Transcript, E181: Dr. Laurie Santos on increasing happiness

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Network ID: LinkedIn News.

Jessi Hempel:

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel and this is Hello Monday. Now, before we start the show, I wanna remind you that in just one week, my book launches. It's a memoir called The Family Outing. It's all about how everyone in my family found a way out of a closet and toward each other. If you've already ordered a copy, thank you. And it should arrive in your mailbox on October 4th. And if you'd like to check it out, you can find it wherever books are sold. And now the show.?

Sometimes it feels like everything is awful all the time. There's the pandemic and climate change, economic uncertainty. And if I forget about any of it for five minutes, my phone reminds me. I find myself doom scrolling mindlessly, my heart thumping fast in my chest. Does this happen to you? I've come to think of this state as ambient anxiety, and it'd be easy to think that this feeling is endemic, that it's just here to stay. That's why I've recently become obsessed with happiness, not as a state, but as a practice.

I think it can be a powerful counter to this anxiety all around us. So today I wanna challenge you. I want you to think about how to let go of some of your worry to cultivate happiness. Today's guest is Dr. Laurie Santos. Laurie is the cognitive scientist who teaches a course called Psychology and the Good Life at Yale. From the day she announced the class, it became Yale's most popular course, and you can now take it for free on Coursera.?

I invited Laurie to the show because to be really honest, I wanted a playbook for my own happiness and she brought it, but like any exercise plan or diet regimen, a commitment to joy takes effort. Here's Laurie.

Laurie Santos:

People are thinking about their happiness, their wellbeing in really different ways. I think the pandemic, really just switched up our routines enough that we could start actively questioning. "Okay, what role does work have in my happiness? Am I happy with the way things are going or do I need to make some changes?" I think we, th- the pandemic kind of taught us that changes were possible in domains where we really just didn't think changes were possible. I mean, a commute is just a thing that happens. Like, you know, you have to go to an office, it's just a thing that happens. You have to wear uncomfortable shoes, just a thing that happens in your work life. And I think in all these domains, we realize like, actually, maybe that's not a given. Maybe I can switch things up in ways I don't expect.?

Jessi Hempel:

Over the weekend, but we were with friends and somebody piped up just out of nowhere, "Did the pandemic kill high heels for you?" And every woman looked around and was like, "Yeah, I haven't worn them in two years. I'm never gonna wear them again."?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. Spanks, certain bras, like they're just dead to me now. (laughs) Like it's not happening, right.

Jessi Hempel:

It's over. (laughs) It's over.

Laurie Santos:

And I think if it can change these, you know, tiny basics, I think it's changed other basics too. Right? I think people are questioning whether or not the career path they had for their whole life is the kind of thing that's gonna make them happy. I think people are questioning whether the amount of time they're spending at work is the sort of thing they want to keep investing in that's gonna make them happy. I think people are questioning whether the goals they had for work, you know, making a certain kind of money, hitting certain kind of accolades. People are questioning whether those are a given.?

And so I think it's just brought into stark relief, this idea that none of the things that we thought were mandatory, a given that we had to do, none of those things may be set in stone and it really opens up the possibility of changing those things around. And I think with that comes some anxiety, right? Because you know-

Jessi Hempel:

Right.

Laurie Santos:

... open space, uncertainty can be kind of scary. And I think that's the kind of thing a lot of us are going through right now.?

Jessi Hempel:

Is there an assumption that we make at this moment in our culture that we should be happy??

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. I think, I think we've always assumed that we should be happy. I mean, the pursuit of happiness is like literally written into the declaration of independence, right? Like it's the kind of thing we've assumed for a long time. And I think it's a reasonable assumption, you know, we can ask like, what's the purpose of life? I think, you know, one answer to that question is that we'll have a life filled with positive emotion. We'll have a life filled with meaning, we'll be able to live a good life, right. And so I think pursuing happiness is something that we've wanted to do for a long time. We've assumed is, you know, part of a good life. And I think it's something that should be part of a good life.?

Jessi Hempel:

Um, so we're gonna unpack that a little bit, but I wanna back up a second, Laurie, and talk a little bit about how you personally got to the study of happiness, because this is not where you began. In fact, you began, um, studying something else I care deeply about, canines, right? (laughs)

Laurie Santos:

That's right. That's right. I was broadly kind of interested in this question of what makes the human mind special and studied that both with, with canines, with dogs and also with monkeys, we were really interested in this question of what makes the human mind unique, but for, you know, almost 20, I'm getting up there, almost 20 years I've been, you know, teaching at Yale and teaching undergraduate students. So, you know, I kind of saw what college life was like, but you know, maybe at the front of the classroom, I wasn't really in the trenches with students, but all that changed when I took on a new role on campus. When I became a head of college, where in this role I was living with students, I lived with them on campus. My house was within their quad and I was seeing college student life up close and personal.?

And, and honestly I did not like what I was seeing, I was seeing this mental health crisis. Right now, today, nationally, over 40% of college students report being so depressed, it's difficult to function. Over 60% report being overwhelmingly anxious. More than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide. These stats are scary. And I think for, you know, a podcast that's thinking about work, even if the college students that I work with right now, aren't in the workforce in five years time, those are gonna be all of our colleagues, right with these statistics that are just so scary.

And so when I saw this happening, I was like, first of all, I was shocked. I just didn't know the statistics were as bad as they were. But second, I was like, we're not teaching these students to be prepared, to go off in life in the way we were assuming as college professors, we really need to, to do something about this crisis. And so that was where the class came from. I was trying to pack together all these strategies that we know can improve people's happiness and teach them to my students so that they could use them in their own lives.?

Jessi Hempel:

Well, Laurie, a- a very basic question, were our grandparents happier than we are??

Laurie Santos:

There's lots of data on this. I think definitely young people are, were much happier two generations ago than college student age people are. We also know a lot about how happiness has changed over time, right? And I think one thing that's striking is if you look back in the 1940s, you didn't have as much material wealth, generally speaking back then, as you do now, we didn't have iPhones and dishwashers and all this stuff that's supposed to make our lives easier.?

And what you found is that over time we've on average gained in material wealth, but we've gone down a little bit in overall self-reported happiness and we've way gone up in terms of people's mental health disorders. So what you see is that happiness has slightly gone down, assorted mental health maladies have gone up. And this is at a time when our overall standard of living is supposed to have gone up. So something's not right.?

Jessi Hempel:

Another thing that was very different a couple of generations ago was that I didn't have the immediate, consistent, constant access to media to show me all of the things that I didn't have.

Laurie Santos:

That's right. I think, you know, social media, you know, is just a tool, right? We could use it in all kinds of different ways, but often we're using it to become incredibly jealous of the kinds of things that other people have, to feel inadequate all the time. I think the news cycle is also something that's in our face all the time. And, you know, back in our grandparents' day, it would hit us, you know, maybe once a day when the newspaper showed up or depending on how old your grandparents are, you know, once a day when they watch, you know, the 6:00 PM news.?

Now it's, you know, literally notifying us, you know, probably while we're having this, uh, conversation for the podcast, if I looked at my phone right now, it'd have some notification of some bad news that was happening somewhere. And so I think we don't have as much control over this negative information coming in than we did back in the day.?

Jessi Hempel:

I think about that as ambient anxiety. And I feel like the ambient anxiety is constantly, it's like the volume is being turned up on it just when I think it couldn't possibly be louder, it screeches a notch louder.?

Laurie Santos:

And I think we, we are also experiencing a- anxiety that comes from, you know, a reduced attention span, right? It's not just many more anxiety provoking things. It's like our mind is splitting from this thing to this thing, to this thing, to this thing, it's really hard to focus and pay attention. And I think just that lack of focus, there's evidence that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, a wandering mind is an anxious mind. And we've kind of created minds that wander even more than they used to probably 50 years ago.?

Jessi Hempel:

So when you're working with students, which you have now done for quite a while, uh, close to a decade, right.?

Laurie Santos:

That's right.?

Jessi Hempel:

Um, so when you're working with students, what are, are the tools that are most impactful for them that come out of your class??

Laurie Santos:

Well, one of the biggest things we, we teach students in the class is that we often have incorrect notions about the kinds of things that make us happy. It's not that we're not trying to be happier. I think a lot of us are putting a lot of effort into being happier, but we're just not getting anywhere. For example, I think a lot of us think money accolades at work, you know, material possessions, those are the kinds of things that would make us happy. Um, or we put our happiness in arriving somewhere, you know, someday I'll get married and I'll feel happier. I'll get that promotion and I'll feel happy.

Um, this is what researchers call the arrival fallacy. It's kind of a happily ever after fallacy, I'll get this thing and then I'll be happy. But if you look at how happiness really works and you do that by studying happy people, what makes them really happy? What you find is that it's none of that stuff. It, it tends to be different behaviors and thought patterns than we expect. Like the simple act of being a little bit more social.?

There's lots of evidence that happy people are incredibly socially connected. There're also really other-oriented, happy people tend to, uh, spend more time on other people, controlled for income, happy people donate more of their money to charity than not so happy people. There's also lots of evidence that happier people tend to prioritize their time over their money. Lots of fantastic work coming out on this topic of time affluence, this subjective sense that you're wealthy in time. Um, the opposite of what many of us feel, especially nowadays in COVID, which can be better described as time famine, where you're literally starving for time.

Jessi Hempel:

That, um, connects to something that we have seen at Hello Monday, which is that many people have shifted the way that they're making their job decisions. And rather than climbing the corporate ladder, they're making decisions that prioritize their time, even when it means a lateral move at work, even when it means sometimes, uh, like a- a doc in pay, they're going back, they're leaving being managers to be independent contributors, for example, because they get more control over their time and they can spend the extra time with family members. I don't know that I believe that, that is permanent or that, that is just a reflection of the moment that we're in, but it speaks to the collective recognition of time affluence.?

Laurie Santos:

And I think that it's great advice from the perspective of the science. You know, there's so much evidence that if we can spend our money to get back time, we'll actually be happier. And there are ways to do that without changing your hours at work. You know, if you have the privilege of having discretionary income, you can hire someone to help with cleaning. You can hire someone to help with unwanted tasks. You can even reframe something simple, like, you know, going out and getting curbside pickup or, you know, getting a restaurant delivery as something that can improve the amount of time you have, which can kinda just, you know, relax you like, "Ugh. You know, when I went out and bought that Pad thai, I'm saving two hours," like, whew, what a breath of fresh air to have that extra time.

But there's also evidence that, that literally changing the amount of hours that you work can really improve people's happiness, you know, look at like culturally speaking, what are the happiest countries in the world? Often times ranked like Scandinavian countries like Denmark and so on. And they have limits on a work week. They go home at three o'clock and hang out with their family. They spend a lot of their free time engaging in clubs and things like that. They have time to be social.?

And so I think as Americans have prioritized money over time, the Danes have prioritized time over money. And, you know, it shows in every self-reported measure of their happiness they're just much happier than we are.

Jessi Hempel:

Just to push back and you, just for a second on, on Danish culture, any of these Northern European homogenous cultures, they also have a basic underpinning of wealth. So yes, they're prioritizing time over money, but that's because money is a given, which is so completely not understood to be true in a place like America.?

Laurie Santos:

I think that's right. And then I think there are also other structural differences in Denmark versus the United States, right? One of them is that there's a lot less inequality in part because people pay a lot of money in taxes, but the tax money that's collected often goes to evening the playing field so that lots of people can have time. Right? It's just a very different way of thinking about time and social justice and equality than we have here in the US. But a lot of those differences wind up meaning that the Danes just in terms of their time budgets have more time.

And there's evidence that, that alone can, uh, really improve happiness. For example, um, the researcher, Ashley Whillans also has some studies showing that one of the hits of, of, of poverty on your happiness might actually not be a hit of not having enough money. It might actually be a hit of not having enough time. If you look at low-income individuals in the United States, often they're working multiple jobs and so on, they're monetarily poor, but they're also time poor. So it's not clear what might be doing the biggest hit to people's wellbeing. It could just be this lack of time.?

Jessi Hempel:

I, I love that you're highlighting that. You talked about the, the fleeting nature of attention. I have this sense that the tech tools that we have right now in the moment, they are in, in their design, um, do you sort of push us to constantly, uh, switch our attention and to do so in a way that we are comparing ourselves constantly to everyone else. How do you address that with young people??

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, it's hard, right? Because the, you know, technology is just a bunch of tools and some of those tools are great. You know, I think especially during the pandemic, I think we learned to appreciate things like Zoom and the fact that we could connect with people, especially in the midst of, you know, the worst of lockdown, but these tools also have downsides. And one of the strategies I give my students is to try to pay attention to how they're feeling after using technology. I actually steal a- a technique that I have gotten from the journalist Katherine Price, who has this lovely book called how to break up with your phone, where she argues, we don't necessarily have to break up with our phone, but we need to take it to like couple's counseling. A strategy that she recommends is an acronym she calls WWW, which stands for what for, why now and what else??

So let's say you find yourself on, you know, you're just like looking at your phone in the way that we do it, like, "oh, I've just like, got my phone in my hand and I'm using it." You know, so that's when she says you should use WWW, what for, right. Like what was I picking this up for? Was I checking my email? Was I checking the weather? Did I have a purpose? Um, why now? Right? What was the trigger that caused you to pick it up. Often, it's an emotional trigger. I was bored. I was anxious. You know, I was, you know, feeling something nasty and that's the solution, right? Wh- why then? Um, but the, the most important question I think is the last W which is what else, right? What's the opportunity cost of picking up that phone. Maybe it's a conversation with your spouse. Maybe it's paying attention to the lovely weather outside, or just taking a breath. What are you missing because you're on that phone?

And, and I love that strategy because what it does is it forces us to mindfully pay attention, not just to why we're using our devices, but the, the emotional outcomes that we get from those devices. Are they making you feel good or are they not? And then that can sometimes convince you of like, "Hmm, maybe I wanna do less of this kind of thing on my phone and more of this other kind of thing."?

Jessi Hempel:

We're gonna take a quick break here. When we come back, more about happiness with Dr. Laurie Santos.

And we're back. So if you've listened to the show for a while, you've probably heard the story. In 2011, I had a terrible breakup. I was so miserable. So unhappy that my friends, Erin and Amelia realized they needed to stage an intervention. I mean it was bad. Erin and Amelia suggested that for an entire year, we send an email to each other at the end of the day, listing three things we were feeling joyful about. We called it the joy list. The joy list worked really, really well and I learned something wild about myself. The thing that makes me happiest, it's not money, it's not travel. It's my daily coffee ritual. I mean, coffee made it onto the list almost every day that year. I told Laurie the story, and then I asked, "what the heck was going on? Why did that practice work at all?" And why so well, here's Laurie.?

Laurie Santos:

A couple of things are going on. One is that you were training your attention towards more positive things. Our natural state is what's known as a negativity bias. Our, our natural spot, that attention goes to is the nasty stuff. And that's good, right? Probably saved us evolutionarily, but it's not a great thing for our happiness. So this act of paying attention to the joys in your life, winds up changing your attentional bias. You gotta look for the joys 'cause you gotta find some descend at the end of the day and that means when you start looking, you end up finding them.

Um, but it sounds like you were also doing something else which is changing your attitude. Um, you were developing a mindset of what researchers call gratitude. And you know, I guess what lay people call gratitude too.?

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs)

Laurie Santos:

It's just this act of thankfulness, you're noticing and, and experiencing some gratefulness for the good things out there. Um, and I think you're not alone on the coffee, Jessi. Like this is the kind of thing that like, if I look at my own gratitude list, which is a technique I use with my students, write down three to five things you're grateful for every day, like coffee is surprisingly makes the list like, you know, more, it's like my husband and coffee are kind of-

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs)

Laurie Santos:

... tied like on the list or these things that I like really love in life. This active writing down three to five things you're grateful for, there's evidence in as little as like two weeks, this can significantly improve your wellbeing, a small but significant boost in your wellbeing, just through the act of paying attention to this stuff. Um, and this is a spot where I think, you know, we can use gratitude, not just in our own lives, but also in the workplace.?

You know, for example, there's evidence that expressing gratitude to the people around you, not only boost your own personal wellbeing, but can improve other people's performance, right? When people hear that you're grateful for what they do, that gives them more intrinsic motivation to do what they were doing before. And it's often the thing that we don't stop and say, you know, we can have coworkers who are incredibly grateful for our team members that, you know, we really just have such like a sense that they're just such a blessing in our lives, but we often don't communicate that. And that means we were missing out on this opportunity to give ourselves this wonderful hit of joy and positive emotion, but also to help the people around us too.?

Jessi Hempel:

Yeah. I think that there's one piece that I had never thought of until the beginning of this conversation, that also goes into that joy list. And that is that I sent it to someone that fostered a sense of community. Um, and that community required a bit of exercise and didn't feel like it that year, right. But I forced it and we're living in a moment where we hear a lot about belonging and people feeling, uh, a lack of belonging and less belonging than they have, have felt. Um, how do you encourage people who just don't feel like it to be out there in community or do you?

Laurie Santos:

No, definitely. I mean, again, one of the easiest happiness hacks you can engage in is just to become more social, to reduce your loneliness, to get a crew, whether that's a community of people who like the same books as you, or wanna share delights with you or you know, that ride or die besty that you never see, 'cause you're too busy, right. Changing those things around so you're more social and it can engage your belonging is incredibly important for our happiness. But I'll be honest, like, you know, I'm with you, like it doesn't feel like it. (laughs) So not like you just kind are like, you know, I've had a long day at work and you know, too many things are going on. It's the end of the day. I just wanna plop down and watch Netflix. Every intuition in my body is like, "Do not call a friend, that would be so much work like what a pain." Right??

But again, this is a spot where we just continue to see our minds are going the wrong way. We just, we're trying to make ourselves happy. We're just doing it the wrong way. And one domain where we do that a lot is in our leisure. We, we often wanna do something that's relaxing. Um, but putting in the work to, for example, be social, to engage a little bit more, to get into flow. These are the kinds of things that we know would make us so much happier. And so I guess my advice is like, if you try it and you mindfully pay attention, you'll probably notice that you feel better once you do it.?

Jessi Hempel:

You know, it just, um, it occurs to me that so much of what you're talking about was built into my parents' lives in a way that it is not built into mine because they had automatic, um, commitments to institutions that don't exist in the same way in my life. Um, I don't think that's about me as an individual. I think that's about, I think, I think it might be generational.?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. There was a super influential book that came out. I think it was in 2000, um, by the political scientist, Robert Putnam called Bowling Alone. And he had this observation about leisure, which is back in the 1950s, people were in bowling groups. They would go out, you know, with a team that they had a commitment to. They would bowl against other local players. But if you fast forward to the two thousands, in the nineties people weren't in bowling leagues. I think if you fast forward to now in 2020, people don't even bowl in bowling alleys. Like the last time I went bowling was on a, like a wee (laughs) like by myself in a room. Right?

Jessi Hempel:

(laughs)

Laurie Santos:

And I, I think these transitions matter, I think there, there's lots of evidence that there's just less engagement in groups, whether that be rotary clubs or church groups or, or what have you, right. We just do that less now than we did in our parents' generation. And I think additionally, this has gotten worse because you know, our screens are really entertaining. We don't necessarily need to get out and even see individual friends anymore because we have a lot to entertain ourselves, you know, online. And I think, again, we assume that scrolling through our Instagram feed or watching some TikTok videos is gonna give us the social connection hit, but in practice it, it just doesn't work the same way. It's kind of like nutritionless in terms of our actual social connection.?

Jessi Hempel:

Well, Laurie, you know, I think about that a lot right now in terms of what it might mean to parent teenagers, particularly coming out of the pandemic, um, and teenagers who actually for good reason actually had to have a lot of their social interactions happen in a digitally intermediated way, um, for a couple of years. And now we're accustomed to it, how do you think about the, the young person who says, "Well, all of my friends are in this game, I hang out in this game after school and I'm hanging out with my friends." Does that count toward my happiness??

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. It, it kind of depends. I mean, what the evidence suggests is that you can actually get a boost of social connection online if you're connecting in real time. You know what I, what I mean by in real time, you know, we're having this conversation over a podcast software, we can see each other, we can hear each other talking in real time. You know, it might not be as good as if we were in the same studio together, you know, like goofing around, but like, it's pretty good.?

If you and I were having this conversation and we'd have to send each other a video or we were doing it by text, like our brains just don't register that in the same way as we'd register like a in real life conversation. So even if you're playing a video game together, but you can talk to each other using a headset where you hear other people's voices and it's kind of like video game plus phone, that's actually pretty good, you know, chatting with your coworkers in the like Zoom happy hour, that's pretty good. But texting, reading things in a feed, you know, connecting in a way that's not in real time that lacks voice and facial expressions in the same way a video call might, it's probably not as good.?

Um, it's tempting 'cause it's easy, and I think this is one thing we see with teens for sure is that, you know, this, this time has been a lot, like they're gonna gravitate towards things that feel easier and that space of not connecting in real time feels much easier, but it's not gonna give the kind of proper social connection while being boost, I think everyone's seeking right now.

Jessi Hempel:

Right. So Laurie, I know that you are taking some time off for your own wellbeing right now. Um, and it would be easy and really kind of trite to say, of course Laurie's burnt out. Happiness is over.?

Laurie Santos:

(laughs)

Jessi Hempel:

But in fact, from what I understand, you actually decided to at least attempt to take the time off before you were burnt out, right??

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. I mean, I was, I- I'll be honest, you know, I was running this residential college in the midst of COVID and that was like kind of a nightmare, you know, it wasn't an awesome time. And so I was starting to see the, the seeds of burnout. Exactly the kind of thing I talk about with my students. I was noticing, for example, just like physical exhaustion, right. Have a good night of sleep and still just be dead the next day. Right? It was kind of more of an, like an emotional exhaustion. Like I just couldn't even imagine putting anything else on my plate, right. Just like so deeply exhausted.

I was, I was noticing the second feature of, of burnout, which is what's called depersonalization, which is kind of like a- a cynicism, right? Like the normal clients you work with or the coworkers who used to make you happy, just kind of annoy you. And so I was noticing these, these things happening and you know, I wasn't at full burnout, you know, I was still capable of doing my job, but, but those changes were telling, and I know the research well enough to know that if I didn't make some serious changes, then you know, the path, the path forward wasn't good. Right? If I stayed on the path that I was on, it really wouldn't lead to a good place.?

Jessi Hempel:

Is burnout the opposite of happiness??

Laurie Santos:

When we think of burnout, it's important to remember that burnout is kind of a special clinical syndrome. I think we talk about burnout a lot right now. And I think we often don't mean what we think we mean. There, there's kind of physical exhaustion. There's sort of feeling tired. And then there's this clinical syndrome of burnout, which includes like a very special sense of physical and emotional exhaustion, a very special sense of cynicism and depersonalization and a real special sense of personal in ineffectiveness. You just feel like even if everything went well, your job would lack, meaning and so on.?

And so I think we kind of use the term flippantly, but it's a sort of special clinical syndrome. And so I think we need to be careful when we use that term burnout. It, it means something in particular and if you're listening to this and you're getting there, you know, taking time off or finding some way to disengage from your work is really essential. Because again, the evidence suggests if you're on the path to burnout and you don't make changes, you know, the outcome's not gonna be great.?

Jessi Hempel:

Thank you, Laurie, for joining us for the episode. We've talked about your show and episodes of your show in, uh, interviews with other people over the years. So it's nice to have you finally here with us.?

Laurie Santos:

Cool. Thanks so much for having me on the show?

Jessi Hempel:

That was professor and podcaster, Dr. Laurie Santos, be sure to check out the Happiness Lab, wherever you listen. So community, how happy are you feeling? And after listening to this episode, what's something new you might be inclined to do to increase your happiness? Let's talk about it and we'll do our community gratitude practice as well. Join us this Wednesday at 3:00 PM, Eastern for office hours.

You can find us on the LinkedIn news page or email us at [email protected] for a link. And as always, if you like the show, please follow and review it wherever you get your pods. Getting new ratings and reviews makes our producer Sarah and I feel ecstatic. Hello Monday is the production of LinkedIn. Sarah Storm produces our show with mixing by Joe DiGiorgi and help from Elias Avalos, Wes Wingo and Derek Carl. Florencia Iriondo is head of original audio and video. Dave Pond is head of news production. Michaela Greer and Victoria Taylor help us increase our happiness each week. Our music was composed just for us by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. I'm Jessi Hempel, we'll be back next Monday. Thanks for listening.?

Sarah Storm:

Hey Jessi.?

Jessi Hempel:

Hey Sarah.?

Sarah Storm:

So we just recorded all that VO, what are you feeling grateful for right now??

Jessi Hempel:

I'm tired today-

Sarah Storm:

Yeah.

Jessi Hempel:

... but three things. One, a producer who's totally on her A game.?

Sarah Storm:

Kind, thank you.?

Jessi Hempel:

Two. I love the week before labor day and that's the week it is this week. Everything's so quiet, but it's about to begin.?

Sarah Storm:

Mm-hmm.

Jessi Hempel:

And three, coffee, definitely coffee.?

Sarah Storm:

What's the coffee of choice today.?

Jessi Hempel:

Uh, almond milk cappuccino.

Sarah Storm:

Delicious, enjoy.