A Genius of Empathy

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wildlife and the environment. Listen to Amazing Wildlife on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever tried to explain this world

to children? I have kids, two of them. Have you ever sat down with a kid and tried to explain why there are Nazis marching in the exact place where you took them to the farmer's market and waited in line for Papoosa's Have you ever tried to explain how a person who lies, assaults, insults, grifts, fakes and hates can be elected into one of the most powerful jobs

in the world. Have you ever tried to explain to them why they should be good people, How they should be good people in a world where there is so much bad, where they see people who look like them shot by police, murdered by vigilantes, run over at rallies I have, And even though my whole job as a writer involves being so called good with words, there are no words good enough to explain why things are the way they are and what we should do about it.

It's too much, it's too big, it's too overwhelming. Maybe you don't have kids, maybe you don't have to make this world makes sense to children. So I ask you, how, then, do you make sense of it to yourself? Do you hide? Do you tell yourself that everything is fine? Do you convince yourself that you're doing everything you can? And do you make excuses for when you're not? I mean, do you know what to do like today, like right now, in this moment, to help. Do you know how to

be a good person? Are you a good person? Because me, I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure about any of us. What does a good person in this world even look like? I mean, what would they tell you if you could find the time to sit down and listen to them? Did you ever have a scary dream? What did you do about it? There might have been one good guy on television of all places. Did you tell the people you love about it? The people who love you? This old white guy in a zip up

cardigan and blue tennis shoes who played with puppets. When I was a little boy and I had a scary dream, sometimes I'd get some paper and crayons and I would draw pictures about my dream. I mean, is this the guy like, is this quiet dude staring into a camera and talking slowly about crayons? Is this the guy who can stand up to our very worst? And sometimes that would help so much that I was able to get

back to sleep real soon. Mr Rogers made it seem so easy, so casual, to know how you're feeling, to be comfortable in your own skin. But it's not easy. It takes work, and that's actually what Mr rogers Neighborhood was all about. He was showing us how to do that work. Really helps to talk about the way you feel, because everybody has feelings all the time. In a time

like this, Fred Rogers has something we desperately need. I think the real genius of Mr Rogers having done his show and having it be targeted towards children is that what he has done is created a template for just how to recognize your feelings and know what it is, which is basically how you get to all the other stuff. It's how you grow. He taught us how to plant seeds. He taught us to plant seeds, seeds that were supposed to blossom into healthy, safe, caring, loving feelings for ourselves

and then for all of our neighbors. And he he had three decades on television to show us, to convince us, to guide us into making the kind of world he dreamed of. And yet here we are in a world that is well m It's not Mr Rogers neighborhood. I'm Carvel Wallace and this is Finding Fred, a podcast about Fred Rogers from I Heart Media and Fatherly in partnership with Transmitter Media. I'm a writer. I got my start by writing about music for MTV and Pitchfork in places

like that. But for a few years I was also the parenting advice columnist for Slate, and every week we would read dozens of letters from desperate, frightened, weary parents wondering how to raise good people, how to be good people. And so I think a lot about what stands in the way for them for us. But the other thing is I grew up as a complete TV nerd. I mean, TV might have had more of an impact on how I understand the world than any adult in my life.

And so now that I am the adult, the parent, even I find myself wondering what TV has to say to my kids, to our kids, about what we can do about the world we live in. And so that's how I get to Fred Rogers, a guy who made TV about this very question. You might have noticed there is an explosion of Mr. Rogers nostalgia going around, but I'm curious about it, Like, why now Fred has been dead for almost twenty years and there are suddenly movies

and documentaries and books. Why is it that generations of adults are all collectively having this nostalgia moment right now? I was really interested in feelings as a kid because nobody talked about feelings, but I seem to have so many. This is Ashley c Ford. She makes her living by thinking deeply about how people feel and trying to communicate something about how that impacts their inner lives and outer lives. I am a writer of essays, articles and a memoir,

and I am a Fred Rogers enthusiasts. What does that mean of Fred Rogers enthusiast? Well, I think of being an enthusiast as being a person who likes a thing from many, many different angles. I remember being very very little and like a nap time when I went to a babysitter, she would put on Mr Rogers and I was like, Yeah, this is not going to put me to sleep. I'm fascinated, Like I loved Mr Rogers, and so I was like, if you want to put me to sleep, you better put on popa Beaver story Time

or something because Mr Rogers, ain't it, lady. He talking about all kinds of stuff that I'm interested in. You know, lots of kids have had that experience. I mean millions actually, but actually has talked about how as an adult she found help from Mr Rogers. I feel like, at different stages of my life, I have come to understand the man and his impact. And I almost want to say

the genius of his empathy. Like we talk about genius and so many capacities when it comes to other things and things that we think of as you know, quote unquote hard, but empathy is really hard. And talking to people about empathy and getting people to understand empathy is so hard. And this man was I believe a genius at it and not just because of innate talent or inclination, but because he valued it and he committed to it and he worked really hard at it. This I love

this idea of being a genius of empathy. And to be a genius of of something like empathy feels like a new idea because we tend to think of the realm of feelings as not requiring work or clarity or discipline. And problem, yeah, yeah, it is our problem. And I want to ask you about that. I want to I mean, like, first, in your own experience, what makes empathy difficult? Like, what do you find empathy difficult or something that requires work rather?

And if so, what makes empathy difficult? Empathy is difficult because people don't have empathy for themselves. M let's talk about empathy. That word is used everywhere today, so much so that it seems to have lost its power, because actually it's a pretty radical idea that we can so closely identify with another person that we can understand their feelings. A lot of us aren't even comfortable with our own feelings anger, fear, sorrow, maybe even certain kinds of happiness.

And if we're not comfortable with our feelings, then We're not really comfortable with ourselves, are we? So then how can we be comfortable with other people? When Ashley came back to Mr. Rogers as an adult, she realized that these were the questions he was grappling with. Yes, watching the show did feel like being with an old, caring friend, but there was way more going on there than just

the warm and fuzzies. The first episode is my favorite episode of Mr. Rogers, and I think what Mr Rogers did was established something in that first episode when he sings the song I like you as you are. I like you as you are exactly and precisely. I think you turned out nicely, and I like you as you are. I do the first time I saw the episode, though

I wasn't a kid it, I was an adult. I had had a really, really tough day and I decided to take a bubble bath and have a glass of wine and just be in the tub and take care of myself. But I didn't want to be like alone with my thoughts, because you know when you have like those sort of stressful, hard days that you're like, I need to watch anything, I need to do anything, because being in my head. My head is not a safe space right now. And so I was like, oh, I'm

going to set up the computer. I'm just gonna play something. And I was like, what can I play that would just be so gentle? What can I watch that would be so gentle that it just it won't make right now harder for me? And I just thought of Mr. Rogers, clicked the first episode of Mr. Rogers, and I'm crying

in the bathtub. I like you, I like you. What I felt like I had rediscovered a piece of myself, like a part of myself, which happens as you age, like you start to think about all the things that you've cast off for reasons that when you look back, or like that was to fit into something else. And I miss that thing and I want it back. And I'm sitting there and I'm listening to this song I Like You as you are, and I'm remembering, Holy sh it, I used to like myself. I wouldn't want to change

you or even rearrange. I used to really really like who I was, and I don't feel like that right now. And it was the beginning of trying to like myself again. Like you, Yes, I like you, Oh you, I do I you like you? As Yeah, are you like what we've done in here, We'll be right back. Teething can be a real nightmare for your little ones. So are you looking for the best relief to soothe teething pain? Highlands Naturals Baby oral pain relief can help us the pain.

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Learn more eco centris dot com or by calling one eight or four Consentics. Cosentics works for Nate. Ask your dermatologist about Consentics. That first episode of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood aired nationally in nineteen sixty eight, and the world in it felt probably a lot like the world does now, scary, chaotic, and unspeakably violent. There was the war in Vietnam. Dr Martin Luther King Jr's a set fascination and the protests

and uprisings that came after. Anger and confusion hung over a lot of adults, and Fred's revolutionary move was to recognize that their kids were probably feeling it too. The very first week of the show when it premiered, had to do with the ruler of the make believe Land, King Friday the thirteenth, building a wall to keep out people and ideas that he didn't want in his kingdom. And now that's creepy when you think about it. In David being Cooley knows a big TV moment when he

sees one. He's watched a ton of them. He's been a television critic for over forty years. And yeah, he loves the Sopranos, and he loves Breaking Bad, and he loves all the prestige television about people murdering one another and dissolving bodies and acid or whatever. But he's also fascinated with the first week of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and the things Fred Rogers is able to communicate in a

land of make believe. Lady Elaine has been up to her tricks again, and she's moved the Eiffel Tower on the wrong side of the castle, and the tree has gone away from over here to the middle, and the clock is over here in the fountain. Well, it's just all mixed direct. She must be really upset. He's furious about it, and he has established border guards in the neighborhood make Believe. That sounds like a war. The people in his kingdom. The other puppets, the other characters send

out balloons. Boy, do you ever look nifty with all those blows over the wall? That are nice, supportive balloons like you know, we like you, we want to get to know you. And they decide a wall and a barrier isn't a good thing. Now, this was, you know, and it's dealing with Vietnam um essentially, but it still resonates, I mean, much more than I'm comfortable with it. Resonating.

Vietnam was just one in what seemed like a laundry list of dark and difficult news items in because earlier that summer, Bobby Kennedy was shot and Fred Rogers asked for a prime time special because he understood that even if children were too young to understand who Bobby Kennedy was or what had happened, they would feel the vibe in their own homes about how upset their parents were, how upset uh they're older siblings were, and wanted to talk about it. So in one sketch, he has Daniel

Stripe a tiger. Just a minute, I want to show you. Simply asking Betty Aberlin, one of the human people who visits in the neighborhood and it's a bloom off, could you blew it up for you? Asked her to blow up a balloon and then let the air out and do it a few times. And he was concerned about something this little, this little puppet. What about your air, my my air inside me? Mm hmm. What if you blow all your air out, then you won't have any left,

just like the balloon. But people aren't like balloons, Daniel. When we blow air out, we get some more back in. Oh, what does assassination mean? And this is out of a children's hand puppet. As far as you know that any other children shows address that topic? Yeah, no, and and

and I've looked. I just ask you in regardless of what, uh the big news event is, can you imagine any children's television program that's on right now coming up almost with like a news special addressing the emotional consequences of it. It doesn't exist. This special ran the evening after Bobby Kennedy died. Fred Rogers wrote this scene overnight. He was so tuned into his audience that he knew that this was something that children and their families absolutely needed to hear.

Fred Rogers empathized with the kids who were feeling so scared and confused, So he talked right to those kids, and then he talked to their parents too, about how to help with the children. The best thing in the world is for your children to be included in your family ways of coping with the problems that that present themselves any time, but particularly now in this very difficult

time in our nation. Fred Rogers invented a neighborhood where people got together to talk about the things that confused them or scared them, and he used this place to show his viewers what you have to do to work through your emotions, and in doing that he was able to communicate complex concepts, moral, even spiritual concepts, concepts that even adults are still struggling to get a hold of.

Empathy is about like sort of finding the space between the parts that connect, right, Like we know as humans that we are connected to each other inextricably and irrevocably. Like we know that because we have to live in the world together and we have to rely on each other. I UM, in working on this project, I'm like really

struck with what seems to me an apparent paradox. I think that this question of empathy feels so complicated for some people because on the one hand, it's like, are you saying we should have empathy for for rapists and racists and violent people and white supremacists. I think that makes people feel panicked about the idea of empathy, and I want to explore that a little bit with you, Like, how do you see those ideas working together? Well, let

me start here. I'll start by saying, um, and I guess I'll just say whatever I say, and you guys can decide whether or not that's not appropriate. UM. My father has was in press and from the time I was about oh six months old until I was almost thirty, and my dad was I found out when I was fourteen years old that my dad was in prison for sexual assault, that that's why he was there, and that that's why he would be there for however long. And my dad had also written me letters up until that

point my entire life. I mean, just so many letters. You're the best girl in the world. I love you so much. You're my favorite girl. UM, I think you're amazing. Never forget that your dad loves you. I'm thinking of you all the time. Nothing is better than your smile, you know, like all this kinds of stuff. And that had been to be perfectly honest, like the basis of

my self esteem. And then to find out that this was true about my father was really, really tough for me, but it started the beginning of a real understanding the complexity of humanity, and that a person can be one person's hero and another person's worst nightmare and their monster and the thing that was hiding in the dark, and both of those things can be true about a person right like it has to be like, there was no

there was no other way to see this. He has both done a bad thing and he a terrible thing, a monstrous thing, and he has also, you know, been the thing that up into this point has kept me from feeling like I was alone in the world. And the truth is we're connected to these people for better or worse. We all want to be good, to be friendly, to be neighbors, at least most of us. But when we see other people acting well bad, we get hurt,

we lose our own balance, we get mad. There are a lot of reactions to the state of our country, the state of the world, the state of society, all those things that are a lot of reactions right now that it is perfectly understandable for people to be this angry, and so I don't really blame the people who are kind of hot headed and lose their minds, or you know, like or or are so seems so consumed by their

anger that they're more angry than alive. Like. I don't blame them, but I do always think, Man, who's going to be there? And how are they going to deal when the anger stops being enough? Because it'll never be enough. It will never, ever, ever, ever ever be enough. What do you do with the man that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite, when the whole wide world it seems, and nothing you do seems very What do you do with the man you feel? It's

a question that preoccupied Fred Rogers. He wrote a song about it. He felt so strongly about it that he recited the lyrics to that song in front of a Senate committee hearing in You Got the Flaw. It's a famous bit of footage, and we'll return to it again. But I'm struck that this is one of the first times Fred Rogers was really explicit about what he was

doing with his TV programs. And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. Uh. I think that it's much more dramatic that two men could be working out or feelings of anger, much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. Could I tell you the words of one

of the songs, which I feel is very important. This has to do with that good feeling of control which I feel that that children need to know is there. And it starts out what do you do with the mad that you feel? And that first line came straight from a child? What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite, When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right? What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay

or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag? Or see how fast you go? It's great to be able to stop when you've planned a thing that's wrong, and be able to do something else instead. And think this song I can stop when I want to, can stop when I wish, can stop, stop, stop any time? And what a good feeling to feel, and what a good failing to feel like this and know that the failing is really mine. I guess that makes me think a lot about the force of anger and the violence

and ugliness that anger can cause. And here's this person sort of standing at the riverhead of anger and wanting to divert it. And I think it's a fascinating idea. And I want to ask you, what do you do Ashley with the mad that you feel? Oh? My god, I think because anger is a thing that I had to teach myself, give myself permission to feel in my adulthood, because I grew up in a very angry household where anger was the emotion. Did you, um? But every day

I I think. What I have learned to do with my anger is to talk to it, which sounds so I know that it sounds a little booboo, but hey, this is Mr Rogers. Um, but I do. I talked to my anger because what I've what I've essentially learned, is that every emotion is just trying to tell you something. And when I'm angry, I think it's trying to tell me what I care about. It's trying to tell me what's important to me. Years ago, Um, I was really angry. I was working at a media company and the Ferguson

Uprising was happening, and the newsroom was covering it. We were all talking about it, and I had a conversation with a boss who told me that they did not want me to tweet out the words black Lives matter because it was political and it could affect my colleagues ability to do their job. And I remember feeling so angry at the implication that I could choose. That's not just a choice. And I think that's when I just got to it, why where I was just like, you

know what I can. I'm gonna do something, and it's going to be something that they're not going to be able to do anything about. I ended up raising about half a million dollars for the Ferguson Library because it was a really safe place for children. Schools were closed and teachers were going to the library and just sending emails to parents and saying, hey, if you need to bring your kids to the library, we're just all going

to go to the library. And it's not that it makes the anger go away, but what it does is it it makes the anger not feel chaotic. I'm giving it a job so that I don't have to live within in my body. What do you do with the mad that you feel. What do you do with the sadness, the frustration? What do you do with the joy and this surprise or the love that you feel? Over something like nine episodes, Fred Rogers used the language of children and the land of make believe to talk about feelings.

But this is not light work. Mr Rogers Neighborhood was not a simple show, and Mr Rogers Fred Rogers was not a simple man. He was a preacher who did his best work on television. He was a wildly talented musician and composer who wrote songs primarily heard by four year olds. He was deeply involved with people who were transforming the very way we think about children and learning. Fred Rogers was a radical in a sense. He was spiritual,

he was revolutionary. I mean he might have even been subversive. Get scared me, get mad if we get too scared about fights, will never do things together? Ever? Yeah, I think now right, I think this is the calming down way to say I love you. Fred Rogers left us an enormous body of work, a road map. I think that we can revisit to see what we can learn that still applies as much today as it did in n So We're going to talk to the people who

knew him best. What was true about Fed Rogers is he was he was tuned in at a deeper level than most people in the daytime. I was learning this complex child development theory in grad school, and at night I would come into the control room and I would see Fred live out all the things I was learning about. We'll also seek out people like Ashley and others who grew up with Mr. Rogers, people who recognize there's something

deeper going on there. We're gonna try to understand some of what Fred coded into his children's program and see if we can put it into a language for the adults who so desperately need it. Now, we're trying to crawl into of mind of Fred Rogers. How did this singular dude from an Appalachian town happen to develop some of the most spiritually sophisticated, substantial, maybe even essential television of all time. You can call his work of philosophy, but it really just comes down to this, how can

Fred Rogers help us be better neighbors? Next week? When I met Fred Rogers, he was a very unusual positive energy, so damn unusual, and by that I mean those puppets. What on Earth was a grown man doing plan with those puppets? Finding Fred is produced by Transmitter Media. The team is Dan O'Donnell, Jordan by Lee and Maddie Foley. Our editor is Sarah Nick's editorial will help from Michael Garofalo. The executive producer for Transmitter Media is Credit Cone. Executive

producers at Fatherly are Simon Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Music by Blue Dot Sessions and Alison Layton Brown And thanks to the team at My Heart. If you like what you're hearing, rate the show, review the show, and tell a friend I'm Carvel Wallace, thank you for listening. Teething can be a real nightmare for your little ones. Highlands Natural's baby oral pain relief tablets can help ease the pain.

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