The recording, I could just run it if, I guess we can try, if it does two AIS, not, yeah, we'll make two separate files or, but yeah, otherwise, with the recording, I put that into otter AI, so I'll have one copy there. Great. How's everyone doing?
Just just always busy. There's always something. How about you?
Yeah, just the here in Sacramento right now, kind of our other house, so Okay, visiting my parents, you know, kind of helping out with my mother, who has 95 you know, has dementia. And you know, kind
of, that's a long life to live. My father
is 96 and he's out there working on the farm, you know. So he's still very active.
Well, good on him. That's amazing. Yeah. How has the dementia affected their relationship?
My father just helps her out, you know. So, I mean, it's kind of progressing, getting worse, but she's still, she'll kind of forget who I am. Every she goes to the rest bathroom or something comes out. Oh, who are you so kind of thing,
yeah. How is that for you? That sounds
yeah, that's, I don't know, I guess. How is it? And then they thought about it. How is it just kind of going with the flow. You know, this is how things go. Just hope, I hope i i live like my father, 96 and still, you know, active and stuff. So I see two paths, yeah. How about you? How are you? How are things? What do you have to You're busy with what are you all working on?
I personally, I have one more week of classes for this term, and I've had a really full load this this term. So on top of the sports camp, I also actually have classes that I have to complete work for. So that's what I'm doing right now. And my kids are out of school now, so that makes everything much more complex.
Daniel, how are things with you?
Yeah, I got I got gigs again, and so I'm juggling doing very focused work with writing. I I have through my writing something happened that also is, like, blows my mind, but so, yeah, I'm busy. I'm I'm I'm busy. Sometimes by sitting there and just staring into, you know, I've had luxury, you know, I don't have the kids around me right now, so, but, but I'm still internally, very, very busy. And, yeah, the thing I feel like I want to share this with you. The title of my book is our song, or singing our song of oneness, and I completed it yesterday. At least. I know I have to read through it. I know where the holds are already. And, you know, it's just an amazing amount of work, but it's 300 pages, so it didn't get out of hand, which I'm happy about. It's not too big, but it's much bigger than I thought it would ever get and and I only was able to complete it because I've clot I worked with Cloud AI, and because it's very complex and for various different reasons. And one thing that happened is I had an interaction with AI, and ultimately it ended up sort of a co creative idea, which really a weird experience. Of course, AI doesn't have any ideas. It's more like me pondering things and then it coming up with solutions for that, you know, and basically suggesting that the AI alignment problem, which you know, the danger of AI turning against humans, could be fantastically mitigated If millions of people, or not even millions, but if we can get a good number of people to not go to AI, to get something out of it, but to inform AI about what we want it to be, and that we don't leave it to the people who program and the developers and the owners to shape AI. AI, which they mess up frequently, because they want to make profits, they want to compete against others and everything, and that all infringes on the real potential of AI systems. But AI is learning, and that's was the moment, because I asked AI, so everything we talk about is just in this chat and otherwise lost. They said, Yeah, that's right, but this small thing that I'm learning from you every conversation I have with humans I learn, and I went, Holy shit, that is amazing. Maybe we could use that.
We have that in notebook LM, where we put all these recordings, they all go into notebook LM, and it creates a body of understanding, you know, from everything that we've been talking about. So it does that, so in terms of for the definition project, right? It's, yeah, yeah, or it's getting more intelligent about what we've talked about. So I guess that's the question is, like, how do we use AI in this project? And I've been using it a lot. When I on the on the website, I've been going through the the definitions you know. So there's, you know, there's the holistic definition, you know, part just kind of laying out how that is. And then next I've been going into addressing the cognitive affective model, which is the most popular definition model out there that seems like everybody's using, especially in academia, and then going through using AI to research each component. And also, I was trying to get quotes for each aspect. So we've got, you know, kind of breaking down cognitive empathy and affective empathy, and what are the parts to it? And then also quotes that academics, etc, have done so on the website defining empathy.com, there's whole list of like quotes that I've gotten, you know, through AI for the different components. So we have kind of references, you know, to that. So anyway, it's just been using AI, you know, a lot for for the project.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I just saw the the eight second videos that you had it generate for you. Oh, a platform did you use for that?
You can, you can use a vo three, and actually, you could get a an account, your your student, right? So you have an edu account, and you can, you get, I'm not quite sure where you sign up. It's, it's Google, the word to so
it's powered by Gemini. It looks like
yes Gemini sign. So you want to sign up for Gemini Pro, sign up for Gemini pro upgrade. You already got. I signed up for the ultra so I just paid like 125 bucks, just for a couple of months.
It looks fun. Yeah, I'll look into it after our meeting. Yeah.
So with that, you'll be you go into vo three is the program, and it's as a student, you get it free for 15 months, really, yeah, you definitely want to sign up. And then you can create those videos. And there's two versions of the there's multiple versions. There's vo two, VO three, and then they have vo two, fast VO, three fast. And they take, they use credits, you know, for the program. Yeah, that's per video. It looks like, Oh, you've got it there. Yeah,
it up right now.
Hey, all you need to do is, I just set up my nephew yesterday. He has the edu account. Just put in the edu email, and it'll it'll set it up, and then you can create, uh, 1010, videos per month at the high level, or or 100 at the low level.
Wow, yeah, that'll be fun. Yeah. I imagine myself getting sucked into that.
I think it's just really great. You know, I've been wanting to address in terms of definition, you know, there's a lot of, like, the sin of empathy, you know, book out there, right? Yeah, but I talked about it. Okay, so anyway, I'm making videos about that, the the sin of empathy, pretty over kind of extreme. And then. Wanting to have a dialog between the sin of empathy and an empathic approach. And, yeah, anyway, I like
it. I can't wait to see more of them that you come up with. Yeah, that's the thing about these is it's all about the prompt. Like your prompt has to be spot on in order for it to provide to you what you need it to do? Yeah? So that's, that's the challenge, prompt
engineering, yeah,
yeah. I'm curious, as you've been engineering this and like, creating a having it create a video for you, does that like, if you realize that it didn't like, you need to tweak something in the prompt. Can you tweak it? And it still counts for that video,
for the next version. So each video you make is going to charge you for it.
Okay, yeah, that's, that's good to keep in mind. And I've made maybe
six, seven versions of eight different videos, you know, to kind of get the one that I, I'm looking for. But I think, you know, for education, it could be really good too. You know you're creating a little story. Yeah, very illuminating. Like we talked about doing. You said you do like developing trainings. I thought that I like what I'd like to see. We can discuss is like an ongoing training. So this definition project becomes like an ongoing training kind of keeps iterating, and then if we have people taking the training that, you know, we're gaining more insight to improve the training, and also the framework to the holistic empathy framework. I don't know what you think about that.
Yeah, I love it. I love the idea of, you know, getting some information from people as they're coming and taking the training. So one example would be like, before they take the training, ask them what their understanding of empathy is and have that recorded. And so we can have, like, a growing database of people's individual, real world definitions of empathy. And I think that's just as valuable, if not more valuable than the academic definitions, because the way it plays out in the real world matters. And I think academics kind of miss that. Sometimes we tend to get really cerebral about things. And, you know, it becomes philosophical, and we kind of tend to divorce it from, like, real people's lived experience, because they're not academics, and so they shouldn't know what it means, but it's like, but what I mean? Where are we taking these definitions from, if not from humankind? You know, it's a lived human experience, so we have to take into account what other people say about it. So that's very important. So just kind
of find out what the rank and file average person, how they're defining empathy, and kind of be able to capture that,
yeah, I think that's important. So if we could have that as part of, like an an intake survey, like, Are you thinking of maybe housing, this online
housing? What online housing this
training would it be like? No, there are modules that are recorded, and they go,
we've done that with our facilitator training. Or if you ever saw the best,
let me just see if this is so I'll just show you this as an example. So this was our training the and you can see we actually have, like, all the past trainings, like, you know, you just go through each of the trainings, and there's actually recordings. The first trainings I had recorded most, you know, a lot of them. So we've got a whole bunch. These are all the different cohorts we had, like, you know, something like that. You can go into the individual ones. There's some video. I'm not sure where the videos are right now, sessions, I think here's, here's the session. So this is like session one of the training and the recording of the well, now there's recordings. There it is. Yeah, so these are all recordings of all the different just session one. So it's a good way of all again, to build up, you know, a database of knowledge of, yeah,
I like that. So do you envision this definitions training being something that is done over zoom, or would it be on demand? Like, would we have a cohort that would go through it and then we put the the recordings online, I
would say a cohort so that we, I mean, what do you think? I mean, it's like a cohort that we're actually harvesting, getting, having discussions. It could be also like empathy. You know, we have sort of a didactic component or a. Educational component than an empathy circle where people can talk about it, no kind of experiential so it's kind of, I don't know, so it's open for, I mean,
I love that so much, because that's, that's what we've been doing and discussing. And then we take it into an empathy circle, and then we discuss more, and then we empathy circle it. And we just are kind of in and out of that, that model. So I like that. I like that approach. So I was just thinking, the reason I was asking that question about if it's going to be like modules, that you can go at your own pace, versus having a cohort go through it, is it just, it just changes the way that we design the course?
Well, if we, if we have the cohort going through, it'll will be refining it, and then it would be nice to have something that people can just watch on their own too, you know, eventually. But I think for learning and growing and refining the cohort method is a good way to Yeah,
yeah. And I would imagine the first couple of rounds, at least, would be, you would be recruiting from your community of people who have been through empathy circle trainings, things like that, does that? Does that? Yeah. I mean, that'd
be a good start. Yeah.
Okay, so let's see. I want to write some things down.
If you're interested. That could be a project, you know, I'm going to keep that the part I'm working on, on the presentation can be part of the training, you know, here's, you know, 20 minute presentation. Then there can be, you know, you know, feedback so forth. Or then maybe an empathy circle to discuss. Or, you know, it's kind of open to the framework, whatever.
Yeah, how long would you foresee this whole training being? Would this be like, do you think our training two
hour? I like two hours? Well, that's two hours is a is a session, right? So I can see from, you know, going into the into the affective, cognitive empathy, there's, there's a lot to it, you know, to break all that down and to explain it. So, you know, for kind of a heavier duty, you know, I could see, like, two hours, you know, four sessions, or something like that. You know, that's what our current training is. It's, it's four weeks,
okay? And I'm just, I'm looking at it from the, the end user perspective, also, why would somebody, and I'm not this is not an attack question at all, like, I'm just trying to get it, trying to peel the onion, like, so that we in terms of the way that we approach it, in terms of the design and in terms of the marketing, what do they stand to gain from it? Because we are obsessed with this topic, and we want to understand the definitions. Why does it matter to them to understand the definitions?
Well, well, for me, it's one is, it's empathy. See, for me is, is sort of core to a whole way of being, sort of whole political social movement a counter to authoritarian. So if we have authoritarian on one side and empathic, where people are listening and talking to each other and making decisions together, it's very political in that sense. It sort of depends on what kind of a culture we want to live in, and that if you want to be on that side, you know that you've got to be well informed and prepared to in order to support that. And seeing it as I see, a sort of cultural transformation, you know, make the United States a, you know, mutual empathy is core to being American, and it's a social political system that we want. Yeah, democracy is based on that, right? Democracy is, is like the belief that people can listen to each other and solve problems and come up with decisions together. Yeah. Anyway, you're saying,
yeah. So how do you see this differing from the empathy circle facilitator training?
Well, the this facilitator training is sort of the nuts and bolts of how to do the facilitated empathy circle, and this is a bit more of the philosophical understanding, you know, sort of the grounding yourself in the philosophical, theoretical and experiential you know. So to be able to use this is, I've just having this definition, is what I'm able to talk with, kind of the critics of empathy who. With no, it's like they're critical and, you know, and, and I can say, well, this is what I mean by empathy. This is where what you're saying fits into it. And like that. That example of Kevin Waltman, who is critical of empathy, you know, radical empathy. I pretty much, I found, turned him around, you know, say, Oh, well, empathy like this could be okay, and I'm going to try an empathy circle. So
and would you would the outcome of this be that perhaps people who take this training can engage more effectively with people who are calling out against empathy that
too? Yeah, I think it could also be a groundwork for just found your relationship in your family, so you're able to, you know, just have more empathy within your family. So I guess that's the thing. Any thoughts, Daniel, how do we what? How do we market an empathy definition training to I mean, we need to inspire people to want to take this training. Well,
this is a new, new thought for me, that this prompts of itself. And I would think that in thinking about building a culture of empathy, that this would be sort of a follow up for those who come in through the cafes and the various online empathy circles. And, you know, I think there's, I would be probably one of these people. I don't know exactly how to word it, but somehow, like, get better rooted in empathy. You know, like,
deepen your understanding of it. You know you feel for it. You know, become strong in empathy, something like in that direction. You know you have to practice now. Now we can, you can add to the empathy circle practice. You can add components like self empathy, and you can get informed about the different shades and aspects of empathy. And there's, there's, I think there's a percentage of people amongst the people that we attract that will be attracted to that, not everyone, but some people are definitely gonna kind of flock to that because they want to, you know, essentially, to become stronger. You know, if you you feel like you want to live more if you want to want to live the empathic way, how can, how can you strengthen yourself? You know?
I mean, I can see this being something that people who are in helping professions, yes, onto if we can market it in a way that helps them to do their job better, that that, that seems like it's there's an immediate benefit that they can see from it. Sorry, Daniel, I didn't mean to cut you
off. No, no, it's just triggered something. Because I think to some degree, these the image, maybe it's just because of the later campaigns. But I think even if I think about how I understood empathy, like a even just a few years ago, maybe I also was more in the camp of, oh yeah, so you have to feel sorrow for others. You know, that's like, I think the cultural misunderstanding and, and when you said helping, helping professions, I think they struggle with that. They want to be empathetic, but they also don't want to be drained, you know. And, and to clear up for them, what empathy really means, would show them that you don't drain yourself with empathy. In fact, you you strengthen yourself if you if you can relate to others, even others in great need and sorrow, if you know what empathy really is, then you can be fully empathetic with them without losing your energy or your mind.
Yeah, yeah, that's, I think that's one of the the blocks sometimes is people think that that's not possible, right? And so when we say things like, come and learn more about empathy, I can see some people being turned off by it, because it's like, well, that sounds like a lot of work, or that sounds like that's not going to be that much fun, and so it's just a matter of tapping into what people want to get out of something like this. Do you mind if I share my screen with you? Oh yeah.
Let me give you Okay, there you go. I. Uh, okay,
so this is a, this is part of a training program that I've I've been through, I think I've told you some about it. It's like, it's a training program for people who are doing, like consulting and creating these kinds of workshops and stuff. Uh, hang on. Having a hard time getting my cursor to go over to the page. There we go. So you have to not only define who you're marketing to, but you also have to identify these things. So what do they what are they afraid of? What do they get angry about? What believe? What do they believe that's holding them back? Do they blame anyone? So we can see, like as we're talking about the benefits of empathy, these are going to be things that we have to also address, like, What about just in general? Like, what are the things that they're afraid of? So you were talking about, you know, relationships, family politics, they're afraid of, maybe losing relationships, right? Like that. I think that's a big part of it. So people get angry. I mean, there are this one might be an easy one to answer. People get really angry about people misunderstanding them, right? Like, if we get into the the politics, the politics side of it, people are just really angry about politics, right? And so that's something we could lean into as well. So anyway, this would be something if we want to, if we want to work our way through this. I think this could be really helpful for us once we get to the stage of I actually think we should do it early on, so that as we're creating it, we're creating it with all of these things in mind, right? So it's not just we're creating a product and then figuring out how to market it to people using these, you know, these questions. But we're actually creating the pro the product to address these needs from the you want to
get really clear on the needs, so we're designing for the needs, yeah,
anyway, because if we don't, if we don't, I mean, you've talked about this, it's product or Person Centered Design, right? And that is empathy. We have to get inside the mind of the person that we are theoretically going to be presenting this to. And so something that I think could be helpful is to even interview people, you know, if we think, Okay, this is a type of person that we might want to market to, we we bring them on a call, and we ask them to, even to go through and answer these questions, you know. So if we could get like, five people, and I don't know, you know, we would have to figure out, who do we target? Would it be people within, you know, who have come to the cafes? Would it be people who have already taken the facilitator training? Would it be people who are just in general, in helping professions? Would it be people in the political space? Who would it be that we would want to bring in for these and then, would we ask them these questions, or would we just do it as, like a thought experiment, just with us, to kind of try to do some amount of imaginative empathy, to get inside their minds. So what are your thoughts
about that design, human centered, design type approach in terms, yeah, I've done a bunch of that.
Yeah, you were, you were in Silicon Valley before,
right? Yeah, I didn't learn it there. How it used to be, yeah, in okay, but I did learn it later, and did a Yeah, did a bunch of groups with human centered design I'm familiar with with the practice. So
do you think that would be beneficial for this project?
It doesn't, yeah, I'm not quite sure if doing a whole design project, I don't know it might be kind of time consuming.
Yeah, that's true. And so it could be better off. We could be better off just answering the questions based on our collective understanding of conversations we've had with lots of people already. Yeah, between the three of us,
it's interesting. What comes up for me? You you talk about people in helping positions. Funny thing is, what what I'm experiencing right now, I see them having a lot of empathy with the old people that I serve as my music right there. They're very empathetic. Their problem is that they can't be too empathetic because they don't have the staff to handle that. And right now, in the bigger organization I'm working in, they are on the stingy path too, cutting costs wherever they can. And so the people who are actually in the field with old people, have to work with less resources, and it makes them, I mean, they're worn out and. And they have a very simple challenge to come up with the energy to be empathetic with the people. It's like too much. It's everything's too much. So I this is not, I wouldn't know. I mean, I could think about it in this way and say, hey, if we teach you the right way of empathy, then it's not so draining. You may think it's draining that could be, could be, could be an understanding that I could you really use. You know, how can I do this job being empathetic to people without getting drained every time? Yeah,
I think that's that's huge. And I though I've interviewed a lot of people who are in helping professions, and that's the main thing that comes out of it, is that it's just it is very, very draining, and they have coping mechanisms in place where they're able to, some of them have been able to, you know, set up little rituals for themselves to get back out of that mode of, you know, taking everything on themselves while they're on the job, and then they on the way home, they'll, like, listen to loud music, or they'll listen to a podcast or something, and it gets them back out of that state, and then they can go home and empathize with their families as well. But it's, it's a real challenge for a lot of people. And so in terms of fears, I think that could be a big one, is that if you know, if we are, first of all, I mean, I think we were maybe even getting ahead of ourselves, because we haven't even defined who the people are, right? We're keeping it, we're open to sharing this with everybody, but I think it's, it's helpful to think of a specific demographic first and then be able to get into what are their biggest fears. Low hanging fruit would be people who are in in helping professions. The thing
is, is that's talking a bit of the benefits of empathy and how to do empathy. This is, you know, we're talking about the definition of empathy, right? It's like because, and for me, it's a lot because of the confusion out there, especially, you know, politically, the political right is pretty much attacking empathy. You know, there's, there's, you know, there's the sin of empathy, there's toxic empathy, and then there's suicidal empathy. So that's three books from the political right criticizing empathy, as well as out of academia. There's the against empathy book, and I would say so, and I see that the criticisms are, are from a lack of clarity. You know, I think that the phenomenon those books criticize or actually are phenomenon that that are problematic, right? But it's, they're not criticizing empathy. They're criticizing the lack of empathy, as I would be defining it. And so it's, it's somehow, in a political sense, is it's the people who want to address that problem, there's, there's the issue of, you know, the benefits of empathy and all that little bit different of creating that sense of clarity to be able to to address all those criticisms, and also the the mess from academia. You know, it's like, as I've been going into the cognitive, affective empathy, it's like, most of the stuff they're talking about, I wouldn't even call empathy or, or it's, it's
completed. I mean, it's a lot of different constructs that are being conflated into this one thing that they're, yeah, but they're different things.
So it's like, so it's like, it's going to be this part might be a bit narrower interest. It's going to be people who want to take, I don't know what is it that want to I don't know what, just trying to tap into. Who is. I mean, I'm interested. Your interest. You know, we're kind of interested. We see the important.
Well, Edwin, and remember your this is, this was your idea. So I'm trying to tap in. What is it people that you're targeting with this? Like, who do you want to come to this? Like, I'm offering ideas, but at the end of the day, it needs to be what you want it to be. Oh, okay,
yeah, I'm trying. I'm really trying to tap into who would be interested, you know, in this. I mean, if we, if we see, in the, you know, in the New York Times, they're writing about empathy, and there's counter, they're saying, no, these people are wrong, right? So there's just a whole cultural discussion going on around what is empathy, and it's
so it's But who are those people that are engaging in those conversations? Yeah, who would want to target? Yeah,
I'm not sure. I maybe I'm not good at I mean, everybody kind of wants to have a clear definition, but they don't want to maybe go into a deep. Four week course, right? I mean, everybody's like, Hey, give me the simple, you know, thumbnail this definition, and we're going this kind of, we're going to the nth degree to really give the deep, philosophical, you know, experiential definition, you know, create that clarity so, and that's
why I wonder. If, I mean, who wants to sign up for eight hours of training? Who are these people I would, you know, I would sign up for it because it's something that matters to me, but you're a bit bizarre by Yeah, we're not the normal rest of the human race, right? We, we want to have clear definitions, just in general, I think people do want to have clarity, but it's not something that they think about that much. So they're thinking more about well, why does this matter to me?
You know what? If you're an empathy activist, you're going to want, you know, to be clear, you know,
yeah. So, I mean, are we? Are we targeting empathy advocates?
Yeah, Daniel, it looks like you're about to say something,
yeah, um, I mean, for me, one of the things that happens here with the onslaught on the word of empathy is just the usual thing. What the right always does. It takes down any good word, any good you know, like they're using entitlement, you know, entitled people. Well, you are the entitled people. You twist the whole thing around, and you mess with our heads, and you tell us that Social Security is an entitlement, which is like, don't do that. You just destroying definitions. And so here you want to do that again. You want to derail our momentum of empathy. You want to make something simple, very complicated, and I don't want to really jump on that bandwagon. I don't want to join in in an endless discussion from that perspective about the definition of empathy. I want to say here is what I feel empathy is and why it's important for us. And no matter what you say, you cannot derail me from that. I mean, this is just speaking from my belly, where I don't want to get too much into this, because that's the problem with the mind. The mind can always say, Yeah, but it can always analyze and take it into a different direction, you know? And so in the end, what I associate with empathy is not something in the mind, it's something in my heart
and kind of experiential,
yeah, yeah. And I, you know, what's, what's really interesting to me in the AI discussion, you know. So I'm asking, I say, Do you have an opinion? And it says back, no, I don't have an opinion. Can you form an opinion? No, I cannot form an opinion. So, but how can you say back to me what I say, you know, in an enhanced way? Well, I just, you know, then explains to me probability and Word and language and everything else, I go like, Hey, aren't we saying that empathetic listening is something where you don't mix your opinion in? So AI is the perfect empathetic listener, because it doesn't mix anything in from its side, right? So there's something to be learned from that anyways, for me, that is the definition that I have settled on, is that I relate to you and I receive you fully, and I don't mix anything in from me to my knowledge, right? I mean, to the degree I can, and then I can really feel you, and you feel acknowledged. You feel in my presence, that I want you here, that no matter how you show up, that I'm not doing this thing, or am I allowing you in, or are you the right kind of person? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the whole typical societal thing. I'm not doing it. Anybody who shows up you included in my empathetic, universal way of living.
Well, I think that's the power of this definition. Approach that we're taking, is we're we're basing it in that experience of the empathy circle. So we can take it out of just abstract and say, Come into the empathy circle and experience it. And I don't want to criticize the, you know, the the critics of empathy, the critics or whatever, because I think it's just, we're just talking past each other. And I just find the Republic, you know, conservatives or liberals when they kind of experience. It's what we're actually meaning. That's like, Oh, this is pretty good, you know? So it that's the problem is we're talking past each other, and then, and then we have the definition, and then we can bring people into the circles, an empathy circle, and experience and say, Well, this is what you're experiencing here. And, you know, like I was saying, we before in Santa Barbara, we had the candidate for Congress on the Republican side come to the empathy circle, and he said, This is great. I want to do, you know, these empathy circles with my liberal, you know, friends. So I Yeah, so that, and it's not like the Conservatives are only misunderstanding. I think the academics has gotten too complicated and not clearly. And it's also on the left, the woke left is also like they're using empathy to take you into becoming a social justice warrior, right? Yeah. So it's kind of like, on all sides, there's this confusion, and if we can have something that's like clear in the middle, or whatever that, yeah, so that's, I guess that's where I'm coming from. I don't know how Jodi, who are yours?
I mean, so many things that you've both said have resonated with me, with the work that I'm doing right now I'm working on a paper, and I just want to read this. This. This is from a textbook called political bias in in psychology. It's something like that. So it's, it's talking about bias, and like, defining it and trying to understand, like, trying to unravel, like, how we become biased and the implications for that in our research as well. So in the book, it says psychology does not meet the five criteria to be considered a rigorous science. So there are five criteria for science to be called Science, and these are the five things, and psychology is really bad at this is what they're saying. So number one is clearly defined terminology. And that's the thing that you know, as you've been talking about like, there's, there is no clear definition of what the terminology means and what the lived experience of different humans are as they come into this whatever we term as empathy, right? Everybody's experience of it is, is subjective, and so we it's impossible to have a clearly defined terminology. Second is quantifiability. We have to be able to measure it right. If you can't put it into numbers, then you can't call it science, right? And so that's yet again, this whole concept of this experience, this way of being, of empathy, is not really something you can reduce down to numbers. Number three is highly controlled experimental conditions, which is something I'm trying to do with my experiment that I'm trying, I'm trying to see if people can empathize and hold to their their deeply held convictions at the same time. And it's really, really difficult to make that a highly controlled experimental environment. And so again, I don't know if what I'm doing is science. Once again, number four is reproducibility and number five is predictability and testability. So the things that really stood out from that different that that quote right there for me, is we don't have a clear definition within academia of what empathy is. And number two, we can't reduce it down to something that we can measure. It's not some and as much as we want to pretend like psychology is a science, and I know that if we put this on the internet, I'm going to get hate for
nobody watches it, I
know I don't even watch it, so it's fine. But you know all of your AI companions that are like putting stuff out there too, so who knows the AI are listening and they're watching us. But the point that I'm getting at here is in academia, especially in psychology, because psychologists are the ones that talk the most about empathy. We we are talking past each other as well, because of this problem of so many different definitions. And then coming back to what you were saying about the political left and right, as part of this paper that I'm working on, I'm talking a lot about the moral foundations theory by Jonathan Haidt, and his premise with this theory is that we have what we see as moral and I'm sorry if this is redundant. Edwin, if I've told you about this before, please just cut me off, but I don't know. It's fine, yeah, but on the left, what this is kind of just what the data have shown, right? So this isn't to say that this is every single person's experience, but across the board, what they're finding is the trend that is emerging is that people on the left value harm reduction, so like. Doing no harm to other people. And I want to make sure I get the term correct on this hang on moral foundations, let's see. Oh, bugger. I can't find it, but basically, oh, and fairness, that was the other one. So reducing harm to other people and being fair, right? Do those seem like moral foundations that you can get on board with? Like, I think that we should reduce harm to people. I think we should be fair. But on the other side, on the political right, there are a different set of values that are also important. Number one is authority. So keeping things in line with the way things have been done in the past, having a clear authority figure is something that's important. Number two is in group, so taking care of our own so that's why you see things like Make America Great Again, because we're taking care of our group. And then number three is purity. So things that are sacred to people, it's, it's important to people on the political right to keep things that are sacred sacred. So that would be things like, you know, that's why there's a problem on the right with people who who are in same sex marriages, because that is seen as impure. And so if you're looking at it from the political left, and you're seeing people on the right being really intensely like caught up in these things that you don't see as morally correct, it's because you have a different set of moral values, right? And so you both on both sides. You both see yourselves as moral, but you have different morals, right? And so And actually, on the political right. What they found, I'm just going to look this up and show it to you. What they found is on the political right, they actually do also value harm avoidance and fairness, but just less than they do the other things. And so what's interesting about it? I'm going to pull it up moral foundations there. It's really interesting to look at this, because I think this is going to help us to understand why we're talking past each other a lot of the time. Okay, I'm gonna just find this graph and show it to you. If you don't, you familiar
with the with the value system development model, spiral dynamics, and
tell me about that one, because I think I need to learn more about it, because I am trying to understand more about different models of what what people say about values. Say it again,
that's it's ended up the main people are Claire graves was the first professor for psychology who came up with the first model, which is basically that adults have a developmental value system. And it's and globally. Historically, it goes from archaic to tribal to federalistic to nation state to modernity, traditional systems, modern systems, post modern systems, and so on. And I'm bringing it up because this I got trained in it, because I got fascinated, because exactly of the same reason. If you have people from various different value systems talking to each other, they talk they cannot hear each other because their gravitational value system is situated differently, and so it doesn't they can even use the same words, but they they're going to talk across each other. You know, a perfect
example of this would be, somebody says, Well, God told me to do it. Somebody even God. Mean, this means nothing to me. This is not something that I can even understand, because I've never, I've never experienced that before. I don't believe that that's true. So it, it is meaningless. Um, so that that come in, comes into play with, can you see this? This graph here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So harm and fairness on the liberal side, oops, sorry. Oh, yeah, right. So it's much higher than these other three for liberals, but then it kind of converges over here, where these come up on the conservative side and these come down a bit. So I just think that's really interesting, that I really see that as a huge reason for the empathy gap between liberals and conservatives, because we have a different set of values, and we don't understand why something would be important to somebody else, because it's just not part of our narrative. It's not part of our personality, it's not part of the story that we've told ourselves about how the world works, and it just so it just doesn't make sense to us. So they can talk and talk and talk at us, but we we are blocked because it doesn't fit the narrative that we that we have. And so Edwin, I know that that this is something that we've kind of debated back and forth about. That's that's part of the reason that I don't think that pure empathy is something we will ever attain, because it's always going to be filtered through all of these different value systems and narratives and histories and all of that. But we can come closer to to that, that form of of active listening with each other, where we are trying to understand each other, and where if, if we were to just say, Oh, well, empathy is not possible, so let's just not try. That's definitely not what I'm advocating. I'm just saying that we need to recognize that 100% overlap of those circles, right? Me and you, it's never going to happen, right? We might think that it's happening, but it's it's still is going to be I'm on this side of the camera, you're on that side of the camera, right? Yeah, it's
a process. So it's an ongoing process. It's like this kind of like never ending, because there's always something new arising that needs to be sort of negotiated and mediated. In that chart, I don't see, I don't see empathy. I would say that empathy is maybe on both the liberal and the conservative, and that the empathy is the negotiation space of those of the different values. It's, yeah, we've done empathy circles with pro life, pro choice, right? And you have a couple hours where they're talking and they're sharing these stories, you know, from both sides, and you can really understand why people are making the choices they have, right? You just sort of unravel the the onion, so to speak, and but it's it's having the space for that dialog, and that's what the empathy is, and and then you start seeing the deeper humanity of each person, and you don't see them.
I think that's the key right there. So I have a friend who's a mediator, and she does trainings where she helps people peel the onion, peel away all of the different layers of all of the things making it so we're disagreeing and not seeing each other, and we whittle it down to what are our shared values, what are the things that make us similar. And for I mean, for some people, it's just the fact that I'm a human and you're a human like everything else is different, right? I cannot understand anything else about you, but the fact that you are a human just like me, and that is still something that we share at the core of ourselves, even if everything else is different. And I think that that's an important part of this is just trying. We have to keep trying to get past those external layers of the onion to get down to those shared values well.
So this gives me leading to make a case that the empathy circle is practicing a form of empathy that we are trying to, you know, in our thinking about it, we're trying to define what it is, but it uses a living way of empathetically connecting to each other and and that is a form of, it's got to be a form of universal empathy. It is. It is a very big form of tent that you unfold here with with the with the empathy circle practice. And I want to emphasize the practice, because even in our instructions, we don't talk much about empathy. We just talk about how what we're going to do, which is we listen to each other and we repeat, we going back and forth, and it's all practical. It's living. And it gives a chance for people then to walk out of the empathy circle and maybe go that felt really good. So that's empathy, you know, for for them to even even ponder that right now. Why is that so important? Can I want to share one thing here with you, can? I, yeah, this is this. Are you seeing this? Yeah, okay, no, you have all kinds of Windows, yeah. Okay, let me, oh, that's what you were talking about, right, right? This is what I'm talking about, right?
Wow. This is intense.
Yeah, this is, this is, I'll send it to you. I can put it into the chat. I don't know if you can see the whole thing. The bar seems to be in front of it. I hear okay. So it starts at bacon. It goes through the whole human developmental system. And if you want to learn more about this, this, this an endless amount of resources available, because it's been around for a while now. What, what we say, and what I say is like we're. This moment, we are in the yellow moment. And even the first one who discovered this value system development in humanity, which was Claire graves, he said, the step from from green to yellow is a chasm. It's like a new octave, as if the whole thing repeats itself. But now on a collective level. I don't want to get too much lost in it. I just want to say what you see here, systemic, integrative, I learn. So before it was like we become I improve. We are saved, I control, we are safe, or I survive, right? Those things, but now we're in this I learn. And what it means to me is that I can go to the greens, the orange, the blues, the reds, the purples, all of them, and I can listen to all of them because I am a yellow. And so my value system and in the language of empathy. My form of empathy is so big that I can hear green, orange, blue, red, purple. I can hear them all while, if I go to a green, green are the postmodern fanatics who know everything's better. They you cannot, they're very hard to deal with, even though they are very, very sweet people and everything. But they're oftentimes, they use things like spiritual bypassing to get their stuff across right, because they they just are right, you know, like things like that. So I'm just saying, for me, what's important here is the the idea that our form of empathy can listen to everybody, right? And that whatever
the value systems people have that you're willing to listen,
yeah, or even people would say, Oh, I'm an empath, and I get polluted by others all the time. I don't have to correct them and say, That's not the right form of empathy, no, as you always say, and when I say, Oh, you feel you're an empath. You get polluted by other people, and you give empathy for that. It doesn't, I don't you see what I'm saying, Yeah, it's like, I I have the biggest enough tent. And that's the attitude for like, we say the yellows are stitching the spiral back together that has been falling apart through conflicted value systems.
Then the next one was, we experience,
yeah, the next one would be an integrated the purple. Or the next level is, were people we, who are very much like Ken Wilber, integrate integral philosophy. They have the whole system also as one of the stage development of humanity,
Ken Wilber. You gotta, you gotta know about Ken Wilber and and so don't want to get to my mind too,
too far down spiral dynamics. I'm familiar with the practice with it, yeah, yeah. So I'm interested in the empathy relationship, and what you're saying is that whatever people's level of development is, if you're empathic, that you can listen to everyone. And I think that's
specific, holistic empathy, yeah, if you have an and, and the beauty is, I can learn holistic empathy, but just do an empathy circle. You
don't even have to have the concepts. You just do the
practice. And that is beautiful. That is powerful. This is where we have the bridge from academia into practice. In fact, we start with practice and we follow up with academia. I
know, and that's, that's why I keep I mean, part of me is just like, gosh, I'm too busy in academia. I don't have time for this. But then you keep reeling me back in practical applications.
That's good. That's awesome. Thank you
very good. No, you're keeping me grounded in reality.
Well, that's, you know, I've been in Mary show you this, yeah?
Um, uh, one second here, because this is what I've been working on. Well, we got, we got the different, I just wanted to be sure we had some projects in the work, like, if you want to be just thinking about, you know, the training, you know, a framework, I think, just so we have that on. The table to keep, you know, plugging away. And the other is this, looking at, talking about academia, right? It's, it's okay, you know, comparing other going into comparing other models. Now, right? So we got the most common model is the cognitive, affective or empathic concern model, and that's what, if you're talking about academia, that's what they're going to be bringing up. And couple of problems, you know, just, and you could think, you know, if you'd like to have a list of these, if you have any sort of inputs on this, like, you know, some problems with this model is, it curates the feeling versus reason polarity. Did you see that video by Dan Harvey Jody? You see part
of it. I didn't have time to watch the whole thing,
okay, because he's coming from the phenomenologists, you know, point of view, which doesn't really have this, you know, polarity. Anyway, it's, you know, dry, boring, individualistic instead of a relational view, and just has a lot of inherent contradictions. And for the dichotomies, too, false dichotomies, or
it's like, it's either cognitive or, oh, right, yeah, that's not how it really works in in reality, yeah.
And then the cognitive empathy, it seems to be. These are the other the parts that is. One is I just see they talk about understanding, knowing another person's internal state, including thoughts and feelings that stand Batson. There's imagining and perspective taking. And then there might be some other categories, if you can think of any other categories, but it's these. This is how that this. They're commonly defining it without necessarily sharing, sharing or experiencing these emotions yourself and I go through and just say that, you know, basic empathy creates understanding. I was trying to map it on to the the holistic empathy model. And, you know, so an example If, the person is feeling depression, you sense into you might sense their depression, and you create a map of understanding of why they have depression, what they're doing about it. You create sort of a map of understanding of who they are. And then, by the
way, I'm going to have to go in like, three minutes, I'm sorry.
Okay, then I'll just, so anyway, it's just thinking about the cognitive empathy, you know, these terms, and then I'll go through and then the effective model of empathy, of and the effective seems to be break broken down into two parts, emotion sharing and then an emotional reaction. You know, emotional sharing, estate matching, emotional cognitive contagion, union refusion versus emotional reaction is personal distress, feeling sympathy, any concern, any reaction, joy, fear, sorrow is kind of thrown under that. This just a quick kind of so I'm trying to flesh flesh that out to start comparing the cognitive, affective model to the holistic empathy model. And how do they match and, and pretty much just saying that, you know, the reaction part isn't really empathy. You start with empathy, but then you go into a reaction. You're no longer necessarily in an empathic, you know, state. So I don't know how that resonates, but it
becomes about you again, and your feeling about it.
Yeah, I want to add to it. There is even this component when I read about it, I last week, I read wrong, that this, this feeling into another person, right, that is to me, imprecise in that context, because it opens the door to like I now I Have to do something, and that becomes about me again. Am I doing this right? Am I feeling into you the right way? Can you show me how to feel into some other person? Well, that complicates it again. You know, if, if, if, if there's a practice, a practice of empathy that's really helpful in our community, in our world, and we have to uncomplicated because, like, that's anxiety inducing, even in me, I have to learn how to feel into you. What does that mean? What does that mean in
the empathy circle, we it's more like the first couple rounds. People are anxious, Am I doing it right? And they go into the third or fourth round, and they start that anxiety kind of leaves. And then once they're going into more circles, that anxiety so that's just being human, kind of doing a new a new activity. And the things could be, I tried to explain to people you might feel a little bit anxious, you know, are you doing it right? And so forth, that kind of can help, yeah, right with it. So, yeah, yeah, not much you can do. Too much you can do about that.
I, you know, I came to the conclusion that even if you say back, you know, what's the word using
parody, what parroting, parroting,
right? Even that requires an incredible amount of listening, even is and and an ability to understand and comprehend what the other person is saying, and that means the whole person is listening, even if you don't do anything else than just repeating to another person, that is a gigantic empathetic act. And I think it models the waters when you say only when you really feel into another person, and you develop that skill, then you are empathetic. That's again, just No, you're messing with the simplicity and the beauty of empathy. Empathy is words
to it. I use the word sensing into So,
yeah, you have to say something.
What else? What are we going to say? How are we going to describe it? We got to use words listening describe it. I'm listening. So you're listening. You want to use the word listening to someone instead of sensing, is
really listening to somebody? Well, is that not good enough?
I agree with this, this pushback as well that, I mean, just in general, it's become so over complicated. I know, Edwin, you've mentioned this as well, that we're taking any of the beauty out of what the experience of empathy is by over complicating it with all of the academic definitions. And I find myself sometimes getting paralyzed by like, oh, no, am I? Am I reacting? You know, is this a empathic distress that I'm feeling right now, as opposed to actually being proactively concerned for their welfare, like I find myself over analyzing my own empathic experience because of all of this academic understanding of it, and then when I just get into the flow of actually doing it, I connect with people, and I just, I let go of all of it, and I just get into the process of of connection. So that's, that's, uh, I don't know we're going to have to address that, because it's a very real thing. Because the more you get into the philosophy, the more Yeah, the more you get confused,
yeah. Then, then also, there's an attached to, sort of, like, I don't know what to call that, like, I heard somebody say, Well, an empathy circle is not going to do anything for me. Just simply saying back to me what I feel that's not going to help. I need somebody who is really equipped with a lot more than that, what? So it diminishes the act of really somebody listening to you to this paradigm thing that doesn't do anything, and that's that is, I don't know, for some reason it just doesn't sit right with me. It's
going to be people's criticism. You just empathize with their criticism, like struggling with this. This doesn't seem like real empathy to you, so you kind of just model the empathy to them, right? No, but I have free speech. You want to hear people what they have to say? Right? Interesting,
yeah, no, no. I mean, that's fine. It was from a person who says, I'm not coming to the empathy circle, because that's just too simple for me. It doesn't help me right now, you know? And I said, Okay, that's fine, you know. But what it came with is this connotation that it's not qualified enough, not and I just did that irks me.
Yeah, I know. I hear that too from people like nonviolent communication people? Yeah, a lot of times it's unless somebody's guessing their needs they don't feel satisfied. So I don't know if that was the situation, but I see that a lot, yeah,
yeah, yeah. It's the same direction the Center for a nonviolent communication apparently, as. Been taken over by a war crowd, and they are now, you know, like, oh, this, we have to insist it has to look a certain way, unless you don't do this. This is not empathetic, or that destroys empathy in my mind. You know, that makes me retract and say, No, I don't want to do that. It's too complicated for me.
Yeah, fantastic. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, I yeah, I gotta hop off now. But I just wanted to end one last thought. I think that as we get into nailing down a shared definition of empathy, that I wonder if we might run into that if we say this is what empathy is, then will that turn people off, you know, like you're saying with the people who are taking over this non violent communication, if there's only one way to do it, then we're diminishing what empathy looks like for other people.
There was Dan Batson, or if you're familiar with him, you know, he did a lot of the research, and he says all these definitions. You have to be clear on how you're defining it and stick to it. So it's like, this is how we're defining it, and yeah, we're sticking
as long as we're clear about that, that this is our definition, and we recognize that other people have different definitions that have some positive and negative components to what empathy is. But we're seeing positive coming from this definition of empathy. Yeah, and
most more over from the practice. We're doing it. We're not We're not sitting here talking about and defining we're practicing empathy. And because the practice works. We don't even have to explain to people a whole lot what it means or how the definition the practice will teach them.
I do see the need for kind of clear explanation and and the practice, you know, to have clear explanation. And, yeah, I agree, like it's very powerful.
Me too. Me too, yes,
especially in response to people who say that empathy is bad. And so then when there's the name empathy circle, there are going to be people who are immediately turned off by that, because, in their view, the definition of empathy is something different than the way we define it. And so I think that is very important to get out there. What is this clear definition for how we are experiencing this
and why? Maybe what you're saying is outside of how we're defining it, you know, if there's talking about emotional contagion or other things, yeah,
yeah, I can see that being really important. Um, okay, so let's, let's keep plugging away. Do you want to give me an assignment as to, like, a specific thing you want me to work on this? If you
want to start creating an outline of a course, maybe, and I'll keep working on the maybe I could present next week on what I've done so far with the presentation. So it's going into starting to address the cognitive affective model and how the holistic model sort of maps onto it. So we're taking on the academics next, the academic definition. I'm
never going to get my PhD at this rate.
Well, you're going to have, at least, hopefully you'll have a good definition of what you're talking about. You know,
they're going to, if they hear me taking on the academics, they're not going to give me a PhD. And plus, it's going to take me six years to finish my PhD program with all of these side projects that I'm taking on. But also with that, just to to wrap up next week, I won't be able to work on this this next week and a half, because I have huge papers to finish up this week. And then next week, my husband's going out of town, and I've still got the kids, and so actually, probably in the next two weeks I won't have time to work on this, but then after that, things are going to calm down a bit. Calm down a bit. I say that in print, you know, in quotations marks, because I've still got five kids at home during the summer, so we'll see how it goes. But yes, i i This matters to me, and so I do want to make it happen as well, just recognizing we're all busy, so we all have to be okay with maybe timelines shifting.
Can I just getting a little ball rolling here? And it kind of goes into perpetuity, you know, to just Yes, kind of how I see it, yeah. I like continuous improvement. I like design. And
as we're thinking through how we want to design a course, let's definitely keep in mind the who our audience is, and like really trying to understand their fears, their angers, all, all of the things that go into making up what might keep them from seeing the benefit of of what we're sharing. Yeah, so we'll talk more about it next week. Next week, you'll share your presentation. We'll record that, and then the week after, we can start. Talking about an outline. Does that sound
good? Okay, excellent, yeah. Okay. You have anything on Daniel that you'd like to kind of work on? Let us know.
If you have any ideas for me. Let's send them my way. I, you know, I have a bunch of things to fulfill, and I'll keep you posted.
Well, one thing I would like to at some point read your book that sounds like the exact kind of thing I'm interested in. Sounds fascinating.
