Jamil Zaki is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, where he has spent more than 20 years studying how people connect, and what happens when we stop trusting one another. He is the author of The War for Kindness and, most recently, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.

The book makes a case that's genuinely comforting: people are better than we think they are, and the evidence is everywhere, once you know how to look.

Frank and Jamil talk about why our picture of each other is so much darker than the truth, how to think like a hopeful skeptic instead of a cynic, what AI is doing to trust, and a simple dinner-table habit Jamil's family calls positive gossip.

In this episode, we discuss:

[03:58] A Cynicism Generating Machine: Fifty years of falling trust, why Jamil's Stanford students are not the selfish generation the stereotype claims, and the junk-food analogy for your news feed.

[09:05] The Wallet Test: The Toronto Star dropped 20 wallets around the city with money inside. Readers predicted one in four would come back. Four out of five did. The story at the heart of Hope for Cynics, and why people are especially good when things go badly.

[13:40] Cynic vs. Hopeful Skeptic: Cynics start with a conclusion and look for evidence. Skeptics think like scientists. Jamil on why cynics "actually are pretty naive," and why the first step is to fact-check your own cynical thoughts.

[17:10] Earned Trust and Psychological Brussels Sprouts: How treating people like "the folks you hope they are" flips a vicious cycle into a virtuous one, and what brain scans reveal when we give.

[20:54] Positive Gossip: The dinner-table habit Jamil's family practices, the red-car effect that explains why it works, and the late friend whose hope inspired the book.

[24:25] A Recovering Cynic: Jamil turns the question on Frank, why this show is "a positive gossip engine," and the neonatologist who did Jamil's family a crazy good turn.

[29:27] Turing Fatigue and the Social Router: What AI is doing to trust right now, why Jamil went back to blue-book exams, and how the same technology could be rebuilt to point us toward each other.

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