Kind: captions
Language: en
when we start to think of situations as
zero
sum when we start to believe that every
victory of yours
is a defeat of mine we actually lose
opportunities to
find win-win situations common ground
and common solutions in fact
it's totally fine to acknowledge
differences between
you and somebody else but when we take
that sentiment and say and also
you're not even a person i'm not even
going to see you as anything beyond
the opinion that i hate we just lose so
many opportunities from that and we
don't have to do that
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impact theory enjoy the episode
hey everybody welcome to another episode
of impact theory i
am joined by professor of psychology
jamil
zaki at stanford by the way not a bad
pedigree my friend
and author of the amazing book the war
for kindness thank you for joining me
today
thanks for having me tom it's a pleasure
so man we're we're in a war
for kindness how do you see that you
know i get asked
about the title of the book all the time
people say a war
for kindness that just sounds like an
oxymoron you can't possibly
mean that i i do mean it i think that
you know the way that i see it
we as a species are built evolved for
connection and togetherness but that
doesn't mean that those
qualities of life are easy to cultivate
and
the way i think about it modern life has
sort of put
a bunch of barriers in the way to human
connection
things like political polarization the
way we use technology
the levels of stress we're dealing with
pull us apart instead of
bringing us together and so in order to
kind of re-humanize ourselves in order
to recover
our sense of connection to other people
i think you do need to fight those
trends and i think that we can win but i
do think it's a battle
i actually love that language i was once
i think rightly accused of
using um war language but for some
reason that like really resonates with
me the idea that you know if you've got
a problem you really have to
attack it and get after it so i like it
i also like the
you know the dichotomy there between
something that seems so
you know soft and genteel but in reality
to me the punch line of the book and the
whole idea
um is so in line with carol dweck
obviously who you know well in reference
in the book and
is like one of my personal heroes i love
her and she's just made something
um so easy to understand which you echo
in this book
the way that she made people understand
that mindset is malleable
you've made people understand that
kindness and empathy have that same
malleability
and i want to hit that from an
evolutionary perspective
why do you think that it's useful enough
from an evolutionary perspective to be
one of the levers that we can pull on
yeah you know i i think about this a lot
and darwin was really confused by the
evolutionary roots of kindness right
according to his theory of natural
selection
an animal should really just do whatever
it takes to survive and pass on its
genes
and in that equation it didn't seem to
darwin like
helping others would fit in especially
if you sacrificed
in order to do it darwin wrote something
like don't i'm
paraphrasing here he said he who was
willing to sacrifice himself
rather than betray his comrades would
leave no
offspring to inherit his noble nature in
other words
from an evolutionary perspective it was
once thought that
kindness and empathy were losers right
that they would not help you
advance where you needed to go even
darwin did not believe that anymore by
the time he died
there's ample evidence that in essence
when animals work together they can
achieve things that no animal can
alone and we as a species humanity
are the champions of collaboration and
working together and that's how we
have that's a key ingredient in how we
have succeeded
as a species so again this old creaky
version of darwin where you can only
look out for yourself
if you want to succeed is one that has
been clearly debunked in a bunch of
different
scientific spaces but i think sometimes
it still carries on in our
collective imagination we like to equate
sometimes
selfishness with success in fact if
anything
the opposite is true now have you looked
at darwin close enough to
know sort of what was it in the biology
that he began to
see that made him switch his opinion
yeah so there's a bunch of uh there's a
long tradition
starting with darwin but going far
beyond him as well that explores this
and there's
kind of three three buckets you could
put the
kind of smartness of kindness into right
why
is kindness in fact evolutionarily a
winner
instead of a loser the first is what's
known as kin selection so that means
if you help people you're related to
your genes are actually doing pretty
well in fact
tom if you were i don't know how many
siblings you have if you had three
siblings
and you wanted to save them from a
burning building
even if you died in the process your
genes would be doing better because each
of your siblings
has 50 of your genes so together they
would have 150
of you in them right so that's one way
that
kindness can be a winner evolutionarily
the other is through
what's known as reciprocity so that is
when we act kindly
towards others and they return the favor
in some way
that can be directly to us like a
tit-for-tat you know
i scratch your back you scratch mine but
it can also be indirect
for instance if i help you and somebody
else sees that
and i develop a positive reputation i
end up being able to be part of a
community that trusts one another
and helps one another that's really the
key to our
success as a species in sort of ancient
times
i think that's still a key to our
success now is being part of something
that's greater than ourselves it's a
cool part of the talk that you give
around this topic of you know you often
start with to really understand this
let's go back a hundred thousand years
and paint that picture for us you know
what did we as a species look like a
hundred thousand years ago
and how did we become the like most
dominant apex predator of all time
like we have literally and i know some
people don't love
this but we've taken over like we run
this
so how what what was it
uh you know about us that allowed us to
pull this off
yeah i mean and there's that never going
to be just one answer to that
right so you might hear that human
beings you know we have this enormous
frontal lobe which allows us to engage
in planning for the future
we can use language to communicate
an infinite amount of thoughts and
experiences to one another
and and you know those two pieces are
hugely important
interacting with both of those is the
fact that well what do we use
that massive brain for what do we use
that
communicative ability for well it's to
coordinate it's to
work together right there are these
different views of
why we're so smart and and two of them
are really interesting
in their contrast to each other one is
what's known as a machiavellian
intelligence hypothesis which is that
we're smart so that we can
basically dupe each other and like win
in a competition where we're all trying
to outsmart
one another and kind of dominate each
other
another is what you could think of as a
cooperative or collaborative
intelligence hypothesis which is that in
fact
the reason that we're so smart is
because we need to coordinate to do all
sorts of things like you know
hunt a woolly mammoth or build a
suspension bridge right
you can't do either of those things
alone and so working together is the way
that we get it
you know really interesting thing is
that you can put both of those
ideas together kind of neatly because
people don't just compete as individuals
we compete as groups
so if you think of two groups of people
in the ancient world
one of whom is terrible at working
together and trying to screw each other
over all the time
and the other one of which is internally
really kind and collaborative
well guess what when those groups come
into competition
the collaborative group will win and you
see this in sports
and in the world of business now as well
right i mean
when groups can really tightly work
together they win
um even in a sort of bottom line
competitive set of terms
yeah that that to me is really striking
when you
when you sort of put multiple ideas
together so idea number one hey this is
malleable
if you don't focus on it then you know
sort of second law of thermodynamics
states that it
it's going to move towards chaos so your
relationship to empathy won't
necessarily be optimized for your
well-being it might not be optimized for
your success it's just going to be
whatever
you happen to bump into law of accident
and then you
put that together with that idea of
cooperation and now it's like hey
if you focus on empathy and realize that
the sort of natural output of this
is that you can now cooperate and
there's that great african proverb which
i think is so brilliant
if you want to go fast go alone if you
want to go far
go in a group and so now understanding
that okay i'm
more likely to be a high functioning
group if
i'm working on that optimizing the
malleability of
my empathy and my ability to cooperate
and you really bring this home in the
book with something that i'd never
really thought of which is
that there were i think you said roughly
five
different types of highly intelligent um
offshoots of apes i would assume that we
were coexisting with
neanderthals being sort of the most
famous and we
end up winning out why yeah i mean
again it gets back to this idea of
you've got different groups
some of whom are better at working
together and when they come into
conflict guess what the more cooperative
ones can actually
compete more effectively yuval hariri
writes beautifully about this and
there's a lot of work
on these sort of you know basically what
we would think of as
the cultural ratchet effect the idea
that because
we were so cooperative so collaborative
among our own group
we actually were able to advance for
instance in terms of simple technologies
more quickly because you pass along that
information
you share that information really
efficiently and that produces
advances in in your culture and also we
were able to coordinate
for instance during clashes with other
with other
sort of human species and you know in
essence
that allowed us to to use your term to
run this because we were
uh because we were so good at
coordinating and
and that form of togetherness and you
know i i just want to
zoom in on something you said tommy
because i think you really put it
beautifully
i mean i guess if there's a case that i
try to make in my book
and in a lot of my work it's really
two-fold and you nailed it
the first is that empathy is something
that you might want
more than you realize you want it right
you might think of it as this soft and
squishy
you know i'm just crying all the time i
you know feel your pain type of
experience
but empathy is actually a vital skill
that allows us to accomplish a lot of
our goals you know
not just around being good people which
is critical
and empathy is part of our moral
foundations
but also part of living the type of
lives that we want to live having strong
relationships
being able to to have a good
relationship with ourselves
and being able to succeed in all sorts
of parts of life so that's message one
is that you might want empathy more than
you think you do and message two
if you want it you can get it right that
this is
something that is achievable just like
any other skill
just like being physically fit just like
working to strengthen our muscles
we can work to develop ourselves into
more empathic
more connected people all right super
powerful so
now i think we have to start teasing out
a couple of different ideas so
number one i think it's worth putting a
finger on exactly what empathy is like
is it a one for one with kindness
is there some other definition that we
can use how do you define
empathy yeah it's thank you for going
there
we we really need to make sure that we
have our definitions clear because a lot
of people can be
confused about the term empathy the way
that scientists like me think of it
is as an umbrella term that actually
describes at least three different ways
that you connect with other people's
emotions
so let's say that you know i hopped on
this call and instead of being
thrilled to talk with you like i am i
was weeping openly well
you know in anguish well as soon as you
logged on you'd probably
have a bunch of different experiences
one you might
feel bad yourself seeing me cry you
might start
sort of catch my feelings almost
vicariously which we would call
emotional empathy
you might also be like what the hell is
going on with jamaica what is he feeling
and why
and that sort of cognitive detective
work is what we think of as cognitive
empathy or theory of mind
and three because you seem like a really
great guy i'm sure that you would be
concerned
with what i was going through and wish
for me to feel better which is often
known as compassion
so those three jigsaw pieces together
make up the full range of human empathy
you asked about the relationship between
empathy and kindness
and it's not a one-to-one you can act
kindly in lots of situations not because
you're connected with someone but out of
a sense of obligation for instance or
because you feel like you owe them
or you're worried that you'll get a bad
reputation if you don't help
likewise i think a lot of us these days
going on social media we're inundated
with
images and stories of other people's
suffering we feel empathy
but we can't do anything about it we
don't feel like we can make a difference
it turns out that those two states where
you're acting kindly without empathy
or experiencing empathy but helpless to
do anything about it
are much less healthy and helpful than
states where you can kind of lock those
two things in together
where you can act kindly towards people
through a sense of personal
connection to them that's really
interesting and one of the
fascinating parts of the book is how you
go into how empathy sort of in the wrong
circumstance or the wrong amount can
actually become
pathologized um that to me is
super intriguing before we get to that
though i want to ask so one thing you
didn't mention
in that obviously intentionally i've
read the book is sympathy
and so how does sympathy relate to
empathy how are they different
that would be really interesting to
understand yeah sympathy is a
you're right a term that i tend to stay
away from
just because its definition has
literally flipped
over the course of history so uh
sympathy used to be
the empathy has only been around as a
word
in the english language since 1909 it
was coined that's
crazy i know right it was coined in
german
first by uh sort of philosophers of art
aesthetic philosophers like
robert visher and theodore lips and they
use this term
ein fulung to describe the way that you
respond to a piece of art sculptures in
particular
by almost feeling your way into the art
so if you imagine seeing a sculpture if
somebody's just been
shot with an arrow and they're sort of
like you know contorted in pain
well one way that you respond
emotionally to that art is by
imagining your own body into that piece
of art right so it so
that was where it came from and it sort
of migrated into the
the english term empathy again barely a
hundred years ago
so before that in the english language
people like david hume
and adam smith would write about
sympathy
and to them sympathy was vicariously
taking on
other people's emotions especially their
suffering
right so like if i saw you in pain my
sort of
my palms would begin to sweat i would
feel really bad that would be
sympathy to them weirdly empathy
basically took that
corner over and then kicked sympathy off
of it
and now when people use sympathy they
almost mean it
as far as i understand to mean something
like pity like i feel bad for you but
i'm not really going there
with you you know i'm sort of it's it's
like um yeah it's it's
it's like empathy but at a serious
remove that often doesn't actually
inspire much
positive behavior now again those are
two ways that sympathy has been used i
hope you can see that they're basically
the opposite of each other
right because the old version was okay
i'm really here with you i'm resonating
with your experience
the new version as i see it is quite the
opposite of that so
as a result and i know that was a long
answer to what
this wonderful straightforward question
i think that sympathy is just a
compromise term it's not one that's very
meaningful
to me because it's wobbled around so
much in our culture
it's interesting so what i love about it
is that
so there's this idea and i really need
to go back and like figure out where i
first read this but i read this
um maybe apocryphal story that there
uh is a certain language where they
don't have a color
they don't have a name for blue they
don't have a word for it and because
they don't have a word for it they cram
it into
like other color definitions like
turquoise or whatever
and so because of that so the apocryphal
story goes
there's actually shades of blue that
they don't see because they don't have a
name for it so to them it just becomes
an idea that gets pushed into something
else
now if there were no word for empathy
versus
sympathy would it be harder to
really get a concrete understanding of
that difference now in my marriage i've
always said to my wife
i am desperate for empathy i don't want
your sympathy
because i interpret sympathy the same
way that you talk about so
you know when when we were sort of
mapping out how we wanted
each other to be it was like look if i
get knocked to my knees
i don't want you to get on your knees
with me and put an arm around me and you
know pat me on the back and tell me
everything is going to be fine which all
equate to
sympathy the like you feel like you have
to pity me and take care of me
what i want is empathy i want you to
understand i want you to know what i'm
going through but also know where i'm
trying to go
offer me a hand pick me back up brush me
off see me like
understand where i'm at but remind me of
who i'm trying to become
and so that sense of like
and you talk about this in the book and
now is probably the time to go into
your first daughter's birth and like
sort of the trauma around that
and then your own worry that the
caretakers in the icu
would sort of ultimately succumb to just
the overwhelming
uh emotions that are present and if they
were to
carry them and take them on that it
could become pathologized
oh man that was such a great question
i have a bunch of response i'm going to
try to hit them really quickly first
the work that you're talking about on
the uh color blue
is not apocryphal that's that's real and
so there's oh
you're a man this is amazing i
i believe that in russian there are
different words for light blue and dark
blue those are just
not the same category really and so
there's some work
from some of my colleagues actually that
shows that
russian speakers are more quickly able
to discern
light and dark blue from each other
because they just think of them as
totally different
uh visual experiences so um
so i'll send you that work but uh but
you're you're pleased and if you have
more details
i i'm all about it i have brought this
up so many times not even knowing where
to start to refine this
so yeah if you've got more i'll take it
yeah basically if you have a really
precise language for something
you can experience it more precisely and
that's part of why i think it's so
important to have
a very precise understanding of empathy
because it does have these different
pieces
and some of those pieces might be what
you want in one moment and
not what you want in another moment i
mean a second response
to you tom is that it sounds like a
really phenomenal
relationship that you're in if you're
able to have those types of
conversations
you know my wife and i are both
psychologists so we talk like this all
the time
but it's rare for me to meet other
people who are not psychologists
who have very self-aware conversations
of this sort
i think that's incredibly productive and
so
useful and really you know quite moving
as well
so to get to your point i think that
you're exactly
your experience resonates with my own
which is that sometimes
there are different pieces of empathy
that i want and others
that at that moment would be the
opposite of useful to me
right the opposite of what i want so and
a great distinction here is between
you'll recall we're talking about these
three pieces of empathy between
emotional empathy so just sharing taking
on other people's pain
and compassion which is feeling for
other people
without necessarily feeling as they do
in the moment
and so like it turns out that emotional
empathy
is the type of empathy that wears us out
most quickly
it's the most associated with burnout
and it's actually not
always the best way to help another
person right if i'm with my therapist
and i'm crying i don't want him crying
to be like my god your life really does
suck
right like i don't want him to feel
everything that i'm feeling
i want him as you put it nicely to be
there
for me to understand me to engage in
cognitive empathy
and then to express good will towards me
and maybe help me strategize
my way out of where i am in that moment
and as you put it beautifully
remind me of where i want to go right so
that that that distinction i think is
really critical
and sometimes i think people imagine
that empathizing
has to mean i hurt when you hurt and if
we believe that then that can get us
into some cul-de-sacs
with our own process of empathy that we
don't really need to go into
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and be legendary
wow that's i love that idea of a
cul-de-sac
where you're sort of self-reinforcing
and ending in in a bit of a death loop
how did you end up becoming so focused
on
empathy yeah uh so for me it was a
survival skill that really defined my
childhood right so
my mom is an immigrant from peru and my
dad is an immigrant from pakistan
and they met and fell in love i think
because they shared a sense of
foreignness in the u.s i think if you're
in a new place
and somebody else is also new there you
can connect
just on the fact that you're both trying
to figure out what the hell is going on
around you
and i think they found that comfort in
each other but then as they
got more comfortable in the u.s now
they've been here for 50 years basically
um 49 years you know i think that they
realized how little they actually had in
common which as their only kid
was like nothing they had nothing in
common at all and
so they um you know they split up uh
and and it was one of those you know
long messy
painful divorces and you know as their
only child i spent a lot of my
time as a kid kind of shuttling back and
forth
between their houses and i think you
know there's i'm sure
many children of divorce who are
listeners of yours and
because a lot of us can attest you
really feel pulled in these different
directions right you feel like you're
caught in between these different
realities and
in in my case those different realities
weren't just personal they were cultural
right it was like literally different
parts of the globe
that were dom that were sort of vying
for my attention
from my loyalty uh and and i learned
that
if i would sort of work hard to connect
with my mom those same
those that same approach just wouldn't
work at all with my dad and vice versa
so it was a really hard time obviously
but i also think about it as
the time that i learned to work on my
empathy right i think of my parents
divorce
as like an empathy gym for me that
forced me to work at that care and
understanding why well because
i had to i wanted to keep my
relationship to each of my parents i
knew that they were both
good people who were in a lot of pain
and it wasn't their fault that they had
different perspectives so
i had to sort of become a bridge between
them and honestly i think it's the most
important thing i ever learned i think
that that's sort of still the most
important skill
that i have in my life and now i try to
teach it to other people
all right so man that's such an
interesting um
way for things to play out you know for
somebody like you who i would assume has
sort of a natural predilection towards
empathy maybe some extra self-awareness
um
this idea of teaching other people so
i want to get into that you talk a lot
about like how we develop this skill how
we reconnect in a world that's divided
and fractured you know i think that
um especially now exacerbated with the
massive isolation caused by kovid
you get this atomization that you talk
about but one thing i want to i want to
set the stage for
this part of the conversation by saying
it seems to me and i'd love to get your
take on this that
um the very thing that makes
empathy a an evolutionarily
advantaged thing such that we can
increase
its effectiveness because it has such
tremendous impact
um on our ability to survive as a group
but so does tribalism
and so when we look at like hey
the brain has all these cool mechanisms
carol dweck identified one that you're
very
whether you believe that you can improve
something
or you don't will determine whether you
actually improve it or you don't like
that's that's such a
revelatory um idea that's changed my
life in ways i couldn't even possibly
begin to catalog
but tribalism also serves a purpose
which when you're on
you know the you're on the
the plains of africa and you're on the
come-up and you're in these tribes it's
like
you really do have to band together and
create this sense of
well there's us and i'm super empathetic
to you but then there's
others and i will kill them as fast as
i'll kill a water buffalo
and that has real utility and i know
that
that people trip up on that now in a
modern context
but now you're fighting against
something that's real and so
how do you help people train
that empathy up and tribalism down
to match a modern context like what are
the things you tell them to do
wow what a amazing question i mean i
think you're
totally right that these are two
enormous
forces in our mind right our capacity to
connect with each other
and our capacity to divide the world
into us and them
and to then selectively connect with the
people who are on our side what we would
call
parochial empathy or parochial altruism
and if anything fear loathe hate and try
to destroy whoever is
on the other side especially if there's
any conflict
between us if there's any sense of
scarcity as well
i don't even need conflict even if
there's some resource where there's not
going to be enough for everybody i will
start conflict
in order to protect that resource for my
own group right these are as you say
really powerful and really ancient
tendencies so how do we get
beyond them well i don't think that we
can get beyond them entirely
you know i i i've never advocated that
just through empathy we can get to some
place where we're all just holding hands
in a global circle thinking kumbaya
together right
conflict is real and sometimes it's
quite legitimate
but i think that often times when we
take that conflict that tribalism
and start to just and we stop seeing
that there are human beings on the other
side of it
we actually lose a lot right we lose a
lot of opportunity
so for instance in the us we're more
politically polarized than we have been
at any time in my lifetime
but also people hate the level of
polarization that we have
right so we hate each other and we hate
how much we hate each other right we
have the goal
of finding some common ground when we
start to think
of situations as zero sum when we start
to believe that every victory of yours
is a defeat of mine
we actually lose opportunities to find
win-win
situations common ground and common
solutions in fact
there's a lot of work in economics
and uh organizational sort of management
science
on what are known as lose-lose
negotiations
where people end up in a place that is
demonstrably worth
worse for both of them than some
alternative right and that often happens
through zero-sum thinking
so the way that i see it is it's totally
fine to
acknowledge differences between you and
somebody else
right and and for instance ideological
differences are real and it's okay to
say
i want the people who i support to win
an election
which means i want the people who you
support to lose an election right
that's that's legitimate there's no
papering that over
but when we take that sentiment and say
and also
you're not even a person i'm not even
going to see you
as anything beyond the opinion that i
hate we just lose
so many opportunities from that and we
don't have to do that
there are this work from my own lab for
instance that demonstrates
that when people realize that
empathizing with somebody on the other
side of a political conflict
can be useful they do it and
they actually make arguments that are
more persuasive to people on the other
side
when they open up and listen first right
when they lead with empathy
they actually become more convincing to
the other side
so again empathy and tribalism
will never i don't think one will ever
just steamroll over the other one
but they can coexist more than i think
they do right now
all right and so is a key part of
dialing
getting a control of the volume knob i
think that's a really
great way that you gave us to think
about it um
is a part of getting control of that
volume knob self-awareness
are there exercises that we can do like
how do we get
better at that yeah it's a great
question so
the way i think about it is you know i
do think of it as
really analogous to being in shape right
so if
let's say you know it's been it's
covered my gym has been closed for a
year i've been sitting on the couch
you know eating potato chips that whole
time and i want to run a marathon
well i'm not gonna go and try to just
run a marathon run a marathon right
right away that day right i'll probably
break my ankle
i definitely won't make it right instead
i'm gonna run a half mile
today and then three quarters of a mile
tomorrow and then a mile
the day after that and keep up that
habit so the first thing i want to say
about like
how can one practice empathy how can one
improve
is it's not always about the big swings
that we take you don't have to go
and volunteer for a month at habitat for
humanity
it's more about the little habits that
you cultivate
but that you deliver on every single day
and so there's a bunch of different ways
to do this
a classic form probably one of the most
best studied ways to build our empathy
is through certain meditation practices
like loving kindness
or meta which is a very simple practice
of extending good will
to others and there's evidence that when
people practice this
every day not only do they get better at
empathizing
but the brain structures that that are
associated with empathy in their brain
actually increase in volume right so
they're literally sort of
going to the empathy gym and literally
changing themselves
physically likewise how does meta work
yeah um meta is a really simple practice
it's got a series of different stages
and basically
after cultivating a mindful awareness of
where you're at right now
you extend kind of good will you think
about your own suffering
and you wish yourself well the same way
that you would somebody who you love
then you extend that same good will
towards
people in your life you know people you
care about towards people you might be
having a hard time with
someone who you might be in conflict
with then towards strangers and then
eventually like the
the hard level the expert level is you
extend goodwill towards all living
beings
um and so you know it's basically an
exercise meant to
push out the diameter of your empathy
push out the diameter
of your kindness as far as you can and
again practicing that every day turns
out to
have profound effects on people's
ability to connect with others
and that that is one of the most
fascinating things about the brain the
fact that you can sit there
by yourself and just think about wanting
good things for other people and it
actually changes
the physical structure of your brain
that's crazy
it's amazing and you know the craziest
part to me is that
you know i'm a neuroscientist but it
didn't take neuroscientists to discover
this
right these are ancient cognitive
technologies
developed far before the advent of what
we would think of as modern science and
i think
to me you know when i learned about
these practices i thought
maybe what some of your listeners think
are you kidding me this is just some
squishy bs you know like
i don't believe any of this at all and
then the neuroimaging work started to
come out showing that wow
actually it can change your brain in
these really deep ways
i was humbled you know i think as
scientists
we can be a little bit arrogant we think
that hypothesis
testing and statistical confirmation are
these like
the royal road to truth that we are
better at finding the truth
than non-scientists especially people in
spiritual traditions and
to me the work on meta is a deep
reminder that we should stop being so
arrogant and realize that there are
different ways
to accumulate knowledge um and and that
that that they should all
be respected anyways that's a little
aside but i think
it it to me it's i share your
perspective of how mind-blowing it all
is
yeah so taking that and now putting it
into real-world context something you
talk about in the book the rwandan
genocide
the way that they have attempted to
combat that now is
it speaks to me personally because i'm
so obsessed with the idea of
storytelling and like how much we can do
with that
one just give people a quick primer if
they don't know what happened
and then two what they're now doing to
try to unite people
yeah so um for for those of you
listeners who don't
who don't know i mean rwanda was the
site of
one of the worst massacres genocides
in in history um in the 1990s there was
a huge you know
like an ethnic cleansing in essence that
resulted in the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of people
and you know afterwards there was this
incredible collective trauma i mean
there's really
it's unspeakable what people there went
through
and didn't happen over like a two-week
period
i think it was a few months tom but i
it's been a while since i
did since i like did the deep dive of
researching it but
i believe it was a few months and it was
you know just
so many people being killed per hour at
some point it was
it's just yeah it's it's devastating to
read about and to think about
um and if you if it's hard for us to
think about imagine how it
is to if you were part of that if your
family was affected by that if that's
where you
live and so there was you know this this
big process of what are known as gacha
courts
um you know sort of this there were just
too many people who had committed
atrocities so
a standard court system couldn't process
them and so there were these
tribal courts that were set up where
people would
who had taken part in the genocide would
apologize
to the family members of people they had
killed and then there would be some
standard
sentence that they were given i mean can
you imagine
losing a family member and then sitting
there and listening to this i mean it's
just
it was really powerful and helpful in
certain ways right
sort of this attempt to heal
but it was also re-traumatizing for many
many people
and so um some some people in
in media and it's sort of like there
were in sort of piece building
and also in media decided well let's try
an alternative approach a complementary
approach
where instead of talking about what
really happened we're going to tell a
story
that's sort of like what really happened
and they created this radio
soap opera called musica or a new dawn
and it was this you know story of these
two
tribes these two these two basically um
small towns that entered into conflict
with one another and it was
super it was filled with all this
romance and intrigue and betrayal you
know
it was a soap opera but it brought out
some themes
including you know that that that these
types of conflicts can be deadly
and also that even people who do
horrible things
can change right can can become better
and it turned out that this soap opera
became the most
popular soap opera like like 90
of the country was tuning in to listen
every week
and people who listened to it versus
those who didn't
turned out to develop slightly more
positive attitudes towards the other
side not not like i like these people
but more like i think that there might
be a path forward to some piece
somewhere in the future the way that my
friend
betsy levy palik puts it is that it
might not have convinced people
to find peace right away but it at least
allowed their imagination
to wander that in that direction right
which i think is so beautiful
because storytelling whether it's
immersing ourselves in novels or plays
or whatever
you know we think of it as just engaging
with fictional people
characters and fictional worlds but in
fact
evidence demonstrates that when we
immerse ourselves in those stories
we can build our empathy towards real
people we can broaden our care
towards real others and that can be
another really powerful way
to practice this sort of personal growth
no i love that and that reminds me of
another story that you tell in the book
tony um who was a white supremacist but
ended up
unwinding all of that how did empathy
play a role for him how
was it possible that he ended up being
reachable
yeah no this is great and i really
appreciate you ticking through these
different techniques for empathy
building because they can all
work for different people so so far
we've talked about contemplative and
meditation practices
we've talked about storytelling now
let's talk about contact
contact is the idea that sometimes
prejudice
and hatred are easiest to do from a
distance
right when you don't actually know
somebody who is in the group that you
profess to dislike and tony was like
that right he was a very troubled
you know young person right he came from
a broken home
he had just a lot of trauma early on and
he would never use that as an excuse for
his behavior and nor would i right i
mean most people who go through trauma
don't become neo-nazis and he did right
so so that i mean thankfully most people
don't
so tony was um was really
you know a virulent um racist and
xenophobe um and
and it changed for him came in two
stages first
he had kids and having kids for some
reason made him
think okay well i really like what
they're doing
matters so much more to me than my
hatred right so that kind of
helped him that sort of like started the
process of getting him unhooked from his
uh hatred and anti-semitism in
particular
but then the thing that really cracked
him open was he
uh met this person they became friends
and this guy was sort of like a
professional
and life coach sort of and and one of
tony's friends paid for
uh you know a session with this guy dave
baron
and so tony and dave are sitting there
and talking they're becoming super
friendly
and dave happens to mention that he's
jewish
and tony's like oh shh can we can i
swear here
of course he's like oh you know
like this is the person i'm supposed to
hate
and what do i say now should i admit
that i basically you know
am sort of uh you know i'm part of this
like white nationalist
movement and he decided to admit it and
doc he's fully expected
to like punch him or you know tell him
to leave him
immediately or what have you and dove
instead showed him compassion
he said that's what you've done but it's
not who you are
you're better than that i see you
and it it was just shocking to tony to
receive compassion
from somebody who he was supposed to
hate
and that type of close connection that
type of
friendship that type of accepting and
compassionate connection
with somebody on the other side of
tribalism as you as you well put it
is one of the ways to if not eliminate
tribalism to soften it right and in
tony's case
it actually set him on a path not just
to not being a neo-nazi anymore but
he then co-founded this organization
called life after hate
that helps get other people out of hate
groups right so he's like a force
against hatred now and a lot of it that
is thanks to his personal connection
with dolls
yeah man i love that i'm saddened that
it doesn't happen very often but i love
that coming into contact with it and
getting to know somebody
can help you cross these barriers
where can people connect with you follow
along as you help us all become more
empathic
yeah thanks tom um so you can find uh my
book
at warfarekindness.com i want to shout
out that
on that um site i also have some
kindness challenges
that i've provided just a little you
don't have to read the book they're just
little exercises that you can try
on a day-to-day basis many really
connected to our conversation
um and and so i hope that if anything
people feel empowered to work on their
own empathy
and you know they can use those
challenges it's just one starting point
there are lots of places
that they can try it but that's that's
one no i love it what about social media
are you on there are you active
yep i'm on twitter and uh at zaki jam
z z-a-k-i-j-a-m um that's my instagram
uh handle as well so yeah you can find
me there
um and my lab is the stanford social
neuroscience lab
ssnl.stanford.edu if you want to get to
the really nerdy stuff
that's where all of the peer-reviewed
publications are
awesome man i love it well guys uh
i encourage you not only to do the
exercises but to read the book the book
is actually really good and it gives a
lot of great stories
and useful takeaways about how you can
take control of your own volume knob and
make sure that
you're getting the most out of you know
our species
powerful ability to group up and i think
that
it is you know now necessary
more than ever and like he was saying
that
when the struggle is worth it it's worth
engaging in it and i think that uh
for everybody's sake it is worth
engaging in it and speaking of things
that are worth engaging in if you
haven't already be sure to subscribe
and until next time my friends be
legendary take care
agitation and stress were designed to
get us up and move us
and when we try and fight that too much
and we try and quiet that stress
that actually can be problematic you
have to decide are you going to try and
quiet stress or are you going to
actually
lean into action