Jamil Zaki was eight when his parents began a divorce that took four years. To stay close to both of them, he had to work, every day, to understand two people who could no longer understand each other. He calls it his empathy gym.

Jamil is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and two books, The War for Kindness and Hope for Cynics. His lab's experiments show that empathy can be trained: people who believe they can grow it work harder at it and improve over time. He also calls himself a recovering cynic.

I lived the era of stack ranking at Microsoft, when colleagues were graded against each other on a bell curve, and I was very glad when we retired it. Jamil explained what the science says such a system does to people, and why real empathy means holding people accountable rather than letting them off the hook. Then he turned the tables and asked me whether learning to ask questions instead of giving answers had been uncomfortable for me. It was, and I told him about the most embarrassing moment of my professional life.

In our conversation, we explore:
→ Empathy as a skill: what his lab found, and how to turn a belief into a plan and daily habits
→ Kind systems: why people think they are alone in wanting more empathy at work, and how leaders can change the norm
→ Stack ranking, cynicism and accountability: why pitting people against each other backfires
→ Artificial empathy: why chatbots now sound more caring than strangers, and the risk of AI that only tells us we are right
→ Young people, self-criticism and hope, and three practices to start tomorrow morning

"It's like a suit of armor that you put on, but instead of protecting you, it suffocates you." Jamil Zaki, on cynicism

If you have ever been told that empathy is soft, or felt that cynicism keeps you safe, this conversation is for you.

Jamil's work:
Website: https://www.jamil-zaki.com/
The War for Kindness: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/550616/the-war-for-kindness-by-jamil-zaki/
Hope for Cynics: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jamil-zaki/hope-for-cynics/9781538743065/

🎧 Related episodes:

• Daniel Goleman (2024), the three kinds of empathy and why empathic concern builds trust: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/14940410
• Kim Cameron (2022), positively energizing leaders: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/10627686
• Rana el Kaliouby (2025), human-centric AI and machines that read emotions: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/16982786

New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/

Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/positive-leadership/id1574911588
🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf

In December 2020, a neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière told Olivier Goy he had ALS, Charcot's disease. No cure. Three to five years. He spent four months on the floor. Then a sentence came to him, so simple it almost made him laugh: if I stay depressed, I punish myself twice.

Olivier founded 123Venture in 2000, with nine months of professional experience, to open private equity to ordinary savers, then co-founded October to finance small and medium businesses. Since his diagnosis he has become an ambassador of the Paris Brain Institute and has raised more than €4.5 million for research through a film, Invincible été, a book, Invincible, written with Anne Fulda, a concert at the Olympia, La Fresque Généreuse and now Invincible Hope. In this episode he speaks through Invincible Voice, a tool built with the researchers of Kyutai that rebuilt his voice from recordings made before the disease took it, and that he made open source for every patient.

Last year I took part in a campaign where leaders spoke publicly about the things we are trained to hide, and I shared my own story. It was one of the most liberating things I have done. Olivier has taken this further than anyone I know. I came to this conversation expecting to talk about courage. Olivier gave us something rarer: a method for loving life.

In our conversation, we explore:

→ From Annemasse to Paris: building two companies as an outsider, and why legitimacy comes from being useful
→ The diagnosis, the four months on the floor, and the decision that turned him into a fighter
→ Leading without a voice or a stride: how ALS rewrote his definition of leadership
→ Why people do not follow the invulnerable: leadership as a mission, visible cracks and generosity
→ AI that gives back: Invincible Voice, patient data at the Paris Brain Institute, and the Invincible Hope mural at Mount Sinai in New York

"The door that looks locked is usually just heavy. Push it. Legitimacy is not granted to you, you take it by being useful." Olivier Goy

If you have ever waited for permission to start something, or to tell someone what they mean to you, this conversation is for you.

Olivier's initiatives:

Invincible Hope: https://www.invincible-hope.com/
Invincible été, the film: https://www.invincible-ete.com/
Invincible, the book: https://www.invincible-ete.com/livre
The Invincible été research fund: https://institutducerveau.org/actualites/linstitut-cerveau-associe-au-lancement-fonds-philanthropique-invincible-ete-pour-recherche-sur-sla
Give to AI research at the Paris Brain Institute: https://don.institutducerveau.org/invincible_hope/~mon-don

RELATED EPISODES

• Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google X (2021), engineering happiness through expectation management: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/8944613
• Gianpiero Petriglieri, INSEAD professor (2025), leadership, love, intention and freedom: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/17854175
• Dr Donna Hicks, Harvard (2026), dignity as the foundation of positive leadership: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/19240650

New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/

Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/positive-leadership/id1574911588
🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf

He kept promising himself he would fight poverty one day. First at retirement. Then in his fifties. Then his forties. Until the day it felt like he was lying to himself. So one weekend he started cold-calling nonprofits at random, and walked away from a career most people spend their lives chasing.

Atul Satija is the founder of The/Nudge Institute, one of India’s most ambitious anti-poverty organisations, and the “Founder 2.0” of GiveIndia. Before that, he spent nearly two decades in the front line of the tech industry: Google, then InMobi, where he sat in the room as it raised 200 million dollars from SoftBank and had to make the calls that come with that kind of money. He has pledged half his net worth to giving. He is the person JP wanted to talk to about the single hardest question in social impact: not how to care, but how to make caring actually work at scale.

I came to this conversation from my own leap. When I moved from leading teams at Microsoft to building Live for Good, I discovered something that still surprises me: it can be harder to raise a small grant for a good cause than to close an enormous enterprise deal. Atul has lived that gap for years, and he has thought harder than almost anyone about how to close it. What he taught me is that generosity is not enough. You have to engineer it.

In our conversation, we explore:

→ What extreme poverty actually is: families of five or six living on three hundred dollars a year, and why the loss of dignity cuts as deep as the loss of income
→ Why the model that lifts a family out of poverty for good worked everywhere and scaled nowhere, and his answer: shape the state, do not replace it
→ The jar, the rocks and the sand: “you don’t want to build a parallel railroad, you want to fix what’s broken so bigger trains run on the same track”
→ Give till it hurts: why the poorest communities give a larger share of what they have than the richest do
→ AI seen from the bottom: why, for those who have almost nothing, there is nothing left for it to take

“If you’re giving what does not change anything in your life, then it is not really giving. You’re buying something with some extra money.”

Atul Satija, founder of The/Nudge Institute

If you have ever told yourself you will do the meaningful thing later, once the timing is right, this episode is about the day later stops being an option.

🎧 Related episodes:

• Nandan Nilekani, who wrote The/Nudge’s first cheque, “Achieving ambitious goals”: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/13663342
• James Chen, “Seeing the Future and Transforming Millions of Lives”: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/16724860
• Raj Sisodia, “How Conscious Capitalism Brings Love into Business”: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1798971/episodes/19005670

New here? Subscribe to Positive Leadership & You for one edition a month, written for leaders who want to build companies and communities people thrive in. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/positive-leadership-you-6970390170017669121/

Want to go deeper? Listen to the Positive Leadership Podcast on your favourite platform. 130+ conversations with the leaders, founders and thinkers shaping a more human future of work.

🎧 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/positive-leadership/id1574911588
🎤 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1EdnJcYgh9nXPTFJ5euOBf