Dr. Jamil Zaki on Unlocking Trust: The Science of Human Goodness EP 502
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Coming up next on Passion Struck. I am in no way saying that what we should do is adopt an unthinking, credulous form of trust of everybody. But what's happened instead is that we've entered this phase of politics in America, and as you elegantly put it, all around the world,

where our default is to just disbelieve and mistrust every piece of information and every source of information if it doesn't exactly match what we believe already. And that is extraordinarily toxic for our ability to recognize common ground and accomplish any goals together. It's extraordinarily useful for people who really are untrustworthy.

Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the

Hey, Passion Struck Tribe.

Welcome back to episode 502. And let me just start by saying a massive thank you to every single one of you who tunes in week after week,

Ready to dive deep, learn, and ignite change. You're the heartbeat of this show, and together we're on this incredible journey to live better, be better, and create lasting impact. If you're new here, welcome to The Movement. Or if you've been thinking about introducing the show to a friend or a family member, which we truly appreciate, we've got you covered with over 500 episodes in the catalog, which is hard to believe. It can be tough to know where to start. That's why we've created Episode Starter Packs, curated playlists to help you dive right in.

We've organized them by theme, like top behavioral science episodes, physical, spiritual, and mental health episodes, astronauts, military leaders, and women at the top of their game, to name just a few. Head over to Spotify or visit passionstruck.com slash starterpacks to find your perfect entry point. In case you missed our episodes from last week, they were packed with fascinating conversations.

I sat down with Dr. David Yeager, a leading psychologist known for his work with Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth. We explored his new book, 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People and how we can better connect with and inspire the next generation. So be sure to check that one out. And let's not forget our 500th episode celebration with the amazing Lauren Zander.

Lauren, founder of The Handle Group and creator of The Handle Method, is known for working with icons like Hugh Jackman and Questlove. In our chat, she brought her no BS approach to help us cut through our excuses and take radical accountability in life. If you haven't caught this episode yet, do yourself a favor and dive in. As always, I truly appreciate all your ratings, review, and feedback.

If today's episode resonates with you, please drop us a five-star review and share it with your friends and family. Your comments mean the world to me and to our incredible guests. Now, let's shift gears to today's topic, a subject that's hitting hard in our world right now, cynicism. Cynicism creeps into our thoughts.

erodes our connections, and chips away at our belief in one another. To put it in perspective, in 1972, half of Americans believed most people could be trusted. Today, that number has dropped to just a third. Across all walks of life, we're seeing a dangerous belief that human virtue is fading.

But here's the truth. Cynicism is often misplaced. Research shows we consistently underestimate the kindness, generosity, and openness of others. When we expect the worst in people, we tend to bring it out in them. To help us untangle this, we have an extraordinary guest, Dr. Jamel Zaki. He's a professor of psychology at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and an expert in empathy and kindness.

His new book, Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, reveals how we can overcome cynicism through hopeful skepticism. It's not about blind optimism, but learning how to magnify the good in people while staying critical where it counts. In this episode, Dr. Zaki...

shares powerful insights from over two decades of research on how to escape the cynicism trap and boost your mental well-being dispel the myth of the cynical genius and stop feeding negativity combat polarization and foster a more unified world avoid social shark attacks and maintain positive connections and build data-driven faith in others to fuel happiness this conversation is a game changer for anyone who's tired of feeling disconnected and cynical so get ready

Dr. Zaki is about to teach us how to magnify the good in others and build the world we all want to see. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

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I am absolutely thrilled and honored to have Jamel Zaki with us. Welcome, Jamel. Thanks so much for having me, John. I want to start this episode out by going into some of the research that I did on you. I understand that your study of human goodness started from your own experiences with it. Can you share with us the story of your parents' divorce and the bitterness that came out of it and how it influenced you to start the study of empathy and understanding others?

Of course, there's an old saying in psychology that research is me-search. We become fascinated in some aspect of human nature, not just because it's fascinating, but because it's mattered to us. And that's certainly true for me. My parents are immigrants. My father came from Pakistan, my mother from Peru, and they met in Pullman, Washington, of all places where they were going to graduate school.

They fell in love, I think, mostly because they were both foreign to the U.S. and felt really out of place.

But as it became clear that they were acclimating and they were becoming Americans, it also became clear that they had nothing in common, which as their only child, I can attest to the fact that they have nothing in common. So a lot of my childhood was taken over by a really difficult and painful divorce that they were going through. And as their only child, I felt like it was my role to try and connect with each one of them, even

even though they had such a hard time connecting with one another. You could think of my child as like a battlefield where I was the one trying to call a truce. Now, I knew that I couldn't join my parents together again. In fact, I didn't want that. But I knew also that each one of them was a terrific person. They both are wonderful people.

I'm blessed to have great relationships with both of them now. But early in my life, I guess I understood the importance of connecting with people, even if their perspectives were fundamentally different. And I think that fascinated me in how people connect in general, especially how we connect in difficult times. I didn't know at that time, I was like eight years old, so I didn't know what the word empathy meant.

But I still credit that difficult early experience with my interest in empathy as a scientific topic, which of course has become a lot of my career since then.

I'm going to jump from that to an interview that I often highlight on this podcast because it's become one of my favorites. I was first introduced to the work of Dacher Keltner through my friend Susan Cain. And as I've learned more about his research, I am just awestruck by what he's discovered about compassion. And I was privileged to interview him about his book, Awe, in which he speaks to this topic

of human goodness. He calls it moral beauty. And when we think of awe, we often think of feeling it in the birth of a child or looking at nature or a majestic piece of art. But what Dacher's research found is that awe is most oftenly experienced when we either do an act of kindness or witness an act of kindness in others. And I thought this was a good way to start the interview.

because you yourself have done significant research on empathy and kindness and how much it influences the human brain. Could you share more from the profound research that you've done and what your findings are on these topics? Absolutely. And I want to also just co-assign how wonderful Dacher and his work are.

And as you said, when I think of the emotion of awe, that is feeling, experiencing something profound that makes you feel small and also integrated into a larger whole, I always think of Carl Sagan's pale blue dot, that famous quote or passage where he describes how from a telescope, a sort of astronomical telescope, everything that humanity is encapsulated in just a single tiny pale blue dot that looks no bigger than a speck.

But as you say, John, in fact, if you ask people what gives them awe in their everyday lives, the way that Dacher describes it is what's known as moral beauty. That is the experience of just seeing somebody act in a way that is kind and compassionate. And it turns out that witnessing those types of compassionate acts actually makes us feel like we're part of a greater whole.

My work suggests that there are opportunities to witness those acts all the time. For the last 20 years, my lab and I have examined how we connect with one another, what those connections do for us, and how we can learn to connect better. We have found that the human brain is fundamentally organized for connection to other people.

For instance, when you donate to charity or help a stranger, similar parts of your brain become active as when you eat chocolate or when you win money. It's not that we have to overcome our instincts to be kind. It's that our instincts, and indeed one of our greatest source of pleasures, is being kind to other people. So at a fundamental level, this is who we are. I also find in my lab that this is what benefits us most.

One of the fastest, most efficient ways to improve our own well-being, our own happiness, is to show up for somebody else. Spending time on somebody else makes us feel less stressed about how much time we have. Giving money to others makes us feel more abundant in our own lives. This is, again, a fundamental quality of our species that I also find to be extraordinarily beautiful and sometimes underappreciated.

that we really exist to be with and for each other. There is good in us, and it does good for us. It's interesting. I was recently at church where they were asking for volunteers in the parish, and I went to the website to see what the volunteer opportunities were. And the first one that they had on there was that they were looking for volunteers to go out and visit the elderly, who are some of the most lonely and isolated people that we have in our communities, whether it's here in the States

or in other countries. And to me, this was really a call for people to show kindness, to bring these elderly people hope and care, maybe from the loneliness that they're experiencing. I thought that was a really neat intersection point. And what I wanted to do with this is I've had a number of astronauts that I've interviewed here on the show. And a friend of mine is actually one of the two stranded astronauts

astronauts who's on the ISS right now. Her name is Sunny Williams. But every single astronaut that I talk to, including one of my really good friends who's a classmate of mine from the Naval Academy, tells me the story this way. He remembers that he was flying over New York City when he was on the ISS and he was looking down and he was trying to picture himself as a passenger in one of the cars that was there during rush hour. And in his mind, he could just imagine

the frustration that they were feeling. And he just realized that the emotions that were going through their heads were so meaningless in the bigger scope of the bigger earth that he was seeing, because what he was witnessing was all of humanity and the connections

that happen all over the world that you witness from outer space and to this day he feels that it's that warmth and inspiration that has changed his life completely and how he sees the world now john i really appreciate you zooming in on this as well i actually use this same strategy as a self-regulation mechanism and i teach it to my kids too i often tell my kids

The next time that you feel angry, I want you to imagine a camera right above your head that's looking at you and the way that you feel and the way that you're acting. And of course, when that camera is zoomed in, you and your emotions take up the whole frame. That's what's most important. But now imagine the camera zooming out, reaching 100 feet, 1,000 feet, 10,000 feet, 100,000 feet. Now imagine the camera in space.

and watch as you shrink. And that's not to say, of course, that you and your emotions are less important, but it's to see those experiences from the perspective of something larger, not just you, but maybe everyone in the city, everyone in the country, everyone in the world.

And to understand that your emotions are a sometimes difficult, often beautiful part of a much larger whole. So I use this, I actually use this strategy myself all the time. When I'm angry, I say zoom out to myself, right? And that's one of my go-to emotion regulation strategies. And I guess I wish I had actually flown in a spaceship, but I think any of us can use that overview effect whenever we need it.

And I love that you just brought that up because I use this in my book, Passion Struck, that I released earlier this year, where I describe the power of perspective. And in the book, I go into how so much of the world today is experiencing black and white or either or thinking. And what we really need to be doing is adopting more of the Eastern traditions and how they see things as both and.

because this black and white thinking is causing so much cynicism, which is exactly what you and I are going to be talking about today. So the week that this episode is airing, your book, Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, is launching. What inspired you to write this?

Thanks, John, for the opportunity to also get personal here. I really appreciate it. As we talked about, I've been interested in empathy and kindness forever. I've been studying this from a scientific perspective for 20 years. And through my work, I ended up as an informal ambassador for humanity's greater angels, right? People bring me in to speak or to write when they want to be affirmed, when they want to

When they want to hear that, hey, people are compassionate, we're kind, we are connected, that's who we're meant to be, that's how we thrive. And I love doing that. And I thoroughly believe the science, partially because I do a bunch of it, but also trust the many other people who do this work and am very close to it.

But sometimes, John, just knowing something and feeling it are not the same thing. And a secret that I've carried with me through my entire career is that even though I studied kindness, togetherness, and compassion,

In my personal life, I do tend to be a little bit gloomier. I tend to be a little bit suspicious of people. I find it sometimes hard to trust folks. I guess you could say that I have been a cynic this entire time. And that cynicism got much worse in the early pandemic, as I think it did for a lot of people when we were all locked in our homes, locked

just experiencing the world through our screens. And I ended up really feeling this great divide between what I knew to be true, the message that I also was spreading to the world about human goodness, and what I was feeling inside. So this book began as an exploration of what was happening with me. But then I quickly realized that my cynicism was not just mine, that this is a

deep and growing experience among millions and millions of people who have lost faith in humanity and in our institutions. And I learned how much that's hurting us. And I also learned that we don't have to feel this way. So all of these insights from both the science and from the many stories that I collected and from my own life led me to think, wow, this is a message that maybe other people could use just as much as I can.

I love that and thank you for being so vulnerable about your own cynicism because I think cynicism is something that so many of us possess and we just don't want to admit it out loud. In fact, I love the statistics that you shared in the book about how the perception of trust has changed over the past few decades. Could you share some of the statistics that you share in the book? Absolutely. So cynicism really surrounds fundamental philosophical questions about who we are,

Overall, is humanity kind or cruel, just or unjust, trustworthy or untrustworthy, good or bad? And these are questions that we've been asking ever since we've had language all around the world. I don't think that there's a simple answer to any of these questions. But as you're alluding to, John, our answers have nonetheless changed over time. That is, people have grown more wary of people over the last 50 or so years.

In 1972, for instance, about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to about a third of Americans, a huge drop. To put it in perspective, our trust has fallen as much as the stock market fell during the financial collapse of 2008. So we are living in a major nationwide trust crisis.

deficit. And it's not just in the US either. In 2022, a survey of 26 countries found that in the vast majority of those nations, most people say that their default is to not trust others. And that's new as well. So again, our answers to these fundamental questions about who we are

Those answers are changing. And that matters because even though it's hard to come up with a single right answer about what humanity is, the way that you answer that question changes the life that you live and the types of communities that you... Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water? Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold. Butter? Yep.

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It's time to get the world talking about black-led brands. We all have our favorites, but we can't keep them all to ourselves. So if you're feeling a little black opal beauty, tell somebody. If the lip bar gives you a lip for every drip, let them know. And if your hair is doing the do, shout that out too. Join Walmart in shouting out your favorite black-led products, creating a new world of choices. At Walmart.com slash black and unlimited. Jamel, I'm going to take this in a direction that I never thought

I would, because what you just said brought up an idea that I wanted to ask you about. One of the areas that I love doing deep dives in is into the science of mattering, which ironically, I started to ask people like Angela Duckworth, Katie Melkman, Dacher Keltner, who they knew who might be studying this. And it turns out that Marty Slugman is dedicating the remainder of his life to its study. What do you think cynicism has to do with our sense of mattering?

Wow. I love this question. It brings me to a bunch of different places. First of all, when it comes to mattering, one person who I might recommend checking out would be my colleague, Jeff Cohen at Stanford. Jeff is really interested in values affirmation. That is, it might not be whether you matter, but it's more what matters most to you.

He asks people to reflect on and to write about what matters most to them and how they live those values through their choices in their everyday lives. And I think that work is probably some of the most connected to the just general idea of mattering that there is. But to your question, how does the way that we answer these questions about human nature, how does that impact our sense of mattering? I think enormously.

Because again, as we've been talking about, a lot of the ways that we most identify ourselves, the ways that we figure out who we are,

is through relation to other people. If you put me by myself on a tropical island and disallow me from ever seeing a human being again, it's not just that I'll feel lonely. My sense of self will collapse. Who am I if I can't be there for other people? If I can't raise my children, be with my wife, be with my friends, teach my students? So much of mattering is about relationships.

And if you decide that the rest of the species is really only out for themselves, that limits how much we can be connected to one another and that limits how much we matter. One more thought on this. Sorry, I'm going long here, but I love this question.

The great sociologist, Emil Durkheim, in the late 1800s was studying a rise in suicide and he coined a term for why he thought people might choose to end their lives. And it was "anamie." Anamie is this sense of fundamental disconnection. It's the sense not that one person has let you down, but that society itself has let you down.

that there's just no more fabric weaving us together, keeping us connected and unmoored like that, separated, floating off into social space. Durkheim said, why would people want to continue living? They've lost what matters. They've lost their sense of why they matter, which is connection. So that's just another, I think that if we lose faith in each other, in a way we lose access to

to the most important things in life, including our sense of self. I love that answer. And I'm definitely going to research that even more because that would be a fantastic podcast interview. But even more than that, I'm just interested in the research and getting my hands on anything that I can find because the closest thing that I've found to science of mattering is self-determination theory. So thank you so much, Jamil, for sharing that perspective.

I'm going to share with the audience another Emil who you bring up in the book. And this is the life story of neuroscientist Emil Granado, who was a close friend of yours and an inspiring figure in your life. And Jamil, this was really an emotional part of reading your book for me because I recently lost my sister to pancreatic cancer just a few months ago. And she, like Emil, was larger than life, filled with hope even in her darkest days. And her complete focus became giving back to humanity.

even when she was at her sickest. So she went back and got a master's degree in social work because she was so adamant about giving back to others. And she often told me about this awareness that she was gaining, especially towards the end of her life, about the beauty of our world and her place in it. And I wanted to use that as a backdrop because I was hoping that you could share more about Emil's journey and your friendship with him and how he helped influence your understanding of hope and cynicism.

John, I'm so sorry for your loss. And that's a beautiful description of your sister, who sounds like she was just an amazing person. Emil was a friend of mine, but he was also one of my heroes. He was a peace activist and a peace neuroscientist. Most people have never heard of that, but he pioneered using tools from neuroscience to understand why people

find it so easy to hate each other and whether we could reframe their thinking to help reconnect people who were in conflict. But beyond the beauty of his work, Emil lived an absolutely gorgeous life, which is not to say he lived an easy life. His mother had severe schizophrenia and wasn't able to raise him. So he was raised by his father. He was grew up very poor in a very rich part of California. And yet

He made a choice. He told me actually that when he was a teenager, he made a choice that he was not going to let these circumstances dictate how he lived. He was going to live with hope. He was going to try to see the best in people. And I think when we, as a culture, talk about hope or trust or faith in people, we often ascribe these things.

sort of philosophies, these perspectives to naive people. We say, oh, that person's hopeful because they haven't been around the block yet. They haven't been hurt yet. Emil went through enormous adversity. He was the opposite of naive. He chose his hope because that's how he wanted to live his life. And he retained that hope

even at the end of his life, which was cut far too short. When he was in his early mid-40s, Emil was diagnosed with a glioblastoma, which is a very aggressive form of brain cancer. And he died from that cancer at the age of 47 with two young children and leaving behind his wife as well. It's an enormous tragedy and loss for so many of us.

But John, just like your sister, Emil told me that this diagnosis was of course painful, but also clarifying that he had access to this sense of awe and beauty

that he had never had before. And trust me, this is a person who experienced awe and beauty all the time. So if he was experiencing even more of it, I can only imagine what his inner life was like toward the end. Emil to me was always an inspiration and also a challenge. As I was struggling with cynicism, why? Because I was cooped up at home and reading Twitter too much. He was battling this illness and still retaining his faith in people.

I was always frankly jealous of that. I felt, gosh, why can't I access this type of hope? And also, again, just deeply inspired. Emile taught me that having a long life and having a good life are not necessarily the same thing. Even though he was robbed of the first, he absolutely had the second. And when he died in 2020, that intensified my desire to explore life.

what I could do about my cynicism and whether there's a way to think and feel a little bit more like Emil did. And with the blessing and support of his wife, I also got to talk with many people in Emil's life and actually got to know him more after he was gone, even than I had known him when he was with us. And his story provides all sorts of clues and elements as to how any of us

can choose hope, not in a naive way, but I would say in a courageous way, in a way that is intentional.

structured around what we want from our lives and what we want to give to other people. - Thank you so much Jamil for sharing that. And I wanted to share something else with the audience. I'm gonna make sure I put more information about Emil in the show notes as a tribute to him. And after I read about him in your book, I did additional research about him and his life. And I happened to come across an article in the New York Times titled "The World Lost Emil Brunel When It Needed Him Most." It was really such a beautiful tribute

to the life that he led and the people that he touched. Jamel, going back to the interview, many people have different interpretations of what cynicism means. And I love how you write about it. And you've got so many great quotes throughout the book. One of them is this, "Trust is such a social gamble and cynics think it's for suckers." When I think about that quote, it leads me to this conclusion that a lot of people have learned a definition of what cynicism is, but what describes it best for you?

I would say that cynicism is a theory about people. It's the theory that overall, fundamentally, and at our core, people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. Now, that's not to say that a cynic would be surprised if somebody donates to charity or helps a stranger, but they might look at that kind act in a different way than a non-cynic. They might say, ah, sure, that person did something nice, but they're probably looking to get something out of it.

Cynics believe that kindness is a veneer, a thin surface that pastes over who we really are. And that when push comes to shove, when we show our true colors, those colors are pretty ugly.

So as you said, in the quote that you allude to, cynicism changes how we experience the world. Cynics, for instance, are more suspicious of others. They see ulterior motives behind other people's kind actions. But cynicism also changes what we do in the world. Trust is the willingness to be vulnerable to somebody else on the expectation that they will show up for us. It's a show of faith in another person.

And, as you allude to, cynics believe that is just not a good bet, that if I put my faith in somebody else, if I make myself vulnerable to that person, more often than not, I'm going to lose. That person will take advantage of me, they will harm me in some way, they'll manipulate me.

If you feel that way, you are not going to trust people. You are going to be very risk averse in social settings. And that's exactly what happens with cynics. Cynics are much less trusting, much less willing to open up to other people, to ask for support, to give support. They're much less open in their partnerships at work. In whatever way you can measure, cynics in essence close themselves off

because they think that opening themselves up is a way to lose, a way to be taken advantage of. Jamel, thank you for that. And another great way to summarize this is from something that you wrote in the book. You write, "Cynicism changes as we think, what we do and what we don't do." And after that statement, you discuss a way that economists illustrate the modern impact of cynicism on our personal and social lives.

John, do you mind if we play the game real quick? Is that all right? That would make sense. Okay. Okay. I'm going to put you in the role of an investor and I'll be the trustee. Okay. So here are the rules. I'm going to magically give you $10. Okay. And so you're welcome for that, first of all. And you can send as much of those $10 as you want over to me.

whatever you send to me is going to be tripled in value. And then I have the option of sending whatever I want back to you. If you send all $10 to me, then that will be tripled and I will have $30. I can then share as much of that as I want with you. So if I decided to go halfsies, we would each end up with $15. You would end up with more money than you had at the beginning, and so would I. But if you send all $10 to me,

I will have $30. I could also just keep all 30. I could also choose to give you back more than half because you were the one who started out with this money in the first place.

So, those are the rules. Does that make sense, by the way, John? That would make sense. Okay. Now, let me add one more stipulation. We are not having this lovely conversation. You've never seen my face. You don't know my name. We are two strangers interacting anonymously on the internet. That's an important feature of the task.

We've got this great, in my opinion, great rapport. So that could make you feel more trusting, but we want to eliminate that. So I want you to do your best to imagine we've never met and never will. So knowing all of that, how much would you like to send over to me?

So given the parameters that you've laid out around this, I would not spend the entire $10. I'd probably spend in the neighborhood of $5. So that's really not dissimilar than what most people do. By far, in these games, and economists have studied hundreds of thousands of people playing games like these, by far, the most common decision is to send $5, to send half, which is in essence...

hedging a bet, right? Saying, "Let me send some over. I can potentially profit if this person turns out to be trustworthy, but if they're not, at least I haven't been completely burned." So $5 is the most common investment. Cynics send much less on the order of $2 or even less. That's a display of their beliefs, right? This is how our beliefs

come through our actions, right? In this case, most people think, "Ah, maybe these people will be trustworthy," and cynics almost pretty confident that people will not be trustworthy. Here's the thing. Most trustees, the people who receive this money, are very trustworthy. In fact, they're much more trustworthy than most people imagine. If you survey people and ask what percentage of trustees will run away with the money,

The average person says half. The average cynic says much more than half. Almost everybody will run away with the money. If you then measure it,

Only 20% of people run away with the money. 80% of people are very trustworthy, even though they don't have to be. There's no reason from a self-interested perspective for a stranger on the internet to send back money. They could just keep it all, but 80% of the time they don't. It also turns out that the level of trustworthiness that somebody shows is influenced by how trusting the first person is.

Now, if I were to put reverse our roles in this game and you're a stranger on the internet, I'm a stranger on the internet, and I decide to send you just $1. I wonder, John, how would that make you feel? What would you think about me given that I've chosen not to trust you? It certainly makes you feel a negative emotion towards the other person with a lot of money. Like, how could they not trust me? Of course, I'm going to treat the money as if it's my own.

Exactly. Exactly. And so one of the things that I think people don't realize is that in trust interactions, right, we're so focused on what risk am I taking on when I trust somebody, we focus a lot less on, well, what message am I sending to this person? How am I treating this other person?

And it turns out that when we don't trust other people, we're protecting ourselves. We're also harming the other person. We're giving them a strong signal that I don't really believe in you. And people react quite badly to that. They feel bad. They don't like the person who's not trusting them. And guess what? They actually become more selfish as a result because they say, this is a broken relationship. I have no reason to be trustworthy. By contrast, when

The investor is very trusting.

the trustee, the person who receives this money, feels great about them, feels very connected to the investor. And guess what? They then send back more money even as a percentage. So actually it turns out that for every additional dollar that an investor gives to the trustee, they get back more than $2. So it turns out to be a financially savvy decision to trust. And also, of course, this is the way that we build relationships in our lives. So by not

trusting, by refusing to put faith in other people, cynics lose out not just on warm and fuzzy feelings, but on productive and important connections that they could have. And this, of course, is not just in the context of the trust game that economists use, but in all sorts of contexts, in our personal relationships, in our careers, and even in the communities and societies that we build.

I wanted to introduce it this way on purpose because I want to play into your zoom in, zoom out analogy. So we just zoomed in for a personal level. So now let's zoom out to the societal issues that cynicism is causing. Can you describe it as a tool for the status quo used

by elites and propagandists to sow distress and maintain control, and how cynicism is not only playing a role in US politics, but we're seeing it in the UK, in Germany, in France, in Belgium, in Sweden, so many places worldwide. How do you believe this pervasive cynicism is affecting society's ability to address and solve major issues? Because I think it is significantly getting in the way of us making the world a better place.

Completely. I think about cynicism as almost a fractal of harm. And again, I love that this conversation keeps on going back to this zoom in, zoom out perspective, because basically at every level of analysis that psychologists and sociologists and economists measure, cynicism hurts us, right? It harms our health, physical and mental health, our personal relationships, our careers, but also, as you allude to,

our culture and society. We are living right now in a moment of what I would call peak political mistrust.

And look, if we mistrust politicians and elites, I think that there are many, we can be forgiven for that. There are many reasons to mistrust people who have abused their power. I am in no way saying that what we should do is adopt an unthinking, credulous form of trust of everybody. But what's happened instead is that we've entered this phase of politics in America, and as you elegantly put it, all around the world, where we've

where our default is to just disbelieve and mistrust every piece of information and every source of information if it doesn't exactly match what we believe already. And that is extraordinarily toxic for our ability to recognize common ground and accomplish any goals together. It's extraordinarily useful for people who really are untrustworthy. An untrustworthy politician

if they are called out, might lose their power. But if they manage to get people to mistrust each other and to decide that actually nobody can be counted on, then it's really hard for us to know that they, this corrupt politician, are uniquely untrustworthy.

An environment of total mistrust is great for authoritarians, for autocrats, and for anti-democratic norms. In fact, there's research that finds that when people mistrust each other,

they're much more willing to support what so-called strongman leaders, folks who lead in really almost dictatorial ways because they feel like everybody around me is out to get me. And in this Darwinian battle royale, we might as well have somebody who at least will control the people who need to be controlled. It's an incredibly toxic way to run a culture. And so if we...

in the US and beyond are increasingly adopting cynicism. It's not just a reflection of a broken system. I think that there are many reasons that we're cynical that we can get into if you want, but that cynicism feeds into the very causes, the very harms that are making it hard for us to trust each other in the first place. It's a kind of vicious cycle.

So Jamil, I'm going to ask you a follow-on question, and I'm going to quote you again. If cynicism was a pill, its warning label would list depression, heart disease, and isolation. In other words, as you write, it would be a poison. So why do so many of us swallow this poison? I think there's a bunch of reasons. One, and again, what I really don't want to do with this book and what I want to be clear on always is that I do not blame cynics for the way that they feel.

Again, that would mean blaming myself first of all, because I struggle with cynicism all the time. I think that there's a bunch of ways that our culture has glamorized cynicism. One, we think that it's really smart and wise.

If you survey people and ask them who's more intelligent, cynics or non-cynics, 70% of them think that cynics are smarter than non-cynics. 85% of them think that cynics are more socially smart. For instance, that they'd be better at detecting who's a liar and who's telling the truth.

In fact, the opposite comes out of the data. Cynics do less well on cognitive tests and have a harder time spotting liars. Because if you assume everybody is lying, then you stop paying attention to the clues that actually allow you to discern who's trustworthy and who isn't. I think we also, as a culture, treat cynicism as safe, like a way of protecting ourselves from harm, when, as we've just talked about, it's actually a great way to cut ourselves off from opportunity.

and connection and even love, I would say. And third, I think we imagine cynicism is moral. And this gets to this broader social context, John, that you're asking about now, right? There's this sense that a lot and a lot of cynics that I talk with will tell me what I really am is a realist. If you're not cynical, you're not paying attention. Maybe hope and trust are a form of privilege.

or naivete, right? It's easy to be hopeful if you're living a relatively good life, but it's also a way of ignoring our problems and burying our head in the sand. But as we're talking about now, actually the opposite is true. Cynics, because they believe that things will never get better, because they believe that the most toxic parts of our culture reflect who we really are, are much less likely to do anything about it.

They vote less often, they protest less often, they take part in social movements less often. It turns out that if we want to better the world, we need to believe that the world can be better. And that starts with believing in each other, adopting a perspective that I call hopeful skepticism, and that I would say I want to put forward as an antidote to cynicism and all the harm that it's causing.

Jamel, since you just brought that up, let's go into that in more detail, because I think that's what the back half of your book is really about and how this could be a path forward using hope for so many of us. So do you have a story that best illustrates that? And if we would use it, how it could change our perception of cynicism? Oh, man, I think that.

Emil's story is a good place to start, frankly. Emil was a person who easily could have lived a very cynical life given all the adversity that he had been through. And again, as we've been talking about, he chose a different path for his inner life. He chose to believe in people. He chose to see the good in others and to live in search of that good and in search of ways to accentuate

the goodness of others. And that made the path of his life something really beautiful, not just in terms of what he experienced, but what he was able to give to other people. And to me, a lot of my, having spent now years researching the science of cynicism, I know that this can feel like a gloomy conversation, but John, we've been talking about all these terrible things that people believe about each other and the harm that does to us as individuals and as a culture.

But I think that the science of cynicism is secretly enormously beautiful because one of the main lessons in it is we don't have to feel this way. If you look at the data, it's really clear that overall people are kinder, more compassionate, more open-minded, and more trustworthy than we realize. The average person, because of their cynicism, underestimates the average person.

And I know that's sad, that's tragic because it cuts us off from so many connections, from so much good we could do. But it also means that the average person is probably better than you think. And so by adopting skepticism, which to me is a mindset of being open and scientific, not naively trusting people, but also not naively mistrusting people,

By adopting that skeptical, open-minded, scientific perspective, we actually open ourselves up to countless pleasant surprises, to new relationships, new connections, and new ways of approaching life and what we want to contribute.

Thank you for sharing that. I'm going to go into a real-life case study of Microsoft and the before and after of Steve Ballmer's reign as CEO. So this one is personal for me because back in the day, I was a CIO at Dell. And while I was there, Michael was really big on the GE leadership style. So it was the first time that I went somewhere that not only would you force rank, but that force rank would determine in short order who would stay and who would go. And it created a

a really chaotic environment to work in, especially when you had the old guard who were protecting those who had been at Dell for a long time. And during that time at Dell, I got to meet Steve Ballmer multiple times. And I also met him when I was at Lowe's. And at one point, he even recruited me to consider taking the role

of CIO at Microsoft. And I went there and went through rounds and rounds of interviews with Microsoft executives. And what I observed there was a total culture of intimidation. But what I also saw was organizational cynicism, which after experiencing it and seeing what I had experienced at Dell, eventually led for me taking my name out of the running at Microsoft.

and in your book you highlight microsoft as a case study to illustrate the destructive nature of organizational cynicism so i was hoping that you could discuss the rank and yank policy and how that contributed to what ended up happening at microsoft i've given a hint to the audience already

But in parallel to what you just discussed about Emil, how did it differ from someone who promoted organizational cynicism, which is exactly what Steve Ballmer was doing, to the results that we're now seeing when someone takes an opposite approach like Satya Nadella is doing? Wow, this is fascinating. John, I feel like I would like to interview you about this experience because you've really been in the trenches here. The way I think about it is that cynicism changes how we live as individuals, right?

But to the extent that we are high up in an organization or community, it also changes how we lead. Steve Ballmer is just one of many examples, as you said, this kind of GE playbook, which goes back to Jack Welch, is predicated on a cynical notion.

It's predicated on the idea of what you could call homo economicus, that in general, again, people are self-interested. Now, if you think that and you're trying to build an organization or build a culture, you have to motivate people using that self-interest.

And so one of the ways that leaders do that is through rank and yank, where managers are forced to rank all of the members of their team from best to worst. And the best ones are rewarded and the worst ones are either sanctioned or even laid off or fired. Now, the idea here is, hey, people are Darwinian creatures. We are all competing. And so if we want them to perform, we should lean into that.

There's a sense of inevitability when I talk to leaders who use these types of practices. They say, I'd love to be nice, but that's just not how you succeed. And it's these kind of bromides, these catchphrases that sound smart.

Until you look at the data, which we can because there are data everywhere on this. You've told a couple of stories of organizations that are like this, but there's also science that finds that the more that people use in their leadership, these Darwinian zero-sum contexts where they put people in competition, the worse that everybody does. And it's not just the worst that they feel.

It is absolutely stressful and chaotic and harmful to our mental health to be in an organization that has Rankin-Yank, for instance.

But it has other effects too. If you feel like you're in competition with everybody around you, why would you ever share knowledge or information or perspective with them? Sharing those things is how creative and innovative collaboration happens. So Rankin-Yank makes that much less likely. Why would you ever take a creative risk with your own work? Playing it safe is the only way to make sure that you're not at the bottom of the pile, right? If you take a risk and it doesn't pan out, you could be fired.

That's those risks are the way that again, innovation happens, the way that people become more productive, the way that new ideas are born. So highly competitive workplace cultures are not just toxic, which they are, they're also deeply unproductive and they end up being really conservative in terms of their ideas, which makes it much harder for them to thrive and see around corners and make it to the future.

And Microsoft, under Steve Ballmer, really started to take a nosedive. They botched a whole bunch of different new projects and enterprises. And then when Satya Nadella took over, by that time, I believe it was 2014, there was all this idea that Microsoft was a sinking ship.

Nadella decided to lead in a fundamentally different way. Instead of treating people like selfish homo economicus, he treated his people like folks who wanted to be together. He had hope in his leadership, and that allowed him to build a structure where people were rewarded, not just for what they did individually, but for how they showed up for one another.

He loosened the reins on them. He didn't micromanage people as much and had all these coding sprints and hackathons. And again, you would think, wow, this is a more freewheeling, a more trusting culture. Maybe people will feel better, but maybe they'll be lazier or maybe they'll slack off more. The opposite was true.

the freedom and trust that Nadella put in his people paid back enormous dividends because they trusted him and each other. They were more willing to share ideas. And that led Microsoft to be a much more innovative company. Now it's, of course, a leader in AI and also a much more successful company. Its market cap, I think, has 10x'd since Nadella took over. I'm not saying that's

entirely because of his new leadership style. But I think many people there attribute a lot of the success to this cultural renaissance that took place at Microsoft on his watch. So cynicism can tank the way that we lead. And that's not just if you're a CEO, any place that you lead, your cynicism can leak into how you lead and the culture you create in a way that harms everybody. But by focusing more on the science and what it teaches us,

realizing that people are trustworthy for the most part and thrive on kindness and connection, we can make the opposite choice and build cultures that thrive instead. Thank you so much for sharing that, Jamel. And it's so fascinating. It was a place that none of the up-and-comers in Silicon Valley or at your marquee universities wanted to go. And now it's become one of the most desirable destinations for tech talent.

To me, it is just shocking the transformation that's occurred over the past decade. Your book discussing climate change, which is something I try to bring up pretty consistently to bring more awareness to it. And as you write in the book, it's great to make planet-friendly choices. It turns out that the idea of urban footprints

was invented by British Petroleum and one of the most deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever. And then you go on to say that carbon footprints are intertwined with the structures around us. It'd be easier for people to use less energy if there were more electronic

charging stations. And what I think is so interesting here is in these campaigns, as you write, wield cynicism. They point to the issue on climate change that we're all at fault, which is the same thing as saying no one is essentially at fault. And with that as an introduction,

I wanted to use this to highlight the book because I think this is a great example of where cynicism could lead to doom. And if we decide to take a different approach to how we tackle climate change, it could be one of the greatest achievements we collectively have ever undertaken.

I love that question and the way that you frame it. I struggle so many people with what you could call climate doomerism. That is, I don't just feel scared of climate change. I feel like there's nothing that we can do about it. And really the story is already written. I know a lot of people feel that way. More people feel that way than ever. And younger people are especially prone to that. And again, super understandable. I think that doomerism often reflects

cynicism, as you say, this idea that, hey, I care about this, but most people probably don't care about this. So maybe we're not going to be able to ever change this. The carbon footprint is one version of this, right? Really, climate change is largely produced by 100 or so major corporations and organizations. And yet, we tend to be blamed for our personal choices and

even though those choices exist in a broader context, right? It's hard for many of us to make the types of choices that would help the climate because we are living in cities or parts of the world where our lifestyles depend on carbon because corporations don't want to change that, right? They don't want to create charging stations everywhere. They don't want to make it easy to make more climate-friendly choices.

This is another example. We were talking earlier about how corrupt politicians benefit when people lose faith in each other. That's true of climate change as well. It turns out that if you ask people, "What percentage of Americans do you think believe in aggressive policy to protect the climate?" People will tell you it's about 30 to 40%. The actual number is 65% or higher, depending on the question.

So we are taught basically to believe that most people don't care. And if we believe that most people don't care, then what could we possibly do to change our destiny? But it turns out that most people do care. And that's true of a lot of issues, by the way. I think that having faith in each other now is intimately tied to the hope that we can have for the future. If you look around more clearly and realize

that you are not alone, that your desire for a more sustainable, equitable, peaceful, and connected world is actually a super majority position shared by most people in the country, most people on earth. That I hope can be deeply empowering. I can tell you that in your efforts to fight for this better future, you are not alone. And if you're not alone, then it actually makes much more sense to fight.

I'm often told that hope is naive or that hope is not a strategy. And that's true. The second part, I don't think it's naive, but it's not a strategy on its own. But hope opens us to the possibility that the future could turn out better and that our actions matter. And when you realize that, in fact, the people around you are good for the most part and do want what you want for the most part,

That is not a naive or a complacent feeling. That is a deeply actionable feeling, one that can lead us to fight harder for the future we want by realizing that it is in fact possible. Jamil, I wanted to ask you, what would be your final advice for listeners who want to embrace hopeful skepticism? And what is the best place for people to learn more about you and this amazing book?

Thanks, John. First of all, this has been a delightful conversation. I really appreciate your perspective and depth of your questions. Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness is available wherever books are. I read the audiobook version myself recently. If folks like consuming books that way, it's available there too. My lab is the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and we're at

ssnl.stanford.edu. And I'm on some social media, though not very much, at Zaki Jam, Z-A-K-I-J-A-M. Jamel, thank you so much again for being on the show and narrating your audio book as well. I don't think people understand until they've done it just how difficult it is to narrate your own book. Thank you so much. It was such an honor to have you on the show. And congratulations on your brand new book.

Thank you, John. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Jamel Zaki and wanted to thank Grand Central Publishing, Fortier, and Jamel for the honor and privilege of joining us here on today's program. Links to all things Jamel will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show and making it free for our listeners. Advertiser deals and discount codes are all in one convenient place at passionstruck.com.

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who tune in weekly. I'm at John R. Miles on all the social platforms where I post daily bits of inspiration. And you can sign up for our courage movement by joining our weekly newsletter, which you can do on passionstruck.com. And in that newsletter, I curate a custom challenge that's based

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and innovation at Good and Upworthy and co-author of Good People: Stories from the Best of Humanity. Gabrielle has been on a mission to showcase the positive side of human nature and we'll be diving into why sharing stories of human goodness isn't just uplifting, it's a catalyst for real behavioral change. We'll explore how Upworthy built

A community of millions created one of the kindest spaces online and how positive stories can reshape our perception of the world. Don't miss this inspiring conversation. I think intentionality is at the core of so many things. And I think it's difficult to be particularly intentional on a platform in the digital world where the incentives are to keep you moving.

and to keep you bouncing around from one thing to the next. This extends on the digital world and also in real life, but you have to pay attention to the forces at work and fight against them a bit. I talk a bit about ways to do that. Sometimes refer to them as the three Bs, which is to broaden, to balance, and to beautify. And these are all kind of opportunities to fight against the momentum, the gravitational pull that's moving you from one thing to the next. And

to check to make sure that you're not just consuming the same thing over and over again and that it's affecting your worldview. Remember that we rise by lifting others. So share the show with those that you love and care about. And if you found today's episode with Jamel Zaki inspirational, then definitely share it with your friends and families. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and become passion-struck.

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