Speaker 1: Pushkin. Even though I'm a happiness expert, there are times
Speaker 1: when I find it hard to feel hopeful. From the
Speaker 1: climate to poverty, to politics to conflicts around the world,
Speaker 1: things can sometimes feel pretty bleak.
Speaker 2: There's the childish nickname the crazy conspiracy theories.
Speaker 3: Did you see Barack Fusan Obama last night?
Speaker 4: She was taking shots at your president?
Speaker 1: Especially around election time, it seems like we're all divided
Speaker 1: and angry. If the only political conversation you have is
Speaker 1: your uncle Chad screaming at you about politics.
Speaker 3: He just wants to get in an argument, He just
Speaker 3: wants to shit on you.
Speaker 1: But it's not just all those uncle Chads and polarized
Speaker 1: political fights. It feels like we're losing faith in one
Speaker 1: another and in our own agency.
Speaker 3: Nothing I do will matter, Nothing anyone I know does
Speaker 3: will matter.
Speaker 4: So I wish I didn't have to hear about this.
Speaker 1: I'm doctor Laurie Santos, and in our new season of
Speaker 1: the Happiness Lab, we'll look at why we're all feeling
Speaker 1: so cynical these days and what we can do to
Speaker 1: fight these nasty feelings. And we'll get inspiration from one
Speaker 1: of my favorite new books, Hope for Cynics The Surprising
Speaker 1: Science of Human Goodness. It's by famous Stanford psychologist and
Speaker 1: my good friend Jamil Zaki.
Speaker 2: Thanks Laurie, and hello Happiness Lab listeners. I've been studying
Speaker 2: the science of kindness for decades, but even I get
Speaker 2: a little cynical. Sometimes Cinics don't just assume that things
Speaker 2: are bad, but also that there's nothing we can do
Speaker 2: to improve the situation.
Speaker 3: I actually hate politics. Our politicians are not afraid of us.
Speaker 3: They aren't worried about winning our vote or if we
Speaker 3: like what they're doing.
Speaker 2: But research shows that cynicism hurts us in almost every
Speaker 2: way scientists can measure. Cynics are prone to depression, loneliness,
Speaker 2: and unhappiness. They even die younger than non cynics. If
Speaker 2: cynicism was a pill, it'd be a poison. So I
Speaker 2: got inspired to fight it. My new book, Hope for
Speaker 2: Cynics tells the story of how we got into this
Speaker 2: predicament and how we can find a more hopeful path
Speaker 2: again listening to the science about what people are really like,
Speaker 2: which is often better than we assume.
Speaker 1: Well. For the course of this new series, Jamille and
Speaker 1: I will meet people who learned about the dangers of
Speaker 1: cynicism and are trying to do something about it.
Speaker 2: We know this doesn't feel right. I think we all
Speaker 2: know that something is wrong in our culture, in our politics,
Speaker 2: and that we need to do better, and that we
Speaker 2: can do better.
Speaker 1: And it'll be quite a journey. We'll head to a
Speaker 1: Caribbean island to meet some of the world's meanest monkeys,
Speaker 1: and we'll cross the Siberian wilderness to find out how
Speaker 1: wolves help one another out. Closer to home, we'll meet
Speaker 1: a twenty something who led a campaign to fight a
Speaker 1: two hundred year old law that was harming our community.
Speaker 3: There is no guarantee we were going to be successful.
Speaker 3: If anything, everybody told us all the reasons we would fail,
Speaker 3: and yet we were.
Speaker 4: Willing to try anyways.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk to a CEO who's optimism about his
Speaker 1: employees to a radical new business model.
Speaker 4: I have never seen anything like this. We're asking people
Speaker 4: to do a month without pay. They did it out
Speaker 4: of compassion for their fellow team members, and the feedback
Speaker 4: we got all of a sudden, in this world where
Speaker 4: everybody was falling apart, they felt safe.
Speaker 2: Just like my book, this new series will be full
Speaker 2: of surprises. We'll hear what doctor Martin Luther King taught
Speaker 2: America's psychologists and what people often get wrong about Darwin's
Speaker 2: ideas of human nature. And we'll see study after study
Speaker 2: showing that it's possible to find hope in one another
Speaker 2: because most people are better than we realize.
Speaker 3: My assumption, my feeling, my hunch is that a lot
Speaker 3: of us are actually looking for a way to disagree
Speaker 3: and still be in relationships with each other.
Speaker 1: Our new season on Finding Hope will launch on September ninth,
Speaker 1: but Jimmielle's fabulous book Hope Forcinix is out now, so
Speaker 1: you should grab yourself a copy where of you buy
Speaker 1: your books.