Top 5: Love the Past, But Don't Live There

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 14.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Happiness Lab is five years old. To mark our birthday, Dr Laurie has picked her favorite five episodes from the archive. The show Why Nostalgia Ain't So Rosy was certainly a memorable one for her.

Actor Rob Lowe LOVES the 1980s. And who can blame him? He was one of the most famous men on the planet. But, as he tells Dr Laurie, he's careful not to wallow in nostalgia for the music, fashions and events of his youth too much - and happiness science backs him up on this.

Research suggests that our memories of the past can be very selective and highly unreliable - causing us to misremember events and cast them in a rosy glow. Sadly, this also causes us to make very bad decisions about what will make us happy in the future.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Pushkin.
0:10.8	It's birthday season here at the Happiness Lab.
0:17.0	We are celebrating our fifth year anniversary,
0:20.0	and it's prompted us to go back into the archive to pull out five of my most memorable
0:24.4	and meaningful episodes from the hundreds that we've made.
0:27.4	My producer, Ryan, has number three on the list, which is...
0:30.6	So it's a show from season three called Why Nostalgia Ain't So Rosie.
0:34.1	And I think I know why you had to me grab this one out, but why don't you tell the listeners?
0:37.4	Is it because of our main guest who we start with? My heart throb. Yes. So this is an episode
0:43.6	where I got to interview the actor Roblo, who definitely was one of my 80s heart throbs. I believe
0:49.0	you made fun of me for a smile on my face in the Zoom interview. Yes, I looked a little cheesy.
0:54.4	And this was the first big season we made during the COVID lockdown.
0:57.4	So I remember sitting with you on Zoom and with Rob Lowe.
0:59.9	He told so many funny stories and did all the accents.
1:02.4	We couldn't fit them all in.
1:03.4	Yeah.
1:03.7	I mean, and aside from all his Hollywood anecdotes,
1:05.7	Rob also really helped us understand the psychology of nostalgia, both the parts of nostalgia that we get
1:11.3	right that help us and the parts of nostalgia that lead us astray.
1:14.8	Because Rob's very nostalgic. I mean, there's lots of things in his youth he remembers fondly,
1:19.2	but as I remember, he's also careful not to get caught up in them. What are the things you get
1:22.8	nostalgic about? Well, Rob in 80s movies, obviously. You know, really cheesy music from the 90s.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -132 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Pushkin Industries, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Pushkin Industries and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.