Jamil Zaki on the Empathy Dividend

Oscarlyn Elder (00:04):

Let's face it, our brains and relationships are complex. And while some folks may think of qualities such as personality, intelligence, and values as static and unchanging, the reality is according to our guest today, that biologically speaking, the only thing a human can't do is not change. It's easy sometimes to get in a habit of negativity and to filter the world primarily through a cynical lens, but that mindset may have an unwelcome impact on our own lives and our personal and family's financial journey. I'm Oscarlyn Elder, co-chief investment officer for Truist Wealth, and this is I've Been Meaning To Do That, a podcast from Truist Wealth, a purpose-driven financial services company. We appreciate you listening.

Our guest today is Dr. Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of two books, “The War for Kindness” and his most recent, “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.” We're going to talk with him today about what has many years of research reveals about how we see each other and how that impacts the way we move through the world and how we can change our behavior for the better. If you want to take notes on today's episode, we have a worksheet that you can download and print. You can find it by selecting this episode at truist.com/dothat.

Professor Zaki, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jamil Zaki (01:48):

Thanks, Oscarlyn. I'm happy to be here.

Oscarlyn Elder (01:50):

I'd like to start by learning about you. What do you research and why, and how has your personal journey shaped your life's work?

Jamil Zaki (01:59):

Wow, that's a big question. I and my friends in lab study human connection. We're really interested in what connection is, how does empathy work, how does kindness work, cooperation, mutual support. We're interested in what those connections do for us, for our health, for our relationships, our families, but also for our workplaces and our professional lives. And we're interested in how we can learn to connect more effectively. So a big, I suppose, foundation of my research is the idea that connecting with other people is not a trait. It's not something that some of us can do and some of us can't do, but that things like empathy, trust and cooperation or skills that we can work on and build. My parents are immigrants from very different places. My mom is from Peru and my dad is from Pakistan.

And they met in Pullman, Washington of all places where they were both going to graduate school and fell in love there. But it's interesting, I really don't know what they had in common except for the fact that they were both foreign to the US. But I do know that as they became accustomed to the United States, I mean they've each been here for more than 50 years now, they realized how little they actually wanted to do with each other. And so a lot of my childhood was really wrapped up in their long and difficult divorce.

I'm their only child and I kind of ended up as a, I suppose, unofficial ambassador between these two people at age eight, which is not a role that I chose, nor would I choose it, now thinking about it. It was pretty difficult, but it was also a real awakening for me. Both of my parents are great people, and I'm blessed to have good relationships with them now. But as a kid, it was just profound to know that these are two really wonderful people. Neither of them is bad, but they see the world in fundamentally different ways. And I think that kind of tipped me off to the idea that, oftentimes, connecting with people is not easy. It takes work, but that work is worth it. In fact, I'd say that the empathy that I learned through that multiyear conversation with my parents, although it was hard-earned, was probably one of the most important skills I've ever acquired.

Oscarlyn Elder (04:29):

Sounds like you had really a continuous master class and gaining empathy skills that you were really put through the gauntlet there and developed these elevated skills because of your family of origin. Is there a specific change that you want to create with your work?

Jamil Zaki (04:52):

I think there are many changes that I want to create with my work, but one I would say is for people to more deeply acknowledge how much we need one another. I think that in the US, we tend to be a pretty individualistic culture. We tend to prize ourselves on our self-sufficiency and autonomy, and that's great. I mean, I certainly share those values, but I think that oftentimes that can come at a cost where we can forget that what makes life most beautiful is not what we can achieve as individuals, but rather our connections to one another. I think related to that, I guess one thing that I hope that my work could achieve is to help people not only value connection, but give other people more of a chance to show us who they are.

My parents were very different people going through a divorce. It sometimes feels like our nation is going through its own divorce right now where people are totally unwilling to be curious about folks who are different from them in a variety of different ways. I'm not only talking about politics, but culture across generations, you name it. The differences between us seem to be growing. It's like this crack that's becoming a gulf, sort of as large as the Grand Canyon, it feels like sometimes. And I think that it takes a lot of work to try and cross back to bridge those gaps, and that's something that I hope to encourage people to do

Oscarlyn Elder (06:25):

That's very powerful. Just makes me think about how lonely life would be without the connections that fuel my life every day and connections with my family, connections with our clients, with the folks that I work with has an incredibly powerful potential.

Jamil Zaki (06:43):

I think that it sounds like you are blessed with many wonderful connections. I know that the work that you all do at Truist is all about connection and about not only connecting with people, but connecting with them over their deepest values and what matters to them. Those conversations are precious, and I would say that you described just now that you would be lonely without them. I think that that's what you see in our country and in our culture, especially among younger people. The United States just this year dropped out of the world's 20 happiest countries driven entirely by a huge drop in well-being among young adults.

And one thing that I think drives this is a lack of those connections. So I think that we are seeing right now in our culture, in our nation, the consequences of losing a sense of connection. And so that's something that I think also is a context for my work because I don't see sort of, oh, let's connect better as just a nice to have, a sort of cool friendly aspiration. I see it as an urgent emergency because we are losing connection in a way that I think is hurting us enormously in almost every way scientists can measure. So I guess yes, just to add a little bit of urgency to what I'm hoping to do, it's that we're really in a crisis of connection now.

Oscarlyn Elder (08:06):

On this podcast, we've explored through multiple episodes, we've really grounded our financial journeys in understanding our personal values and purpose. And as I've shared before, I think many of our conversations often come back to the importance of connectedness and communication and relationships, especially within families or family-owned businesses. You've defined hope as having a positive goal, a desire to achieve that goal, and a path to pursue that goal. And I think from what I've read, that's in contrast with optimism, which you say is more complacent or it has a more complacent sense to it, that things will probably go well on their own. It strikes me that your definition of hope is relevant to a personal journey, to a person's financial journey. Do you think that's true?

Jamil Zaki (09:01):

Oh, absolutely, a hundred percent. And I think it's a really nice frame for it as well. Let's define our terms here. Optimism, as you say, is the belief that the future will turn out well, and people tend to be pretty optimistic about themselves if you ask them how are things going to go for you in a variety of ways, in terms of your health, in terms of your financial life, in terms of your work, people are like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to do great." That's a good feeling. It's a good feeling to believe that the future will turn out well. But as you said, Oscarlyn, it can also lead to a bit of complacency. I mean, if you think that a bright future is on the way, you can kind of hang out on the couch and wait for it to arrive, you don't have to do much.

I also think, by the way, pessimism can be complacent as well, because if you're sure that nothing is going to go well, you also don't have to do anything. You can think of them as light and dark complacency, but hope is different. Hope is the idea that the future could turn out well, but that we don't know. And in that uncertainty, our actions matter because if the future could turn out well or less well, gosh, now you can't just hang out on the couch. Now you have to get up and do something about it. And that's where willpower, this sort of desire to achieve your goals and way-power, a path to get from where you are to where you want to be, that's where those components come in.

And I absolutely think that for a family business, for a financial journey, hope and these components of hope are fundamental, especially because we might as individuals hope for different things and really planning together, whether you're a family or a business, is in large part about sharing your hopes with each other and aligning and finding what are the common things that we all want and what is a common path that we can take to get there. And so I think that hope is a very powerful resource for us as individuals, but it's a huge resource for our communities as well to feel like we're sort of rowing together in the same direction and therefore to make us more likely to achieve what we want to achieve together.

Oscarlyn Elder (11:14):

So my takeaway from what you've shared is that hope really aligns us with taking action. I love what you said about optimism and pessimism being the light and the dark of complacency. And what we espouse here is that we don't want folks to be complacent. We want them to own their journeys. Ultimately, our belief is if they have... I'm going to add hope to the vocabulary. If they have the hope and the resources and planning and they're able to take that action, that they'll have more confidence in taking action.

Jamil Zaki (11:49):

I think that's right. And it's interesting because what is confidence in this context? I think one thing that human beings crave in all parts of our life, but certainly in our financial lives is certainty. When we invest, when we plan, we're trying to be sure, we're trying to be as sure as we can that we will have enough money for retirement or the ability to support our families or to act philanthropically in a way that's meaningful to us. We want to be sure. We also want to be sure about our health and about what will happen in the world. The fundamental fact is that we are never sure, and it's a scary thing, but it's a deep truth about life.

And I think that the minute that you let go of the need to be sure is when you actually start to make decisions that are probably wiser. Because when you want to be sure, you end up clinging to possible futures and needing them, but the future doesn't owe you anything. The future will unfold the way that it does. So embracing uncertainty, the uncertainty of hope is a way to make decisions, not because you know what will happen, but because you are just trying to do the best thing that you can given the information that you have, and you are still allowing yourself to be open and curious about what the future brings instead of trying to boss it around which you ultimately never can.

Oscarlyn Elder (13:25):

Jamil, I think we need to take you around sometimes when we're talking with clients because you just articulated like so excessively think what investment professionals are often trying to relate to our clients, but I'm just really, really stunned in a way by just how eloquently you summed that up. When we come back, we're going to extend our discussion to talk about some additional definitions that we need to establish for folks who are listening. So we'll be right back.

Jamil, your research focuses on concepts and terms that folks may use regularly in kind of everyday life, but they can define them differently. You've already talked to us about hope and optimism and pessimism and how they're different. How about empathy?

Jamil Zaki (14:22):

Yeah, empathy is actually the first thing that I ever started studying. I've been studying it now for 20 years, and it's really interesting to be a scientist to examine something that people talk about all the time. Because I've now heard hundreds of definitions of empathy from people who are confidently telling me what it is all while disagreeing with one another. And I think that part of the confusion comes from the fact that empathy is one thing at all. As scientists understand it, it is an umbrella term that describes at least three ways that we connect with other people and their emotions in particular. The first is what we might call emotional empathy, and this is where we kind of vicariously catch the feelings of another person. I don't know if you've ever seen somebody stub their toe, for instance, and you kind of feel it yourself. You kind of recoil a little bit. That feeling of just taking on what other people feel is emotional empathy.

The second is cognitive empathy, which is where we try to figure out what another person's world looks and feels like, where we try to voyage into their mind and understand them. And a third is what we might call compassion or empathic concern. And this is not feeling or thinking. It's a form of wanting. It's a desire for somebody else to feel better, to stop suffering, or to feel good. And oftentimes that type of empathy, compassion is the one that inspires us to actually do something, to act kindly towards other people. So those three pieces really... We often use them interchangeably, but they're actually quite different. They're different in terms of where they live in the brain. They're different in terms of who tends to be higher in one or the other type of empathy. And they're different in terms of when they serve us and when they're most useful to our goals.

Oscarlyn Elder (16:19):

Interesting. So it's not one thing. It's really multiple elements that weave together into maybe different strands of the same braid that weave together to form that.

Jamil Zaki (16:33):

I love that. I'm going to steal that from you, Oscarlyn.

Oscarlyn Elder (16:37):

Very good. Why is empathy important? So you've defined it for us, but at the end of the day, why is it so critical to connectedness and perhaps to happiness and kindness?

Jamil Zaki (16:51):

One of the first people to think about this question was actually Adam Smith, best known as the father of modern capitalism, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher. And a lot of people don't know this, but years before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote another book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he talked about what he called the fellow feeling, but we would just call empathy. And he said, "This is what allows our species to thrive. This is what allows us to be there for one another, to have family life, to have culture, to have democracy." In order to have anything from a family to a company, to a town, to a nation, to a broader global society, we need to care for one another, at least to some degree. Interestingly, I work a lot with leaders in the world of work, and there is this stereotype that empathy is nice, but it's not effective.

It's good if you want to be kind to people, but it's not good if you want to get things done. That takes ruthlessness and competition. And it's just funny how wrong that is. I mean, it's almost... You couldn't be more wrong that that stereotype because it turns out that the data are clear. There's decades of evidence now that in fact, empathy doesn't just make people feel good. It helps them work well together. There's this great research on what people call collective intelligence. I think you've done some work on this, Oscarlyn, on sort of how teams perform and whether a team is effective or not. And it turns out that one of the best predictors of whether a team at work, in sports, I mean really in any context, works well together and has positive outcomes is whether they have a sense of interconnection with one another.

Oscarlyn Elder (18:45):

Absolutely. And that relies on trust to some degree as well as emotional intelligence and the different components of emotional intelligence. And what you're saying is that empathy, kind of thinking of complex models, empathy is the substance that connects all of those elements. Why might someone want to increase their empathy? Give me some insight into how you think about the leverage points around empathy and why they're important.

Jamil Zaki (19:15):

I want to be clear that when I say that empathy is a skill and that we should work at it, I don't necessarily mean that everybody should try to empathize as much as possible with everybody else all the time. And I think that's especially true of emotional empathy. I mean, imagine trying to walk down a block of, I don't know, Midtown Manhattan, while feeling the pain of everybody around you. You would collapse into a heap within seconds. So I mean, at a level of our close relationships, it's very clear based on the data that people who are able to empathize with and especially understand folks in their family, tend to have more satisfying relationships with them. So marriages, for instance, tend to be better functioning if people feel heard and seen by their partner. Same goes for intergenerational relationships.

So that's the kind of smallest circle. Let's expand the circle and you see similar things. So in our professional lives, being able to empathize is enormously important. Doctors who can empathize with their patients tend to not only have happier patients, but they tend to make more accurate diagnoses. Why is that? Well, because if a patient feels like their doctor cares about them, they're more willing to open up and be vulnerable and share, "Actually, I've been having these symptoms over the last four months, but I haven't wanted to talk about it because I'm scared of what it might mean."

Think about in financial advising. Well, I know you already do think about it much more than I do, but I think that if somebody, a client feels as though, "Hey, this person, they're not just in a transactional relationship with me, they're actually curious about who I am." Well, it's not just that that's going to be a nicer relationship. It's going to be one in which more information is shared and better decisions are made. Being empathic is not the same as being nice. It's not the same as being polite. It's not just saying things that are pleasant. In fact, empathy can mean saying things that are really unpleasant and being really honest with people and holding them accountable, but it's doing so from a place of care. And when we do that, it's not just that we feel better about one another, it's as you're saying that outcomes improve.

Oscarlyn Elder (21:39):

What you're really advocating for there is you need to be aware, empathy really does matter, and it impacts outcomes. So it's worthy of attention and it's a skill ultimately. It's related to skill and that it can be improved. It could be changed. You can strengthen the muscle if you want to. When we come back, we're going to shift to explore how empathy and cynicism may or may not be related.

Jamil, welcome back. How does empathy relate to cynicism, or does it?

Jamil Zaki (22:21):

Yeah. Well, let's define cynicism as well. Cynicism is the idea that in general, people are selfish, greedy and dishonest. So it's basically a gloomy view of human nature. It's really on the rise, unfortunately. People trust each other far less in this country than we did 50 years ago. In fact, the drop in trust in the US between the 1980s and 2020s is about as big percentage wise as the drop the stock market took during the financial collapse of 2008.

Oscarlyn Elder (22:56):

I'm glad that you put it in that context because a lot of folks remember that drop and remember what it felt like physically.

Jamil Zaki (23:03):

So we are really in a recession when it comes to trust in one another, and that's part of why I've become so interested in cynicism. So what happens when we don't believe in one another? One of the things that we stop doing if we have this gloomy, cynical view of human nature is we stop trusting people. And when we stop trusting people in our lives, whether they're family members, friends, colleagues, or even strangers, what we stop doing is not necessarily that we stop empathizing with them, although that is part of it, but we also stop giving them opportunities to empathize with us.

We in essence, close ourselves off. Cynicism, you can think of as a sort of psychological suit of armor that we put on where we say, "I don't think that if I were to open up with this person that anything good will happen. In fact, I think they'll probably take advantage of me. I think they'll probably cheat me in some way. So maybe what I should do is just stop the conversation before it even begins." And that in essence cuts off opportunities for friendship, community, collaboration, and yes, empathy in a way that stunts, I think our social lives and our social worlds. And there's a bunch of evidence that this has really harmful long-term effects on people's health, their well-being, and their communities.

Oscarlyn Elder (24:27):

Yeah. So cynicism, you said, is a suit of armor. You have to trust someone enough to open up and disclose kind of who you are, what you're thinking, your perspective, and you're seeing cynicism keeps us isolated and impacts connectedness at the end of the day. I'm wondering how might somebody go assess themselves, am I cynical? Am I not cynical? Is there some type of instrument or scale? How do we develop the self-awareness around or cynicism and perhaps empathy levels?

Jamil Zaki (25:02):

There is a scale, and I actually collaborated a few months ago with the Times of London, a great newspaper, and they published a cynicism test that anybody can take. And Oscarlyn, maybe you can answer these questions. Actually, if you don't mind. I don't want to put you on the spot, but—

Oscarlyn Elder (25:18):

Uh-oh, OK. I can try.

Jamil Zaki (25:20):

I'll give you a couple of true-false questions. True or false, most people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught?

Oscarlyn Elder (25:27):

False.

Jamil Zaki (25:29):

OK. True or false, most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance?

Oscarlyn Elder (25:33):

False.

Jamil Zaki (25:35):

OK. I think two is enough. I was going to ask a third, but I feel like... Those would put you on the low end of a cynicism scale. So the actual scale has dozens of questions like that, but generally speaking, if you agree with these kind of bleak statements about human nature, that would be an indication that you're cynical. Another thing that people can do though is just do a mini audit of your day of the decisions that you make. And ask yourself, are the decisions that you're making around people, are they decisions to be open? Are they decisions to take chances on people? Or are you sort of focusing on keeping yourself safe around other people? And I think that if you see people and human interaction mostly as a risk and you're trying to mitigate that risk, that's a cynical way of acting.

Oscarlyn Elder (26:27):

In your book Hope for Cynics, you talked about, I believe it was hopeful skepticism. How does that differ from cynicism and why might we really want to encourage or need hopeful skepticism?

Jamil Zaki (26:42):

This a great question. And so I think people often confuse skepticism and cynicism, even use them interchangeably sometimes, but they're super different. So again, cynicism is the idea that I already know who people are. I'm just waiting for them to reveal themselves. The cynic thinks they already know all the answers. They think almost like a lawyer in the prosecution against humanity. A skeptic by contrast thinks like a scientist. They don't believe that everybody is great or that everybody is terrible. They are looking for evidence as to whether they can trust this person as opposed to having blanket assumptions about whether they can trust anybody.

And so because of that, skeptics tend to be pretty agile. They tend to learn more quickly and adapt to new situations. Hopeful skepticism is the idea of combining this scientific mindset of being skeptical with a realization of our own biases. It turns out that people pay way more attention to negative information than positive information. And because of that, we end up really wrong about other people. We underestimate how trustworthy, warm, open-minded, and friendly they are. And so hopeful skepticism is basically saying, "Okay, I'm going to let the world come to me. I'm going to be curious and open, and I'm also going to acknowledge that when I do that, probably things are going to be better than I expected because my negativity bias is probably clouding my expectations about the social world."

Oscarlyn Elder (28:22):

So we want to encourage the hopeful skepticism. Again, I think you indicated that scientific mindset, it's really also partnered with hopefully less negativity bias at the end of the day.

Jamil Zaki (28:36):

I'm often told ever since writing a book on hope, hope it's just a pair of rose-colored glasses. But in fact, we are all wearing a pair of soot-colored glasses most of the time. We sort of focus so much on the negative. It's really quite amazing how wrong we end up being. And look, I mean, I'm not saying here that there aren't people who do terrible things every day. Of course there are. But oftentimes, in part because that's what the media covers, we over-rotate and we think that that's the best evidence for what people are. And we forget that everyday kindness all around us.

Oscarlyn Elder (29:14):

We often discuss family dynamics on this podcast, especially when it comes to estate planning and sustaining wealth over generations. Next, let's talk about how empathy and trust can help families have conversations that are sometimes difficult.

Jamil Zaki (29:38):

One of the things, again that I want to begin with here is the idea that empathy is not the same as just being nice or polite. This is a stereotype. And oftentimes people say, "Well, I can't be empathic in this situation because it's hard. We disagree. And if I were to empathize with somebody I disagree with about a family plan, about a political issue, about something that matters to us, if I were to empathize, I would lose the battle before it even begins." As though empathy is a sort of weakness. But it turns out that trust and empathy are fundamental to what I would call disagreeing better. Not to agreeing, but rather to figuring out, given that we have different perspectives on what our family should do, for instance, what do we share and how can we move forward together?

Oscarlyn Elder (30:31):

So am I remembering that you might have a bit of a recipe for disagreeing better and what that looks like in practice? Isn't that in your book?

Jamil Zaki (30:41):

It is, yes. And this is based on work by Julia Minson, a great researcher at Harvard and her colleagues. They talk about what's known as conversational receptiveness. So Julia and her colleagues bring people into their labs to fight. They have hundreds of fights. I mean not physically of course, but to argue about-

Oscarlyn Elder (30:41):

Right. Verbal, disagreements.

Jamil Zaki (31:03):

... To disagree. And this is about political issues, but it's also they'll bring people in with their friends to fight about things in their lives. They'll bring people in with their spouses to have arguments about things they disagree on. But what they've found is that arguments can turn into fights. They can become toxic, or they can be enormously productive. And actually what often hurts us as families, as communities is the fear of disagreement. The idea that, gosh, that's going to be so unpleasant and we're going to say hurtful things and everything's going to go sideways, so let's just not talk about it.

Oscarlyn Elder (31:40):

Which is worse probably, because then it just kind of builds up and it builds up to a boiling over point.

Jamil Zaki (31:46):

Exactly. That silence is not the same as actual peace and agreement and solidarity. So what they find, Julia and her colleagues, is that disagreements that go really well are characterized by this idea of conversational receptiveness. So what is that? People who are conversationally receptive do a few things. One, they point out common ground. So oftentimes disagreement is so threatening to us that we start to disagree about what we disagree about. We hyper-focus as you were putting it well earlier, over-index on the things that we really do not see eye to eye on. And maybe there's 10% of a decision that we disagree on and 90% that we agree on, but we will spend 90% of our time talking about the 10% and feeling as though it's actually 90%.

So something really important to do at the beginning of a disagreement is map out the space and start out by saying, "Hey, if our opinions are a Venn diagram, there's a lot of overlap here, so let's acknowledge that before we move on to what we disagree on." After that, people who are conversationally receptive tend to focus on asking questions and showing curiosity instead of showing confidence. I mean, when we get into debate mode and try to convince people of things, they can tell, and they don't like it necessarily. They feel as though we are just trying to show them the light as though we know that we are right and we just want them to be less wrong. Showing actual genuine curiosity about the person that you disagree with actually is contagious. It makes it more likely that they will in turn, be curious about us. If you want somebody to listen to you, the best thing you can do is show that you are listening to them first. So those two steps are really fundamental to disagreeing better.

Oscarlyn Elder (33:49):

It's really a de-escalation tactic it sounds like. So de-escalate, give space, ask questions, listen, and then hopefully you're able to find some common ground and get into the areas maybe where there are differences and be in a position to work them out. I really appreciate that perspective because I will share, I did not grow up in a family that knew how to disagree well at all. Our family yelled. There was a clear chain of command, and it often involved intense delivery of messages. I have a beautiful family. It was just not a family that there was not a lot of disagreeing openly with our family, I'll say. Again, there was a chain of command. My father was a drill sergeant early in his adulthood. And so again, families have their own culture. How might developing the muscles of empathy and hopeful skepticism help build a healthy family culture?

Jamil Zaki (34:53):

Yeah, happy to answer that. Sorry, I just want to be clear about something. Your father was actually a drill sergeant?

Oscarlyn Elder (34:58):

He was actually a drill sergeant early-

Jamil Zaki (35:01):

He was a literal-

Oscarlyn Elder (35:02):

He was a drill sergeant early in his young adulthood. And so yes, he had the hat and everything.

Jamil Zaki (35:09):

Wow.

Oscarlyn Elder (35:10):

Go ahead.

Jamil Zaki (35:10):

Because a lot of people say, "Oh, my dad was like a drill sergeant."

Oscarlyn Elder (35:15):

Yeah, no, my dad was a drill sergeant at one point in time. And I'll say he softened some as he aged, and he grew and shifted. But again, open disagreement was not necessarily encouraged at times.

Jamil Zaki (35:30):

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Yeah. I think that the question you ask about culture is so interesting because it's the case that our default mode, if you go on automatic mode on a camera, for instance, our default mode is to trust, connect with and empathize more with people in our own culture, people who we share a lot with. And that's a good thing if you're interacting with people who are very similar to you. But I think one of the gifts that our modern world gives us is the chance to work harder to expand our empathy for people from other cultures, from other perspectives. And to your point, every team, every group, and even every family can be defined through a culture that they all share or through the diversity of their perspectives. Think about my family, my dad, my mom and I were from three totally different countries and two different generations.

And even if your family has lived in the same town for five generations, well people, two generations up and down from one another, those are different cultures. We can try to focus on family culture as homogeneity. Let's see what we all have in common. Let's talk about the values that we share. And I think that's a really deep way to build trust, to build empathy. But I think that another thing a family could do, another thing a team could do at work, another thing that an advisor can do is build culture through difference and say, "Well, what are the things that we don't share?" And to be truly curious about, well, what are the different experiences that we've had in different parts of the world or in different generations that make us different from one another? How do we celebrate that and learn from one another?

Oscarlyn Elder (37:19):

What role do you see common narrative or storytelling playing within the development of culture and the muscle building around empathy?

Jamil Zaki (37:32):

It's huge. One of my friends is writing a book now on narratives and sort of the power of narratives, and it's just phenomenal. And this is what mythology has been about. I mean, the oldest culture really would be things like epic poems. And before that, people sitting around fires tens of thousands of years ago, telling stories, repeating the stories, letting them evolve. And so a narrative is so much more powerful than a statistic, for instance, or an opinion. This is why I encourage people to get into interview mode as much as possible, learn each other's stories. I mean, I think that this is one of the great things about podcasts is you learn about people. And I can imagine having a family podcast. I mean, if you were to interview your dad or your grandfather or your aunt, you would learn... This might be a person you're with every day or every week or every month for years, but you could learn so much about them by becoming curious. So I think that narratives, to your point, are just a fundamental tool for building all of these qualities of connection that we might cherish.

Oscarlyn Elder (38:46):

As we wrap up, what would you suggest our audience take away from what they've heard as it relates to empathy and their financial journey? Is there a singular action item that you would suggest they think about and act on in the context of our conversation?

Jamil Zaki (39:07):

A financial journey is a personal journey, and it's a community journey. Money is not just money. It's the way that we can have, or a central way that we can have impact on the world. A lot of people want to use their financial journey to provide for their family or to do more to help people around the world or in their community. So to me, when I think about my own financial journey and my own financial plan, it's really about people and my connection to them and what I want to leave for them, who I want to be, how I want to show up in the social world.

So I think that sometimes the way that our culture orients us can make money seem like it's a consumer tool, something that's meant for us to optimize ourselves. And that absolutely can be true, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I guess when people consider their financial journey, I would encourage them to populate it with as many people as they can and to think in terms of community and connection, and then see if that changes anything about what they hope to do and how they might want to accomplish it.

Oscarlyn Elder (40:20):

That's truly beautiful. Thank you for sharing that perspective with us. And before you leave, we have one tradition or one consistent tradition on this podcast, and that is I ask our guest if there's one thing that they've been meaning to do that they haven't accomplished yet and that they're willing to commit to publicly with their audience. So is there anything that comes to mind that you've had on your list for some time that you know need to mark off and you're willing to give voice to that today?

Jamil Zaki (40:50):

OK, OK. Oscarlyn, I'll take the challenge. So my family and I are going to be in Europe for a chunk of this year. I'm going to be teaching for Stanford's program in Spain. I'm a runner. That's one of my hobbies and something that I hope to do, but I have not committed to yet, is to run a half-marathon in Spain. I just think it would be really cool to run a race in Europe. I've run one half-marathon, but it has been more than 10 years, so I'd like to work up to that distance and get that race under my belt. So I will commit to that. It's something that I actually have been wanting to do for a while.

Oscarlyn Elder (41:26):

That is a great I've been meaning to do item. We look forward to hearing how that race goes. I just want to thank you so much for joining me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, and I know that our listeners will as well. Before we say goodbye, in total, where can people learn more about your work in research?

Jamil Zaki (41:47):

Yeah, thanks. So you can find all of my work at Jamil-Zaki.com. My lab is the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, ssnl.stanford.edu. And at both of those sites, you can learn about our research, but also about the work I do with companies, organizations, and various communities.

Oscarlyn Elder (42:15):

Jamil, thank you so much again for being here. Extremely grateful for your expertise and for the impact that you're making in our world. So thank you.

Jamil Zaki (42:24):

It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much, Oscarlyn.

Oscarlyn Elder (42:27):

And for those listening, thank you for joining me today. If you liked this episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate and review the podcast. And tell friends and family about it. If you have a question for me or suggestion for this podcast, email me at dothatatruist.com. I'll be back soon for another episode of I've Been Meaning to Do That, the podcast that gets you moving toward fulfilling your purpose and achieving your financial goals. Talk to you soon.