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S1: The following recording may contain explicit language I can’t get more explicit than May.

S2: With literacy it may be It’s Friday November 15th 2019 from slated for just I’m Mike Pesca. Elizabeth Warren has amended or possibly withdrawn her big tax the wealth to deliver the health plan.

S3: I mean that is still the goal of her policies and her new plan or series of plans.

S1: But it seems that she’s saying we can get there to the land of health a lot easier than in the first version of the plan which early reviews indicate hews much more to reality than the old plan did. So it’s now a two part plan where first she would create a public option and next within three years she would pass a bill that eliminates existing private plans seems to acknowledge some of the problems practical and political of her original idea which was widely criticized and by widely I mean from the right the middle and the far left. Paul Krugman tweets of this new plan this new initiative from Warren looks much more workable politically than immediate transition to single payer. If she wins and Dems take the Senate the immediate plan is for a sort of expanded ACA plus public option which means it’s not single payer which means in my opinion it might be doable and not being single payer and trying to be doable was exactly the point that Pete booted George and Joe Biden mostly by implication were making. And politically that does take away some of the advantage they had because the point they were making is now the point she is making. So it’s no longer a point in their favor but a judge did go to Elizabeth Warren into an own goal of laying out a huge sprawling complex ambitious plan that was riddled with more arrows than St. Sebastian now was it just Pete booted judges getting under Warren skin and whenever I use the possessive on Pete Buda judge people complain. But I think it’s British judges now I think what was going on is that Elizabeth Warren was caught between two competing impulses. One was her motto and brand.

S4: I got a plan for that. The other impulse is encapsulated in this famous exchange. I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t doing shouldn’t fight for so having a plan for everything meets the Go Big or Go Home imperative.

S1: In her first health care proposal it was indeed an enumeration of everything that someone who wanted single payer could ever hope to fight for. Well it turns out maybe there are some initiatives that will in fact be hard to do. And it also turns out that maybe there is a role for being strategic in how you fight for what you want. So we have this less destructive time frame endorsed by Elizabeth Warren’s new plan. Another way of looking at it is that maybe without her announcing the first plan and it getting pushed back and it being fact checked and her dropping in the polls a bit after the announcement which might not be coincidental. Without all that maybe we wouldn’t have the current plan. In other words it just may be the case that Elizabeth Warren is her own Overton Window on the show today some more impeachment hearings. Let’s focus on that clear beacon of sanity and virtue. I’m talking about Devin Nunes but first empathy is in the decline studies show. But who did those studies jerks. Probably some jerks if that guy. Wait maybe I’m part of the problem. I see that now. Let’s hope not because I’m joined by Stanford psychology professor who is an expert on empathy and I got to say I give him a pretty hard time in this interview. I am a little suspicious because when we were kids we had sympathy and sympathy worked fine. Now we got empathy.

S3: But here with another side of the argument aside that here’s my side and understand where it’s coming from. The author of The War for kindness building empathy in a fractured world.

S1: Empathy who doesn’t like empathy.

S5: Well maybe me. I’m a big fan of sympathy. It’s what I grew up with. But empathy kind of draining. And yet Jameel Zaki who is a professor of psychology at Stanford and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory has put together a book called The War for kindness building empathy in a fractured world. Jamil is here. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. So I’d like defining our terms and as I understood it was sympathy is feeling sorry for someone. Empathy is feeling as if you were someone putting yourself in their shoes I understand is an exercise why it’s good. I just wonder if we’re really better off if what we want is like let’s define what we want out of society better opportunities for people less privation less negative feeling. Why isn’t sympathy enough.

S6: Well so it’s great to define our terms if you want to call that sympathy versus empathy. That’s fine. The way that most psychologists think about it would be a little bit different we would say that empathy is an umbrella term for multiple ways we connect with each other including sharing people’s emotions which I think is what you’re calling it but also feeling concerned for them which I think is what you’re calling sympathy and the ability to take their perspective which yes cognitive empathy.

S7: OK. So let’s put the third thing aside. There was Tip O’Neill was a great politician and he used to champion a lot of social programs and as a politician some were done for political gain but often he would just sympathetic so he would always brag about all the programs that he had to help the life lives of dwarves for some reason and Chris Matthews always tell the story. He would always talk about the dwarves. Now Tip O’Neill was this giant of a man. I doubt he could feel empathy with a dwarf maybe for a second or two. You’re like oh yeah I never realized it’s hard to reach that high button in an elevator let’s say. But what sympathy seems fine sympathy guided the person to give money for social programs and to change the FDA code and everyone’s better off because he had sympathy why did he need to have empathy.

S6: Well I don’t think that you need empathy for everything. I certainly don’t think that you needed to structure of humane policy that helps people. But I would argue that maybe it’s not true that Tip O’Neill as a tall person couldn’t have denied that was being a little guy. Yes you can write about the particulars of our lives are different but the contours of our emotions can be quite similar right. I want something I don’t get it I’m frustrated I’m upset now for you that goal may be different than it is for me but we can share the way that that feels.

S7: So Paul Bloom at Yale has written about a book against empathy and I think it was meant to be provocative but he really does come down to reason reason being a better guiding principle than empathy. I’m very empirical you are too right. I mean I love the the end notes in your book where you sort of rage rate the quality of the research or the the replica ability let’s say does a belief well you’ve I’m sure you’ve read Bloom’s book but does an emphasis on empathy preclude letting reason be your guide.

S6: So I love Paul. He’s a great friend of me to have and we’ve debated about this everywhere for a long time. I think that that it’s great to think about trying to be reasonable. But I think that his view of emotion and logic is fundamentally separable is really old fashioned OK. What psychologists now know is that well when we try to reason objectively our emotions and desires get into what we end up thinking anyways through confirmation bias and the like and instead of being sort of fundamentally irrational we can actually work with our emotions so we can tune them towards our goals. Right so emotion and reason are not as fundamentally split as I think Paul would like to think right but you are saying that that emotion is a flaw in reason.

S7: I agree. Oh no I’m not saying that at all. Some point you say a cognitive bias could get into our reasoning if we can say I know we’re not robots but as best we can if we can reason with that portion of the brain and not let emotion get into it and make the right choices based on that. Let me give you a tangible example. If we were to have a foreign policy of what aid to give based on empathy we’d probably give it to the worst off people in the world. But if we were to have or what wars to intervene in if you could show me more pictures of children dying and the worse they were actually suffering number of suffering amount of suffering that would dictate our foreign intervention yet a reason based foreign policy would take a lot other things into a fact like ability to win the war ability to if you quote unquote overthrow that dictator what their lives would be otherwise. American interests in general. I would rather go with the reasoned approach of intervention with a little bit of sympathy involved versus the empathetic approach where you put yourself in the position of the victims and let that rule the day again.

S6: So I think of empathy and emotion as not necessarily a guide for how groups of people must behave. Organizing policy and the like that said I do think that the idea that we can be purely logical Vulcan beings in our morality is a dangerous one because it’s incorrect. I just don’t think that that’s the way that people operate.

S7: And I agree. But aren’t you straw manning this like I’m not. I know we can’t be that but what is better to be. I don’t have Paul Bloom here and I can’t channel him. But what’s the better way to be guided in your decisions and by the way also take and care that your analysis is not as American foreign policy it’s more of the individual American how to act like that. Yeah.

S6: So Paul is not made of straw. Right. That’s less valid human being and I think you’re channeling him pretty well. And in fact he does make a stark distinction between emotion and reason I say that’s what psychology comes down on is that emotion and reason work together and we guide our emotions and our emotions in turn give teeth or a sort of power our actions. I mean if you just think of things a purely cognitive fashion you might not be moved to act. That’s why they call it being moved right. And so what I come down on is that we can steer our own emotions right sometimes other people try to steer them for us. You talked really you know something that a lot of psychologists discuss is hey if I just see pictures of one disaster and not another well I’ll over overwhelmingly want to give to the first rather than yeah yeah for the quality of the narrator because we’re all very narrative driven will have a greater effect on our empathy than perhaps the facts politicians company’s propagandists all try to drive our emotion and they all do whether we realize it or not. What I try to talk about in the book is that we can drive our own emotions and we can make choices about the way that we feel about how we point our empathy and those choices are powerful and we’re making them whether we know it or not so we might as well know that we are an interesting part of the book as you talk about people whose jobs caregivers whose jobs it is to kind of be empathetic and certain empathy.

S7: And maybe there was a conception of the more the better but we’re learning that that is not the case.

S6: Absolutely I mean I guess if one of the key points of the book is that you can control your empathy and I do subtitle it building empathy and so people say does that mean that we should turn our empathy up to 11 spinal taps all the time. No that would be a disaster. I mean you couldn’t walk a block in downtown Manhattan without collapsing to a heap and that’s definitely true in medical settings right. I mean so I’ve worked with Nick you physicians and nurses and social workers and I mean if they felt the pain of every family in the room they would burn out and many of them do. And you know that also wouldn’t help them help their patients. I mean I don’t want my therapist crying and saying God your life really does suck right. I don’t want him to share my feelings. I want him to understand and feel concerned for me. And so one of the things that that I’m trying to do and other psychologists are trying to do in medical settings is help professionals sort of toggle between different types of amount of empathy.

S5: So you talk about distress and concern.

S6: That’s right. So not feeling as somebody does but feeling for them.

S5: I do think or I do wonder that many of the solutions in the book you talked about meditation for a second or things the Seattle Police Department is doing and some of them are opt in and some of them are you know being being dictated from on high. I do think that the kind of person who is just interested in meditation and who is saying yeah I’d like to give that a try is not that alone is probably 80 to 90 percent of the solution just wanting to be empathetic is pretty much the most empathetic act you could take. And when we talk about society’s lack of empathy we’re probably the big problems are the people who either don’t have the time or dealing with you know maybe a kid with an opioid problem or are feeling resentful because of stranger is because their life is in such extremis that it seems harder to you know prescribe meditation to those people and think it’s gonna be the solution.

S6: Well I agree. On the other hand people want to do what they think will be good for them and when they think other people are doing so they’re just some unhelpful stereotypes that we’ve developed. We think that if I’m stressed I should focus only on myself and I could never have the bandwidth to help somebody else. But research demonstrates that when you force people who are stressed to help someone they actually feel less stressed as a result. So we’re we’re sort of robbing ourselves of the solution sometimes because of our wrongful stereotypes about how people work. And likewise I think that we’re not doing ourselves any favor when we tell ourselves that our culture is an individualistic greedy one because if we think that that’s what the people around us are will fall in line.

S5: Yeah yeah. Or an emphasis on the transactional nature of I get something and that’s the only reason I give something.

S6: So since since the book came out I’ve received hundreds of emails from people who say I want a more caring culture. I want to be more caring but I’m the only one. And I’m like Can I put you all in a group chat like that you’re surrounded by each other. But sometimes the loudest voices in our culture just aren’t the kind. So we get sort of magnetized towards this toxic extreme behavior because we think that’s what our culture is. But maybe there’s a quieter majority underneath that.

S5: You know what I was thinking about as I read the book talking about the concern versus distress that’s thinking about the socialists because I did this thing a political ad and the Socialists were all really really angry. I suppose there some nice socialists maybe some of the older ones you know Bernie Sanders seems like although he has a lot of anger and fire he doesn’t really have personal animus is very good friends who are conservatives anyway. I think what the socialists and sometimes the young socialists and the people with the rose next to their names and there are there is sometimes the meanest people online and I wonder if they’re feeling a stopped being this constructive concern for all they see in the world. I’m not saying that the world doesn’t need a ton of changing and our society doesn’t need working over but it’s become distress and when it’s become distress it shows up and presents itself in sometimes these you know caustic confrontational extreme ways.

S6: Yeah I mean you know there’s a lot to be distressed about right now. Right. You know and I think that it’s you know I sympathize with people who you know who can’t regulate that feeling. I’m not going to comment on whether one sort of group of people politically are that way or not. But I think I’m sure the Tea Party thinks the same way. Yes yes. Right so there’s there’s this idea like if you’re not angry now you’re not paying attention. Yeah. Which might be true but again the question is how can we make our emotions useful. Right. And I think so my friend Rob Wheeler has done work demonstrating that when protests are when people use extreme measures in protests they’re actually less effective at convincing anyone of their argument whereas when they frame their argument in a way that the other side can understand yeah they’re more compelling. I think that. And again I’m not going to. Apart from what group we’re talking about when you have strong emotions about what’s going on a question that you might ask yourself is how can I channel these emotions into a useful action. How can I become compelling. How can I generate a movement. And you know maybe sometimes that’s through anger. Anger is not always a bad thing. Distress is not always a bad thing. Right about the way that we control and work with those emotions.

S5: Right. But distress is proper when you touch the hot stove. Right. To think of every stove whether it’s on or off as being a flame might be a misuse of distress. That’s when distress turns into chronic anxiety. Yeah yeah that’s true too. All right. So this part of the book I love they’re all like many books that build a case based on your own work the works of your colleagues the works of studies that are out there. You’re acknowledging these studies aren’t always perfect and if you were to write a book or a similar book 20 years ago you’d probably be citing a Stanley Milgram in the Stanford Prison Experiment Stanford. Wait a minute. Was that your building.

S6: Yeah. And there’s a plan. Oh really. Right.

S7: One floor beneath my office there’s a plaque for the prison expanded almost like Do we really want a plaque like a testimony to it on replicable study. Am I right. So it’s been pretty hard to replicate that. That’s one of those totems of how on replicable science is. So what do you hear when you are. Who is it. You’re the researcher. You worked with to kind of assess the quality of the studies in the book.

S6: Keri Liebowitz yeah yeah. So yeah. So basically we were thinking science is changing right. We’re sort of revising what we know all the time and in the book some of the things that I say are based on 70 plus years of evidence and have been replicated over and over like what’s one what’s one that’s just so solid in terms of Taco Bell contact theory that when you befriend or form relationships with people from different groups yeah you’re prejudice and stereotyping against those groups tends to diminish in certain ways form bonds not just like CRM on a tray.

S7: Oh no no.

S6: In fact seeing someone on a train could have the opposite effect you feel like they’re encroaching. But but so there are rules for us how contact theory works and when it works. But if you meet those criteria the effect is extremely strong and replicate. Okay good. So other things are brand new right. So some of the studies that I say are my own and I was like excited that they had been published a week before. Right now I want to acknowledge that those have different status in terms of their what we call evidentiary value. If you’ve only done something once you just don’t know whether it’s going to turn out the same way every single time. And so I wanted readers you know I wonder readers have a chance to understand that you know and to evaluate the evidence for themselves and know hey this thing is brand new. So catch me again in five years and I’ll tell you whether implicated this thing I have high confidence in I just want to trust my readers to be you know to be wise enough to understand that that against science is a process. It’s not a completed product and that we’re on we’re kind of working through it together and I’m giving them what I know and I want them to know how well I know it and what I’m confident in and what I’m less confident.

S7: The name of the book is The War for kindness building empathy in a fractured world. Jamil Zaki thanks so much.

S8: Thank you.

S1: Marie Ivanovich testified before the House Intelligence Committee today. She was removed from her post. She was smeared but not smeared with marmalade and fed to and so that whole thing lacked pizzazz. She confirmed all the misdeeds that were brought up by Ambassador Taylor and State Department official George Kent. But since those only confirmed troubling shameful acts rather than shouting out accusations through slurred speech while teetering on stilettos as your champagne flutes sloshes about again you got the pizzazz problem before all the charges of pizzazz listeners that we’ve had to consider over the past couple of days. I have to say there was a pretty pizzazz full display today in Congress and it was put on by Republican Devin Nunez who took umbrage great umbrage. That committee chair Adam Schiff would ever worry that the Republicans might expose the whistleblower who they by the way called not a real whistleblower and in need of exposure.

S9: Here’s what Nunez said no Republicans here know the whistleblower’s identity because the whistleblower only met with Democrats.

S1: This we should point out this fact or this claim was also echoed by Adam Schiff on Wednesday who said he doesn’t know the whistleblower is only his staff. Does this whole thing denying knowledge of the whistleblower strikes me as weird because I know the name of the whistleblower and the reason I do is that Donald Trump junior tweeted it and that on FOX a Trump defender blurted it out.

S10: And also that Senator Rand Paul said the name of the whistleblower said the whistleblower must come forward then name the whistleblower. I guess a lot is riding on the exact meaning of no not as a no don’t say the name of the whistleblower you lawless maniacs more like Adam Schiff doesn’t 100 percent no. And if confirmed by the appropriate authorities sense he doesn’t know that this particular guy who all the people are naming is the whistleblower really is the whistleblower.

S1: Fine so we come to should shift worry about the Republicans. I mean yes.

S10: Rand Paul a Republican senator but we’re talking about Republicans in the House of Representatives. Would a Republican member of the House of Representatives ever out the whistleblower. Guess what.

S11: One already has North Carolina radio station WFAA notes that Dan Bishop said the whistleblower ain’t Valda Moore and then the station went on to report Bishop also wrote that the person who reported the president’s call about Ukraine is quote not a bonafide whistleblower and that quote even if he were he wouldn’t be entitled to secrecy. Bishop then wrote the name of a person whom he said is a quote deep state conspirator. He wrote that that person needs to testify.

S1: Now the name Bishop tweeted was the same as the name that Rand Paul mentioned that Donald Trump junior mentioned in the Trump piece on Fox mentioned. But new news wasn’t done with the complaints and the umbrage taking. He criticized the entire proceedings with this charge.

S12: I would just say to the American people today’s show trial has come to an end. We’re headed down now to the basement of the Capitol to go until I don’t know what time we’ll be back. They’re hiding again behind closed doors.

S1: It is a show trial to be criticized for playing out for all the public to say but it should also be critiqued because it’s behind closed doors. Cult like those renewed as his words cult like therefore escaped scrutiny scrutiny that I suppose would be forthcoming were to be I don’t know played out on television. You know I’ve got to say whenever I see arguments like that. I kind of fear for my job because what’s my job. I’m here to point out contradictions to offer context perhaps to give you some insight. But do you need me. Do you really need me. If within the span of 15 seconds Devon Nunez criticizes open proceedings for not being closed then criticizes closed proceedings for not being open. What is my use here. Perhaps my only use is branding. So a while ago I noted that Devon Nunez was removed from his role as acting head of the intelligence agency with with anything having to do with the Mueller Report because he badly bungled some tactics of trying to discredit that investigation. He was embarrassed and back then Trey Gowdy had to take over. But unlike the former Representative Gowdy is out of Congress now. I do not think the sword and cap would deign to place Devon Nunez in the House of slithering Devon Nunez is pure Dudley tersely. But the reason I bring this all up is just to demonstrate that Nunez was and continues to be discredited and also if you watch the guy comes through very clearly he is a nincompoop and this was my branding. Devon Nunez disgraced nincompoop Jim Jordan. This guy is not honest but at least he’s cogent speaks quickly punchy sentences at least Steffi Yannick. She’s not substantive but she’s not just pure silliness. Devin Nunez is and continues to be a disgraced nincompoop. And if that is all I can add to a broad American tapestry of civic involvement then I am happy to play my role.

S13: And that’s it for today show just producer Daniel Schrader doesn’t know who the whistleblower is doesn’t even know what a whistle is what it does or who New York Times columnist Charles Blow is or who’s that James Bond villain Clowes. Someone felt. Just producer Christina to Joseph children would think a whistle can blow. I mean she once had a whistle tried to blow it made no noise to drive the. Now’s your crazy. That’s weird. The just discredited nincompoop Devon Nunez if he tries really hard and puts in the time and works on honing his skills and making pointless arguments seem compelling. Well then I think he could ascend to Jim Jordan heights of being useful to his fellow Republicans though in accurate. And I vow that if Devon newness shows this propensity I will no longer dub him disgraced nincompoop Devon Nunez. He will become distraction every nitwit. Devon Nunez perhaps dare to dream room for desperate to Peru. And thanks for listening.