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Welcome to That's what she said. Conversations with interesting people from the world of sports, music, comedy and more.

Talking about their lives, careers, successes and failures.

Hi, my name is Laurie Santos and my dilemma is how you get people to do what they really want to do.

Even we know what we need to do to be happy. We don't always do that. How can we force people to behave better?

I mean, I feel like you're the expert on this, right? You literally teach the class on this.

But seriously, I can imagine you've got when you've got a third of the students at Yale and your class is probably going to be some that aren't listening or aren't buying in or you've got people in your work or personal life that don't care about all the research you've done, all the ways that you can prove that our lives actually get better when we're meditating and connecting with people and exercising and being grateful and all that.

goodness. So even though I know you're the expert, I know you're not immune to having people around you that you'd like to help. And I feel the same way ever since I got into learning more about neuroplasticity in the ways we can actually change our brain and personality and moods.

I've been wanting to share it people, which is why I have people like you on the podcast to get as many people as possible to sort of buy in on it and join me in this new super happy place that I found and understand all of the science that backs it up.

So if they're not naturally predisposed to believe it, they'll buy in and I bet your research would tell you the same thing as the author of the book better than before, which I've been reading, which is about sort of changing your habits and she writes that people respond better to watching someone else live a great life to have and practice good habits.

Then then being told about it and why they should do it and that they respond better to you kind of talking about how great it is and then letting them be versus nagging or demanding that they change so it can be tough. I've got friends and family that I want to shake because they aren't doing the things that they could to make themselves happier and more satisfied.

But I know that they respond better to saying join me at yoga or check out this great book then to say tell them what they're doing wrong repeatedly. And I think that's all we can do. But I'm sure you already know that like I said you teach the class on this girl.

The commission has spoken.

My guest this week is Lori Santos professor of psychology at Yale University director of Yale's comparative cognition laboratory and canine cognition center and ahead of

the day. She's also host of the new podcast the happiness lab which launches today September 17th.

We talk about her groundbreaking course about finding and maintaining happiness and how our brains trick us why the GI Joe fallacy leads us astray and how to rewire ourselves to lead happier lives plus her work with dogs and monkeys to better understand human brains and stuff like do dogs really feel guilt and are they more rational than humans and learning new things plus our dog breeds all that different or is it just their training and their experiences.

I think you guys are going to love this I really love talking to her.

That's what she said I am super pumped for this and yes I know I'm going to get all the comments that I say that every single podcast but this time I really made it even more than some of the other ones because even just doing the research for this has been so fascinating and all of you who are regular listeners to the podcast are absolutely going to immediately understand all the ways the things that I always talk about are going to come to ahead and sort of become one in this conversation with Lori Santos before we get to all the amazing stuff you're working on now.

I want to do it more quickly than I usually do just because I want to get to all that good stuff want to go back and start from the beginning when you were growing up in New Bedford, Massachusetts your dad was a programmer your mom was a guidance counselor when you were growing up what did you think you wanted to do when you were an adult.

I think like you know there just weren't that many people who had all kinds of crazy careers when I was growing up so if you went to college you were either going to be a doctor or a lawyer and I knew I didn't want to be a medical doctor that just blood is it key in that stuff so I think I wanted to be a lawyer but I had zero concept of what lawyers actually.

Your dad is Cape Verdean which I believe is like an African American Portuguese descent.

Yeah that's right yeah so I'm kind of by racial kind of a mix of lots of different ethnicities.

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