The Happiness Blueprint with Dr. Laurie Santos

The first episode of the new season of the Decision Education Podcast takes a deep tools for improving mental well-being

What if happiness is a skill we can learn? Laurie Santos, a Yale professor, cognitive psychologist, and host of the popular podcast The Happiness Lab, joins me to explore the science behind happiness and why her course, “Psychology and the Good Life,” has become the most popular course in Yale’s 300-year history. Santos advocates for intentional decision-making and social connection as tools for improving mental well-being.

Key takeaways from this episode include the powerful effects of time affluence and time famine, how to use counterfactual thinking in positive ways and gain insight on how creating intentional happiness habits can lead to a more fulfilling life.

This conversation is one of my favorites I have had in hosting this podcast because there were so many practical and actionable takeaways. Shortly after interviewing Laurie, I was hiking with my dog and went to take out my phone to listen to an audiobook. Because of this conversation, I stopped, put the phone away, and did the hour-long hike with no electronics. Just me and my dog in nature. I haven’t taken my phone out on a hike since and have set more intention around keeping my phone out of sight when I am with friends. I have notice a marked difference in my well-being because of these new behaviors.

I hope you will get as much out of the episode as I did.

Thanks to First Round Capital for supporting The Decision Education Podcast—empowering leaders to make choices that shape our future.

The transcript is below or you can click the link to listen.

Annie Duke: I am so excited to welcome my guest today, Laurie Santos. Laurie is a cognitive psychologist who conducts research on a variety of topics in psychology and cognitive science, including the evolutionary origins of human cognition. She is also the creator and host of the podcast The Happiness Lab—a top three Apple podcast—which has attracted more than 85 million downloads since its launch.

She is currently Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon professor of psychology and head of Silliman College at Yale. Laurie is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned a B.A. in psychology and biology as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology.

She is the recipient of numerous awards for both her research and teaching. Laurie was also recently voted one of Popular Science magazine’s Brilliant 10 Young Minds, and she was named in Time magazine as a leading campus celebrity. I want to start with, I think what probably you’re most known for, which is your course, “Psychology and the Good Life,” at Yale. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it’s the most popular course at Yale in, like, the history of the institution. Is that right?

Laurie Santos: Yes. In over 300 years. It’s very humbling.

Annie: Yes. Well, congratulations on that. And people can catch it online as well at Coursera, right? “The Science of Well-being.”

Laurie: Yeah, Coursera.org.

Annie: So you are teaching students how the science of psychology can help them to learn to make better decisions and live a happier life. Can you talk a little bit about why you think—besides your fabulous teaching ability—why you think the course is so popular?

Laurie: Yeah. I mean, I think these days students at Yale, and just young people generally, are really struggling when it comes to their happiness and their mental health, right? If you look at the national statistics, it’s pretty harrowing. Like right now, nationally, more than 40 percent of college students report being too depressed to function most days. More than 60 percent experience overwhelming anxiety. More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide in the last year.

Like, when I first started to learn these statistics, I was like, whoa, I had no idea it was this bad. And so I think part of the popularity of the course is just like students looking for solutions, right? They don’t like this culture of feeling so depressed and anxious. And I think they wanted some strategies they could use to feel better. But I think another thing that the popularity of the course shows, which I think is kind of really in line with this podcast, is just the idea that, like, people are voting with their feet. Like, they really want an evidence-based approach to kind of engaging with their mental health. They don’t want a bunch of platitudes.

Annie: I actually just saw something, I mean online as one does. I think what it was saying was that there used to be kind of a U-shaped curve in terms of happiness, where young people were happy, older people were happy, middle-aged people were kind of unhappy, and now that curve has been depressed.

Laurie: Yeah, definitely. And then, in fact, there’s, like, really nice data that have recently come out from the annual World Happiness Report, sort of supporting that. So historically people have thought about happiness as having this U-shaped function where young people are pretty happy, it kind of goes down as you get to middle age—the nadir, by the way, kind of varies depending on the survey, but it’s around 48.6. That’s, like, the lowest point of happiness, which is exciting for me because I’m about to turn 49. So I’m, like, I’ve passed it! I’m going back on the upswing.

But then historically happiness does get better and better as people enter, like, older age, which is again a misconception I think we have. We assume that, you know, if I’m in my seventies and eighties, I’m going to, you know, my health is going to not be so good. And maybe it’s harder to move around or travel. Like, my friends are going to be passing away. But actually, historically, and even now, that’s been a time that’s been much happier than say midlife, which is interesting. But the modern data are suggesting that that U shape is kind of getting flattened—a little bit on the older edge, so older individuals are less happy than they used to be historically—but a lot, a lot on the younger edge, where younger people are much more miserable than they’ve ever been.

And in fact, it’s really young people’s happiness that has been booting the United States out of the top 20 happiest countries. The World Happiness Report always does these rankings where they kind of list where folks are. And for the first time in the history of the report, the United States is no longer in the top 20. And that’s mostly due to the unhappiness of our young people. If we were just looking at the happiness of young people out of the hundreds of countries that are in the World Happiness Report, the United States would be in the mid sixties. That’s how unhappy our young people are. We’d be beat by countries like Guatemala and so on. Like, it’s just kind of not what we expect for a wealthy nation like the United States. But our young people are just, like, more unhappy than ever.

Annie: So I want to dig into that a little bit because in your work and in your class, you talk about this issue of, you know, what are we comparing to? So, you know, in judgment and decision-making, we know that it’s very hard for us to understand anything in the absolute, right? We have to compare it to something. We have these ideas, I think, about what are going to make us happy as we’re sort of projecting into the future. And we’re thinking, well, if I made a million dollars, I would be happy. Or if I had a certain car, I’d be happy, or a certain kind of house, I’d be happy. And we sort of believe that for our future selves as we’re sort of forecasting into the future. But we have this problem of reference classes, right? Like, what are we referring that to? Can you talk a little bit about how that cognition works, and then how it might depress somebody’s happiness?

Laurie: Yeah. And so, you know, this is really, you know, the classic science of reference points, you know, and we have the late Daniel Kahneman, you know, and his partner, Amos Tversky, to thank for, kind of, some of the most elegant work on this stuff. We just don’t think in terms of absolutes. We think only in terms of a comparison point.

And this is a problem for happiness because it means we could objectively have everything we need to be happy, right? A salary that’s pretty decent, a relationship that’s pretty good, you know, like, a body shape and a vacation that feels really awesome. But if all of those things are a little bit less good than somebody else, now all of a sudden, we start to feel unhappy, right? So it’s not objectively how good our salary is or our house or our vacation plans. It’s all relative to someone else. I think the striking thing that’s happened recently is that we have way more social comparison points and way more extreme social comparison points than we really ever have.

You know, I think back to my days in college and, you know, let’s take just one thing you could compare socially on, like say, you know, how my body looks and what my clothes look like, right? Like I had some social comparisons. I would pull out like Seventeen magazine and I would flip through it, but then I would close it and I would walk away. Right? It was a magazine that didn’t have the amazing Photoshop tools that we have now. It wasn’t a device that was dinging in my pocket with, you know, pictures of people on Instagram and TikTok that look amazing, right?

The kind of social comparison we can do now is just so much worse than it was before. And I think one thing I talk about with my students in class is that, you know, the way our reference points work is you don’t get to pick your reference point, right? As soon as you see a reference point, it’s going to become your comparison point whether you want it to or not. And we’re much more susceptible to reference points that make us feel bad, that make what we have look like it’s sort of worse or a loss, than we are to reference points that make us feel good. And that is kind of a recipe for unhappiness. When you add the extreme number and kinds of reference points we see right now to the fact that our brains are just designed to soak up any reference points that we have around us, all of a sudden everything is going to make even an objectively good situation look kind of crappy.

Annie: So, you know, when you talk about, like, how the U.S. has slipped with young people in terms of happiness, it does feel, like, intuitively, right? Like social media is such a bad recipe in terms of that particular issue, right? And particularly, as you say, you know, the losses feel—we feel those much more keenly than we do the gains. Those are the things that we really remember. So we’re thinking about how we compare poorly to somebody, and even if intellectually we know, like, that’s Photoshopped or they’re just showing their best moments, we can’t really sort of think that through. It’s just going to be how it makes us feel.

If you look at countries where young people still are thriving more, is there less technology or access to technology or sort of this constant stream in those countries where young people aren’t being affected the same way as they are in America?

Laurie: Yeah. I think, when we talk about these sort of social comparisons and these reference points, we have to realize, you know, that’s probably a big issue that’s kind of making young people unhappy today, but it’s not the only issue that’s making young people unhappy today. And I think we can get some hints about, kind of, what’s going well in other countries versus wrong in our countries if we look a little bit about which particular countries are doing okay in terms of young people’s happiness versus which, like ours, are doing not so great.

And what you see is that it’s not the case that, like, young people’s happiness is kind of tanking across the board. What you find is that in Eastern Europe, young people are actually happier than they were maybe five or 10 years ago. This is also true in the global south, right? And so one possibility is, well, maybe they have kind of less social media. Like, a little bit. I think, you know, to a certain extent, social media platforms are kind of dominated by English speakers. And so as you get away, maybe you’ll have less of an effect.

And this kind of fits with one really interesting data point in this year’s World Happiness Report, which I actually think is, like, one of the data points that hasn’t been talked about a lot, but is actually really cool. I mean, cool, like it’s bad news for our country, it’s bad news for our young people, but cool from, like, a nerdy, data-science perspective, right—which is, if you look at the countries where young people’s happiness is dropping the most, they tend to be English-speaking countries. So the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the UK, those are spots where young people’s happiness has really gone down. And an interesting test case is what happens if you look at Canada. If you look at Canada, what you find is that the English-speaking provinces have dips in young people’s happiness that mirror those that we see in the U.S. It’s just as steep a drop, but you don’t see as steep a drop in the French-speaking and the Quebecois parts of Canada, right? Young people’s happiness has still gone down, but not nearly to the same extent.

Some of the authors of the World Happiness Report, people like Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, have said this is actually telling us something about our media, not just social media, which I think is heavily English dominated, but maybe the kind of like, you know, negativity bias that we see in the media. And I think this is something else we’ve known from decision sciences, right? Again, since the time of Kahneman and Tversky, right? Losses loom larger than gains. Bad stuff is going to catch our attention a little bit more than the not-so-bad stuff, right? And to the extent that our news media has made algorithms that are trying to get eyeballs, I think there’s been more and more of a focus on this negative stuff, which again, has always been true of the media. It’s always been, you know, kind of, if it bleeds, it leads.

But again, you know, when I was in college, I would, you know, flip through the New York Times and then I would close it and I would walk away, right? I didn’t have the bad news kind of pinging in my pockets literally 24/7. And so I think these kinds of negativity biases that might come with, again, things that we see on social media, but maybe all media, there’s a suggestion that that might be worse among English-speaking nations. And that might be one of the reasons that if you’re looking at the kind of change, the negative change in people’s happiness, that’s worse in English-speaking countries than in other countries.

Annie: So I guess this kind of brings up the question of, you know, you have these people taking your classes, right? And you know some of these things—this thing in your pocket is making you unhappy, as an example, the way that you’re comparing yourself to other people is making you unhappy. So have you thought about, like, what the connection is between being more intentional in your decision-making and that connection to happiness? And, you know, have you had students report, like, following through on some of that, you know, intentionality in terms of the decision-making about what is going to make me happy or not happy?

Laurie: Yeah, we really designed, kind of, the way the course was structured with some of these decision principles in mind. And, you know, one thing we know is that knowing is not half the battle, right? Just knowing what you’re supposed to do doesn’t mean the actual behavior changed to put it into effect. And so one of the things that we tried to do to get around that was that we actually had homework assignments where we—not forced is too strong a word—but maybe strongly nudged students to be able to do some of these practices.

So every week they had a different happiness practice, whether that was getting more social connection, you know, turning off your social media, making sure you get more sleep, you know, journaling, meditation, things like that. Every week they had a different behavior that they had to do. And the nudge was kind of interestingly powerful because, you know, one very powerful nudge for college students is a grade, right? I’m going to grade you on how well you did your social connection in your sleep. Yale was not too keen for me to do that, right? Like, how am I going to grade a student on sleep? But they did let me kind of put it in the syllabus with a date. You know, I set reminders, like you’re supposed to do your social connection by this time.

And it turns out that that nudge was powerful enough that many students self-reported, kind of, putting these behaviors into practice, right? And the evidence seems to suggest—that we’ve been able to collect so far—is the act of putting this stuff into practice matters. We did one sort of formal study with the students who are taking my online Coursera.org class, where we compared students from before to after the class, with a control group of students who take an Intro to Psych class on Coursera.org. So another psych class, but they’re not learning these habits. They don’t have the same homework, right? And what we find is that on a 10-point happiness scale, students taking my class go up about a point relative to that other class. Which, I mean, and again, I think it’s worth saying, like, it’s a 10-point happiness scale, right? They go up about a point. What does that mean? It’s a lot. It’s 10%. But this is kind of what a lot of these studies show is, like, you’re not going from zero to 100 on a happiness scale. But, you know, being a five instead of a four on a 10-point scale, or an 8 instead of a 7, that’s really meaningful.

And so that’s the kind of level of effects we’re seeing. But the point is, I think, what got students there isn’t just teaching them all these concepts. I think it’s the nudge. I think it’s like, you’ve got to do, you know, you’ve got to do your sleep by tomorrow. You’ve got to do these, you know, these kind actions by tomorrow. I think that really helped.

Annie: So, okay. I have a couple of questions about this. I mean, first of all, by the way, if the results were a lot bigger, I wouldn’t believe them.

Laurie: Yeah, probably, that’s nice to hear. We got, like, the biggest results possible, but not so big that you don’t believe them.

Annie: Completely believable. Right? I mean, like if you said, oh, they’re five points on a 10-point scale, I’d be like, what’s going on with your data? There were a couple of things I want to key in on. So just for listeners, you know, as I was listening to you talk, I said, oh, there’s something very interesting that she said.

We’ve been talking about social media, which has the word social in it, and we think about it as a way to connect to other people across the globe. Right? But you’re talking about social connection as something that you really want people to do much more of. And it sounds a little bit to me like you’re saying, like, this device in your pocket that’s dinging is actually maybe interfering with that, which is counterintuitive because social media is meant to connect you to many people socially—it’s in the name. So can you talk about, you know, what’s the difference between, sort of, what we’re getting from social media in terms of connection versus what you’re talking about, which is like authentic social connection?

Laurie: Yeah. Well, I think it’s worth starting with the idea that social media is a tool, right? We can use it in all kinds of different ways, right? I can be on, you know, Facebook lives with people and connecting with them in real time, in real life, right? Now, definitely a lot of us learned that we could use—not necessarily just social media—but all of these online tools from Zoom and things like that to FaceTime to connect with people around the globe. You know, think back to, you know, your holidays 2020, and I bet a lot of people were using these technological tools to be social because we didn’t really have any other way to do it. But that raises a question of like, what do we need psychologically for a tool to feel social, right?

Like, what are the kind of parts of social nutrition that we get from social connection and how can we do that in best practices online? And I think work by people like Nick Epley and others has shown that one of the big things is that we need to be connecting with other people in real time. It doesn’t have to be in real life, it has to be in real time. So the kind of connection that you and I are having over our little podcast app is in real time. Like, I’m seeing your expressions, you’re hearing my voice, I’m able to react if you laugh or, you know, you say something back to me. That is pretty nutritious socially. It’s not as good as, you know, like, hugging your mom on like, you know, March of 2020, right? We couldn’t do that. But it’s pretty good, right? It gets us a lot of the way, kind of, in terms of our social nutrition.

What doesn’t work is when we connect socially out of real time, right? So I text you and five minutes later, you text me back, right? Or I read something that you wrote on Instagram and I click like on it, right? Those things, I worry are kind of like the Nutrasweet of social connection. They almost feel like they’re social, but we’re not kind of getting the good psychological juice that sort of comes from it.

But I think there’s a different reason that social media isn’t fulfilling its promise. It’s not just so much that the actual tool itself isn’t social. The problem is that it often comes as an opportunity cost of the in real life, in real time social connection, right? How often have you seen a family at dinner where everybody’s got their phone out, you know, looking at social media, but they could be just like talking to each other in real life, but they’re actually not.

This was something so striking that I found in my work with Yale students. I remember in my role as a head of college, going onto campus and going to the dining hall, which, you know, back in the nineties, when I was in school, I remember being like, you know, the loudest place on the planet. It’s not so much that it’s quiet, but there are so many students who have,you know, these big Bose headphones on and they’re looking at a screen. They’re in this space where they could be really talking to people in real life. And they’re just looking at a screen.

And so, I think it’s not so much that these tools are bad at the kind of nutritious part of social connection. I think they are to a certain extent, more of them need to be in real time. I think it’s more that they’re an opportunity cost on the attention that we would normally deploy to in-real-life social connections with our partners and our, you know, if you’re a student with your roommate and things like that. And so it’s kind of stealing the time we would normally get away from them. They’re also bad for happiness because they are an opportunity cost on our normal attention. We’re just, like, not paying attention and present in the world around us because we’re literally looking at our phones.

One of my favorite metrics for this, it’s just like such a funny little decision variable that if you plot the sales of gum in grocery stores, they have gone down consistent with the number of iPhones in people’s pockets.

Annie: Oh, because they’re right at the cash register!

Laurie: Because they’re at the cash register. You know, what would happen when you’re at the cash register before phones? You’d be looking around, flicking through the magazines, and you’re like, ah, gum. I want some Altoids or whatever, right? You know? But now you’re just looking at your phone, so you don’t even notice the gum anymore. But I think that, you know, that’s gum, which maybe is great that we’re not all buying this, you know, sugary stuff we don’t need. But that also is, like, the smiling person who’s looking at you back from the cash register, or the other people in line, or just the fact that it’s springtime out, and it’s beautiful, and there’s flowers that you could notice, right? It’s our boring little thoughts that allow us to make these connections in mind wandering where we think of new ideas. Like, there’s a big opportunity cost of staring at that screen that we don’t notice. And—but yeah, I love the gum metric, which is such a—it’s a funny little nerdy example, but so telling, right?

Annie: I assume one of the things that you’re teaching your students is—talk to people.

Laurie: Yes.

Annie: Like, if you’re sitting next to someone on a plane, talk to them.

Laurie: Literally just talk to people, yeah. And trying to overcome this sort of broader bias that researcher Nick Epley, who’s at Chicago Booth, talks about a lot—what he calls undersociality.

Like, we just don’t realize the true positive effects of social connection in so many different domains. We don’t realize that talking to someone will make us happier than we expect. He has this data that if you talk to a stranger on a train, you wind up feeling happier. We don’t realize that asking for help from someone can make us happier than we expect.

We don’t realize that giving a compliment to someone or expressing gratitude to someone can make us feel happier than we expect. There are all these kinds of benefits that are sitting there from the practice of socially engaging with other people. And we’re kind of not getting them because we don’t do it as much as we probably should, given the level of reward that we get from it.

Annie: So I guess this brings me to sort of a core question, like, do you feel like happiness is a skill?

Laurie: For sure. Just like, you know, so many of the other things we talk about in decision sciences are a skill, right? I think, you know, eating healthy, you know, getting out to exercise, right?—saving money, like, you know, so many of the core situations, in which decision scientists think about, well, how can we apply behavioral science to improve people’s lives? Those ultimately are skills that we can learn.

I think what the skill is doing is—it’s not changing our intuitions, right?—but it’s giving us some hacks and strategies we can use to sort of nudge ourselves in the right direction. And we need to know what those strategies are to be able to pull it off. We also need to know what the right intuitions are, and I think of my course as kind of doing that. I’m teaching you, hey, it’s not the things you think. It’s not money, it’s not accolades, it’s not, you know, perfect grades. It’s actually these other things. And here’s how you can kind of push yourself and nudge yourself to engage in those habits a little bit more often.

Annie: Where do you think our intuition is actually really good about this stuff?

Laurie: That’s an interesting question. My usual take is like our intuitions are so sucky when it comes to this stuff, right? I think we can sometimes notice if we allow ourselves to be a little bit more present. Right? And what I mean by that is like, you know, I can ask you after you’ve had a, you know, a really great conversation with a friend and checked in, you know, did that feel better than plopping down and watching Netflix? And you can kind of notice. And so I think that while our predictions are off, when we reflect on how a particular event actually made us feel, we often get a sort of honest intuition. And the question is, how do we turn that experience of like, oh, like, that wasn’t what I predicted—how do we sort of update our priors after that? And I think we’re not sure as decision scientists. I think this is something that we’re still really learning. But there are some hints that this act of being a little bit more mindful can be helpful.

I’m thinking about the work of Hedy Kober, who’s one of my colleagues at Yale and thinks about uses of strategies like mindfulness for reducing craving in people with addiction disorders, right? She does a lot of work with people who are smokers, and she has people really reflect on, for example, what does it taste like to smoke? Oh, it doesn’t feel so good. I’m kind of smelling things. She has people kind of, in the moment, notice these maybe negative consequences of smoking and how it feels. And what she finds is that that can kind of translate back, when people are really present and mindful on it, to sort of decrease their craving later on.

She does this also, for example, in the domain of making choices about healthy eating. She has people, you know, when you’re eating the broccoli, like, notice how, like, crunchy it is and how it feels and how proud you are that you’ve made a choice that’s a little bit healthier. And what she finds is that that can actually kind of turn on people sort of wanting for some of these kinds of behaviors later on. And so I do think there’s ways our intuitions are correct, if we can kind of hone in and pay attention to them. The problem is that they’re often not very salient and I think we need better strategies to make those kinds of tiny correct intuitions a little more salient.

Annie: So one of my favorite strategies, actually thinking about what you said, is this idea that, like, we’re pretty good when we sort of are thinking back but not so good when we’re thinking forward. So I just love mental time traveling as a tool. So you know, a lot of times I’ll just say like, for example, if it’s a workout that I don’t want to go to, I actually just have built into my process, like, well, how am I going to feel if I don’t go when I wake up tomorrow morning? Am I going to be happy? Am I going to be sad that I didn’t go? You know, I’m looking at a piece of cake and I’m like, I know it looks delicious but, you know, tomorrow am I going to be happy I ate it or sad? And I ask myself this repeatedly in order to try to leverage that idea that I’m probably going to be better in retrospect.

Laurie: Yeah. And I think there are interesting ways we can use these forms of time travel to our advantage. And in an upcoming episode of The Happiness Lab, my podcast, I’m interviewing Hal Hershfield, who’s done this in kind of an extreme way.

Annie: I love him so much.

Laurie: Yeah. It’s such great work, right? So for folks that don’t know, he has people come into the lab and look at very far-future versions of themselves. So you’re kind of in this VR setup, and you walk through a room and you walk past a mirror and you look and it’s yourself when you’re 70 or 80 years old, right? So really fast forward into the future. And he finds that this act of just kind of perspective taking as though you are your far-future self has all these positive decision consequences, like it makes people eat a little bit healthier, it makes people in, kind of, banking studies, save a little bit more for retirement, right? So, I agree, this sort of mental time travel can be really powerful. The key is that you’ve got to give yourself the act of sort of doing it.

One of the tools we’re exploring in this episode is that there’s a group in collaboration with Hal’s group at the Media Lab at MIT that’s been developing a kind of chatGPT version of your future self. So you can kind of talk to your future self and really, like, have these moments of perspective taking. I got to play around with it for The Happiness Lab podcast and it was sort of jarring, you know. When your future self reminds you, you have agency and the choices you make now matter, you’re like, oh my gosh, like, yeah, I don’t want to screw her over. I have to be nice to future Laurie.

Annie: I love that so much. So to close this sort of part of the topic off, I’d love to get your thoughts on the combination of two things. So I want you to give me the intersection of these two things. The thing that would improve somebody’s happiness the most in terms of, like, a decision-making strategy they could put in place. But I want you to intersect that with the thing that people are actually most likely to do. So what’s the intersection between those two things?

Laurie: Honestly, I think the hack that works best once you get a teeny bit of practice at it is engaging in a little bit more social connection. You know, one of the strategies I give my students is, like, today just scroll through your contact list on your phone. You’re going to be on your phone screwing around anyway. Scroll through your contact list and just text one person you haven’t talked to in a while. Just say, hey, I’m thinking of you, like how much I value your friendship. Can we find a time to chat sometime soon? Right? It’s so fast. It’s so easy. And for a lot of people, that feels kind of nice because you’re doing something nice for your friend. But if you actually set up that time to chat, that’s a really big boost to your, sort of, happiness. And so I find that some of these social connection hacks can be quick, easy, dirty, but kind of reliably positive for your happiness.

Annie: So would you recommend something like calendaring it, setting alarms, you know, something to prompt you to do it?

Laurie: Yeah. One thing that I’ve kind of been using is like, at kind of natural transitions, you know, so at the end of this, for example, you know, we’ll finish our conversation, I’ll kind of close my laptop, and then there’s a moment where I’ve got to kind of do something else. I’ve sort of used a rule of like, in those moments, before I check the email, it’s like, try to text a friend. Scroll through and try to, you know, make a sort of connection.

But if calendars are your thing, I think sort of setting a calendar alarm to do that is really powerful. Another domain where I’ve seen calendar alarms be really helpful is in the domain of finding strategies to be a little bit more mindful. Right? Just set an alarm that when it goes beep, beep, beep, you have to just do a moment of like, what can I see right now? What can I smell right now? What can I taste right now? What am I hearing right now? Right? Just like these little moments to kind of force yourself to do these things. And I think those behaviors are powerful because like, it doesn’t take much time. You know, the problem with a lot of these behaviors is we get overwhelmed when we feel like they’re going to add to our sense of time famine. But if you can just kind of do these quick things that take you just two seconds and that there are these natural, kind of, fresh start transition moments. I think it can be quite important and powerful.

Annie: I am stealing the term time famine from you. That’s a very good term.

Laurie: Oh, that’s a big one. It’s the opposite of what Ashley Whillans at Harvard Business School calls time affluence, where you’re feeling wealthy in time. And, you know, there’s so much data suggesting that wealth affluence doesn’t make us that happy, but time affluence is really important. Ashley finds that if you self-report being really time famished, it’s as bad a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed. You know, we know losing your job would probably feel really crappy. Just feeling overwhelmed and like you don’t have any time is as bad for your well-being. So these are strategies I really try to take into account because I’m so prone to time famine.

Annie: So I’d love to just, you know, from your own work, you know, how much of this is—the kinds of mistakes that we make in decisions, you know—just humans sort of making themselves unhappy somehow through the environments that we’ve designed, as opposed to just, kind of, how our brains are built, so we need to implement strategies to try to make that better, but it’s not something that is uniquely human?

Laurie: Yeah, I think we have these, kind of, built-in bad heuristics, right? I think naturally we’re kind of bad at some of this stuff. And even, you know, some of the very early work I did before I was focused on happiness was finding that lots of our biases are shared with non-human animals, right? We’re not the only ones that are kind of this crappy at sort of forecasting, right?

But that said, I think the problem with humans is that we build stuff based on our intuitions, right? So I’m going to build a social media app that makes us connect, right? Like, what do I build in? Well, I have these intuitions that are wrong. And so I build apps and tools that kind of end up systematically moving me astray.

Right? I think a lot about this in the domain of this undersociality, this Nick Epley term that I mentioned before, we don’t recognize the importance of our social connection. All these new apps that we build from something like Uber—where I don’t have to talk to a cab driver, I just, like, put the destination in, I don’t even have to have the normal conversation, I just get in the car and they know where to go, you know—to apps that are very convenient, like, you know, maybe something like Instacart or something where I can buy groceries online, or Amazon, where I just like ship all my stuff to me without having to go to a store. All those things are very convenient, but they might be systematically taking human interaction away.

Even something like our music, you know? I remember—I’m old enough to remember the days where you’d go to somebody’s house and you’d see their CD collection and you’d talk to them about music. Now it’s kind of, like, private, you know? It’s like this little Spotify list on my phone. You might not know from even visiting my house what music I’m listening to. Where do I get my music recommendations? By and large, they come from whatever algorithm Spotify is telling me to buy, you know? We’re even moving school online and away from classrooms in lots of these interesting ways.

And so there’s some evidence that the tools we’re creating are kind of following the intuition about how much social connection we need. But because those intuitions are wrong, we’re kind of systematically eliminating social connection when we need it most. The musician from The Talking Heads, David Byrne, writes a lot about, kind of, technology and things. And he has this great article on what he calls “Eliminating the Human,” where he basically claims that so much of our technology is built to take the human away. And what are the sort of psychological consequences of that? That’s not good. And so I think it is the case that we’re designing new environments that don’t recognize what really matters for our happiness and we’re kind of messing things up.

You know, the same about something like social media and TikTok, right? I don’t think the designers of these tools were thinking, let me build in all these, kind of, reference points that make both people feel totally crappy about themselves. Although, bracketed, they might have been thinking that because that is what gets them advertising revenue because we tend to buy stuff that makes us feel better with these reference points. But the idea is that we’re building these technologies that don’t really understand what we actually need, what will actually make us happy. And that means we might be creating environments that are making us act more and more astray from what really will matter for our well-being.

Annie: Now I’m just thinking about the tradeoff between efficiency and, you know, I guess connection impoverishment because you don’t really think, oh, it’s not such a big deal that I’m using DoorDash as opposed to calling the pizza place, you know? When I’m wandering through a store, it’s not like I’m talking to everybody in there, you know, as I’m picking out, like, my groceries or whatever.

Laurie: But you might, like, smile at somebody and, you know, especially if you don’t have your phone out, right? You might, like—one of the most telling moments of doing my podcast was sort of thinking about this question. I interviewed this guy, Don Wetzel, who’s the inventor of the ATM. And he actually came up with the idea for the ATM when he was waiting in a long bank line and sort of thinking about convenience, about, like, oh, it’s so frustrating, like, a machine could do this. Why am I waiting for a human teller to give me my money? But what was interesting about Don’s story is not just why he invented the ATM. It was talking to his wife, Eleanor, who’s never used an ATM because she thinks it was a bad idea. She thinks that you should want to talk to the teller and she really values chatting with the teller. She’s this lovely Southern lady who I met for the podcast and she’ll talk to you about everything, right? You know, the podcast episode is really about, kind of, who’s right. And I think from a decision science perspective, you know, we do want to maximize convenience. It’s helpful. But we also need to think about the cost of that. And often the cost is social.

Annie: I really like this idea of, like, being intentional around the tradeoff. The tradeoff between efficiency and social connection. So maybe you’re using an ATM at some point, or sometimes you’re going into the bank teller, although I’m not sure how much that actually exists anymore with online banking. But, and I assume even the difference between do you really need to order in or can you go to the restaurant?

Laurie: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so I think these are just the tradeoffs we need to think about. But to recognize the tradeoff, we need to understand how valuable these little social connections are. I think what we hear are the ideas like, oh, social connection matters. We think it’s with, like, our friends and family members. But work from folks like Nick Epley has really shown that, like, it’s not just the people that we’re really close to. It’s those weak ties that actually matter for our social connection a lot.

It’s like chatting with the priest at the coffee shop or, like, smiling near somebody in line or sort of sharing that moment where you’re walking down the street and you both notice something together and you kind of laugh. Like, those are the things that really matter for our positive emotion and we kind of get rid of them at our peril.

Elizabeth Dunn has this lovely data of you put people in a waiting room and you look at how often they smile at one another. And those that just have their phone in range wind up smiling, I think it’s like 30 percent less than those that don’t have their phones around them, right? These simple kinds of little mini acts of social connection, these sort of micro moments of being social with one another, I think we’re losing those a lot because of our devices.

Annie: So I’m just assuming that you’re a fan of some of the phone free in school movements.

Laurie: Yeah. And I think, again, it gets back to—my sense is that a phone is a tool, right? So can we get the good parts of the tool without some of the nasty parts of the tool? One of the things I’ve seen pushed for online on Twitter, folks like Abigail Marsh and others have been kind of pushing for this is, you know, just like we have airplane mode on phones where we can kind of shut off the kind of WiFi technology so it doesn’t mess with the planes. Could we get like school mode on phones, right? Where the phone is allowed to make a phone call, so a parent can call you if there’s some sort of emergency. Maybe I can let you use your calculator. If there’s some tool that I need you to use for school, we can keep those. But we don’t let kids browse the internet or look at TikTok or look at Instagram, right? We don’t let their notifications pop up to sort of steal their attention, you know, from whatever they’re learning in school. Right? I think we can find ways to not, like, ban technology and get rid of it completely, but to use, kind of, what technology is good at, which is to, like, find ways to make the technology even better. Right? So that it’s kind of doing the stuff that we really would want it to do.

Annie: I love that idea. And hopefully it would also know what location you’re at, so it would automatically put you into that mode.

Laurie: Exactly. So your parents would know where to pick you up. Exactly. We get all the good but none of the bad stuff. Because the problem is that, like, it’s hard. I’ve talked to Nick Epley about this, who for a while had a, like, flip phone, you know? And he was like, ultimately, in the modern life, it was too hard. You know, I’d go to a conference and I couldn’t, like, call an Uber or I couldn’t look at directions or, you know, I couldn’t, like, text really quickly if I needed to get in touch with somebody. Like, there are good parts of our phone too, but we want to kind of make sure that we’re getting all the tools that we need, but kind of avoiding some of the tools that steal our attention and that, kind of, make us focus on negative stuff that maybe we didn’t need as much.

Annie: So, I mean, you’ve done some work on counterfactual thinking. I find it fascinating. I’d love for you to maybe talk about it because it’s not just that we might compare ourselves to actual, like, real things that are occurring in the world that we may, in our minds, we may compare poorly to. I want to say in our minds, cause I don’t think it’s necessarily true that we do. But it’s not just that. It’s also comparing ourselves to imagined alternate realities. So yeah. I mean, can you talk a little bit about, like, sort of what is that? Why does our mind do that? And to your point about good and bad things, what’s the good thing about doing that? But then how does it negatively impact our happiness? So what’s the good and bad of counterfactual thinking?

Laurie: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the good of counterfactual thinking is like we get to think about all these worlds that aren’t necessarily here, you know, every good, like, you know, kind of cool feat of engineering that humans come up with or every interesting idea probably wasn’t the reality before, you know? So we needed to kind of invent something that wasn’t true of the actual world to think about the way the world could be. The problem is that we often then start using that to, like, feel crappy about ourselves. And again, that’s the power of reference points, is now—it’s not just the actual reference points out there, or the ones that are probably a little fictional that we see on social media, there are also the ones that we imagine for ourselves, right?

So I can imagine a world where I’m as rich as Jeff Bezos. Right? And just the act of imagining that can kind of make me feel a little bit crappy, right? But I think there’s a real power that we can use this imagination tool for good. And this was an insight, you know, that came not exactly from decision science, but actually from the ancients. I think the ancients were, in some ways, good decision scientists. They just didn’t have the, like, science that we had, and prolific, and all these tools to, like, run their studies. But the ancient Stoics talked a lot about what they called negative visualization, which is functionally a way to, like, imagine reference points that make you feel really good about your life.

So the Stoics said every morning you should wake up and imagine: today my spouse is going to leave me, my kids are going to die, I’m going to lose my job, I’m going to stub my toe, I’m going to break my knee. And they’re not saying, like, ruminate about this for hours and hours, they’re just saying, like, imagine all those bad things. And then you open your eyes, and you go and your spouse hopefully hasn’t left you, and you haven’t stubbed your toe, and your kids are still alive, and you still have your job. And so there’s a moment where you can, by doing that quick negative visualization, again using your counterfactual thinking to think about reference points that make you feel better, quite intentionally, you get this little boost of gratitude.

You’ve kind of broken up your hedonic adaptation so that you can notice, ah, I kind of do love my job. I’m really happy about my kids, right? But you didn’t kind of have that ability to notice before, because you didn’t have the comparison point when those great things in your life weren’t there. It’s also kind of like a It’s a Wonderful Life sort of effect. If you remember the movie, it’s like, imagine what would life be like if you were never there? None of this ever happened, right? And so it’s a quick way to use counterfactual thinking and imagination to get that in your own life for good.

Annie: So, I mean, like, what I hear you saying is, obviously there are good things about counterfactual thinking. We can think about what if I had made a different choice and sort of start to work out those decision trees. But it’s not just that I have to look on Instagram and see some Photoshop version of somebody who’s, like, beautiful and has amazing clothes and looks like they’re living such an incredibly happy life. But even if I didn’t have Instagram, I would be imagining, well, I should have had this other life, or this other life, or this other life, and the life that I’m living is comparing negatively to that, so to try to find some way to turn that on its head—at least the Stoics would say, right?—to help you be happier.

Laurie: Yeah, and I think to just, you know, have these moments where you recognize, you know, how stupid some of these traits are, you know? One of, kind of—so many, kind of, cool, interesting people I’ve gotten a chance to talk to you because of this work in happiness—but one of the cool ones was that during the pandemic, I got to work with and consult a basketball team—not supposed to say which one but—you know, they were in the bubble at the time. And so they’re like, oh, we’ll just do a, you know, a kind of class about how we can all feel better. And, you know, I was asking their coach at the time for this NBA team, like, you know, what are some strategies we need to focus on with these basketball players that are like the best of the best in the world? And he was like, the thing that hurts them the most is social comparison. They’re always comparing themselves against other individuals.

Annie: LeBron.

Laurie: Yeah. You know, I’m like, oh my God, these are the best players on the planet—you know, in some cases, in the history of the human species—but like, they’re still kind of feeling crappy. And so I did this exercise with the team I was working with to kind of convince them how bad their reference points were, how skewed their reference points were.

And so I was like, you know, what’s your reference point for like, you know, being a good three-point thrower? And they’re, like, oh, Steph Curry. Or what’s your reference point for, like, making the most money—at the time it was LeBron—LeBron James—you know? What’s your reference point for how tall you should be in basketball? And they all said Tacko Fall, you know, he’s like seven foot something. He’s like the tallest player. But I’m like, why wasn’t your reference point for three-point throws Tacko Fall? Or why wasn’t your reference point for height, you know, Steph Curry, who’s like kind of short as a basketball player? And they’re like, oh. It’s like you’re just picking the reference point for each different situation that makes you feel maximally crappiest, right? Like, we can’t listen to that system.

And the problem is, like, you know, you’re naturally going to be inclined to make those reference points. But you can actually ask the question, is this really true? Right? You know, is this, kind of, really telling me kind of what I think about? And often when you kind of look, you can remember that your reference points are skewed, and then you can kind of look back at, kind of, the things that maybe you weren’t paying attention to, but are often quite salient. There are ways we can sort of do that intentionally. And I do think sometimes this imagination or this negative visualization is a way to do that better.

You know, the tragic thing about hedonic adaptation is if you’re the best of the best in the world, you just stop getting any good kind of hedonic utility from that. In my class, you know, my students are much more hip about pop culture than I am. And I was mentioning to them this song, “All I Do Is Win” by this artist DJ Khaled. And so the song goes like, “All I do is win, win, win, no matter what,” right? This is about this person who wins all the time. And I joked that like, if all you did is win, that would, like, be a really sucky life because you wouldn’t start to notice any of the good parts of winning. It would just be your reference point. But you’d be terribly anxious that you were going to lose, right? Like, all you then have is anxiety that you’re going to do worse.

And I want to say, I think this is one of the things that’s fueling the mental health crisis that we especially see at, you know, Ivy League institutions, like the one that I’m at, right? You know, these students are students for whom all they’ve done is win. You know, every grade they’ve ever gotten in their whole life is an A. And when that’s true, the next A doesn’t feel good at all. They’re getting no utility from that next A, but they’re having a lot of terror about the possibility of an A minus or, God forbid, a B plus, you know? And so I think that this is going back to your former self or what would old you, before you kind of got good at things, have recognized? I think those are really great strategies, and what ways we can kind of use our counterfactual thinking and our mental time travel in positive ways.

Annie: I’m such a huge fan of mental time travel and I think some of it for me was just when I was playing professional poker, it’s so important not to get really upset because if you get upset, you play really badly. And one of the main strategies that I used to stop myself from getting upset were these mental time travel tricks in order, you know, it’s just to get myself in the front part of my brain. But it was actually really, really helpful for stopping me from getting overly invested in one particular bad event that had happened, which can really cause you to start splashing some money around and then you will be broke. So I was trying to stop myself from doing that. But then I ended up using it in all sorts of different areas. So it’s part of the reason why I’m such a big fan.

Laurie: Totally. And I’ll tell you about one mental time travel trick that I’ve been interested in recently, which is different than we normally think. So we sometimes think, like, oh, I’ll fast forward to my future self and that will make me more patient in the moment right now. Or it will make me eat healthier in the moment right now. This is, we mentioned Hal Herschfield’s work, and this is a lot of what his work shows. But there’s an interesting way that sometimes thinking about our future self and what our future self might want, or kind of fast forwarding time, can make us do something that’s a little bit more present-fun oriented.

So there’s this kind of different bias that a lot of us have, which researchers have called hyperopia, which is that you’re kind of overly focused on your future self, right? You know, you have that nice bottle of wine and you don’t want to use it tonight because you feel like, oh, tonight’s not good enough. I’ll use it sometime in the future. Or you have the nice outfit or, you know, like those frequent-flyer miles that are sitting there. You could go on vacation this weekend, but you’re like, no, no, no, we’ll save it for something good, right? This is different than our normal moves when it comes to time biases.

Usually it’s like us right now, present—really good thing. But sometimes when it’s like a special thing or a particularly good thing, we kind of, like, push it off, right? We kind of don’t invest, we kind of overly invest in our future self. And sometimes we do that to our detriment, right? A lot of people’s frequent-flyer miles and gift cards and things never get used. Or I mean, I, for one, got a really nice bottle of wine from my friend April for Christmas and it’s still sitting there six months later on the shelf, right? And so hyperopia is also a bias that I think we need to fight against, but I think there’s a world where, kind of, fast forwarding, especially to our far-future selves, will kind of help us with this. And this is salient because I was just playing with some of these chatGPT tools where I was talking to my future self. And one of the things I realized was, like, oh my gosh, I’m not going to be healthy forever. You know, like I’m not going to be able to use those frequent-flyer miles, you know, 20, 30 years from now. Maybe I should use them soon. Maybe I should drink that nice bottle of wine. And so one of the reasons I like mental time travel is you can use a different kind of mental time account for different things. And often we think of the stuff that’s like screwing over our future self, but sometimes I think we’ve got to like, you know, not put too much pressure on our future self to do all the fun stuff. Sometimes we’ve got to, like, really live in the here and now. And so I’ve been kind of using these techniques to kind of fight my hyperopia a little bit more than I kind of expected when I first started doing some of this work on time biases for my podcast.

Annie: What I think is interesting about that is that you’re pointing out that there are different ways to screw over your future self.

Laurie: Totally. Sometimes we do it by not perspective taking at all. And we’re like, she’ll be fine. She won’t have any emotions. She’ll want to go on the diet. She’ll be great.

Annie: I’m not going to save any money.

Laurie: Yeah, she’ll be good.

Annie: My 80-year-old self is going to be so freaking sad that I didn’t go to Bali.

Laurie: I think the big bias is we often assume our future self is going to have lots of time. This is what folks like Gal Zauberman call future time slack, right? Like she’s going to have time to throw that dinner party with the nice bottle of wine. She’s going to have time to, like, use those frequent-flyer miles because she’ll have time for vacation. So I think it’s not like we want to, like, give our future self some fun. We just think, like, it’s going to be a better opportunity for her. And what we don’t realize is, like, that’s probably not true. And especially for our far-future self, you know? We might want to kind of maximize some of those benefits now. And so, yeah, so I think it’s not always kind of screwing over our future self. Sometimes we’re, like, giving them the gift of this stuff that, if we’re being realistic, our future selves might not be able to use better than we could use it right now.

Annie: And then your future self will be very sad. Because I’m 80 and I’m like, well, why didn’t young Annie go to Bali? That was completely ridiculous.

Laurie: Totally. And sometimes if you perspective take on the future self, you’ll get a sense. And I had this sort of a little bit talking to this, sort of, chatGPT of future me. It was like, you know, that older Laurie is going to want the fun memory of me and my husband, like, going to do fun things, right? Like, there’s going to be things that I’m going to want to look back on fondly. And then that can help too, because it’s not just have those events, but take pictures, be present at them, you know? So I can, like, not forget all these memories because I was looking at my phone and didn’t have time to encode anything. I want to, like, really be present during those kinds of moments, so I can have those memories, share it with another person, so we can reflect on it together. Sometimes by, like, the best thing for our future self is actually doing something in the present. We often forget that.

Annie: Yeah, we do. So actually one of the things that I used to say to my, I mean, I still say it to my children, but particularly when they were in high school, you know, sometimes getting grounded for things and they would be very, very upset. And I would say, 40-year-old you is going to be so happy about this. This is going to be like the best story for you to tell at the Thanksgiving dinner table, you know? So just trying to get them to see like, the, you know, sort of the long game and they would laugh. And I think it would help them be a little bit happier about it.

Laurie: I love that because it’s yet another strategy that the ancients were really good at, right? This is in the Aeneid, you know? He starts—he’s about to tell this story of like, you know, they got, you know, buffeted from Troy and they were flung around and their, you know, like, city burned and all this stuff. And they’re like—someday this is going to be a really good story is the way this starts. And of course it is a good story because we’re still reading, you know, Virgil’s Aeneid, you know, many years later. And so you’re just giving your kids a strategy that the ancients knew about well too. So I love it.

Annie: Yeah. Yeah. And they use it. So I’ve passed on the mental time travel to them. All right. So I’ve got a couple of closing questions, if that’s okay.

Laurie: Sure.

Annie: If you were thinking about a decision-making tool or idea or strategy that you would want to pass down to the next generation of decision makers, what would that be?

Laurie: Ooh. I think a big one would be to value time over money, or for young people to value time over grades. I actually think one of the reasons young people are really unhappy is that they’re a lot more time famished than they were years ago. You know, think of probably with your own kids, how many play dates and events and soccer practices they go do versus you at your same age. They’re almost more overwhelmed in terms of time famine than, you know, we are as adults. And, and that’s bad for the adults too, because you’re often, you know, chauffeuring them to all these things. And so I think kind of, getting the next generation to value time and to kind of trade off time for money or trying for academic success would be huge.

There’s evidence, for example, that if you feel time famished, you’re less nice. You know, think of some of the classic experiments of the seventies, you know, where you put these folks training to be priests under time pressure and they were mean when they saw a person who was in need and they didn’t help. There’s new research by Ashley Whillans and colleagues showing that this translates to, kind of, climate action. When you feel pressed for time, you don’t recycle as much and so on. And so I think we’d have a nicer planet. We’d have a more socially connected planet if people had a little bit more free time. So forcing the next generation to trade off time for money.

Annie: I’d love that. I love that idea so much. Also just like, honestly, parents should be, you know, encouraging that because the amount of scheduling that’s happening and, as you said, it’s also making you unhappy too. So parents, if they start to value that for their children, like the whole family unit is going to be happier.

Is there a book that you would—what’s your number one book that you would recommend to listeners to improve their decision-making?

Laurie: Oh my gosh, so hard. There’s so many great books out there.

Annie: You have to pick one. I know. I’ve been asked this question a million times. It’s—I always cheat, but try not to cheat.

Laurie: I think just because I recommended the time one, I’m primed by that. And so I’ll say to check out Ashley Whillans’s Time Smart, which has all kinds of strategies you can use to prevent time famine and feel more time affluent. But that’s not to diss any of the other millions of other good social science books out there. It’s just because I was on time. So I’m going to stick with that.

Annie: Fair enough. And we will make sure to link that in the show notes. Okay. So you’re familiar obviously with the mission of the Alliance. We want to bring Decision Education to every K-12 classroom in the country, really the world. If we were successful, what do you imagine that the impact on society would be?

Laurie: Oh, my gosh. I mean, we need decision science for all the public health problems that we face as a society and as a species. I think we need decision science for all the, kind of, big existential problems we face as a society and as a species. Like, how do we become nice to ourselves? How do we find meaning and purpose in life? And I think we need decision science just to, like, you know, continue existing on our planet, right? Like, we know the biggest climate problems, I think, are problems of human choice and human decision. And so I think training the next generation in these skill sets is going to allow them to sort of solve so many of the crises that we in the older generations haven’t been able to figure or haven’t been able to solve. We’re kind of giving them the sort of scientific tools they need to enact the behavior changes needed to fix so much stuff.

Annie: Okay, I’m going to can that and send that. That was so good. Oh, my gosh. That was amazing. Thank you.

Laurie: Good. Feel free to, you know, patent it and use it.

Annie: I’m really going to, like, I’m going to print that out and keep that as my elevator pitch. That was wonderful. Really appreciate that. Okay so, if listeners want to find out more about you, learn more about your work, follow you on social media—which obviously they should only do to become informed—where should they start?

Laurie: Yeah. Yeah. I think you can, you know, learn a lot more on my podcast, The Happiness Lab, which you can use on your phone, but then engage in social connection, telling people about the episodes and what you learned and so on. And if you heard about my class at Yale and were intrigued, I’d encourage you to check out the online version of that class which you can look at on Coursera.org. The one for adults is called “The Science of Well-Being.” And we also have one for middle and high school students which is called “The Science of Well-Being for Teens.”

Annie: And obviously we can find you in your local grocery store since you’re not using Instacart, right?

Laurie: Yes. Chatting with everybody at my Trader Joe’s.

Annie: Calling for a taxi. We know that you’re doing all of those things. Laurie, thank you so, so much. This has been such a wonderful and informative and, frankly, incredibly fun conversation, separate and apart from just being so incredibly educational. You are so lovely. You’re such an incredibly great communicator and spokesperson for just the power of behavioral science, and I’m so honored to have gotten to have this conversation with you.

Laurie: Yeah. Thanks so much. Ditto, ditto. Thanks for all the great work you do.

Published November 13, 2024