Hey, it's Guy Ross here, and on my podcast, how I built this, I talked to the founders

behind some of the world's biggest companies, and together, we discuss all of the skills

they learned along the way, like confronting big challenges head on and how to lead through

uncertainty. So check out how I built this on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, guys, kindness and empathy are, to say the least, loaded propositions right now.

When you hear those words, some of you might think, those are soft skills that won't help me get

ahead. Or if I'm too nice, I'll get trampled. Or I need my anger to be effective. Or I'm

plenty nice. It's other people who need to up their game. My guest today is going to push back

on all of those reservations and tell us how and why to, as he says, hack your empathy.

Jamil Zaki is a psychologist and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He wrote a

book called The War for Kindness. And in this conversation, we talk about how our modern culture

is suffering from what he calls an empathy deficit, why he believes selfishness is a sickness.

How to avoid empathy burnout. And we talk about the academic criticism that he has faced from

the man he calls his academic nemesis. That criticism is that empathy is actually an outmoded and

unreliable human capacity. So here we go now with Jamil Zaki.

All right, Jamil, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming on.

That's great to meet you too. I know it's going to be hard to focus since I have a cat in the back

of it. Easily in the top five best types of distractions on Zoom.

We're looking at each other on a video program and I have a cat over my shoulder now maybe leaving.

Or not. Actually, no, he just looks like he's going to make himself more knowing. Good,

good opportunity to practice kindness. So that brings me to actually the question I wanted to ask

...