How to be less cynical (w/ Jamil Zaki) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy: 

You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I've spent almost all of my life living in big cities, and something that I've noticed is that there's this idea out there that the people who live in big cities are cruel or callous, that if you live in a big metropolis, people don't care about each other.

But that has not been my experience. Not at all. I mean, sure people are gruff and they're often in a rush. But I am always struck by how excited people are to help out a stranger. In every place that I have ever lived, if you look lost, someone is gonna come up to you and ask if they can give you directions.

If you're a parent at the bottom of a staircase with a big stroller, some random person is gonna pick up the front end of that stroller and help you get it up the stairs. And if you fall down, someone's gonna laugh at you, but someone else is gonna check to make sure that you're okay. And now, for whatever reason, when I see those moments of kindness, I often think about them as exceptions to the rule, right? 

Like, “Oh, that's nice that there's one nice person out there who helped that old lady across the street, rather than just pushing her down into traffic and stealing her purse like most people.” But the thing is, that's actually not what most people would do.

Compassion, empathy, optimism, and faith in our fellow humans. Those are not as fleetingly rare as it might appear from just watching the news. Today's guest, Jamil Zaki is a psychologist who studies empathy and Jamil believes that while we might think empathy is in danger of disappearing completely from our world, that does not have to be the case.

Here's a clip from his TED Talk where he explains that many of us don't fully understand how it is that empathy works.

[00:01:34] Jamil Zaki: 

For centuries philosophers and scientists have told us it's a trait inherited through our genes, hardwired into our brain, something that you either have or don't have. I call this The Roddenberry Hypothesis because Gene Roddenberry enshrined into the characters of the greatest television show of all time, Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

No, that is not up for debate. Thank you. I'm glad to have so many fellow Trekkies here. Um, on one side we have the USS Enterprise's ship's counselor Deanna Troi known throughout the galaxy for her empathy, she catches other people's feelings and can read their mind. On the other side, we have the android, Data, who doesn't feel emotions himself and can't tell what other people are feeling either.

According to conventional wisdom, each of us has a level of empathy somewhere between these two. And like our adult height, we're stuck there for life. So that means if empathy is too hard for you, there's nothing you can do to overcome your limits. And if our collective empathy is dwindling, we can't do anything about that either.

This is all pretty fatalistic. Um, thankfully it's also wrong.

[00:02:47] Chris Duffy: 

Why is that wrong? And why is there cause to be hopeful? We're gonna have Jamil’s answers to those questions and many more in just a moment. But first, a quick break.

Today we're talking about empathy and optimism with Jamil Zaki.

[00:03:08] Jamil Zaki: 

Hello, uh, I'm Jamil Zaki. I’m a professor of psychology at Stanford University, and author of the book, Hope for Cynics. 

[00:03:17] Chris Duffy: 

You have focused a lot of your research on empathy and the fact that empathy is a skill that we can build upon. So, I think that for many people, especially people who haven't read your book or heard your TED talk, that is a counterintuitive idea.

Many of us think of empathy as an innate quality. Tell me a little bit more about that and why you believe that it is a skill. 

[00:03:36] Jamil Zaki: 

I think a lot of us think that humanity and people in general change very little, at least in terms of who we fundamentally are. Sure, we might get taller or shorter. We might gain skills, might get better at chess, worse at Scrabble over time, but we don't think that we change at a fundamental level.

And in fact, I would say that one of the central messages of all psychology and neuroscience over the last 50 to 100 years is that change is all we do and that we change at every level, in essence that psychologists can measure. Our brains change over the course of our lives, not just in response to injuries, but in response to our choices and habits, our levels of intelligence can change over time. 

Our personalities can change and we can change them on purpose. So yes, I think you're right that the idea of empathy, changing, the ability to care, the idea that we might get better or worse at that feels counterintuitive, but I think that's because in general, we feel more fixed than we really are. 

And I don't wanna blame people for that. We change super slowly. So it's easy to forget that change is happening at all. But when you look more closely, including at the data on empathy, that change is the definition, not the exception. 

[00:04:57] Chris Duffy: 

I feel like, uh, you know, as you said, we have this idea of ourselves where we think we're so much more stable, and yet sometimes people are better at seeing it in the past.

Like if you ask like, “Are you the same as you were 20 years ago or 10 years ago?” Most people are like, “Well, I think I've grown and improved a little bit since then.” Or maybe you've gotten worse since then. But either way, you don't think you're the exact same. But we tend to not have that same idea going forward.

[00:05:20] Jamil Zaki: 

There's a name for this in psychology. It's the end of history illusion. The idea that we have been changing, but we're done. History when it comes to ourselves and our personal development is over. So my friend Dan Gilbert surveyed lots of people between I think the ages of 17 and 70, and he asked them, “How much do you think you've changed in terms of your personality, your preferences, and your values over the last 10 years? And how much do you think you will change in the next 10 years?” 

And people felt like they were very much different than they had been. 30 year olds in Dan's study said, “My goodness, my 20-year-old self makes me cringe all the time. I'm, I'm nothing like him.” But they thought, “Well, but you know what? I'm done. I'm done changing. And when I'm 40, I'll be similar to how I am now.” 

40 year olds begged to differ. They think they're completely different than they were at 30, but that they have finished changing and they'll, and they'll be the same when they're 50. And I think that this idea that we're fixed is comforting.

We wanna know who we are. We want to have a foundation that we can rest on. And it can be destabilizing to realize that actually we're a work in progress. But I also think it can be really empowering, right? The, the ship of your life is sailing, there's no breaks, but you have the rudder in your control.

[00:06:39] Chris Duffy: 

You know, it feels like what we've already discussed just in the first couple of minutes here, it's psychology, but it's also related to the work that you do at the social neuroscience lab, right. This, I guess this would seem to me to fall into the realm of what it means to have a social idea of neuroscience.

[00:06:55] Jamil Zaki: 

Absolutely. The notion is that our brains aren't just changing because we study math or learn guitar. They're changing in community and actually the communities that we choose to live in or the ones that we don't choose to live in but live in anyways, shape us at a physiological level into the people who we become.

That's why it's so important to when we can choose our friends and choose our loved ones because that's the same as choosing your future self. 

[00:07:26] Chris Duffy: 

One of the things I really appreciate about you in your work, and especially in translating your academic work into public facing materials, is you come up with these concepts that are very backed by research studies, by actual, you know, peer reviewed papers, but they also have, they have the terminology that I think any of us can get and understand. 

And so one of the, the terms that you've used is an empathy gym, and that's the idea that if empathy is something that's a skill that we can grow and strengthen, that there are ways that we can go to work that muscle out. So what are some of the empathy gyms that people listening can go to, and why would they want to do that?

[00:08:04] Jamil Zaki: 

So let me take the second part of your question first. Why should we want to grow our empathy? A lot of people don't take that as a given. I don't think that we need to. The evidence is really clear. Empathic individuals tend to benefit themselves and the people around them in all sorts of ways. Empathic people tend to be happier, less stressed.

They report lower levels of depression and loneliness. They excel in their work. If their work involves people, which at least as of now AI, not withstanding, that's, that's most jobs. And in general, empathy helps us navigate the world. We are fundamentally social creatures. So feeling connected and being connected are one of the things that help us flourish.

Empathy also helps the people around us. Empathic teachers benefit their students, empathic bosses their employees, empathic spouses their partners. So it's really something that we can invest in. That's for us and for others. Now, that's the why to the how. There's a lot of different strategies we can use.

So one of the most famous and best studied is also one of the oldest. There are meditation techniques, for instance, compassion meditation that can build our empathy while changing our brains in the process. Immersing ourselves in storytelling like novels and plays, builds our empathy, not just for fictional characters, but for real people.

And then connecting, especially with people who are different from ourselves, can broaden our empathy more efficiently than almost anything else. 

[00:09:36] Chris Duffy: 

Your first book was about empathy. It was about building empathy. It was The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. You have this new book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, and, and one of the ideas that you talk about in Hope for Cynics is this concept of hopeful skepticism. There's a counterintuitive nature to just even that phrase. 

So tell us what is hopeful skepticism? 

[00:10:00] Jamil Zaki: 

Yeah, so hopeful skepticism has two pieces to it. The first is a skeptical mindset. So skepticism and cynicism are often confused with one another, but they're really different.

Cynicism is the blanket assumption that most people are greedy, dishonest and untrustworthy, and it leads to all sorts of negative consequences we can talk about later. Skepticism is not a particular belief about people. Rather, it's this scientific mindset where you want to gather data, you don't wanna rest on your assumptions, you wanna learn about the world and about people.

It's, in essence, a curious way of approaching people. The hopeful piece is injecting into that data-driven, open-minded view of the world, the understanding that many of us have an overly negative default setting. That when we think about people, we often don't give them the benefit of the doubt, and we often underestimate them.

So hopeful skepticism is saying, “Well, rather than assuming anything I wanna learn about people. But I wanna start with the, the stipulation that probably people are better than I think in a bunch of different ways, and I want to take that knowledge with me as I try to learn about them.” 

[00:11:17] Chris Duffy: 

You're preaching to the converted here in the idea that like, uh, the idea of hope, the idea of empathy, those are things that I really care about.

You don't end up on a show about being a better human unless you believe that there is some fundamental chance of becoming a better human and of other people being it. It would be hilarious if every episode of the show is just like, “Not gonna work. Sorry, I don't believe you.” But I, I think that this is where I, I see a really clear and interesting link between the books is that like we have to have empathy for other people and have empathy for ourselves if we are going to believe that things can get better.

But I think there's also this, this piece to kind of the, the argument against your books and, uh, and not the good argument, but like the dark side of that you're fighting against, which is I think that there's a real like cultural idea that smarter people are less hopeful and that smarter people are less empathetic.

'Cause they're like, “Look, everyone, if you really get it, you know everyone's trying to screw everyone else. And if you really get it, you gotta take what you can while you're here because it's gonna get worse.” You don't get accused of being naive or being an innocent little gullible sap when you say that. Obviously you are, uh, a, an extremely educated, successful, uh, professor.

You have a PhD, you're not some ignorant, naive fool, and yet there's this cultural idea that being hopeful, that being empathetic, that those are, are associated with cluelessness. So what do you think about why that is and how do we fight that? 

[00:12:46] Jamil Zaki: 

Well, first of all, the enemy is right here with us, right? So I feel these doubts all the time.

I certainly hear them from other people when I talk about hope and increasing our trust, people say, “Gosh, what are you some type of rube or chump? You're just naive and gullible.” And I feel that way myself sometimes. It's really easy to get into this defensive mode and to feel as though the only smart thing to do is to have our guard up all the time and to not trust people.

But when we can, I think it's important to look at the evidence, right? The cultural glamorizing of cynicism as you're really sharply describing, has its own name in psychology, it's called the cynical genius illusion, because it turns out that most people hold the exact stereotype we've been talking about.

If you ask people who's smarter, cynics or non cynics, about 70% will say cynics are smarter than non cynics. If you ask who's socially smarter, for instance, who would be better at, at picking out liars from truth tellers? 85% of people think cynics will be better lie detectors. In other words, most people put their faith in people who don't put faith in people.

Uh, but the thing is, it's an illusion for a reason. Most people are wrong. It turns out that in study after study, cynics do less well than non cynics on cognitive tests, on math tests, on analytical reasoning. If you assume everybody's on the take, you stop really paying attention to the clues that you need to pick out who's telling the truth and who isn't.

So you are right. We have this cultural sense that while cynicism obviously is the smart way of approaching life, I've had that sense inside myself. But if you look at the data, the opposite is true. Cynicism is an assumption about people masquerading as wisdom. 

[00:14:37] Chris Duffy: 

There's also certainly hope can be a collective action and, and you talk about how, um, there's collective empathy.

One of the reasons why I think it sometimes can feel like the sophisticated answer in, for me is because it's so easy for one person to puncture that. If one person just acts like an absolute unmitigated jerk, it really changes the level of empathy in the whole group. All of a sudden people are like, “Ugh, well, do I really wanna help everyone else here? This person is just the worst.” 

Even if there's 20 people who are all like, “We're gonna make a difference.” If one person says, “Actually, none of this is gonna matter because blank.” It's hard to fight that. So what can I do when I'm in those places where it feels like the 20 get outnumbered by the one? 

[00:15:24] Jamil Zaki: 

I have this experience all the time, and our minds guide us to pay more attention to threats than to opportunities, pay more attention to harm than to helping. 

And you can see why that would make sense almost from an evolutionary perspective. We need to protect ourselves. So looking out for warnings, paying lots of attention to that one person who's really mean or really hopeless seems like the smart and safe thing to do.

But oftentimes that gets us a hugely backwards sense of who's actually in our group. The loudest people are often the ones with the most negative opinions. You know, the people giving life one star reviews on Yelp, they, they, it's really easy to pay attention to them. But a great way to take a more even handed approach is to, again, apply skepticism to our cynical reasoning.

I found, my lab and I found that at Stanford, for instance, students systematically underestimated how empathic their peers were. They didn't realize how caring all the people around them were, and when they didn't realize that they actually were less likely to open up, for instance, to a roommate or friend when they were going through a struggle and more likely to end up lonely.

We ended up trying to help just by presenting students with real data. We showed them what their peers actually felt. We said, “95% of your peers said they like helping people who are struggling. More than 90% said they want to connect with new people at Stanford.” And simply showing people the data, simply showing them the numbers, helped them realize that they could trust the people around them.

Now, I'm not suggesting we all survey every group that we're in that might, uh, make us less popular at parties, but I think it's important to, uh, when we can not over rotate, not over anchor on that one negative person and actually ask ourselves, do an internal audit, “Who else is around me? What do I know about how they feel?”

And oftentimes we can be really pleasantly surprised that most people in our environment want compassion, care, and connection, and most people want hope as well. 

[00:17:36] Chris Duffy: 

Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but then we will be right back.

And we are back. Looking at the data and understanding accurately how other people feel is one way to build empathy and to build hope. What are other practices that people listening can put into place in their lives? 

[00:18:00] Jamil Zaki: 

I present myself, I think of myself as a recovering cynic, so I use all of these strategies all the time.

When I try to get myself out of that hole, there are three things that I do. I try to think differently. I try to act differently, and I try to share differently. Thinking differently means adopting this hopeful, skeptical mindset that we've been talking about. It means being open to evidence, auditing my own inner life, right?

If I find myself coming to the worst conclusions about people, especially when I'm stressed and burnt out. It's so easy for me to think the worst about people. I try to just hit the pause on that inner chatter and challenge my thinking. I call it being skeptical of my cynicism. Say, wait a minute, you're you in your mind right now, it's playing a tape that says that people don't care about each other, or, you know, we don't care about social issues or everyone's out for themselves. 

What evidence do you have for that? How would you defend that if you had to? If you had to present it as a real argument?

And oftentimes, I realize I don't have very much evidence for my cynical assumptions. The second thing is to act differently. By collecting new social data, there's a couple of ways of doing this. One is taking calculated leaps of faith on other people, choosing to trust not just because it feels good, but to try to give other people a chance to show us who they are and to tell them, “Hey, I'm choosing to trust you because I believe in you.”

A second way of collecting more social data that I've tried, 'cause I'm sort of a secret introvert. I sort of do a lot of public speaking, but actually am quite shy. So I'll just challenge myself to go and strike up conversations with strangers or deepen a conversation with an acquaintance even when everything in my system is screaming not to because I think that the conversation will be awkward or terrible because I know from the data that actually those conversations are better than we expect. 

And then the last piece is to share differently. So I try when I can, especially with my kids, to do what I call positive gossiping.

That is not just talking about the worst things that people do, which is so tempting just to talk, you know, take a reality TV perspective on life and focus on all the people out there cheating and stealing, but rather to catch people doing good things. And spread that information to talk about the good things that people are doing.

All of these habits are meant to address and reverse the biases in our mind, the biases to pay attention to the worst and to assume the worst about, about the people in our lives and people in general. 

[00:20:33] Chris Duffy: 

I love the idea of positive gossiping and it feels, obviously it, it's a great thing to do with kids.

It also feels like a thing you could absolutely do with adults. It makes me think how nice it is when someone notices a thing that I've done and they tell other people about it. Like, “Oh, I noticed that you took our friend who is feeling sick. You brought them some food that's so nice for you.” I'm like catching someone doing something kind or good and then spreading the word about it 

[00:20:56] Jamil Zaki: 

And just to add a little bit to it.

Expressing gratitude and saying what we're thankful for in other people's behavior to them is something that we often don't do. 

[00:21:07] Chris Duffy: 

Mm. 

[00:21:07] Jamil Zaki: 

We often assume that third grade teacher who had a really positive impact on us just knows it. We don't have to tell them, or that the friend who listened to us during a hard time, they must already know how positive an impact they had. 

So I don't have to tell them. We further think it might be awkward to just go up to somebody and say, “Hey, you made a big difference in my life. Thank you.” And it turns out we're dead wrong. When we thank people for things. Well, we point out the positive things that they're doing.

As you're talking about with this example, it has a huge effect on those individuals who have already acted kindly, it reinforces them. It strengthens your connections as well. So I think that positive gossip can feel kind of hokey. It can feel a little bit saccharin and we fear that, “Oh, maybe it's gonna be awkward to do this.”

It's actually really wonderful for everyone involved, much more than we realize. 

[00:21:57] Chris Duffy: 

When I was, um, teaching in an elementary school, one of the master teachers who had been there for a really long time and really made such an obvious impact on kids' lives, one of the, the tricks that she told the rest of us at a professional development day was, “When you have negative feedback or when something has gone wrong, make that a phone call or an in-person conversation with the parents.” 

[00:22:20] Jamil Zaki: 

Mm-Hmm. 

[00:22:20] Chris Duffy: 

“But when you have positive feedback, when something has gone right, when they've done something amazing, write that down in a letter and send that home. Send a hard copy home because that can go up on the fridge. They can see that, like that's what you want to have a physical piece of evidence for.” 

[00:22:35] Jamil Zaki: 

I love that. You know, and again, it's, it speaks to the importance of just saying the good things. When bad things happen, we need to talk about them. It's an emergency, but when good things happen, it feels like a luxury to talk about them.

I wish it didn't. I wish that we felt more of an imperative to do that. 

[00:22:50] Chris Duffy: 

There's also a lot of discomfort that many people feel when being thanked or complimented. So how can we allow people to thank us? 

[00:23:00] Jamil Zaki: 

So first of all, that discomfort might live more in our mind as the thanker than it does in the actual mind of the thankee.

But if you feel worried about making someone uncomfortable, write it down. That way somebody can receive it in their own time and in their own way. The important thing is that they know that they've made a difference for you. 

[00:23:21] Chris Duffy: 

Hmm. I wonder if some piece of this is also that there is a there are some kind of broken cultural scripts or things that we see in movies and TV where when someone says something really heartfelt or, or kind to us, we feel like we're supposed to be performing.

Am I performing this the right way or am I looking pompous? Or how is my face when they're saying something really kind instead of actually letting it in? And so. 

[00:23:42] Jamil Zaki: 

Yeah. 

[00:23:42] Chris Duffy: 

Um, if you get it in a way where you can process it over a longer period of time, it can sink in. And also, I, I know that I felt even when someone has said something really kind to me.

I felt so awkward in the moment sometimes, but then later on I've gone home and thought about it and said like, “Wow, that was really nice. I'm so glad they said that to me.” Even though in the moment I was like, “Oh no, I'm eugh.” You know, truly had a verbal speaking, a non-language to them. 

[00:24:06] Jamil Zaki: 

I wouldn't let that stop us from expressing what people mean to us.

I think it's always a good idea, but it speaks to how we might want to do it. Do you think that if it was more the cultural norm to share gratitude and to be upfront about the positive impact people have had on us, so if you received that feedback more often, you think you would feel less awkward about it?

[00:24:27] Chris Duffy: 

I know that me personally, structure allows me to take in and appreciate both constructive and positive feedback much better. 

[00:24:36] Jamil Zaki: 

Yeah. 

[00:24:36] Chris Duffy: 

Talking about like some of those corny or you know, hokey things like my wife and I, we make time every week to say like, “Hey, here's something that I really appreciate that you're doing and here's something that we should maybe like think about working on differently.”

And I am a person where if we didn't have this kind of, what I still consider to be this like cringeworthy, like little family, we call it a check-in. But if we didn't have that, there's no way that I would bring up the hard parts. 

[00:24:59] Jamil Zaki: 

Yeah. 

[00:24:59] Chris Duffy: 

And I don't think I would hear the positive parts as deeply. 

[00:25:04] Jamil Zaki: 

See, I love that, and I think that structure is a way to be intentional about what we share and also the way that we think about our relationships and our lives, right?

I mean, cynicism, I think of it as sort of a quicksand. You know, if you don't do anything, it's going to pull you in further, right? If you don't have structured time to share positive thoughts and also constructive thoughts, then a lot of us, I'll just speak for myself, get pulled towards the negative. 

Again, it sort of, it grabs our attention and it feels more urgent. So fighting that tendency is a matter of, of placing structures in our lives and in our minds to move us out of that steadily, to fight those default assumptions in whatever way we can. 

[00:25:49] Chris Duffy: 

So this is a, a thing that I want to dive deeper into. I feel like I can find a lot of evidence that the world is really bad.

[00:25:58] Jamil Zaki: 

Yeah. 

[00:25:58] Chris Duffy: 

A lot of evidence. There is no shortage. If I open a newspaper or I watch the news or I go on social media, anywhere I go, I am finding lots of evidence that the world is a cruel, brutal, violent place and that people do not care for each other and do terrible things to each other. So, that is a real struggle for me when I think about fighting cynicism.

I wonder is the, like looking for evidence more the seeing in your own personal life versus like doing, you know, quote unquote the research online or, or being informed about how the world works? 

[00:26:35] Jamil Zaki: 

I, I do too. I experience this all the time and, and again, I in no way in talking about fighting cynicism mean to tell us to paper over or ignore real and massive problems throughout the world.

I think that there are so many, it can be overwhelming. It's also important to realize though, that when we tune into the news or go online, we are seeing a particular slice of events on Earth, right? We are being fed really systematically information that is negatively skewed. There's something that psychologists and communication theorists call Mean World Syndrome.

This is the idea that the more that people watch the news, and I guess now the more they spend time online reading about the news, the worse they think people are, the more that they feel like they're in danger. And that's maybe fine if truly what we're reading is accurate. But it turns out that the more that people read the news, the wronger, they become about a bunch of different things.

I'll give you just one example. From 1990 to around 2020, there were 27 national polls where Americans were asked, “Is violent crime getting worse or better, or is it the same as it was a year ago?” In 25, out of those 27 polls, Americans said that violent crime was getting worse. So the picture that we're painting is of a nation that is just steadily turning into like Gotham City from Batman or something.

[00:28:01] Chris Duffy: 

Mm-Hmm. 

[00:28:01] Jamil Zaki: 

You know, it's just as bad as it could be. Over that same 30 year span, FBI statistics show that violent crime in the US decreased by 50%. And so there are ways in which you can be right, that there are enormous problems, but the news isn't showing us the millions or billions of people who are working towards a better world, who are treating people well, who want things that we want as well.

Whether those are things like better policies for the climate or other positive changes, right? So I think one, the problems are real, but two, it doesn't help when we're only focused on those problems and not given any evidence about the real solutions that people are pursuing as well. 

[00:28:44] Chris Duffy: 

In both your books, you blend storytelling and science and, and we've talked about some of the, the concepts from neuroscience and psychology and some of the research that you've done.

I'd love to also have you share some of the stories that you find compelling, maybe around a person who found hope or was able to develop hope in this way, that you talk about this optimistic skepticism, this sort of hopeful skepticism. What's an example of someone who made a a powerful change?

[00:29:14] Jamil Zaki: 

The protagonist of my new book is my late friend and colleague, Emil Bruno.

Emil was a peace neuroscientist, which I didn't know was a thing before I met him at 12, 14 years ago, my goodness, he was brilliant. He studied how we might use tools from science to diagnose why people hate one another and to develop interventions to, to stop them, to help them build compassion across lines of difference and conflict.

His work was beautiful, but his outlook on life was even more powerful. He really saw the best in people and I, when I met him, thought maybe this guy's really naive. I mean, his positivity was so intense. I thought maybe this guy's sheltered or you know, maybe he just hasn't really lived. Maybe he hasn't been through any adversity.

It turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong. When Emil was born, his mother developed severe schizophrenia and basically couldn't raise him. And so he had this extremely difficult childhood. He really believed in his mother, and his mother was very kind to him, but she struggled so much and he saw how through her struggles, she still found ways to be there for him in the ways that she could.

And the way that he put it is that his mother walked through darkness and spread light, and he made a choice as a child, as a teenager to do the same thing to, despite the many hardships that he went through, to be hopeful, he chose hope in a defiant way, not in a naive way. And later in his life, about six years ago, he was diagnosed with a, an aggressive form of brain cancer and, and died far too young with a young family.

I mean, his life ended in a tragic way, and yet even then he refused to give into hopelessness. I remember talking with him and he ended up almost counseling me through the news about his illness. He said, “You know, we all die, you know, but most people don't know how long they have.” And he lived the rest of his life, even through his cancer with this profound and I remember asking him, “You know, how do you do it? And what should we do with your wisdom?” 

And he said, “Yeah, you know, I know I have this positive outlook. I know that not everybody feels this way. I wish that before I die, I could squeeze that outlook out of myself, like tube coming out of a toothpaste and spread it so other people could use it if they want to.”

And I tell his story in the book just as a very small way of trying to advance his mission in that regard. 

[00:31:52] Chris Duffy: 

Hmm. Certainly when we think about cynicism and uh, a lack of optimism, politics right now, and political division is a place where it's really hard for many people to see the optimism. So what's your outlook on the current social and political climate?

[00:32:11] Jamil Zaki: 

First, let me say, I don't think that hope or empathy will fix the real structural problems that we're facing. I mean, the problem in the US isn't merely that we disagree, it's that there are real political changes and threats that are profound, and so I'm in no way saying, “Hey, if we feel better, everything's going to get better.”

That said, I think that one thing that stands in the way of making progress together as a culture is the cynicism that has pervaded our politics, and that's in a number of ways, but let me just share one. Across disagreement we have so many cynical and inaccurate beliefs. So one thing that I try to do, and again, I struggle with this mightily myself, is to remember that when I think about a person I disagree with, I'm probably wrong.

First of all, media outlets are probably giving me a picture of that person that is very wrong and specifically makes them scarier and more extreme than they really are. And so with that knowledge, I try when I can to look up, “What do people I disagree with really think on a bunch of issues?” It turns out that there's an enormous amount of common ground in the US way more than we realize, and we're almost, I think by the media being shuttled away from realizing that, right?

I think we're almost taught to ignore any common ground and focus on our most toxic divisions, but I try to remember that actually that's leading us to be wrong about each other. And actually, if you look at the data, we do have more in common than we realize. That doesn't fix anything I know, but maybe it opens a door to finding those common values and connecting further, even in this incredibly toxic environment that we're in.

I think that cynicism is such a sad state of affairs because it really hurts us, our relationships and our communities. But on the other side of that is some really good news, which is that when we start paying more attention, pleasant surprises are everywhere, especially in the people around us. 

[00:34:15] Chris Duffy: 

It's not a coincidence that talking to you has made me feel more hopeful and less cynical about, uh, the future.

The rest of us have to do the things that will improve the world. We have to have hope, we have to have empathy because the alternative is not tolerable. It's not livable. 

[00:34:32] Jamil Zaki: 

Yes. You know, I'm not telling us to be optimistic. Optimism is the assumption that things are gonna be great. Hope is different. Hope is the idea that things could improve and the empowered notion that we can play some role, even a small role in pushing that improvement along when we conclude things will certainly be awful. 

As you said, we almost guarantee that they will get worse, and I think it's our job as people on this planet to not give in that easily and to fight for what we believe in together.

[00:35:03] Chris Duffy: 

Thank you so much, Jamil Zaki, it has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I cannot recommend more highly that people buy both of your books and practice the ideas that you are have talked about here. I I really appreciate you making the time to be on the show. 

[00:35:16] Jamil Zaki: 

Thanks so much, Chris. This has been truly delightful.

[00:35:22] Chris Duffy: 

That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Jamil Zaki. His new book is called Hope for Cynics. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by a group of hopeful cynics that includes Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe, Shasha Brooks, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le, and Joseph DeBrine.

This episode was fact checked empathically by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles. On the PRX side, we have got a team winning the war for kindness while fighting the battle of booking guests. That's Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Maggie Gourville, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzales, and of course, thanks to you for listening to our show.

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Um, probably don't do that, but, uh, one or the other ways, we will be back next week with even more How to be a Better Human. Thanks again for listening and take care.