When are you happiest? Yeah, what makes you happy? Yeah, I mean there are so many things that make me happy.

Honestly, I'm happiest when I'm not like striving to do stuff. I find those kind of moments of contentment where I'm just being and noticing

like those are some of the moments of my greatest happiness. I'll also say like I have

great moments of happiness when I'm kind of goofing off and having fun with people I care about.

I'm big into kind of karaoke and singing and those kind of moments of like

belting out a bad 80s tune can be like the moments that I'm like, this is what life

was meant to live for like this feels

really good. That's Lori Santos. Now you may recognize her voice if you've

listened to her podcast The Happiness Lab.

She's a cognitive scientist and she's a professor at Yale University,

where she teaches college students all about the science

behind what it really means to be happy. So we thought she would be the perfect guess to kick off our new season of chasing life.

And right away, I wasn't disappointed because she told me something intriguing, that happiness isn't something that necessarily comes naturally to us humans.

Natural selection doesn't really care about our happiness that much.

I mean, natural selection's job is just to like keep us alive and

keep us around to reproduce and I think it does that not by kind of making us feel these kind of moments of

contentment but maybe just the opposite.

It does that by building in a negativity bias.

So we're just a little bit worried that there could be a tiger around the corner

that we could get shunned at work, and we're kind of constantly on the alert for that.

Professor Santo says you probably have a lot of misconceptions about what it means to be truly happy

and sometimes as a result we go about it in exactly the wrong way. That's why she spends time on

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