This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

It is Saturday, so we have a vault episode for you.

This is going to be part four of four in our cynicism series.

This one originally published

424, 2025. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart

Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the fourth and final part in our series on cynicism.

There's been a light at the end of the tunnel, and we've finally reached it.

So in part one, we defined cynicism as the tendency to

believe that people are bad, selfish, and untrustworthy. And we distinguished this modern

definition from other concepts like the cynic philosophy of ancient Greece, which is a whole

different thing, and from similar but distinct

concepts like pessimism. We also looked at research on the correlates of cynicism across a bunch of

domains of life, from health to career and all kinds of things, and discovered that being

highly cynical tends to have overwhelmingly negative effects on a person's life. In part two, we

focused primarily on the so-called cynical genius illusion. The short version of this is that,

while people might not necessarily like highly cynical people, for whatever reason, we tend to

assume that they are smart and competent

...