in research and in life is that cynics will. treat people as though they are selfish and then bring out those people's most selfish side. And then the cynic will say, aha, I knew it all along, not realizing that they have created the very situation that they feared. You know how they say, I've always like said out loud, it takes less effort to be kind than it does to be mean. And so I'm thinking about it from like

an energy perspective. Do you have any data or information around the energy difference between being a cynic and being an optimist or a hopeful skeptic? Yeah, absolutely, right? So I think that you're pointing to the virtuous version, right? I mean, if cynicism creates these kind of toxic self-fulfilling prophecies, right? You basically, you mistreat somebody, they mistreat you. You can think of that as energy dissipating from the relationship, right? Basically, the connection between you reducing to zero, sort of giving way to entropy.

Well, guess what? The opposite happens when we treat other people in good faith, right? When we treat them as though they're the folks we hope they are instead of the people we fear they are. This is what is often known in social science as earned trust. Right. So when you treat somebody as though they will step up, they're much more likely to step up. And that's why I often encourage people to not just trust others in order to learn about them and build relationships. but to trust loudly.

If you're going to put faith in somebody, tell them you're doing it. I know it can sound cringe and corny and all of that, but the data are very clear that we underestimate the power of our positive words. And Abby, to your point, that generates energy insofar as when we tell people, hey, I'm going to give you this responsibility or I'm going to invest my time in you or my energy in you because I believe in you. If you say that out loud, it makes it much. more likely that this person is honored by the way that you're treating them, and then they become

who you hope they'll be, right? So it turns these self-fulfilling prophecies into something really beautiful. And then you get into this like energy loop. Like this is an experience that I had playing soccer and being a veteran, a leader on the team. There was oftentimes, I would say things that were factually just like untrue, but they were personal, real true beliefs and things that I thought could be possible for my teammates, that they were like, you're crazy. And I was like, no, this is so possible. Like, I really believe that this is possible for you. Tell him what you said to Alex Morgan. Alex just told the story. Didn't you say you're going to be, though, whatever? Yeah. So Alex Morgan and I, we were sitting in a hotel and we were talking. This also happened with

a former teammate of mine, Mia Hamm. Mia had the record and goals. And she just like offhandedly said to me, well, you're going to break my record. Wow. And I thought, she is bat-shick crazy. I mean, I must have had like 50 goals at the time and she had a hundred and, you know, 58 or something. I'm like, that is insane. But I never forgot it because it made me feel like, oh, this person who achieved this thing believes that there's even a small chance, even like a little bit of an opportunity. And so I thought about that and I got closer and I eventually, of course, not of course, but eventually I passed her. And then, you know, similar things happened with Alex Morgan. When she came onto the scene, I had mentioned to her like, oh, you're going to do so many bigger things than me. Like you're going to be more famous. You're going to make more money. You're going to win more championships than I am. She's just like, what? And you just don't believe it. So you have to like, there's almost this willing of belief into the energy between people that I think really is tapping into something divine.

That's beautiful. I think that's so beautiful and compelling. And it reminds me of in psychology, we talk about the pygmalion effect. So there's all these experiments where teachers are told that some of their students are gifted and then the rest are not. But in fact, and we wouldn't run these experiments today, by the way. These are done decades ago. But in fact, the students that the teacher learns are gifted, their aptitude is the same as all the other ones. But it turns out that teachers who think that they're working with a gifted student,

invest more in them. They say, I think you're going to thrive. I think you're going to crush this. I think you're going to succeed. And then guess what? Those students become more likely to succeed. And I think we see this in all parts of our lives. And it also speaks to the power that we all have to better each other, right? By expressing the way that you did, Abby, beautifully, our belief, our faith in other people. Now, I think you said something really critical, though, which is you always believed it, Even if everybody else thought it was bad shit crazy. It was true for you. I don't think that this works if you're being insinceree.

I think it only works if you truly believe in people. So I would not suggest trusting loudly or expressing faith in people if it's false. But if you believe it, I think you should say it. You know, there's this saying, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all. But I think we need the opposite saying as well. If you do have something nice to say, just spit it out. Yes. Stop being so shy with our positive evaluations of other people.

Yes. Well, and we also have the information that we need to share with people. But we also have false information that we believe that is very much impacting us. So you talked about this study that 30% of people believed that, quote unquote, most people can be trusted, only 30%. But then 65% of those same people said that their own community. could be trusted. So it's like we actually do trust our own people. It's this idea that the people that aren't our people are different than our people, right? So it's like what we can see, we trust, but we mistrust what we can't see. And I was wondering if you could, in this thinking of

this globally, talk to us about what happened in Prague with Vaclav Havel and the whole idea that hopelessness results from most people believing incorrectly that most people don't care. So we think that most people don't care, which isn't true. But then that thinking leads to hopelessness, which leads most people not to care. So it's like this vicious cycle. Tell us what happened with him because that was with the butcher shop and all of that. It was so beautiful. Yeah, Vaclav Havel was an amazing person.

He was a playwright, friends with Kurt Vonnegut and Samuel. Becket and all these people. And he was also a dissident in Prague. And he was part of what was called the Prague Spring, which was this movement to democratize Czechoslovakia. And it failed. The country moved forward. And then immediately this sort of movement for greater egalitarianism was shut down by Soviet rule. And the country became much more despotic, really. And so Havel then was imprisoned and lived for years in jail. And he wrote about how cynicism was at the root of this sort of authoritarian state, that the thing that helps regimes to control people is if they can convince people that nobody else wants change. Right. So for instance, if you, and he wrote this

beautiful essay called The Power of the Powerless, where he says, if you tell a butcher, if you force them on penalty of going to prison to hang a sign in support of communist rule, for instance, in Czechoslovakia, then what other people will think, their neighbors, is that, oh, this person is not going to support me. If I want to take part in a movement to make things better, this person is not on my side, right? Even though they're being forced to put the sign up. So there's these authoritarian states and really, I think these movements to take power away from

people thrive by getting people to trust each other less. I think there's something really powerful, though, that people need to know, which is that, in fact, and Amanda, this gets to your point, the more that we're able to move past those representations, whether it's a sign in the window or what we see in the news, and actually get to know the people around us, the more we realize that those negative beliefs are wrong, the more we realize that people actually do generally want what we want. that they want greater peace, for instance, that they want more egalitarianism. And this is one thing that just struck me over and over again when I was doing the research for

this book is that cynicism really lives more on our screens, right? When we're taking in cable news or social media, we are much more likely to mistrust people, to think that people are extreme and dangerous and violent and that we should really stay the hell away from them. When we are actually out in the world with our commitment. communities, that cynicism naturally dissipates. So one of the crucial things that I learned is that in order to defeat cynicism, we don't need to ignore the truth. We actually need to get closer to the truth. We actually need to be more accurate and learn more deeply about what people are really

like. Because then what happened was when a few of like the theaters came out and instead of like against all odds that came out and spoke against the regime, then other people started saying, oh my God, them too, them too, them to, them to, two. Two weeks later, the regime is crushed, right? Because it's the domino effect that is the reverse domino effect of the sign going up. Is that they're with me, they're with me, wait, we have more power. They're just trying to separate us from each other. Exactly. I mean, I know you all had Malcolm Gladwell on talking about tipping points and how epidemics, for instance, you reach this point and then all of a sudden, everything moves really rapidly, right? It's bit by bit and then all at once. And that can be true of virtuous

social movements as well. And that's exactly what happened. So about a decade after the Prague Spring, there was a second movement in Prague to sort of defeat and remove the Soviet rule. And it started slowly. And then as you said, Amanda, people started realizing how many others supported this cause. And then all of a sudden things moved very quickly. And Vaclav Havel went from a jail cell to being the first democratically elected president of the country in a very short amount of time and ushered in this sort of golden age for that state. And I think that we see this now too. Like one of the issues that makes me most cynical is climate change. You know, I just feel like, oh my God, everything else means nothing if we can't slow this destruction down. And I often feel

really alone in this. And it turns out that a lot of people do. Research finds that Americans believe that only 40, 35% of fellow Americans want aggressive policy to protect the climate. The real number is closer, depending on the issue, to 65 or 80%, depending on which particular issue you're looking for. So it turns out that most of us don't realize that most of us wants climate action, but if you want that, you're part of a super majority. And again, discovering faith in each other now goes hand in hand with cultivating hope for the future and not a complacent hope, one where we could say, hey, most of us want this, let's fight harder, let's pressure governments more, let's pressure industry more to make change because that's what

the vast majority of the country and the world desires. Can you just leave us with a couple, like let's just say the people are thinking, they've listened to this and they're like, I want to try. I want to try to be less cynical because I believe everything you're saying and I'm feeling it in my bones and that feels right. But it's hard. It's like changing a religion. It's a hard thing to do. If these people aren't going to fix climate change today, what can they do to experiment with moving from cynicism to skepticism in their everyday lives? Yeah, I love this question. And, you know, one of my favorite pieces of writing on this comes from the brilliant nun and author Pima Chodra. She writes that, you know, we can let go of our assumptions. We can let go of what we think we know and treat our lives a little bit more like an experiment. And so that would be my suggestion. There's a bunch of ways you can do that. The first is to fact-check

your cynicism. If you find yourself judging somebody you just met or, you know, mistrusting a whole group of people, ask yourself, what evidence do I have for this claim? If I had to defend this position, how would I do it? Oftentimes when I feel this, which is quite often, I realize, wait a minute, that's just kind of a vibe that I'm getting more than it's really based on any information. And so if you don't have data to support your claim, go out and collect some data. The best way to do that is to take little leaps of faith on people. I'm not saying to be reckless. I'm not saying to put everything on the line, but take little chances on people, give them an opportunity to show you who they are. And then the third thing I would say is to try

out something I call positive gossip, right? We tend to think negatively. We also tend to speak negatively. In my lab, we find that people gossip three times more about selfish actions than they do about generous ones. But we can balance that out. You know, I try with my kids each day to sort of forage for one example of goodness that I witness and then tell them about it at dinner, which I know sounds corny and they're nine and seven. I probably have about two years left before they completely disallow me from ever doing it again. But for now, this is my small way of trying to fight their cynicism, but it also changes the way that I think. Yeah. You know, when you know you're going to say something or talk about something later, it kind of pops up an antenna in your

mind and you look for it in your everyday life. And I've found that because I know that I want to share something positive with my kids each day, I start to notice more positivity. And it actually isn't that hard to find at all. So those are just some starting points. And I mean, again, I think that living a little bit more like a scientist can be really beautiful, not just because you learn more, but because if you're like most people, most people are better than you think. So when you pay more attention, pleasant surprises should be everywhere. I love that. Calling out moral beauty, you said. I love that. It's finding evidence of moral beauty all around you. It will be there if you're looking for it. I love it. Thank you so much for being here. Book is beautiful. It's a beautiful tribute and such

important information. If we're going to get ourselves free, it's going to be in part through more accurate information. So thank you for this. Thank you so much. Thank you all. This has been absolutely delightful. Thank you for having me. And yeah, I hope that this can be useful to folks. I think it will be. I think that whoever's in charge, well, you know who's in charge, someone else should put you on every stage in America for the next. I mean, oh my God. So helpful. So beautiful. Thank you. Thank you very much. See you next time, Pod Squad. Bye. Find moral beauty. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to Week and do hard things. Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus

sign in the upper right hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren Lagrasso, Alison Schott, and Bill Schultz.