{{current_date_full}}
Hi, {{first_name | friend}}!
Greetings from New York and a happy post-Mother's Day to all who celebrated. For us, that meant a family-wide BBQ and an attempt for my six-year-old to play tennis? Soccer? Tennis Soccer? A ball was kicked, lessons were learned.
For the second issue of Worth the Listen, I wanted to balance out the true crime from issue one with a bit of self-care. Podcasts are remarkably good at providing space for really smart people to say smart things in highly functional ways. One of my favorite examples of this, and what I often turn to when I find myself needing to decompress from [looks around] well, everything, is The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.
Small disclosure: I know Laurie professionally and have been involved in separate conversations around her broader media work. I'm recommending the show here because it genuinely does the job Worth the Listen is built to do: to give you something worth your time.
This is not a new pod. It launched in 2019, after Santos's Yale happiness course had already become a phenomenon. The concept is simple: what can you actually do to make yourself happier? Just that. An idea seemingly anyone would say yes to, yet very few of us actually find the time to engage with. It wasn't until I found myself out of work for the first time in 24 years that I finally had the time, and the incentive as I stared at the walls of my apartment, to dip my toes into the world of self-improvement. It sent me down a self-improvement path that, to my surprise, actually stuck.
So I'm sharing it with this listener pass: Reach out anytime, reply direct to this email or via LinkedIn (I never developed the aesthetic touch for Instagram). Tell me what's working, what you want me to cover, and what's earning your time.
Worth Your Time
The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
We're going to approach this less as a binge and more as a starting point composed of my two favorite episodes.
So let's begin with "How to Feel Truly Loved" with Sonja Lyubomirsky and Harry Reis. Released February 9 of this year. 42 minutes. The cleanest argument for why this show is still essential six years in.
Lyubomirsky is the closest thing happiness research has to a household name. Her best-selling book The How of Happiness anchors thirty years of work building the science of what actually moves the needle on well-being, not what should. The premise of the episode is the gap between being loved and feeling loved, and why so many people who have partners, friends, and family still feel chronically un-recognized. Reis is the social psychologist who has done the most work on what closes that gap. The episode names the five mindsets that turn knowing you're cared about into actually feeling it (which is a subtle but critically important step). Most importantly, as with most Happiness Lab episodes, they are practical, testable, and within reach for anyone willing to try them.
The episode also lands inside an active cultural conversation. The Surgeon General's loneliness advisory came out in 2023, and the concern has not gone away. In early 2024, the American Psychiatric Association found that 30 percent of adults had experienced loneliness at least once a week over the previous year. We are a society that seems tethered to our phones in a way that is, well, not great (and yes, I recognize that most people are reading this newsletter on their phones and listening to a podcast on their phone, but it's about progress, not perfection). Most of the response in the wellness space has been to sell people more apps. Lyubomirsky and Reis offer something cheaper: a vocabulary for the thing you already have but haven't been paying attention to.
The second episode was the one that felt wildly counterintuitive, mildly terrifying, but also highly impactful: the strangers we avoid on the subway would make us happier than the headphones we put on instead.
People who know me think I am an extremely extroverted person. That's not entirely the case. While I do enjoy talking to people, I also really enjoy not talking to people, especially when traveling (be that plane, bus, subway, whatever). So when I found myself on a subway a month ago, watching everyone do exactly what we all do on trains, which is nothing involving each other, an episode I had not thought about in years came rushing back.
It's called "Mistakenly Seeking Solitude," episode 4 of The Happiness Lab, released October 8, 2019. Nick Epley, behavioral scientist at Chicago Booth, sets up the episode by describing his Chicago commute. Same as mine, same as yours. Then he and David Byrne, yes, the Talking Heads David Byrne, walk through the research showing that brief conversations with strangers reliably make us happier than the silent commute we default to. Byrne wrote a 2017 piece for MIT Technology Review called "Eliminating the Human" about how every new convenience strips out a chance to look another person in the face. Santos brings the data, Epley brings the lived example, Byrne brings the music and the elegy. The episode is funny. There is a recurring bit where Alexa keeps failing to play "Psycho Killer." It is six and a half years old and feels just as important today as it did back then, perhaps even more so.
That's the show in microcosm. Santos pulls a real research finding, brings on the scientist who did the work, and asks the questions that turn the science into something you can use tomorrow. The format works because Santos turned a lecture hall into a movement before she ever turned on a mic. Her Yale course enrolled 1,200 students in a single semester and became the most popular class in the university's history. She knows how to teach and, as another friend of mine says, you can't teach if you can't reach. Santos does both.
Where to start: the Lyubomirsky episode. If that connects, go back to "Mistakenly Seeking Solitude." After that, the catalog is a quietly growing wellness library that may end up being the most impactful binge you take on.
Try an episode and let me know.
Listen Next
A Slight Change of Plans
Maya Shankar is a former White House behavioral scientist who trained as a violinist with Itzhak Perlman before a hand injury in her late teens forced a pivot to neuroscience. The show is the result. Each episode is an interview with someone navigating a major life turn, with Shankar's research lens running underneath. Less explainer than The Happiness Lab, more story. She was on Happiness Lab in January talking about resilience, which is the cleanest on-ramp between the two shows. Apple Podcasts named her show Best of the Year. Earned it.
Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
JLD interviews iconic women over seventy. Each episode ends with her mom Judith. Season 4 returned May 6 with Jean Smart, Pam Grier, Joan Baez, and Cyndi Lauper. If The Happiness Lab is the science of being happier, this is the field report from women who already are. Different texture, same lift. Worth keeping in the rotation.
For Whom the Alarm Clock Tolls (back-catalog Happiness Lab)
The episode where Santos goes after "time famine," the feeling that you never have enough hours in the day, and what the research says about clawing some of that time back. May 2020, 34 minutes.
Steve Raizes, the resident podcast obsessive @ Pix Media
Steve Raizes has spent 15 years in audio, working on shows like 48 Hours, The Daily Show, and RuPaul's Drag Race. He covers podcasts for Pix Media, where he writes Worth the Listen. When he's not listening to podcasts, he's raising a 6-year-old and a ragdoll cat (possibly not in that order).
Currently listening to: The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe (iHeart / Novel). The British host voice still elevates everything. Three episodes in to the new season and Anna Sinfield has yet to misstep. If you missed Issue 1, now is the moment.
Steve’s 5-Star Picks
