Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Venes and every week I sit down for a

40-minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something

that makes me curious. On today's episode I'm joined by the host of the

Happiness Lab podcast and professor of psychology at Yale University, Dr.

Laurie Santos, where I ask her, how can we become less of grumpy nightmares?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Venes. I'm so excited to

introduce this week's guest, Dr. Laurie Santos. Laurie, welcome.

Thanks so much for having me on the show. Is it okay if I call you Laurie?

Yes, of course, of course. Okay, so I think you probably have one of the most

interesting jobs ever. You are a professor at Yale and you teach a course on

happiness. How to be happy. The science of happiness. The science of

happiness, honey, I'm very curious about this. It's like how the

wider question is, and you're the perfect person to answer it, is can we train

our brains to be happier? Yes, the answer is definitely yes. That's what the

science suggests. I think this is super important because sometimes we think

that happiness is just built in, right? Like you're just genetically going to be

an optimistic person or not, and that's all there is. Or we think that

happiness is about our circumstances, right? Like you need to become rich and

famous and get a yacht and then you'll be happy. Otherwise, you're just out of

luck. But what the data suggests is that we can control a lot of our happiness

through our mindsets and through our behaviors. So what are when you say the

data suggests? And where do we get said data? Yeah, good. Like pull me out on

...