The Surprising Wisdom of Hope (Jamil Maki, PhD)

Listen now (56 mins) | "In certain ways, our culture has glamorized the cynic. The person who doesn't have faith in others is seen as maybe wise or especially sharp. And it turns out that..."

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Dr. Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. Jamil trained at Columbia and Harvard, studying empathy and kindness in the human brain, and I’ve been a mega-fan for years, after interviewing him for his first book, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, in 2019. His latest book, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, is a must-read. It’s a love letter of sorts, a collaboration through the veil with his late colleague Emile Bruneau, who also studied compassion, peace, and hope. 

I would love for every single person to read this book as it paints a more accurate, data-driven portrait of who we are, which is mostly good, and mostly aligned in our vision for the future. Jamil explains what happens to us when fear and cynicism intervene and the way we come to see each other through a distorted lens. He busts some other significant myths as well, namely that we glorify cynicism as being “smart”—you know, no dupes allowed—but cynicism actually makes us cognitively less intelligent. Yes, you heard that right. I loved this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.

MORE FROM JAMIL ZAKI, PhD:

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness

The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World

Follow Jamil on X and Instagram

Jamil’s Lab’s Website

RELATED EPISODES:

Amanda Ripley, “Navigating Conflict”

Loretta Rose, “Calling in the Call-Out Culture”

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

I just loved Hope for Cynics. People really need to read this book. I really hope people read this book and thank you for writing it.

JAMIL:

Oh, well, I really appreciate you saying that, and thank you for sharing about it as well. I think I really needed it a year after my first book had come out. It was probably some of the most anxious and depressed times of my life and not just mine. I mean really the worlds with everything shut down and we were all living through our screens in a way that we hadn't before, and there was just this toxicity to the whole way that we were processing information about one another really was driving me into this psychological hole that I didn't want to be in. And as a psychologist, I felt well uniquely equipped to explore what was happening to me. And it helped me a lot to go through this multi-year research process. And if it could help other people in any similar fashion, it would mean so much to me. And then of course, my friend Emil had died during this time, and the ability to even share 1% of his philosophy was also a real gift personally. So

ELISE:

Yeah,

JAMIL:

I hope it can benefit people.

ELISE:

Yeah. Will you tell us a bit about Emil? I mean, it was truly so moving to watch your collaboration unfold in this book, even though he is no longer here, but I thought it was such a stunning way to stay in conversation with him and carry his ideas forward and hopefully popularize the way that he approached the world. Can you tell us a little bit about him?

JAMIL:

Emil Bruneau was a brilliant neuroscientist and he did a type of neuroscience most people have not heard of, which is peace neuroscience. He was also an activist and a practitioner helping bring groups in conflict together. And he sought peace in this really personal way, in this very practical way, but then also as a scientist was interested in understanding what happens in our brain when we give ourselves over to hatred and what, if anything, does that biology tell us about how we can be pulled back. He did work in the context of the conflict in Israel and Palestine in the context of political polarization in the us, the civil war between the Fark and government paramilitaries in Columbia. I mean, he was everywhere, but beyond the beautiful work that he did, Emil was what I would call a classic philosopher in that he was one of the people I knew where his beliefs, his point of view on life wasn't just represented in what he said or the science that he did, but in every aspect of the way that he lived, he had perhaps more integrity than almost anyone I've ever met.

And he had a deep joy and satisfaction with life that came from that. The reason that he is the protagonist of the book is because he was so different from me in that way. I mean, I consider myself to have some integrity, but I have a much harder time than him finding joy. And Emil also had this incredible faith in people. I mean, he had witnessed acts of hatred on five different continents, and yet he was stubborn and stalwart in his belief that most people are good. And that was something that I had a hard time accessing as well. I tend to be more cynical. And so to me, he was always this friend. He was a friend. We were close and we collaborated, but he was also a hero and an aspirational figure.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, you paint a really beautiful portrait and also of this idea that which I think is something that we all desperately need to learn how to do, which is how do you move conversations and conflicts forward without castigating, shaming, blaming, criticizing, judging, and assuming the worst of each other, which is clearly something that we loved to do in our culture. And so to that end, I loved him. I loved reading about him and everything that he represents and the way that he had seemed like he lived above the binary and above needing to make someone wrong or bad. I love core thesis, the myths of cynics because I recognize myself as falling into these traps. And let's start with the first one, which is that cynicism is clever or a sign of being more cognitively astute.

JAMIL:

Yeah, I think that's a great place to start, and maybe I can also offer the definition of cynicism. The quality that Emile never had that I find myself falling into is kind of a default belief, an assumption that people are kind of selfish, that they're maybe not very trustworthy, that life is a competition. I tend to feel this way, and a lot of people tend to feel this way. We as a culture have lost faith in each other and in our institutions at the same time, but especially in our fellow citizens, our fellow people. So why do we do that? Why are we so cynical? Why are we more cynical than before? Well, you bring up that in certain ways our culture has glamorized. The cynic, the person who doesn't have faith in others is seen as wise or especially sharp. And it turns out that that's true in the research as well.

If you survey people and you tell them about a cynic and a non cynic and ask them a bunch of questions about those too, most people, 70% will tell you that cynics are smarter than non cynics. And 85% of people believe that cynics are socially smarter than non cynics, for instance, that they'll be better at spotting liars. In other words, a lot of us put faith in people who don't have very much faith in people, which is ironic and also wrong. It turns out that the data are pretty clear that actually when we give into cynicism, we don't just feel bad, which we do, and we can get into that if you want. We also judge poorly, we do less well, for instance, in spotting who's telling the truth and who's lying, because if you have a blanket default assumption about everybody, you stop actually paying attention to the evidence in front of you that can show you who might be trustworthy and who might not be.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I think that resonates with so many people and that natural, I don't want to be a dupe. I don't want to be taken advantage of. I need to maintain this sense of hypervigilance. I need to be self-protective, and even as I say that, I can recognize in me how untrue that is. I try to avoid, I think people would say, I have an open mind that to the point that maybe my brain will fall out at times. But I think for a lot of people I will go there out of curiosity and because I think fundamentally that there's a lot of interesting ways of seeing the world and systems for understanding it, but I also recognize how easy it is to move out of curiosity and into fear and certainty. What is that type of certainty that comes with cynicism?

JAMIL:

I think it's the type of certainty that comes with any theory about the world, any conclusion that you draw before even taking in evidence. We all have conclusions that we've come up with and that allow us to close our mind off. Certain types of people deserve my interest. Certain types of people don't. Some types of music are great and some types are boring. Once we make these judgements, we simplify the world, but we also shrink it. And for cynics, I think that type of is a sneering sort of confidence, a confidence that even when people seem like they're doing the right thing, seem like they're acting kindly, eventually they'll show us their true colors. And you can see this kind of grim satisfaction that cynics often express when somebody finally screws up when they actually do something terrible, because the idea is, aha, I knew it. All along, this person's true colors have now been revealed, and if you ever believed in them, you were exactly as you're saying, a naive dupe, which is what none of us want to be naive,

ELISE:

And then to support those decisions. I can't remember what Amanda Ripley calls it, but I loved that book too. High Conflict. It's an amazing read for anyone who wants to go even deeper into some of this, but what's it called nut finding? She a specific nut, nut picking, right? Where you find the instance of a failure in the system or a lapse in integrity, and you use that to justify your cynicism period as an end state, final resting place on someone.

JAMIL:

Absolutely. I love Amanda as well. In fact, I was talking with her yesterday and you're exactly right. I really like the parallel you're drawing as well. Cynics basically can do nut picking for all of life, right? Amanda says, we find one extreme version of the outgroup and we decide that the whole group is represented by them. So I look for a January 6th and I say, anybody I disagree with is one of them is just like them, but cynics do that for life as a whole, right? It doesn't have to be a particular group. They're almost like lawyers in the prosecution against humanity, not just against the other.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and I think that obviously politics and in this moment of time, this plays out very easily. This is a masterclass, and we will get into politics too in a bit because of just how stunning the evidence is that we have such a massive Venn diagram of shared values and beliefs, and yet have been convinced that we are extremists on both sides, which is one of the things that I rail against all the time as a montanan, as many different things. But come on. Come on. I refuse. I refuse to morally exclude and reject half the population of this country. Stop it. We need to stop it. And I think collectively, as you indicate everyone, I'm not alone. Most people are tired of this extreme polarization.

ELISE:

Polarization, which is not actually reflective of where we are on the issues. Actually, maybe let's just go there.

I mean that image that you have, that graphic that you have on immigration, and I'll include an image to this, although people obviously need to buy and read your book. It's so good and fast and full of stories, but it just looks like a giant you in terms of our expectations of the other party, and then the reality is very different. Can you talk a bit about that and other instances of that?

JAMIL:

Yeah, so these are actually data that my late friend Emil collected along with his lab and along with a group called Beyond Conflict, and they asked Americans of all different political persuasions about their views on immigration. So this is a one to 100 scale where one is I'd like all borders to be totally open and 100 is I'd like all borders to be totally closed. So it's basically a measure of your liberalism or conservatism when it comes to immigration. And they first asked, well, where would you place yourself in this space on this dimension? And then they asked, what do you think the average person who disagrees with you would say? How would they answer this question? And so you can from these data basically create an image of two realities. One is what people actually want. And that reality, as you said to me, it looks like a hill with two peaks.

Yes, Republicans want stricter borders than Democrats do, but there is a huge amount of overlap in the middle, and the two peaks of the hill are not that far apart. I mean, we're talking on a 100 point scale. One group is in the thirties or forties and the other group is in the sixties, so it's really not that far apart. But then if you look at the image created, when you plot what each group thinks the other one wants, there's no common ground whatsoever. That's that U-shaped curve that you were talking about before because Republicans think that Democrats want completely open borders, and Democrats think that Republicans want completely closed borders. So there's all this common ground, but it's invisible to us. And in our imagination, we are incredibly divided, which actually turns into a toxic self-fulfilling prophecy because if we don't know about that common ground, we don't explore it, we don't acknowledge it, and we don't create openings for it.

ELISE:

I think the graph is shocking to people because we are so convinced that people who are on the other side, and it's obviously only informed by the media bubbles that we find ourselves in, and the way the toxicity, and I say this as a white woman, but it's definitely very present amongst white women or women in general, I would say, of assigning badness and shaming and castigating each other and morally excluding based on politics rather than, okay, I would love to understand. I want to understand your worldview. You're clearly having a different experience and getting different information and have a different reality than I do. And so I wouldn't hear about that when I go to Montana during the summers. I ride horses at a place, and one of the things that I've come to really love, I love horses, but it's a very divergent political crowd. So earlier this summer I was on rides with a middle-aged white man who loves Greg Abbott in Texas and wants to defend IVF, but doesn't believe in anything beyond 12 to 15 weeks. But so we're on a horse for four hours every day, and I'm talking to him and I'm giving him data and I'm asking him questions. I mean, it was a very peaceful encounter. Another guest was A-U-C-S-F, ob, GYN, who travels around the country teaching high risk abortion,

But everyone's having fun and playing softball. And to your point, you talk about these studies of putting people on Zoom and how incredible those encounters are, people who are diabol completely opposed, and I don't know if I changed his mind, but I am certainly going to try with love and grace, I'm going to challenge him. I'm going to get him to read the turn away study. I'm going to send him things that I want him to know so it can inform his point of view. Anyway, I experience that all the time and I try and put myself in those circumstances all the time. And yet I think most of us never get that opportunity right?

JAMIL:

Well, I think most of us actively avoid opportunity like that. There is this study that to me is both funny and sad, was conducted during Thanksgiving of 2016, a pretty charged time in our political history, if you remember, and just a few weeks after the election of 2016 and researchers used geo tagging to figure out where people lived using their phones, where people lived and where they ate Thanksgiving dinner, and whether or not they had crossed a political boundary from a county that voted blue to one that voted red or vice versa in order to have Thanksgiving dinner as a proxy for whether you're having dinner with people you disagree with. And it turns out that when people ate Thanksgiving dinner with people they disagreed with in 2016, they left 50 minutes earlier. I mean,

We're talking, people are giving up pie in order to avoid broaching political conversations, not just with strangers but with their own family. And I think that if the image that you have in your mind is a very cynical one where the outgroup, the other is extreme, hateful, maybe even violent, of course you don't want to talk with that person. There's nothing to be gained and so much to be lost. It's like having a beer with a fascist. It's not a very appealing experience. And I think that because we are so wrong about each other, we end up not ever collecting the data through the conversations, the likes of which you had during this horseback riding trip. We don't collect the data that we would need to realize that we were wrong in the first place. So it's almost like our cynicism doesn't just make us wrong, it shuts us off from the evidence that we would need to be right.

And I do want to be clear here when I say that we have so much in common, I'm in no way arguing that there aren't really extreme and violent people out there. I'm also not meaning to diminish in any way the real dangers and real division in our politics and in our culture. I mean, there are so many terrifying rights that are being rolled back. Democracy itself is under threat. So I don't mean to diminish this in any way, but I think that when we assume the worst about the average person we disagree with end up leaving the civic process, we end up taking part less in the conversations that could help us all protect our common values.

ELISE:

A hundred percent. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the presence of fear. I want to talk about the oath keepers, I want to talk about some of the other components of the book. But before we get there, you write about Loretta Ross, who is the second person on my podcast. I love Loretta and her process of calling in. I'll link that episode in the show notes for people who want to go back and listen because she is a valiant activist, an unprecedented person in this game who also her parents were Republicans, Middle Class black Republicans, and she refuses to abandon most people in this country. And I can find common ground with 90% of people, maybe not Insurrectionists, maybe not oath keepers, but she's, as you write, worked with planners. She's gone there in an attempt to find the humanity. I want to talk a bit about solutions too, but that story about her uncle and who's sharing, I think he's maybe homophobic at Thanksgiving and saying to him, I know that you would run into a burning building to save people regardless of their sexual identity, et cetera. So I'm just trying to reconcile as a path to holding people to the belief that I believe people are essentially good. So explain it to me. I want to understand making it safe.

JAMIL:

Yes. I mean, Loretta is, to me, she's such a fearless person and she's been through so much in her life, as I'm sure you talked about with her. And she's come out with this sense of mental and emotional toughness. And I think that's what allows her to engage in this calling, in this open-minded dialogue because it's not easy to do this. It takes confidence in your own position. I think these days we've stereotyped and written off dialogue as actually a form of weakness like listening to somebody now is platforming them or you somehow condoning somebody just by hearing them out. And again, I don't feel like we owe everybody our attention and our time at all, but the act of listening, if we've reached a cultural moment where the act of listening is seen as toxic or negative or harmful, that's a problem. I think that's a really bad place for us to be, and yet I understand why we're there.

I think that a lot of people are operating these days from such a state of threat, a feeling that they're constantly in danger of being hurt in some way. Again, there are real threats out there, but I think that in a social media environment especially where you can be called out by people on your side, even listening or having a civil dialogue with somebody on the other side kind of threatens your identity as a member of your own group. Amanda Ripley was talking with me about this yesterday. I was asking her, why do you think people engage in such toxic language online? And she said, because they want to feel safe and they want to belong. And it's a real perversion of a fundamentally beautiful desire. We all want to be part of something greater than ourselves, but actually being open-minded these days might make other people in your group feel like you're not really part of that group. You're betraying your side. And the fact that we operate under that type of threat in such a public, in this panopticon where people can all see us and what we do, I think really poisons our ability for dialogue

ELISE:

A hundred percent. I mean, I live this every day as in a quiet refusal to sort of pick up a bat. I see it as shaming, belittling, deprecating, and absolutely not efficient or effective to cajole or bully To me, I'm like, we're supposed to be better than this. This is not our values. As someone who is a Democrat, I'm supposed to stand for inclusivity. I'm supposed to stand for tolerance. I'm supposed to stand for equity, and I do not feel like I'm doing that when I am lambasting people who don't agree with me, particularly when I don't even understand how or why they might not agree with me. And in engaging with Republicans or independents or people who are even more center than I find myself these days, there's just so much commonality.

And I think that this is an opportunity for us, this moment to choose something different and to say, rather than just being against other people, what are we for? How can we create a platform that other people want to join because they feel like they're something in it for them that's loving and joyful and hopeful because we do, as you and I are very aligned about the things that give you existential dread and give me existential dread, the environment being one of them. Let's stop messing around. Can we stop messing around and get serious about where we should have some real fear? And then I also loved the stat about how two thirds of Americans do want action on the climate.

JAMIL:

Yes. Well, first of all, cosign everything that you just said, I think it's very powerfully put. And we're talking about really a tragedy here, a social tragedy where we are because of our bleak assumptions about each other, cut off from the conversations that could change those assumptions. But there is good news. The good news is that because we are so far off base, because our cynicism leads us towards these assumptions about each other that are clearly and demonstrably, dozens of studies show are wrong, all we need to do to find a more hopeful perspective is simply to open ourselves to the data, right? To open ourselves to other people in this case, to treat our lives a little bit more like a social experiment. And in talking about these conversations, it's interesting you talked about these nice kind of and lovely dialogues you had with people during this horseback riding trip who you disagreed with.

Well, this graduate student, my PhD student, Louise DeSantos, who did this conversation study, it was inspired in part because she rides horses and often travels to Colorado and has these trips where she encounters people who are way far in the political landscape from her. But you share this interest, you share this humanity. And that inspired her to set up this study that we did where people who were Republicans and Democrats came together over zoom for these 20 minute conversations, not about the weather, not about their perfect day, about the issues that they disagreed on. And we asked them ahead of time, what do you think these conversations are going to be like? And they were terrified. They were sure that they were going to despise one another, that the conversations would be really aggressive, maybe even hateful. And the experimenters were scared of that too. We put all these protections in place because we thought people were going to try to dox each other or threaten each other. Our university ethics board was like, what are you going to do if somebody gives somebody else a death threat or tries to find their information on social media? We all thought this was going to go badly, even as scientists. And after these conversations, we asked people, how pleasant was that on a one to 100 scale? And the most common response was 100 out of a hundred.

I mean, people were shocked. And what's shocking to me is how shocked we all are because we've never tried. Most of us have never tried. And it turns out that when there is a human being, it's very easy to be cynical about people. It's very easy to write off people, a group or even the entire species. But when there's a human being in front of you, it is incredibly hard to do the same thing and very easy to pick up on the shared contours of your existence, the shared values that we have, the same fears that we have, just the shared humanity that we all experience. And so it's just shocking to me how bad things are. And also shocking how straightforward it is to make them better, just

ELISE:

Better. I know you have to scale that program. I mean, I almost feel like this sounds cute. I don't mean this in such a cute way, but in our country we have this urban rural divide and you have a versus BBL M divide, you have a Black Lives Matter versus Bureau of Land Management divide.

No, but truly it's like those are the two realities, and there's such a difference in terms of where people are oriented in terms of their daily lives, the economics of their daily lives, and what feels present and essential. And so I think too, getting people on to say urban, rural, et cetera, and to be like, what's present for you would be fascinating for Americans,

JAMIL:

And they would discover so much common ground. There was this survey that went out a few years ago that identified 150 issues that Republicans and Democrats actually agree on with the majority of each party signing on to overturning citizens United so that companies can't influence elections, expanding pre-kindergarten subsidies for the poorest people in our nation. There's so many things that we all want, as you said, also climate policy, right? You might be surprised by this, but if you present the issues as issues, instead of saying, Democrats want this, do you want it too? If you put it that way, of course Republicans will say no, but if you give particular climate policies, two thirds of Americans support pretty aggressive action to protect the climate. So if we could get out of those bubbles and see each other more clearly, it wouldn't just make us feel nicer about one another. It would also maybe allow us to mobilize on issues that we all hear about, which probably is not what a lot of politicians want, but it's what would be better for us?

ELISE:

Well, it's kind of stunning. I mean, the story that you told about, I think her name is Fahe in Michigan, and the community organizing that this young woman did around gerrymandering, and I think as a Democrat you think, oh, all Republicans want this. And the fact that it was completely bipartisan and where did they land, that it's two Democrats that who have to observe any res districting and approve it to Democrats, to Republicans for independents. Beautiful.

JAMIL:

Yeah, Katie Fahe is an absolute inspiration, Katie. And as you said, here's this woman, 26 years old, she gets really fed up with gerrymandering as this anti-democratic process. And this was in also 20 16, 20 17. And so she's seeing the people around her in Michigan just full of hatred for one another over these ideological wedge issues. And she thought, well, what's something that we can all get behind or rather that we all despise? And it was this idea that elections are being decided in back rooms through the way that politicians are drawing and redrawing districts. And she just put something on social media, I'd like to challenge this, who's with me? And within a few months, there was this enormous, completely citizen led campaign to overturn gerrymandering that against all odds succeeded. And now Michigan has one of the most basically neutral. So if you look at their electoral maps in Michigan, they're more fair in that people are actually represented, whereas in other states, gerrymandering means that a lot of our votes basically don't count. Some estimates suggest that Katie Fahe and her campaign re enfranchised 10 million voters in Michigan whose votes had not counted before. And again, this is the type of thing that as everyday citizens, we don't realize we can do, but she really turned hope into an action.

ELISE:

No, I loved that story and that it's completely bipartisan and one of those fundamental things that we would presume or judge or assume, that's the reality. Nobody wants to be ruled by the other party. We want a functioning democracy. I want to talk a bit about trust in relationship. Can we talk a bit about this idea that when you trust people, they rise to the occasion because as much as your book is about politics, it's about so much more.

JAMIL:

Absolutely. So I want to actually return to something that you were saying earlier. We were talking about how people sometimes shut themselves off from trust because they want to stay safe.

And that's something that I certainly experience, and I do want to be really clear here. We're talking about cynics and how cynicism hurts us and hurts our culture and our politics, but I don't mean at all to blame cynics for feeling that way. First of all, I'd be blaming myself because I tend towards cynicism and I have to fight it actively. But second of all, a lot of people who are cynical have been hurt in the past. They're responding to times that they trusted people and were betrayed, even traumatized, including in close relationship. George Carlin says, scratch a cynic and you'll find a disappointed idealist. And I think that's exactly right. I think a lot of cynics don't want to feel the way that they do, but think that they have to feel the way that they do. They've placed bets on people and they've lost, and in order to not lose again, they need to stop betting.

I think that's a really understandable perspective, but it's one that actually hurts us because to your point, people learn from us what we expect them to do and who we expect them to be, and then they become those people. So if in our actions we make it really clear that we have no faith in somebody, A, we're much less likely to become friends with them, to become closer to them, to build any form of meaningful relationship. But B, they're more likely to actually become selfish and untrustworthy. And that's a real tragedy of cynicism is that by not being open to other people, you actually close those people off as well. We don't realize the influence that we have, and the good news there is that we can own our influence instead and wield it in an intentional way. The research that you're talking about is on what's known as earned trust. So the idea is that when you show your faith in somebody, they're actually more likely to step up and try to be the person who they see themselves in your eyes and they want to be that person and can turn into this really beautiful virtuous cycle instead of a vicious one.

ELISE:

I think we all recognize that, and you offer a lot of stories in the book that are really compelling about examples of presuming the worst or creating systems that we would look at now and say, that's a highly toxic system that treats people like chattel or children or not capable cheaters. And that when you engineer that assumption, you write about Microsoft and Balmer, you write about firefighters that when you start seeding that people respond by saying, then fine, yes, I'll steal. I mean, I can feel it in my body, the instinct to be like, well, you hit me, I'll hit you back.

JAMIL:

I mean, the firefighters story was wild to me. First of all from Boston, and I remember this, but around 2000 and new fire chiefs took over and learned that most firefighters were taking more days off or some firefighters, sorry, not most. That's actually really important that in general, firefighters were taking more days off on Fridays than on any other day of the week. And the chief said, aha, my unit is full of cheaters and I'm going to catch them. I'm going to stop them. And at that point, because of how dangerous their work was, firefighters were able to take unlimited sick days and he said, no more. You can only take 15. If you take any more, you have to have a doctor's note or you'll have your paid doc. And there was all this micromanagement as well, and he was sending this signal to his people, you cannot be trusted.

I have to keep you under my thumb or else you're going to steal as much as you can. And it's exactly as you said, firefighters, most of them were not doing this. There might've been, I dunno, 5% fewer who were cheating the system, who were taking long weekends on the city's dime. But most firefighters are extremely honorable people who are trying their best to protect their community and risking their lives. They do this work, not just because they're looking out for themselves, in fact, the opposite. And they felt so insulted and disrespected by the fire chief that they responded by taking 6,000 more sick days the year after his policy came out than before, because they basically said, you've not given me a chance to show who I am through my actions, so I guess I'll just be the person you expect me to be. I think we can all see even micro moments in our lives where we've been treated that way and we might not realize the micro moments in our lives where we are treating other people that way. We see ourselves as trying to stay safe and don't realize that we're actually diminishing others with the same actions.

ELISE:

One of the formative experiences for me in this was a part-time job that I did much earlier part of my career, and it wasn't directed at me. It was a culture wide clock watching and desk watching environment. And as a creative who tends towards workaholism, I generally have always over-delivered and given too much of myself in jobs. And my reaction to this was, well, I am out of here. I am not checking my email. I mean, I had such a feel it in my body. I am not giving you any more than outside of the parameters of this particular very specific set of hours. And when as a leader and manager, one of the main things has been autonomy. I don't care where people work or what, I don't care. As long as they do their jobs at a high quality, I'm not paying them to sit there.

JAMIL:

You're like the anti Boston fire chief, right? And there's such wisdom in that. And one of the things that I try to do as a manager is likewise, I really rotate on autonomy. I really try to give people space to be who they are because I choose people to be in my lab who I really believe in. I think there's an extra step too, and I'm sure maybe you do this as well, which I call trusting loudly, which is when you put faith in people, don't just do it. Tell them you're doing it right. Make it explicit. Say, wow, I'm going to give you responsibility on this project. You just do it in your own time. I'm here for you if you need me, but I don't need you to check in with me more than you want to because I know you've got this. I think that you can do a great job with this. I think we underestimate the power that language like that can have in helping somebody flourish, in helping them again rise to the occasion, but also to really strengthen their tie to us, right? Trust is given and then given in return. And if we trust loudly than other people realize that they can put faith in us as well.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, I think that's really beautiful. And I would imagine everyone listening is like, yes, of course. This is what your whole book is about, these things that we hold to be true about ourselves and then struggle to extend to other people. Because I'm sure if you ask most people, they'd be like, yeah, I'm really responsible and dedicated and loyal and ethical and honest worker. And of course life gets in the way and sometimes we need to go and pick up a sick kid or whatever it may be, without being accused of stealing time or not needing to have our keyboards and our mice tracked for movement.

One of the things I had no idea, and this is such a small side, we don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but I loved this, gave me a lot of hope when you wrote about the 1890s and the parallels to this moment in time, and then what came out of that because I feel like, wow, I hadn't heard that.

JAMIL:

I hadn't either. And so I started this project as we were talking about with my own cynicism and my own struggles, I quickly realized that my struggles were by no means unique. And they were actually more prevalent now than they had been in the past. In 1972, about half of Americans believed most people can be trusted by 2018 that had fallen to a third. At the same time, our hope in the future, our faith in institutions, and I don't just mean politics, I mean education, science, journalism had all fallen. We really are in a crisis of faith and faith in each other and connection right now. And I thought, gosh, this is a one way street. It seems like things have been getting worse my entire life, and they'll probably keep on getting worse. And I was talking with a friend and he said, well, if you're going to write about this, you got to find a place where things went the opposite way.

Is there any time in history, any place where a community, a culture went from low trust to greater trust where people went from disconnected to connected? Can this possibly be turned around? And so I looked all over the world and couldn't find examples. And for a long time I was lost in hopelessness with this project. I thought, if I can't find that example, then I don't know if I have a good case. And then I found this book by the brilliant Robert Putnam called The Upswing, and I realized that there was a place on earth where trust and community had been rebuilt. And it's right here, it's just a hundred years ago. So as you said, the 1890s where this breathtakingly, unequal, extremely divided and quite corrupt time in America, trust was really low sensationalist journalism was driving people absolutely mad with these really intense and crave in stories about the ultra wealthy and other folks just doing terrible things, and people were really lonely and disconnected from their communities as they moved to big cities.

And back then people probably would've thought that the US was on a one way street to even more degradation. But instead, there was this blossoming of what we call the progressive movement, all of these different organizations, unions, different community groups coming together and pushing a unified version of the country, everything from women's suffrage to kindergarten to environmental protections to campaign finance, all of these things came together to actually create a stronger social fabric. And the fact that we did it in the past is inspiring to me because it means that we can do it in the future as well.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it feels as terrifying as this moment is. It feels like our systems and structures are not sophisticated enough to keep up with who we are. We need an upgrade. We need something that's more expansive. We need obviously increasing ongoing transparency. And some of these systems have proven to be too archaic and too restricted. So I feel like we're also on the move towards some expansion that puts us in a different place, and I'm sure we'll learn from this experience as well. But I'm hopeful that we're turning the corner on this to say, not this anymore. We are better than this.

JAMIL:

Completely agree. And I think one thing that working on this book has helped, one way in which it's helped me in terms of my hope is to realize that as you say, a lot of us are sick of this division and this sense of, I guess, intractability that so many of our problems seem to have actually, it's not just a lot of us, it's most of us. It's a huge majority. I think people, because of the way that we consume information online, because of the way that we're mostly exposed to the extreme and toxic elements of our culture, we don't realize how popular our views are. We don't realize how many people want what we want. And if there's anything that the book does, I hope it can help people look around and realize that if you want a more peaceful, egalitarian, sustainable world, you are not alone. You're not even close to alone. Most people are with you. And you can make that faith in others into a determination, a sense of empowerment and opportunity for the future. Because knowing that we all want the same thing is sort of like knowing that we could probably get it if we try together.

ELISE:

Beautiful. Thank you. I love the book. I hope it's everywhere. I really hope that you read and share this book. I think this is such, if you can't tell from my enthusiasm, an important essential message, and the book is fast, and as mentioned full of stories, I am going to read to you a section where he's talking about sort of this average political rival and how we imagine each other. So he writes, Democrats think 44% of Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year. Only 2% do Republicans think 43% of Democrats are part of a labor union, but just 10% really are Republican cat. People guess that Democrats favor dogs and Republican dog lovers think Democrats must like cats. Both Democrats and Republicans also imagine rivals are more extreme than they really are. A pattern researchers called false polarization on issues like immigration and abortion. People guess the average rivals more extreme than 80% of actual people in the other party asked about the middle.

We conjure up the fringe. The more specific the question, the more wrong we become. So here is to our common feature full of hope and joy and peace and love. And I don't think that that's too much to believe in and stand for. I really don't. I think that's what we want for ourselves. It's what we want for each other, and it's certainly what we want for our children and all younger generations. If you like today's episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.