Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

This is the BBC.

Thank you. ABC. Hello, what does it mean to be happy?

If we trace the history of the word in English, it was first used to express luck, fate, the idea that the gods were smiling on you.

But in modern times, happiness has come to signify an emotion we all seem to want more of.

Philosophers have argued that we should strive to maximize the sum total of happiness,

and in recent years, governments have sought to calculate gross national happiness.

But how can we define happiness?

How do we know when we have it? And is it always a good thing? Here to help me chew over these questions are the broadcaster and psychology

lecturer Claudia Hammond and the novelist Charlotte Mendelssohn. Now, if you asked me off the cuff

to name an emotion, I think I would probably start with fear or anger.

Happiness would not be first on the list.

Now, maybe that's my problem, Claudia.

But how much attention has science actually given to happiness?

I mean, for a long time, happiness was ignored, like other positive emotions.

It wasn't really seen as something that mattered. It wasn't

really seen as something that was a problem in the same way that feeling very sad is a problem

or feeling very anxious or afraid is a problem. So within psychology, it wasn't studied for a long

time and it wasn't seen as something that could be measured either. And so it was seen as

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