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Hello, beautiful souls! In this episode, we have the insightful Jamil Zaki, author of “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.” Jamil shares his profound journey of studying human goodness and the personal struggles that led him to write this book. His story is one of resilience, hope, and the power of human connection.

Jamil, a neuroscientist and psychologist, has spent over 20 years researching compassion and kindness. Despite his findings that our brains are built for kindness and cooperation, he admits to struggling with cynicism in his personal life. This book was born out of his desire to reconcile his scientific knowledge with his personal feelings. He discusses the rise of cynicism in society, the impact of media and social media on our perceptions, and the importance of trust and connection. Whether you’re navigating a challenging time or seeking a deeper understanding of human goodness, Jamil’s journey offers valuable insights into how hope and connection can transform our lives.

Check out his book at: https://www.jamil-zaki.com/

 

Episode Highlights: 

02:09 The Science of Human Goodness

12:52 Personal Journey and Overcoming Cynicism

24:05 Positive Gossip and Spreading Hope

28:08 Hope vs. Cynicism and Optimism

37:04 The Power of Positive Experiences

43:07 Journaling and Reflecting on Positivity

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Transcript

spirituality is such a powerful source of resilience and hope. I mean, if you think of it, Hope is the idea that things could improve and that we have something to say about it. And I think a spiritual life empowers us to feel that we are connected to, to each other, to the universe, to whatever we consider God to be.

And that’s so powerful and helpful in many, many ways.

Welcome to the angels and awakening podcast, where we connect you with your angels, loved ones, and soul self. I’m your host and author, Julie Jancis. My journey began when I started hearing my late father before I knew he’d passed. Through my readings, membership, and Angel Reiki school, I help you awaken, heal, and master your unique spiritual gifts.

If you feel called to work with me, it’s your angels guiding you to discover your soul’s highest purpose. Details at theangelmedium. com. Thank you, Earth Angels for the five star reviews. You’re entered into a drawing to win a free session. Now let’s see what messages your angels have for you today.

Hello, beautiful souls. Welcome back to the Angels and Awakening podcast. And friends, when I read the title to the next book, I knew I had to have this author on the show.

And I think you’re going to agree with me. Jamil Zaki, has written Hope for Cynics, The Surprising Cynic. Science of human goodness. I mean, just reading that title, Jamil, just makes me want to like read the book, dive in because we all want this, right? Like hope for cynics and human goodness. This is amazing.

Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Alright, I want to start here. What kind of gave you the idea for this book?

the idea for this book is very personal. I’ve studied human goodness in one way or another for 20 years. I’m a neuroscientist, psychologist, and my lab and I focus on things like compassion and kindness and our research is extraordinarily positive.

We find that That most people value compassion over selfishness. We find that giving away money activates similar parts of your brain as eating chocolate. The idea that in essence, our brains are built for kindness and cooperation. Really the message of our work is simple. There is good in us and it does good for us.

So it’s a really powerful message. optimistic message. And oftentimes I’m brought in as a speaker or writer to tell people how good other people are. But this entire time I’ve lived with a secret, which is that even though I know that the science is true, of course, I believe it. I’m collecting the data myself.

It’s sometimes hard for me to feel it, even though I study human goodness. I tend to be pretty cynical privately. I tend to doubt people and fear that they might not have my best interest in mind or maybe think that they’re generally pretty selfish. So this book was born in really my personal struggle to bring what I know to be true about our species together with my heart, how I often tend to feel.

you describe that so beautifully. When it comes to cynics, describe that for us, and like what you define as that cynic. also, do you feel that, or is there any science behind, is cynicism growing with technology and us looking at social media and thinking that everybody else’s lives are perfect?

These are great questions. So let me start with the first, and thank you for starting with the definition too. Cynicism can be thought of as a theory that we have about people. The theory that in general, human beings are selfish, dishonest, and untrustworthy. And if you have that theory, You’re going to do things a lot differently.

You might judge people, you might suspect their motives, even when they do something really kind, and you might decide not to trust them, right? I mean, trust is our willingness to be vulnerable to somebody else on the belief that they will show up for us and step up and honor the faith that we put in them.

And if you’re cynical, you just don’t have that faith in people. So you don’t trust them at all. Your second question is a really important one. Is it on the rise? And unfortunately, Julie, that is a strong yes. So, uh, yeah, I started this book because I was feeling cynical and trying to explore what that was doing to me and what I could do about it.

But I discovered I am not alone. So, uh, in 1972, about half of Americans believed that most people can be trusted. By 2018, that had fallen to about 30%, a huge drop to put it in perspective, the amount of trust that we’ve lost by by proportion is the same as the amount of money the stock market lost during the financial collapse of 2008.

So we are literally going through a national trust deficit. Now, you asked, is that because of media or social media? It’s really hard to know that because two things that change together doesn’t mean that one of them caused the other, but absolutely, the rise in cynicism Coincides with the rise of cable news and then, of course, social media platforms that I think I suspect strongly might be contributing to this problem.

And are people studying that right now to know like where the cynicism is coming from? Because it looks to me like that is an important question so that we know where to nip that in the butt.

It’s a super important question. There are some people studying this, although it’s hard to study it. Using experiments because it’s hard to change whether people are on social media or not, whether they’re watching the news or not, but for a long time for decades, scientists have studied what’s known as mean world syndrome.

And this is the idea that the more that people engage with the media, whether that’s television or online news or social media, the more that people engage with these sources. The less they trust people, the more dangerous and mean that they think the entire world is, and the more frightened they are of things like crime and violence.

It’s remarkable how wrong the media can make us, because one thought would be, well sure, you watch more news, so you know about more stuff, and it’s that knowledge that makes you feel cynical. But actually, people who watch more news are more wrong about the world. They’re not just more cynical. So, for example, people who watch a lot of news think that there’s much more crime than there really is.

and you can demonstrate that actually watching the news in some cases is the opposite of educating ourselves. It’s basically getting ourselves really frightened about the worst things that are happening in the world and ignoring all the good that people are doing all around us.

and you see it, you see it play out over the last year with television too. I know watching the news. Therefore, I know there are a lot of stories of, people just kind of turning around in somebody else’s driveway and the person, a homeowner doesn’t like that there’s somebody turning around in a car and they’re driving and shoot some, I just wonder if the increase in cynicism, does that have an effect on the science you found of human goodness?

I think it does, because when we don’t recognize the goodness in people around us, when we’re really focused on terrible, awful, but very rare events, like the ones that you’re describing in these stories, We stop connecting and human goodness, what I study, often comes from our willingness to connect with others, to be there with others and for others.

And cynics, for instance, are much less likely to do the things that I study, like donate to charity or support their friends through difficult times. So the more that we’re becoming cynical, the more withdrawing from really the parts of life that allow us to flourish and that allow our society to flourish.

very much.

human connection, connection to life. As a whole. So you talk about the surprising science of human goodness, and I want to steer our conversation in that direction because I look at your work and there is so much hope for our future. Talk to us about some of the surprising aspects of your research and, what gives you hope about humanity?

Yeah. The more that I studied cynicism. Both in myself and in the research, the more I actually, I became really depressed first of all, because it’s so sad how cynical we’ve become and how much that’s hurting us. But after, six months of feeling pretty down about it, I actually started to realize that there’s an incredibly hopeful message.

In the science of cynicism, because it’s true that we’ve lost faith in each other. But if you look at the data, actually, we’ve lost way too much faith in one another. People don’t realize how kind, open minded, warm, and caring the average person is. In other words, we’ve reached this point in our culture where humanity itself is underrated.

So you can see all of these studies where people. I don’t know how kindly others will act. I’ll give you an example. The Toronto Star, this newspaper, ran a sort of social experiment. They dropped 20 wallets around the city of Toronto. And these wallets had money in them, and they had an ID card. So if a person who found the wallet wanted to be kind, they could choose to return it.

And they asked people in Toronto What percentage of these wallets do you, how many of these walls do you think will be returned? And I wanted to ask you, Julie, do you have an intuition here out of those 20 wallets? How many do you think people would kindly return to their owner?

I’m going to say all 20.

Oh, wow. Well, this is great. You’re, you’re, you’re probably the most optimistic person I’ve ever talked with about

this.

No. Well, okay, so let’s first start with what, with what people guessed. So the average Torontoan guessed that 25 percent of these wallets would be returned. Much gloomier than you. the actual rate of return was 80%.

So it’s not a hundred, which would, which would have been awesome, but 80 percent is a really great. So people, most people, when they find a wallet on the street, Their choice is to give it back, right? I mean, an act of generosity for a stranger. But not only is that true, it’s also true that most people don’t know that, right?

People underestimate by four times how kind everybody else is. There’s all sorts of other examples of this that I’m happy to get into. But the, the basic point is that the average person underestimates the average person. We don’t realize all the goodness in people around us. And that I think is really sad because we miss out, as you’re saying, on this human connection that we value and need so desperately, but it also means that there’s an opportunity if we look more closely, if we just pay a little bit more attention to the people around us, not necessarily to the news, but to real human beings, pleasant surprises are everywhere.

People are probably better. Then we think they are. And so by opening ourselves a little bit more, we can reconnect to all the good that’s around us. It’s sort of like. What Mr. Rogers said, you know, Mr. Rogers once said during disasters, during difficult times, look for the helpers and the helpers are all around us.

So I hope that my book gives people an opportunity to see them more clearly.

So in your own life, you’ve had this shift where you have this cynicism, which kind of, I think for a lot of people just can be innate. It’s just part of who they are. Do you find that it has to be like a conscious, awareness?

To shift that perspective, or did it start as a conscious awareness to shift the thought to, no, maybe I’m going to give people a chance. I’m going to believe in them. I’m going to have this hope. And did that become easier over time if it was a practice?

For me, it took a lot of practice. And if you don’t mind, I’ll, I’ll tell a little bit of my own story here.

Um, I come from a relatively difficult family background. My, my parents are both immigrants, from very different places, Pakistan and Peru, and they’re both amazing and people. I’m really lucky to have them in my life, but They never got along when I was a child, and I’m their only child, right?

Their cultural differences really made it hard for them and hard for me, and as their only child, I was sort of really exposed to a lot of their very painful and very harsh divorce. So I sort of grew up having a hard time, trusting people because of a lot of what I experienced as a kid. and it turns out I’m not alone.

People who are insecurely attached, right? People who have had a hard time connecting as children tend to be less trustworthy. We tend to be more prone to cynicism. And so that was part of my journey was realizing that a lot of the way that I think and feel. Doesn’t come from something that I did. It comes from what happened when I was really young, but that said, we all struggle with this.

People have what psychologists call negativity bias, meaning that we pay more attention to, to frightening or harmful things than we do to happy or helpful things, and that makes sense. You know, you can imagine in the ancient world, right? When we’re evolving, if you paid attention to a lot of great things and ignored bad things.

You might get eaten by a saber toothed tiger or run over by a woolly mammoth. So it’s smart in a way for us to pay attention to the bad, but then also it introduces a bias in our mind, and it makes it easy for us to skew or warp our view of the world to be too negative. So I think of cynicism a little bit like a treadmill, right?

It’s pulling us towards a bad, negative view of human nature. And if we just stand still, We won’t stay where we are. We’ll be pulled further into a cynical worldview. So being anti cynical is an active process. It’s work that we do to consciously realize our biases and pay attention to the better side of people.

So for me, that’s been a constant practice over the past few years. It’s a lot of work, but I find it to be immensely worthwhile.

And how has it shifted? Do you feel like it opens up your heart a little bit more to people? Does it change how you feel? Does it change the connection that you feel to others?

Absolutely. When it works, right? I’m not here to say, Oh, now I’ve, I’ve solved this problem. I consider myself a recovering cynic still to this day. So, you know, I find myself falling into the same thought patterns that I always have, but. I try to hit the pause button sometimes on my inner chatter and say, wait a minute, you’re coming to this really negative conclusion.

You’re feeling judgmental. You’re feeling suspicious. What data do you have to support this feeling? Or is this just your cynicism talking? Right? And I find often, I don’t have data to back, right? I’m, I’m suspicious of somebody who I just met who hasn’t done anything to me. Well, there’s no reason for me to feel that way.

So when I have the bandwidth to do that, when I can open myself up, what I often find myself doing is thinking differently first and saying, well, let me be curious instead of cynical and then acting differently. Let me take a chance on this person. I’m not going to loan this stranger my car, but maybe I can do something small to see if they’ll, if they’ll meet me or how they’ll respond to my trust.

And that’s opened me up to so many interactions that have been friendlier and kinder. Then I normally would have. It’s really allowed me to connect with people in brand new ways. And I do think to your point, Julie, that that’s worked its way into my heart a little bit. Not always. I don’t want to overclaim here, but, but a little bit, I’ve sort of had this openness become a little bit more of an instinct in my, in my own life.

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where does judgment, which is different from cynicism play into. All of this because there’s just so much more information out there today than there was in the eighties when I was growing up. And, uh, I’ll give you an example. We live right across the street from a high school and it’s cold here in Chicagoland.

there’s a couple months out of every year where it’s just. Freezing and watch these kids, you know, walk into school every single day. And most of them don’t wear jackets because I’ve heard from the mamas. They don’t, the kids don’t want to go to their locker to put away the jackets. They just wear a book bag and they, they don’t really visit their lockers anymore.

They just use their book bag. And every time. They pass, you know, even though I’ve done so much work on myself, I think, and it’s just a snap thought in my head. What the hell are they thinking? They should be wearing a jacket. You don’t, they know it’s so cold. They could get sick. And. I was always, given like lightweight jackets as a kid, but we went to Catholic school and it would just be freezing outside.

And you’re in this like skirt and a light jacket. And I just remember freezing. So I would get my daughter these extra long jackets to wear, at recess and elementary school. And for some reason, this is just a big Thing within my mind, but people have these just flash judgments that they make all the time.

And I think reality TV and the, just us going through, cause for those who didn’t grow up in the eighties and nineties TV, wasn’t always the way that it was, but reality TV is just so judgmental. how does judgment play into all of this?

Wow, what a great question. I love that story, by the way, and it resonates a lot with me.

As I said, both my parents come from these very warm countries. I grew up outside of Boston and they were mortified by how cold it was. And my mother would buy these jackets. I feel like every time I walked to school as a kid, I just looked like a, like a blue marshmallow. You know, I remember. Being as wide as I was tall because of the size of the jackets she would give me but gosh I mean, I think that you’re exactly right that judgment is And here I’m just speaking as a person, not as a scientist, but I see judgment as ascendant in our culture.

And I would say that there’s a second problem, you know, not just that we are judgmental, but that we’ve started to glamorize being judgmental. That it actually feels kind of cool, or it’s a good way to be popular, to judge other people, to be negative about other people. And I think that that’s a real problem, because it’s not just how we feel.

It’s how we think we should feel, you know, cynicism and judgmental attitudes are rising in part because They’re desirable. People are rewarded for being judgmental. I mean, on social media, the tweets that go most viral are often ones that are calling people out or trolling people or making fun of other people.

So we’ve created this ecosystem where we’re giving people hits of dopamine by rewarding them with approval and popularity. For being the most cynical and judgmental versions of themselves, and especially kids will do what it takes to fit in. So if we’re teaching people, hey, cynicism is smart, it’s interesting, it’s funny, it’s moral, then that’s what people are going to gravitate towards.

And it’s really, it’s really too bad. I mean, I, when I talk about hope and trust, people often say, oh, that’s kind of cringe. Yeah. It’s like, now being positive is like this toxic, embarrassing thing, and that in and of itself is such a sad cultural trend, but I don’t think one that we have to live with. I think that we can push back.

I mean, part of being hopeful is not just thinking differently, it’s standing up for human positivity as a value, as something that we don’t think is cringe, that we actually think can be more popular or more helpful than judging everybody all the time.

one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on this podcast is to ask this next question, because I think that what you would find personally, if you like surveyed this audience, is that they are more hopeful.

They are more positive. how do those who maybe see the life with more rosy colored glasses, more hope, work with the cynics in our own lives?

This is a great question. And first of all, I think you’re exactly right. there’s a lot of evidence that people who are engaged a little bit more with spiritual traditions, for instance, tend to be more hopeful and more positive, especially during difficult times.

You know, I mean, spirituality is such a powerful source of resilience and hope. I mean, if you think of it, Hope is the idea that things could improve and that we have something to say about it. And I think a spiritual life empowers us to feel that we are connected to, to each other, to the universe, to whatever we consider God to be.

And that’s so powerful and helpful in many, many ways. I think that. To your question, what do we do if we’re feeling hope and other people are not? What do we do about the cynics in our lives, the people who we’re worried about, or maybe who we wish we could help see the better side of each other? I think one way of viewing this is to not think of hope as rose colored glasses, although I completely understand why you would say that, but rather, I think, that oftentimes cynics are wearing mud colored glasses that they don’t realize are there.

Cynics think that they’re being realistic and smart and sharp, but actually, they’re usually the ones who are most wrong, because they’re ignoring so much positivity and kindness around them. So, one thing that I like to do in trying to convert the cynics in my own life is what I call, Positive gossip, basically the opposite of, of being judgmental in our language.

So I do this a lot with my kids, you know, like I noticed, in my own anti cynicism journey that even though I try to be positive around my kids, gosh, if I’m driving them to summer camp and someone cuts me off in traffic, they learn all sorts of terrible things about that person and about city life and about humanity in general.

So. I’ve tried to balance that. You know, I’ve tried to realize that, Hey, it’s so tempting when somebody does us wrong or when there’s a corrupt politician on TV or whatever, to talk a lot about that and not to talk about the little ways that people are kind and helpful every day. So I’ve tried to balance out and focus on telling my kids and really pointing out, like, wow, did you see this person helping?

Somebody who’s homeless on the street. Did you see this person? doing this kind act. Did you see in the news, there was this group of people who are trying to clean up the Pacific coastline. like I said, this positive gossip, I think helps everybody involved. One, it can be a recruitment tool for bringing other people into a more hopeful perspective, helping them take off their mud colored glasses.

But two, when we. try to help other people focus on kindness, guess what? We end up focusing more on it ourselves. When I went on a mission to help my kids savor positivity in the world around us, I had to find positive stuff to tell them about, which was really easy to do because again, helpers are everywhere, but it kind of popped an antenna.

out of my mind and help me also see all that positivity in order to share it with them, which is sort of a psychological win win.

Yeah, that’s amazing. I feel energy. I perceive energy. I work with energy a lot. And when I work with the energy of hope, you think about, linear linearly in this life, right?

Like I am here right nowthere’s an energy of hope for that future. And a lot of times it’s attached to different. Things, our purpose, the way that we want to serve, the way that we want to express ourselves, use our gifts, create the things that we want to do within this lifetime. the places we want to travel to, the memories we want to make with our children, grandchildren.

Is there a definition of hope that you use scientifically? And if so, do you find that same thing of it’s attached to something? in the future that’s almost magnetically, energetically pulling us to it.

Honestly, I have chills in the way that you just described that. That was immensely beautiful. I might steal your definition, Julie, now.

Yay! Take

it!

Yeah! I mean, I think the scientific definition in psychology is that hope is a way of viewing our problems and the challenges that we’re facing by understanding that they could get better. Right, that, by viewing our goals as things that we could achieve. And so it’s, it’s this sense of possibility, right?

That the future could go well, connected with a sense of agency. I have something to say about that, that I can do something about it. honestly am floored by your definition, because I think that it’s just absolutely. on point to also describe those two things as having a magnetic quality with one another.

That there’s a future I want and I feel connected to it. I feel like there’s part of me that by being able to visualize that future, Being able to, I mean, for lack of a better term, manifest it, right? And, and to then see myself connected to that, that’s a way of inspiring people to take the very actions that they need to make that future come to pass.

And I think this is really important for people to know. It’s often, I think another stereotype that we have is that. Cynicism is realistic and hope is sort of like burying our head in the sand. it’s ignoring our problems. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, hope is an energizing feeling.

It’s something that, inspires people to create positive change, to address their problems. Hope is one of the emotions that is most connected to resilience in difficult times. There was a study that came out recently on the COVID pandemic, seeing well what emotions prevented people from becoming depressed and anxious during COVID.

Hope was the number one emotion tied to well being. And it’s also the number one emotion tied to, many different types of positive action, including doing things like protesting for causes we believe in, or voting, taking part in civic action, and also, you know, helping others and engaging in a life that matches our values.

So hope is not, to me, naive in the least. I think it’s an extremely powerful way to, again, see a future that we might want to live in, see where we are now, and connect those two.

Thank you for talking about that because on social media, I’ve been seeing a lot of spiritual folks actually kind of driving people away from purpose, or they say you don’t need to have purpose.

And that has just baffled me completely because without this idea of service in some way. Um, you know, some thing that I can give or do my entire life to make this world a better place. I just, then what’s it all for? Like, I, I guess I just don’t get it. And so I, I like how you just described that. And I think too, as you were describing it, I believe that everything within.

The universe multiverse breathes like there’s an expansion and there’s a contraction and an expansion and contraction. And when you were talking about that, I got this really great visual of when you’re in that cynicism. You’re contracting. Yes, not manifesting. It’s actually the opposite. you’re going away from things going inward.

versus when you’re in that hope, you’re right. It feels very, very expansive because you’re kind of in this energy of anything as possible, all the good can come in and you’re open to all of these just great possibilities in your field.

Oh, gosh, that’s beautifully put again, you know, I think that it’s curious to me as well that people in spiritual communities would say you don’t need purpose.

I think that it does remind me a little bit of another distinction I think is worth your listeners knowing about, which is the distinction between hope and optimism. So I’m If hope is the idea that things could get better, and I have something to say about it, optimism is the idea that things will get better, and I don’t have to do anything in order to make them better.

I actually think that optimism and cynicism have more in common than you might realize, because both of them suggest that there’s really nothing for us to do. A cynic thinks, things are going to get worse no matter what I do, so that kind of shrinks them away from any sense of purpose, because what they do won’t make things better.

won’t, won’t impact anybody. An optimist thinks, well things are gonna get better no matter what I do, and that can make us complacent. And you know, again, I have my own spiritual and religious background but my sense is that when people say God has a plan for instance and, that everything happens for a reason, that’s great, you know, that’s a really powerful perspective that can be very comforting, it could be really beautiful.

I’ll just, if you don’t mind, share my perspective. I think that the idea that God has a plan doesn’t at all mean that we can’t be part of that plan as active agents, that we can’t be the way that God’s plan is executed right through our striving, through our integrity, through our desire to live in a way that matches who we want to be and maybe who the universe or God intends us to be.

So I think that there is sometimes this idea of. if the universe has a plan or if God has a plan, maybe I don’t have to do anything. I actually don’t see it that way. I think that you can completely, bring together and marry the ideas that there’s a broader plan that that breadth of the universe is ongoing, but that we are part of that and that being part of it means taking action.

Living the way that we want to impacting the world, and being hopeful, right? So hope I see as more action oriented, optimism and cynicism, even though they appear so different. I see as more passive ways of viewing the world and living in it.

I love it. It’s like that movie Eat, Pray, Love, where they talk about how God is within you dwelling in you as you, as you experience life.

Doesn’t want to know what you think about it. It wants to experience it all through you. And, yeah, I want to emphasize your point there because I think it’s a huge distinction that I did not realize until you said it, that optimism really, takes away your power. If you can’t do anything about it and cynicism too, you don’t have any power.

We really want to empower people to make the change because again, God is you dwelling within you as you wanting to experience life through you. you know, we just had Tony Nader on the podcast, uh, the head of transcendental meditation. And he said something that I’ve been just pondering ever since, which is, The question that we haven’t asked is what does God not know?

And he goes, God doesn’t know what it’s like to live as Jamil doesn’t, doesn’t know what it is to live as Julie doesn’t know what it is to listen or live as you, the who’s listening right now. And really, I think the only way that this world is going to change and be better for our kids and our grandkids, which I’m so hopeful for, is through us.

Wow. Yeah, I completely agree. It’s a beautiful way of putting it. And I guess the way that I would see it is that God doesn’t know. What it’s like to be me or what it’s like to be you, but God is learning, right? If you, if you follow that logic, our experience is teaching the universe what it’s like to be us.

Right. And, and that means that we should do our best to learn, to be open to experiences. And that’s another place that I think cynicism really gets in the way and hope can help. I often. And in the book, I write a lot about a mindset that I call hopeful skepticism. So skepticism, a lot of people confuse it with cynicism, but it’s really different.

Skepticism is, is basically thinking like a scientist. I believe that cynics, Think like lawyers, they’re like the prosecution in the trial against humanity, right? They’re saying people are horrible. Here’s all the evidence I have. And you’re like, well, what about this evidence that people are great? And they’re like, we’re going to get rid of that.

That’s, that’s immaterial to the case. Right? So it’s a really biased way of viewing the world because You have a conclusion and then you’re living to serve that conclusion, right? And even if it’s a really sad conclusion, you’re eagerly chasing it. Skepticism is. Not thinking like a lawyer, but thinking like a scientist and saying, well, what am I seeing from the world?

What am I receiving? It’s not the same as being naive. You might interact with somebody and within five minutes, they give you plenty of evidence to show that, wow, I really should not trust this person. Right. But it’s just. Being willing to take in new information. And I think that that’s connected to this idea that the universe is learning through us.

So if we want to give it good information, we need to be willing to learn. We need to stop resting in our assumptions about people and the world. I guess this is what, from a Zen perspective, would be called a beginner’s mind, right? We need to sort of, when we can, Get rid of, or at least stop for a moment, the cycles of thought that we’re used to, the habits of mind that we’re used to, that put people into categories, that judge people, that assume the worst, right?

We need to stop playing those tapes over and over again in our mind and actually receive what the world is giving to us, what other people are giving to us.

so hope skepticism, healthy energies, and I love that. you touched on another word that I think is fascinating, which is a will and that you have to be willing.

How do those who kind of fall more into that cynicism, optimism category, how do they find the will to make that change?

I think that there’s a number of steps here, but one of them is to notice the impact that we have on the world. I think both cynics and optimists often feel as though they’re passive spectators in life, and a lot of us.

Think of ourselves that way, especially if you’re on your screen all the time. You know, I feel like a lot of cynicism lives on screens. It lives on our televisions, on our phones, on our tablets, because we see, sometimes good, often horrible things happening thousands of miles away that we have no control over.

It’s really easy To adopt a helpless worldview. if you’re doom scrolling from 11 PM to 3 AM, uh, not that I’ve ever done that, Julie. but I think that, I think a lot of hope. is not on our screens. It’s in the world around us. and the more that we can engage with our local communities, the more that we can see the impact that we have.

So like with my kids, I often will go volunteer to do a neighborhood cleanup here in San Francisco, or we’ll volunteer at a food bank. And what I try to tell my kids when we do that is, Do you see what you’ve done today? Do you see, do you feel that you created something good today? And, you know, I’m telling it to them, you know, they’re eight and seven, but I’m really telling it to myself too.

You know, it’s a reinforcement. it’s cultivating experiences. Where we see the impact we have and we feel that and once you collect those experiences, it’s like building a new muscle, a muscle of hope, right? A muscle of, agency and empowerment. So I often tell people, you know, think globally, hope locally, you know, try to, try to focus on where you can make change and notice the change that you have.

Is there a science behind that piece of experience? Because it’s actually something that the world’s and just going back throughout time, thinking about past texts spiritually, that the great spiritual teachers talk about, like, don’t trust my words, experience it, feel it for yourself is that experience and feeling it for yourself.

Like, concretely etching in these neural pathways, that’s opening something within us. This is the word physiologically, like within our body.

That’s a really interesting question. try to answer it as best I can, and let me separate the science here from my own speculation, because I actually agree with you pretty strongly, but I don’t know, I want to be clear about what’s known and what’s not known.

So, what we know is that absolutely new experiences etch new pathways into our brains, as you’re saying. And one, of the most powerful ways to etch new pathways is to have experiences that are emotionally meaningful, right? So if you go out and do something and it’s rewarding, it sort of brings you a sense of accomplishment or connection or whatever, whatever else is meaningful and rewarding to you, then that will be reinforced.

Right. That, that action will be associated with a great thing that happened. Right. I mean, it’s goes back to, to Pavlov even, right? That, that if you, if an animal does something and then it gets a bunch of sugary water, it will do that thing again because it associates what it just did with sugary water.

Well, the rest of us, we can associate things like Volunteering is one good example of this, right? People often, when they volunteer, they think, Oh gosh, I have to wake up early on a Saturday and then, you know, do a bunch of manual labor. That sounds pretty bad. And then they do it. And it’s this incredibly uplifting experience and that reward.

should be able to, again, etch new pathways into our associations, into our mind, saying, wow, I’m now connecting that experience of volunteering with this positive energy that I had. you know, how that’s related to spiritual practices and, and texts, I can’t say as a scientist, but I really feel intuitively that you’re right.

That this is part of why reading a bunch or just being told this is a valuable thing to do with your life or you have agency, you are an expression of God or the universe. Yeah, that sounds great. But what, how do I know? Right? I mean, just hearing it, you might even be suspicious. That sounds pretty grandiose.

I don’t feel that way all the time. And so I do think that we need to cultivate those one on one experiences, those real life experiences and not just cultivate them. But really pay attention to what we learn from them. Another issue would be if you go and volunteer, you have a great time, and then the minute you get back in your car, you just go on your phone and, and start doomscrolling again.

I think it’s important for us to psychologically digest. Our experiences with other people to really pay attention to them, especially the ones the positive experiences that we might usually ignore and to sit with them, talk about them this positive gossip that I was mentioning, but to really center them in our mind, because that’s how we can take an experience and really learn more deeply through it.

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And what does that look like in practice when you do it? Not just the positive gossip, but is there another way that you kind of process that information? Yeah.

Me personally, you mean?

Yeah,

yeah. You know, I think one thing that I do a lot, and you know, I, I realize this is, maybe a little bit silly.

No. You know what, I’m, I’m not gonna defend it or I’m not gonna apologize for it. I journal, uh, a lot, you know, and, if I look at my journal entries from when I started this book versus now they’re different. used to write all about how crappy everything was, and this is 2020, the early pandemic, so things were pretty bad in a lot of ways, but I was ignoring, for instance, I wouldn’t, in my journal at night, write about, wow, health care workers are so heroic, or here’s something that I did to help my neighbor who’s a lot older than me, right, I would focus on all the bad things that were happening in the world and the bad things that people were doing, I now try to use journaling as a way to consolidate, to reinforce those new pathways, right?

If there’s been a positive pathway carved into my brain, into my mind, by something positive that I did, or something positive that I witnessed, I try to use writing as a way to deepen those grooves in my, in my brain and mind, and those experiences are so awesome. available to us. My friend Dacher Keltner at Berkeley studies awe, the experience of being, bowled over by the beauty of the universe.

And he studied tens of thousands of people and asked them, what made you feel awe today? And he thought it would be things like, I was in a, beautiful grove of redwood trees, or I watched the planet earth documentary with drone footage of the Himalayan mountains or something like that. and yeah, people of course report feeling awe at nature or history, but the most common thing that created awe in people’s lives was everyday virtue.

Witnessing the goodness of other people. So, we have those experiences all the time. I think that the question is how can we bring them into our lives more deeply. And, and again, I think talking about them is one. Really noticing them and being able to stop ourselves in our tracks and say, wow, this is really beautiful.

Or, writing about them can matter. I’ll just say one more thing. There’s, one of my favorite writers is, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, and he had this saying where, you know, in his memoir he writes about this, I think it was from his dad, that, that if they were doing something like fishing, or sitting on the porch looking at the sunset, his dad would stop and say, well, you know, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

And it’s just these little sayings. you know, I tell my kids all the time, I’ll pause and say, Hey, what am I thinking right now? And they know by now they’ll say like, you’re thinking it’s a good moment, dad. And I’m like, yes, I’m thinking this is a good moment. And so I think just. Retuning our minds to pay attention to, reflect on, and talk about the positive experiences we have.

Those are all strategies for deepening these, these connections in ourselves.

Well, that’s a much different childhood than I grew up with in the eighties, you know, versus dad driving around in the car, flicking off, you know, whoever’s off, uh, you know, pointing out the kindness, that, the kind acts that, that others are doing.

Wow. That’s a completely different way to live. And, it really also kind of speaks to what we’ve gotten to in the course of this show, which is when you’re in. That positivity. And not optimism or Cynicism. But when you’re really in the hope and healthy skepticism, you are.

In your power and you are taking action in this life and you are following your heart. I think a lot of times those acts of kindness come from these inner whispers within ourselves that are calling us to be kind to one another, to love more. It appears to me from the outside looking in that there are a lot of people within the, cynicism, optimism category who want to step into their power, but maybe don’t know how to verbalize it.

And I think that you just did it here. Keep a kindness journal. I think it would even be better than keeping a gratitude journal. There’s a lot of people when they journal, they think, what do I want? What do I want? And a lot of times when people do a gratitude journal, a lot of people do it, right? But a lot of people think to themselves, what do I have to be grateful for?

What I want has not arrived. But a gratitude journal from that perspective is very, very different from a kindness journal where you just write down the awe inspiring. Kind acts that you saw that day, and energetically, I could feel how that would open up your heart even more to more hope. and, and keep that hopeful cycle going.

I love that. And I think you’re completely right. I want to reflect on a few things that you said. First, that cynics. At some level might not want to be cynics. George Carlin, the comedian, once said, Scratch a cynic and you’ll find a disappointed idealist. I don’t think people, most people say, I can’t wait to live a life where I think everybody’s terrible and therefore I have broken relationships and my health suffers, right?

I think a lot of us, I think a lot of us come to this worldview because we’ve been hurt. You know, and we’re trying to stay safe. There’s this phrase once burned twice shy. And I think of this as really prevalent, right? I call it. Pre disappointment, that if somebody’s disappointed us in the past, what we’re most scared of is being betrayed again.

And the way to make sure that we are never betrayed again is to never believe in anybody again, right? So, so it’s, it’s a very disempowered way to live, but it’s also at least you’re controlling something, you’re controlling, you’re not giving other people a chance to hurt you. So, I want to just say, To any cynics listening, I personally have no judgment of people who are cynical because I often am you, right?

And so I completely understand. It’s such a hard world in so many ways right now. And if people feel this way, I want to completely validate that and resonate with that. But that said, Cynicism ends up hurting us again, a second time. Because, as you’re saying, it takes us out of our power. But it also causes us to use our power in ways that we don’t realize that are harmful.

There are self fulfilling prophecies all through our lives. If you think that people are only out for themselves, you’ll treat them with suspicion and scorn and judgment. And guess what? Other people respond really badly to that. so we end up inadvertently bringing out their worst sides and confirming our fears.

I often think that cynics tell a story full of villains and end up living in it. But the good news there is that, and again, related to your point, When we turn to hope, we can reverse those cycles. We can turn these poisonous, self fulfilling prophecies into virtuous ones. Because when we focus, as you’re talking about, on kindness through journaling or otherwise, we Again, we reshape how we interact with other people.

And when you instead treat others with curiosity and faith, taking chances on them, showing that you believe in them, that also brings out a different side of them. It’s what people in the social sciences called earned trust. The idea is that when we trust somebody, they feel like, Oh shoot, this person believes in me.

I better step up. Right. And so just like cynics bring out the worst in others, when we act with curiosity. And kindness, we’re much more likely to bring out their best, creating again, the world that we think we’re in, right? So, if you’re cynical, you’ll end up being right, because you’ll bring out that side of people that is selfish and greedy and dishonest.

And if you’re hopeful, you’ll probably also end up being right, because you’ll bring out their best. So, it’s a huge opportunity, I think, to change, not just our mindset, but the worlds that we live in, our local social environment.

I’m so glad I got the opportunity to bring you on the show. Like I just knew this was going to be so powerful and it was so powerful.

Thank you so much, Jamil, for your work, for the science and the research that you’ve put into this. and thank you for bringing hope to this world.

Oh, Julie, thank you for all you do, and this has just been a delightful conversation.

Where can people find the book, and where can people find you?

Hope for Cynics is available wherever books are sold.

read the audio book as well, if people are into that type of thing, and My lab at Stanford is called the Stanford social neuroscience lab. And, I’m generally pretty easy to find on the internet. So, uh, yeah, my lab, my book are all out there.

Amazing. We’re gonna put all of that information in the show notes belowThank you so much.

Thank you.

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