The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos created the most popular course in the university's 300-year history — a class on the science of happiness — and The Happiness Lab is essentially that course in podcast form. Each episode runs 30 to 47 minutes and takes a specific assumption about what makes life good (money, achievement, a perfect body) and tests it against the actual research. Santos interviews psychologists, neuroscientists, authors, and ordinary people, building episodes that balance academic rigor with genuine warmth. The show has produced 270 episodes across multiple seasons and carries a 4.7-star rating from nearly 14,000 reviews on Apple Podcasts. What makes it land is Santos's ability to deliver findings that contradict common intuition without sounding smug about it. She is clearly passionate about the research and skilled at making studies feel relevant to everyday decisions. Some episodes focus on individual stories; others go broader, tackling topics like creativity, resilience, or the psychology of social media. The weekly release schedule means the catalog has real depth. If you have ever suspected that the things you are chasing might not actually make you happier, this show provides the evidence — and more importantly, the practical alternatives that research says actually work.