#841 - Dr Jamil Zaki - How To Be More Hopeful In A Cynical World

28:51But rather, we think not like lawyers, where we're arguing for or against humanity, we think like scientists. We take each situation as its own experiment and come up with new rules for how we engage in each environment that we encounter. Skepticism is the truly wise philosophy, in my opinion, when compared to either cynicism or gullibility. I think a lot of people, as you often do with lexical games, as soon as you say, well, you don't want to be cynical, you want to be skeptical. You go, well, I'm not cynical. I am just skeptical. You're going to go, well, your skepticism looks a lot like cynicism to me.

29:31Exactly. And I think that this is why it's so difficult to practice good skepticism because oftentimes that we want to say that that's what we're doing. But again, we take the easy way out. And the easy way out in this case is to appear to be thoughtful without being thoughtful. It's a lot of work to evaluate every situation and every person as you encounter them. Sometimes we need blanket assumptions, right? I mean, so for instance, I have a blanket assumption. If I'm playing poker, I think the person across the table for me is trying to take my money. I don't need to evaluate each poker player I play against in order to mistrust them.

30:13While we're at the table, I might trust them a lot when we're not. But I take that type of situation as something that I can rightly stereotype as as one where I don't want to have a lot of trust. Being with my family is the opposite. I know I don't have to evaluate my mother or wife every time I see them. I know that I can trust them, right? So there are ways to simplify, but it's a lot of work, especially when we're encountering new people and new situations to be skeptical, but that work is incredibly worthwhile because it's the way that we actually learn and adapt and achieve wisdom. Yeah.

30:50So what about what's happening with cynicism levels across time? Have you done any longitudinal analysis of whether or not humanity's getting more or less cynical? It's a great question. And there's really good data from the US. Good in that it's high quality data, not good in that the news is good, because cynicism has been on the rise for at least 50 years here in the US. So in 1972, about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted and by 2018 that had fallen to about a third of Americans. That drop is as big as the stock market took in the financial collapse of 2008. So we are living in a real trust recession and it's not just in the US, there was a survey recently of 28 countries around the world.

31:41And the researchers in this survey found that in 24 of those 28 countries, most people said their default was to not trust others. So there really is a growing bias against trust and towards cynicism that appears to be occurring in many places around the world. What do you attribute that to? It's hard to know because history is not an experiment, right? that you can't run it a thousand times and tinker and establish causality. So anything that I say here is speculation, but there are two things that I think at least bear some attention. The first is inequality. It turns out that both places and times that are more economically unequal tend to be less trusting.

32:29So if you live in a town or county or a nation that is highly unequal, you tend to trust less. And that's not just if you're poor, right? If you're poor in a highly unequal area, you might have reason to mistrust. But even if you're wealthy in a very unequal versus a more egalitarian area, you're less trusting. Now, why is that? Well, high levels of inequality tend to put people in a zero -sum mindset where anything that you gain, right? There's not enough to go around. So anything you gain, I lose. So that's one thing that we look to. one big social parameter that might track cynicism. And then the second is just media saturation.

33:13You know, we have this ancient negativity bias, but of course, all throughout our lives, that ancient bias has been combined with a hyper -modern ecosystem that just feeds us in constant information, information that's meant to keep us clicking and scrolling and watching, Not meant to make us happy, crucially not meant to make us wise, or accurate about what people are like. And so organizations that provide this information have learned over the course of time that the best way to keep people engaged is to feed them as much negativity bias as we can. And it turns out that people who watch more news, who spend more time on social media, have a more bleak view of the world and of humanity.

34:01Does that by bleak view of the world? Does that mean more cynical? More cynical, but also, you know, I think it's important to again dispel the cynical genius illusion here because sometimes when I tell people this they say, well yeah, if you're watching a lot of the news, you're more informed. They're more informed, yes. Exactly. I can hear the YouTube comments already. Right, right. Me too, but it turns out that that's not always the case. I'll give you an example. There's something that communication theorists call mean world syndrome. So people who watch more television news believe that violence is a greater danger to them than people who watch less news.

34:42And over time, as media has become more saturating, at least in the US, on yearly national surveys, almost every year most Americans think that violent crime is getting worse in our country. I pulled FBI statistics from a three -decade period that coincided with those surveys. And I found that over the 30 -year span when most Americans thought every year was worse than the last, they envisioned our country as like Gotham City from Batman or something, right? But FBI statistics revealed that over that same span, violent crime around the nation decreased by 50%. So here's one case where tuning into the news doesn't just make you think things are worse.

35:26It makes you demonstrably more wrong about how the nation is. Does that mean that smart people are less accurate with their assessment of the world then? Why say say more about why smart people would be less cynical exactly would be less accurate with their assessment of the world. Yes, that is true. And here's where, and I know we've been down in the cynical dumps for a while. Now, maybe this can be a turn towards the light because I can tell you, you know, for me, I was a cynical person and still a recovering cynic. And I started this project three, four years ago in part to uncover the science of cynicism and in part to see what was going on with me.

36:15And it turns out that I was inaccurate because most cynics are inaccurate. It also turns out that marinating myself for years in the science of suspicion and mistrust and hopelessness made me a much more positive and bullish person. Why would that be? Well, because again, it turns out that if you look at the data, cynicism is driving us not just to bleak conclusions, but to unnecessarily bleak conclusions. And when you look more closely at what people are actually like, the average person is more trustworthy, more generous, more open -minded, and friendlier than most people realize. That's not to say that there aren't folks doing horrible things every day, but the average person, and especially the cynic, underestimates the average person.

37:08What about the relationship between not upbringing and cynicism? Are there certain types of upbringing, certain types of people that are predisposed to cynicism? Yes. So first, there is a heritable component to cynicism, meaning that there are some genetic factors that likely raise your potential for cynicism. That seems to be a pretty minor factor though. Much more reliable is our home environment and in particular attachment style. So you probably know that some kids are securely attached. Others are insecure attached. And attachment is kind of a stand -in for whether you think you can count on your caregivers early in your life.

37:52And by extension, whether you think you can count on other people. And so if as a child somebody has a history of feeling alone, unsafe as though the world and other people are unreliable, that tends to follow that child into adulthood. And insecurely attached kids tend to become, if not cynical adults, at least less trusting adults in their relationships and with strangers as well. Yeah, it's that thing about when you see somebody getting angry, it's kind of a little bit like that's a hot stone that they've carried and you wonder who gave them that stone and who gave them that stone and who gave them that stone and it's kind of the same I guess with cynicism that I know certainly some people will be predisposed to it.

38:41certainly there's a heritable component to everything psychological that makes us. But also to perpetuate that, I'm British, which means we're kind of, I think, culturally predisposed to a little bit of cynicism. We can be quite dower. We can sort of think of the worst of things, a lot of the time personalities, a lot like the weather. But since being in America, I've noticed that it's, my disposition's changed. It's been nudged forward bit by bit by bit by people that are more blue sky thinking and more hopeful for the future and sort of believe that things can go right and less sort of cutting and such.

39:18So yeah, I really do hope that people see the folly in cynicism, that it seems alluring, it seems sophisticated, it seems like it protects you from the world, but it doesn't, just guarantees failure and a different sort of set of terms. I don't think as well that cynics come across to the people that they want to be liked by very well. I mean, being the king of a bunch of sort of other negative people doesn't sound like a particularly glorious kingdom to, you know, be the Lord over. It's not. And I think this is something that people get really stuck in. I think of cynicism almost as a psychological quicksand.

40:02It sort of pulls you in and changes your patterns of behavior. When you act cynically, other people around you become cynical, they also become more selfish and you decide you were right all along. There is all these self -fulfilling prophecies that trap us. I think it's a tragedy, frankly. Again, really don't blame people for feeling this way, especially if they've been betrayed or hurt especially early in their lives. My thought on this is not you shouldn't feel that way, but rather we don't have to feel this way. There are all sorts of ways to break out of cynicism. There's even ways to break out of insecure attachment.

40:46There are therapies that people can use that allow them to achieve something known as earned attachment where you can shed those hot, that hot stone you've been caring, you can finally drop it and sort of re, be reborn in new relationships and into a new identity. And there are ways to shed our cynicism as well, practical tools we can use to find the truth about other people, which is often full of pleasant surprises, to lean into a type of hope and trust that are not gullible or naive, but data driven and healthy and ultimately successful. Can we talk about some of those tools? Can you take us through them?

41:30I'd love to. Yeah. So the first is to try to shift from cynicism to skepticism. So it's a change in mindset. And the way to do this, again, is to challenge ourselves to think more like scientists. One way that I do this with my own cynicism, which is very frequent, is to be skeptical of my cynical thoughts. So if I encounter a stranger and I find myself mistrusting them immediately, or if I find myself making a blanket judgment about all politicians or all lawyers or whatever other group of people, I stop myself. I try to hit the pause button on that inner chatter. I know I have negativity bias.

42:12I know that these are programs that are operating under the surface of my mind, but we can call those programs up and take a hard look at them when we want to. And I try to do that with my cynicism. I say, okay, Zaki, you're a scientist. If you were trying to support the claim that's going on in your head, scientifically, what evidence would you use? And oftentimes the answer is, well, nothing. I have no evidence to support this claim. And so I think kind of stepping out of our own mental loops is a first step towards this mindset. A second mindset shift, and then we can talk about behaviors that we can change as well, is what I call a reciprocity mindset.

42:56So oftentimes, cynics and the rest of us don't realize how much influence we have on other people. The fire chief in Boston probably didn't know that by trying to catch some of his firefighters is cheating, he would change all of them for the worse. He just thought he was trying to find out or figure out who already was malingering. But we do have lots of power over people. When we mistrust them, they become less trustworthy. But the opposite is also true. When we trust people, they're more likely to step up and meet our expectations. And in my lab, we taught people this fact. We said, hey, did you know when you put faith in other people, they become more faithful to you, right?

43:41They will pay that back. Trust isn't just you taking a chance, it's you giving a gift to another person that they're likely to repay. And we found that when we taught people this, they were more willing to trust others, and others in return became more trustworthy. worthy. So that mindset of reciprocity can turn these dark, sort of toxic, self -fulfilling prophecies into more virtuous ones. I suppose the weird asymmetry that we have as an experiencer is that we feel the pain of broken trust, but we don't feel the pain of not trusting fully. Yes, I love that. This is a huge point in the, you're like in the weeds of the literature here actually.

44:26There's this great study where people could choose to trust a stranger or not and they with money and they had to guess how often do you think this stranger will be trustworthy? And most people guessed about 50 % of the time people would act in a trustworthy manner. But actually 80 % of the time people acted in a trustworthy manner. The thing is that when people chose not to trust they didn't learn that they were wrong. You only learn when you've trusted incorrectly. You never learn when you've mistrusted incorrectly. And that's something that I think a lot of us don't understand. We don't realize that we're taking in information asymmetrically.

45:08We're only learning half the story and betrayals are, you know, might haunt us, but all the missed opportunities we have fall completely out of our view. And because of that, we miss more of them. Yeah, I think about this a lot, especially to do with internet content, that the stories that rise to the top, especially on a site, let's say like Reddit, for instance, which are usually individual posts by an individual user, a lot of the time about something that's happened in their life. And by design, the most outrageous, outrageous stories are the ones that rise to the top because they're so non -typical.

45:46So what are you learning from? If that's the data set that your personal GPT is learning from, you're learning from the most tail end outcomes that anybody could have. And then you're saying, well, that's the way that most of the world is. It's like, no, that's literally the opposite. Like the world's experiences are on a bell curve. And you're choosing to invert it and have this sort of U -shaped curve that is, and this is now my new worldview. It's incredible, isn't it? I mean, if I'm driving my kids to school, the thousand motorists who follow traffic laws and are very polite, completely, they're lost to me, five minutes afterwards, right?

46:30They recede into the landfill of lost memories. But the one person who cuts me off, I think about for the rest of the day, and I feel like I've learned something about humanity from that one person, and you're exactly right, it's because they're unusual. We are over rotating on exceptions and forgetting the rules that make those exceptions, which are often that people are quite positive and act in ways that are kind and trustworthy. And so we're learning from exactly the wrong evidence in many cases, but we don't have to. Another strategy that I've used in my own life and that I encourage people to use, it's actually inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy.

47:12I call it encounter counting, right? So if we have 10 different conversations in a day, 20 conversations, 50 conversations, we know because of negativity bias, we're going to remember the one worst conversation more than any of the other ones. So I encourage people to just take a notebook with you, just one day. You don't have to do this every day. And write down after each significant conversation you had what it was like. And compare the actual data of what your social day was like to how you experience it, how you remember it, how you expect it to go. And I think this is where we can try to fight against the asymmetries in our minds more effectively by treating our lives a little bit more like an experiment, by being more observant, by noticing more carefully.

48:03And again, when we do, all of the quiet goodness that is all around us, but that we ignore, comes into focus. You talked to me about the role of hope. What is hope in the world of cynicism? Yeah, this is a great question. And hope I want to differentiate. We're doing a lot of great linguistic work here. So hope is different from optimism. Optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well. Optimistic people tend to be happier, but they can also become complacent, right? Because if the future is going to go great no matter what you do, you don't have to do anything. You can kind of sit on the sidelines.

48:46Optimism is also a bit fragile because if you have very rosy expectations of the future and they don't come to pass, you can be disappointed quite easily, right? You could have sworn that everything was going to turn out great and it hasn't, so it must all be terrible. I think optimists are actually at great risk of becoming cynics later on. Hope, by contrast, is the belief that things could turn out well. And I know that sounds like a small distinction, but it's not. Because in the uncertainty that hope gives us, That uncertain future makes room for our actions to matter. Whereas optimism is complacent, hope is action oriented.

49:27And you see this in the research. Hopeful people, more than optimistic people, take action. They feel agency. They try not just to envision a better future, but to chart a path to that future and then walk through that path. And it's especially useful for people who are facing adversity. We think of hope as privileged or toxic or naive sort of happy -go -lucky Philosophy that ignores all of the world's problems. In fact as researchers see it Hope is a great way to attack our problems to try to overcome them through our efforts How can people cultivate more hope? Well, there are a bunch of interventions in the world of psychology that help people do that.

50:14The first is to be really, to remember that hope is very specific, right? Hope, there's this snarky saying that people often tell me that I've written a book about hope, hope is not a plan. Actually, hope should be a plan. It should be exactly that. That hope should entail a number of different things. If you want to The first is to envision, in very precise and specific terms, a future that you want. And hopefully a future that is within reach, one where your actions could bring you closer to it. The second is to draw a map between where you are and that future. What are the actions that you could take?

50:55What are the actions other people could take? What could come to pass that would bring that future about? So create a pathway to it and then take the steps to walk along that path. So there are these great interventions for students from low income backgrounds that help them do these three different steps. In vision, a future chart a path and then take steps towards that path. And they find that those interventions help low income students achieve more academically through this process of active hope, right? Not complacent optimism. What do you think is happening there? Is it making a positive future feel more in reach by laying out step by step how it could come to pass?

51:42Is that the sort of fundamental mechanism? I think that's exactly it. One of the things that I think makes it hard for us to pursue our goals is when they feel too far away or when they feel totally out of our control. And I know many people feel that way about world events right now in this social media age. Like my students, my undergraduates, lived such a different life than I did when I was 18. When I was 18, 90 % of the world I cared about was framing him Massachusetts, you know, town of 70 ,000 people. And in that town, if I wanted to do something, chances are I could, or at least I could try.

52:21My freshmen students, they're worried about problems occurring 5 ,000, 10 ,000 miles away. They're worried about generations into the future. These problems feel so enormous that it's hard to feel hope because it's hard to feel agency. Hope then is often a matter of trying to take those grandiose, gigantic problems, those goals that feel out of reach and impossible and saying, well, let's try to work backwards from there. What's something closer? What's something smaller that at least moves us in that direction? It's sort of chunking one big goal into a bunch of smaller ones. What do you advise your students who are swimming in the muck in the mire of modern media landscape?

53:12What do you say to them to sort of maintain a hopeful mindset, avoid cynicism when they're terminally online and spending a lot of time bombarded by bad news. I mean, first log off whenever you can. You know, I mean, I really do think that this younger generation, that people who are coming into college now, I think, are awakening to what social media has done to them. And if you ask me, I think that younger people will begin rejecting social media more than Gen Z. I hope at least that's what happens. But I think that there are a bunch of other things that you can do even if you're not willing to totally log off.

53:53One is to just audit the information that you're receiving and be skeptical of it. Remember that the profit models of these companies depend on making you feel as bad about things as you possibly can. So you are receiving half the story. You're not receiving the whole story. Second is to try and seek out the other half of the story. In my book, I talk about this great organization called The Solutions Journalism Network. This is a group of reporters who pool together stories about people solving problems. So this is positive news, but it's not positive news like, oh, a cute kitten was rescued from a tree yesterday.

54:36You know, it's not that feel good sort of stories is that help us ignore world events. Instead, it's stories, for instance, of people, citizens fighting gerrymandering to have greater power to their votes or inmates teaching each other skills -based classes so they can work more quickly when they leave prison. These are stories of people lifting each other up and solving or at least addressing major problems. So I encourage my students to balance their media diet the same way that they would balance their nutritional diet and realize that what they're consuming online is often a bunch of really empty, if not toxic calories and that they need, if they're not going to totally cleanse, they at least need to supplement.

55:22Was that website, can people go to read that stuff? This is called the Solutions Journalism Network and it's just a, there's something known as the solutions story tracker, which is a library of thousands of stories of people, again, solving real problems or at least addressing problems. And these days, if I read something incredibly depressing in some news source, I immediately go to the solutions journalism network and I look up the same topic to see, well, what are people doing about this? It's like an aesthetic to a cut or a graze that you've got from normal media and then you go across to the other one.

56:04Just thinking about this body of work, you mentioned that this was quite a personal project for you, given that... Well, I just explained that because I think it kind of would be for me as well. Yeah. Well, I'm happy to open up. I certainly made the choice early in this project that especially for something like cynicism, where people I think feel so much pain, I didn't want to present myself as somebody who solved this whole problem. And I'm just speaking from on high. So one of the things about me is that for 20 years, I've been studying kindness, empathy, compassion, and social support, friendship, all these really rosy pieces of human nature.

56:55And because of that, I've developed a little bit of a persona that is people often recruit me to write or speak for them when they want to feel good about humanity, when they want to shot in the arm. But a secret that entire time is that even though I study this stuff, I can't always feel it. Right, just understanding something scientifically isn't the same as knowing it in your heart. And I myself have struggled with cynicism since I was a kid. You know, I had a pretty chaotic home life and I have always had trouble trusting people and have always found it quite easy to see the worst in people.

57:34So there was this split really between the way I presented myself professionally and who I felt like internally and this project for me was, it was an attempt to harmonize my inner and outer lives. Yeah, I, um, there's that Kurt Vonnegut quote that you're a fan of. We are who we pretend to be, so we should be careful who we pretend to be. and a friend that I sat down with last year stopped making content on the internet because he said that he felt like he had to live up to in private the things that he was saying in public. And I suppose that there's two ways to do that. You can either stop saying things in public or you can start being in private.

58:17The version of you that you are in public or bring them both in line. But that's, it's kind of like, I know the gurus fallacy or whatever, that if you have done some work or if you are an evangelist for a particular worldview that people then begin to assess you personally about how well you can adhere to that worldview. You go almost all of the people that I know their research is me, such. It's some flaw or interest or unrequited desire that they have deep down that is the reason that they're so passionate about the thing that they're doing. And yeah, I mean, unfortunately scientists kind of have a much tougher run of it at the moment because those of us that just get to play in the shallow end of the pool on, I don't think any of us, I'm certainly not held to any standard essentially at all.

59:12But yeah, I can see how that would be, how that would be challenging. Have you, so you mentioned, you've gone through a bunch of different tactics and sort of reframing strategies, is there something that you have found as a rehabilitating exynic? What's the most used strategy or mantra that you find yourself coming back to on the daily basis? There's many, but one that I'll share now is an action that I try to take much more often than I used to, which is what I call leaps of faith. I think that in general, I'm not saying in every case and I'm not telling people what to do, but I think that in general, we are too risk -averse in our social lives.

1:00:02We play it safe because we worry that if we don't, people will take advantage of us, or maybe something more mundane will happen. Maybe I'll open up to somebody and they'll just be bored. They won't want to talk about what I have to say or they'll judge me, right? And I felt that way all the time. And to your point, I was representing a public version of myself, which was accurate to the science, right? I mean, I wasn't lying. I was telling the truth about research, which is my job. But I wasn't feeling the way that you might when you learned about that research, which I don't actually think it's my job to feel a certain way, but people I think would be surprised because I didn't open up.

1:00:47I had this, my exterior was so positive as a happiness and kindness scientist that one of my friends started making fun of me and calling me Guy Smiley because she said, you just are so smiley all the time. And I thought, huh, I think she means that maybe as a compliment or a joke, but it actually makes me really sad because I realized that I've felt unsafe presenting who I really am. I've felt unsafe putting faith in people. And so since starting this project, you know, one of the things that I've learned is that people are much more trustworthy than we think. And we vastly underestimate how well it will go when we put faith in others, whether that means trusting them with money or with ourselves.

1:01:36And so I've tried to purposefully take more risks than I did in the past. Now that's not to say that I'm sending my bank account information to a prince who's going to wire me 14 .5 million dollars. But I try that works. I swear that works every time. At least one of these times it will work. I just have to keep on opening new accounts and eventually I'll score. But I just am much more vulnerable with people in my life than I was before. I'm much quicker to say when I'm struggling, I'm much quicker to say what's going on with me and to be honest, even when that is unpalatable or when that requires something of a friend, right?

1:02:18So I used to suffer much more in silence because I thought that I would be a burden on other people if I opened up to them. And now I realize that was a very cynical way of viewing other people. I was assuming that they didn't want to be there for me, even though they were my friends or in some cases my family. And now I take these leaps of faith all the time and I am so shocked frequently at how friendly strangers are and how trustworthy new people in my life are and how capable my trainees are when I trust them with more responsibility and at how warm and giving the people in my in my life are, and my journey now is to try to stop being so surprised, right?

1:03:02To try to actually... You know what I mean? To try to update, to try to be a good Bayesian, to try to update my world view in light of the evidence. You know, I think that, and I imagine that a lot of your listeners might experience this if they took more leaps of faith on people, they might be surprised to because people are surprisingly positive because we are overly negative in our assumptions. And it's like that game where you only get to find out how often people betray you with money if you give them some money that you don't actually get to have all of the positive reinforcement from people with you putting your faith in them unless you put your faith in them.

1:03:48So I guess the final thing, the final hurdle, horsemen of the cynicism apocalypse that I think of is the felt sense of discomfort in unsafety when you're faced with the potential of having to do a thing. You remember even though it was six years ago, the last time that somebody betrayed you or whatever it might be, you've got this sort of ambient lingering sense that something might go wrong. What's your advice to people who, when they are faced with the potential to be hopeful or to be positively skeptical, there's something arises inside of them that kind of feels tight and tense and limiting because I kind of get the sense that that's probably where a lot of people may get stuck.

1:04:37I think that's right. And, you know, I know on your show you talk a lot about high performance and how to sort of how to achieve more, whether that's in a variety of domains in life. And I think a common message that you hear in any type of high performance setting is, you need to take risks. You can't achieve much by just focusing on being as safe as you possibly can all the time. Now, taking risks doesn't mean being reckless or putting yourself in harm's way. But I think that in essence, hope is the social version of risk taking in our careers, of risk taking in our athletic lives, of risk taking to be as high achieving and as successful as we want.

1:05:25We need to take risks. And I think that a lot of us are trained to be risk seeking or at least risk accepting in a lot of domains, but not socially. And I think what hope demands of us, what true social fulfillment demands of us, is that we realize that we need to take some risks in that part of our life as well, the same way that we would in any other part where we want to do something great. In that interesting, the framing around risk taking in extreme sports or in a game of business or in moving to a new country or doing whatever is perceived bravely, but taking risks socially is seen as naivety.

1:06:13Isn't that amazing? This is one of the things that really floors me is we have these highly, I suppose we have these really shifting standards for what is brave and courageous and what is frankly stupid. And I don't know why. I mean, I get it that being betrayed feels bad and it makes you look bad socially. But that is a poor rationale for giving up on so much that social life has to offer us, friendship, collaboration, even love, right? These are some of the greatest achievements you can have in your life and to lose them because you're too scared to be the chump. It strikes me as a real tragic way to live, a very understandable way to live, just the same way.

1:07:06I mean, I don't do any extreme sports because I fear bodily injury, but for somebody who wants to have that thrill, to have that feeling, they know they have to take risk. And if you want to truly be able to love, if you want to truly be yourself in community with other people, You need to be willing to take some risk. Hey, man, I love it. Let's bring this one into line, dude. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you're doing. Oh, well, thank you. You can find me at jameal -zaki .com. My book, Hope for Sinek's, The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, is available wherever books are.

1:07:45And my lab at Stanford is the Social Neuroscience Lab. and you can find us at ssnl .stanford .edu. Awesome. I could have this conversation all day. I think it's very timely to do a buck about cynicism. I'm fascinated to see what you do next. Good luck with the rest of the tour as well. Thank you. This has been really delightful. Thank you for having me.