A Genius of Empathy

On bad days and bathtubs. On assassination and puppetry. On the mad that you feel. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
papoosas Have you ever tried to explain how a person

(00:22):
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,

(00:44):
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,

(01:10):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:57):
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

(02:20):
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,

(02:41):
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

(03:03):
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,

(03:25):
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

(03:46):
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 are
supposed to blossom into healthy, safe, caring, loving feelings for
ourselves and then for all of our neighbors. And he

(04:07):
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 it's not Mr Rogers neighborhood.
I'm Carvel Wallace and this is Finding Fred, a podcast

(04:30):
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 columnists for Slate, and every week

(04:51):
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.

(05:15):
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

(05:37):
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 book Why is it that generations

(06:02):
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.

(06:26):
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

(06:51):
little and like a nap time when I went to
a babysitter. She would put on Mr Rogers and I
was like, YEO, this is not going to put me
to sleep. I'm fascinated, but 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

(07:12):
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

(07:36):
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

(07:57):
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 something like empathy feels like a
new idea because we tend to think of the realm

(08:20):
of feelings as not requiring work or clarity or discipline.
And problem, yeah, yeah, here's 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

(08:41):
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,

(09:03):
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,

(09:25):
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

(09:48):
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

(10:13):
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, 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

(10:34):
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
gonna 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

(10:59):
now out 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, Yes, I do.
I like you? What I felt like I rediscovered a
piece of myself, like a part of myself, which happens

(11:20):
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

(11:43):
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 do.
I like you? Oh you, I do? I love you?

(12:08):
Like you as you are. You like what we've done
in here, We'll be right back. That first episode of Mr.

(12:48):
Rogers Neighborhood aired nationally in nineteen and the world in
it felt probably a lot like the world does now, scary,
k aotic, and unspeakably violent. There was the war in Vietnam.
Dr Martin Luther King Junior's assassination and the protests and
uprisings that came after. Anger and confusion hung over a

(13:12):
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

(13:34):
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

(13:54):
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 was 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

(14:16):
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 erect. He
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

(14:37):
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,

(15:00):
this was, you know, and it's dealing with Vietnam 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

(15:21):
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

(15:42):
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

(16:04):
a balloon, could you blow 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.

(16:25):
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?

(16:57):
And this is out of a children's hand puppet. As
far as you know that any other children shows address
that topic, No, and and and I've looked. I just
ask you in regardless of what uh the big news

(17:20):
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

(17:42):
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

(18:04):
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,

(18:27):
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

(18:47):
you have to do to work through your emotions. And
in doing that he was able to communicate complex concepts, moral,
even spiritual concepts, excepts 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,

(19:10):
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

(19:31):
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.

(19:56):
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 prison from the time I was about oh six
months old until I was almost thirty, and my dad

(20:19):
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

(20:40):
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

(21:03):
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

(21:24):
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

(21:45):
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

(22:07):
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

(22:28):
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

(22:51):
never ever, ever, ever, ever be enough. What do you
do with the man that you've feel when you feel
so mad you could bite me, when the whole wide
world seems wrong, and nothing you do seems very what

(23:13):
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

(23:35):
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

(23:58):
for mental health. Uh. I think that it's much more
dramatic that two men could be working out their 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

(24:22):
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

(24:46):
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,

(25:06):
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 feeling to feel like this and know that the

(25:26):
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

(25:48):
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

(26:10):
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 talk

(26:34):
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.

(26:55):
I was working at a media company and the Ferguson
uprising was happening, and the news room was covering it.
We were all talking about it, and I had a
conversation with a boss who told me that they did

(27:16):
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

(27:42):
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

(28:06):
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

(28:32):
the man 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

(28:53):
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

(29:16):
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

(29:38):
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.

(30:01):
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 Fred Rogers is he was he was tuned in

(30:23):
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

(30:44):
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,

(31:05):
we're trying to crawl into the 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,

(31:26):
how can Fred Rogers help us be better neighbors next week?
When I met Fred Rogers, he was a very unusual

(31:48):
positive energy, so damn unusual, and by that I mean
those puppets. What on earth was a grown man doing?
Plan with The pub is Finding Fred is produced by
Transmitter Media. The team is Dan O'Donnell, Jordan Bailey, and
Mattie Foley. Our editor is Sarah Nick's editorial will help

(32:11):
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.