Late night. Cross County Parkway. A flat tire. A really nice suit.

And then three strangers pulled over.

In this solo episode Clayton returns to a moment from the mid-1990s that he has been carrying for thirty years without quite having the language for it, until a recent episode of the podcast Hidden Brain and psychologist Amit Kumar's research on kindness finally gave it a name.

What Kumar found across study after study is quietly extraordinary. When people perform acts of kindness they consistently underestimate how much it will mean to the person receiving it. We evaluate the competence of what we are offering. The receiver experiences the warmth of being seen. Those are two completely different things. And we keep talking ourselves out of acting because we are measuring the wrong one.

The three men who stopped on that ...