I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

We were in the central bazaar of Tehran. I was nine years old. I didn't have my head scarf on.

There was this morality guard that came up to us and she was so angry and her anger seemed so

aggressive and violent and forceful. And my mom started working on this morality police officer

and utilizing her knowledge and awareness of this individual

to get her to lower her guard and calm her down a little bit just enough so that she might be willing to let us go.

Because in a situation like that, you can't

fight fire with fire and expect to win. That's Sherman Cruz. Her experience that day led to a

lifetime fascination with the power of empathy, and in particular with what she calls

strategic or stoic empathy.

So many people have an impression of what empathy is that doesn't square with what I think you've found.

How do you see empathy?

What's empathy to you?

I mean, it's a super complex question,

but the first very basic distinction I make

is by subdividing empathy into

two different categories. That is cognitive empathy on the one hand and emotional empathy

on the other hand. So cognitive empathy being our ability to understand one another, I'm not going to walk a mile in your shoes, but I'm going to hear what you're hearing, smell what you're smelling, touch what you touch, and set my pace to your pace versus emotional empathy, which is your pain in my heart, right?

It's what we feel even when we see a beloved television character suffer a fate that they

don't, that they don't deserve. We flinch and we move back as if recoiling in pain as if something

happened to us. And so we have cognitive empathy on the one hand, emotional empathy on the other,

and then comes the complex part of realizing that it's actually not a binary choice at all,

...