Who is Luigi Mangione, and why is he an internet "hero?" : It's Been a Minute Luigi Mangione is alleged to have shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and even before he was identified, the reaction to the shooter was far different than other instances of gun violence.

Today on It's Been A Minute, guest host Gene Demby talks with The Guardian's Abené Clayton about why Mangione is being praised by some, and why his alleged actions won't do much to fix the healthcare industry.

And later on the show, a conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos, psychology professor at Yale and host of the podcast, The Happiness Lab, on the surprising science of how gratitude can affect our brains.

Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus content by joining NPR+ today: https://plus.npr.org/

Luigi Mangione & America's pent up pain

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BRITTANY LUSE, BYLINE: Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luse, and you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

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GENE DEMBY, HOST:

What's good, everybody? All right. First things first, I'm famously not Brittany Luse, although I aspire to be - I mean, the wardrobe, the glasses. Nah, I'm actually Gene Demby, one of the cohosts of NPR's Code Switch. Brittany is out on vacation - lucky her. But she asked me to jump in because she wanted somebody to be here to help process the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting news with all of you. And to do that processing, I'm joined by Abene Clayton, who covers gun violence for The Guardian. What's good, Abene?

ABENE CLAYTON: Thanks for having me, Gene.

DEMBY: All right, so first, I got to set the scene a little bit. So it's been over a week since a masked gunman shot and killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, outside a Manhattan hotel. This week authorities identified and detained an alleged gunman, and he's been charged with murder. You've probably heard his name by now - Luigi Mangione. And we kind of have to walk a very delicate line here because we're talking about, you know, violence here, a brazen murder, which is pretty scary to think about for a lot of people. And at the same time, there's been a lot of praise and solidarity for this alleged gunman and his actions. I mean, just listen to some of these reactions.

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D'ANDRE WILCOX: Y'all saying murderer. I'm saying freedom fighter.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: This dude might have been Batman.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: How about we free Luigi and arrest the corrupt CEOs?

DEMBY: The alleged shooter even got his own superhero-esque nickname with some people on the internet calling him The Adjuster. And on the other end, there are reports of CEOs across industries being scared for their lives, beefing up their security details, removing their identities from their company's websites.

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DEMBY: All right, Abene, as somebody who covers gun violence, how would you characterize the reactions we've been seeing to the shooting? And how have these reactions been different from the normal reactions to violence?

CLAYTON: You know, it is violence hitting somebody who a lot of people feel like typifies the inequalities that lead to other forms of violence. You know what I'm saying?

DEMBY: Obviously, we are not condoning murder. And this is a awful tragedy for his family. But the response is - it reminds me a little bit of the way - when you read about, like, Bonnie and Clyde, right? They were doing these really horrible things, where they were killing people. They were robbing banks. But this was also during the Great Depression, and people were very, very angry at bankers, right? You know, banks had basically tanked the economy, and, you know, people have lost their livelihoods. They lost their homes.

And so because they were robbing banks, it was seen as a sort of - even though what they were doing wasn't sort of vigilantism - right? - it wasn't sort of resolving any of the situations that people found themselves in. They were also going after - like, hitting the pockets of people that were really, really unpopular. And this feels kind of like that kind of folk hero thing.

CLAYTON: I think the Bonnie and Clyde thing is quite accurate. Yes, this was a very public and hard-to-watch, traumatizing act of violence that will impact his family for years to come. And also, what does he represent? What's the backdrop, right?

DEMBY: Yeah, I mean, it's something that we don't really think about as, you know, violence. But just last year, the American Medical Association reported that a third of the physicians they surveyed - and they asked a thousand physicians - a third of them said that they'd seen delay or denial of care due to prior authorization lead to, you know, either serious adverse health effects for their patients or even death. Why do you think people have a harder time seeing what happens to people like us on the business end of, you know, insurance companies' decisions as violence, but we can see gun violence more clearly as the destructive thing that it is?

CLAYTON: Yeah, you know, that's a good question. I think it is violence, right? To me, by definition of what harm and violence is, I would absolutely put it in that category. But I think in the U.S., we have such a narrow framework of whose victimization deserves to be remediated.

I hear it all the time when I write about shootings that happen, you know, in our hoods across America. Someone can straight up be shot and killed - a young 22-year-old. And it's like, well, that's no victim. Is that violence, or is that someone - you know, all these flippant comments that now are kind of directed at this CEO I've seen befall people with no power, very little money, honestly, whose communities have been scarred by the extractive nature of industries like healthcare. It's violent. But obviously, Brian Thompson is not a young Black boy on the corner who's unfortunately gunned down, but to see his victimhood also questioned in this way is - it's been interesting to watch.

DEMBY: We should also note here that we do know - at least the police said that the bullets he used had inscribed on them the words deny, defend and depose. And that echoes a phrase commonly used to describe the alleged tactics that insurers use to, you know, avoid paying out insurance claims to their customers. And United Healthcare, we should say, is the biggest health insurance company in the country.

And it was just slammed last month in a senate investigation for denying people certain types of care as a way to boost the company's profits. Like, honestly, when I first heard the news, I thought about when my wife and I were going through our long, arduous IVF journey. Not long after we, you know, conceived and had our son I'm so thankful for, one of the big clinics in our area informed its patients that our health insurance was dropping coverage for that clinic.

And so that didn't impact me and my wife directly, but we just could not stop thinking about all the other folks that we would see, like, in the waiting room - right? - the people who were in the middle of treatment. And suddenly they were going to have to pay out of pocket if they could - right? - to try to start a family. And it's just, like, very financially and emotionally devastating news that must have been to them - right? -because these are choices about their lives that are out of their hands. And it all kind of happened on a dime through the decisions of some healthcare executive or somebody with an actuarial table somewhere.

CLAYTON: Then when you see, like, documents that show how sometimes arbitrary these decisions are, like, you're - people's lives are being played with - you know what I'm saying? - so that a spreadsheet is balanced. And that's a recipe for resentment. One thing that is usually a component of why someone shoots someone else is around grievance, right? You have done me wrong. And it sounds like - and obviously, we don't know - like, Luigi is innocent till proven guilty. He hasn't made any statements. It's unclear what his motivations are. But based on the context and the information that we have now, it appears that a part of the thinking was, like, you have hurt all these people. Sending this signal is worthwhile.

DEMBY: I mean, on that point - right? - I've seen a lot of people criticizing how the media has been covering this, like, how the public is riding with this alleged shooter. And the media hasn't been able to capture that sentiment. How do you think the reactions of the public differ from what you've seen - from the way you've seen this covered?

CLAYTON: You know, when I knew that I'd be coming on to talk about this topic, I started paying more attention to cable news. And I saw people straight-up, like, scold - right? - and say, oh, and there's this, like, disgusting perversion and people loving it. And, like, having that become a part of the story feels incredibly tone-deaf, right?

And I'm also concerned that mainstream national news is putting the same sort of burden of badness, if you will, on people getting their jokes off on the internet, on people who are saying - who are telling their stories - right? - of these horrific outcomes because of shoddy healthcare coverage. They're putting those on the same level as folks who have actually contributed to that harm, right? Like, you can't say that you're just as bad as the billionaire who is, you know, buying up these homes and selling them at exorbitant rates. You're just as bad as that person because you got a joke off about Brian Thompson. That's just not true. We can't equate those, and I think that doing so will only lead to more alienation and lead people to double down. You know what I'm saying? It's dangerous.

DEMBY: It was really interesting to see Ben Shapiro, you know, famed right-wing pundit, sort of lamenting the - air quote, "the left's" response to the shooting and taking glee. His audience clapped back at him really pretty hard. It was like, nah, this is not a left thing. We are very angry at these people, too. Like, we don't have tears to shed for these people as well, which is really interesting to watch them have to metabolize the fact that this wasn't, like, partisan schadenfreude. This was, like, a thing that is felt broadly across ideological...

CLAYTON: Yeah.

DEMBY: ...Categories.

CLAYTON: The polarization you mentioned - whenever there is a high profile, kind of, vigilante-style shooting, it's usually pretty evenly split along party lines, right? You think of Trayvon Martin, of Ahmaud Arbery, you know, so many folks who were shot by usually a white or white-adjacent person who said, I'm taking the law into my own hands. Usually, you can rely on how people are going to feel about that on who they voted for in their politics.

And I think they were going to see the alleged shooter as this sort of, like, antifa figure who their base would reject. But their base, I'm sure, was among the Americans who are like, yeah, I got healthcare, but it don't work for me. And that has just thrown people into a warp that is really interesting to watch but, I worry, won't end in root-cause solutions, as most mass shootings don't.

DEMBY: I keep thinking about when we cover, like, police violence on Code Switch, which one of the things we always have to, like, remind people is that, like, these individual cases - they often unearth, like, all this feeling, anger that people have over historical racism, right? Like, it all comes to bear on these individual cases. But there's no way the actual resolution of these cases, like, in a American court - right? - like, is going to resolve all those issues, right?

And so I imagine that the trial for Luigi Mangione is going to be really, really heavily covered - right? - maybe even, like, OJ levels of coverage, right? But then what's going to happen is that people are going to, like, think of the verdict as reckoning with all this other stuff that this case has unearthed. And it can do that. The verdict is only about this case. It's only going to be about who shot whom, who was where. I wonder what that means for how we do or don't resolve all that other stuff.

CLAYTON: This is something I have been thinking about, right? Like, this really high-profile incident of gun violence - what is it going to change? I worry that, much like other high-profile shootings, especially high-profile mass shootings, where someone does it for these grievance reasons, I don't think that those will ever truly get addressed with this. And I'm just really worried that we're going to lose the plot, which is that millions of people, even if they do have insurance, don't have actual access to healthcare in a timely, sustainable, affordable manner. And the fact that that continues to get lost is extremely worrying and makes the ground really fertile for someone else to try it, you know?

DEMBY: So I guess to close out, I'm wondering - like, at the end of the day, this is still the killing of a man, whose murder, as we said, is, like, standing in for all these other things - right? - this rage that so many people feel towards this larger system. I'm wondering, what do you think are the wrong lessons that we could take away from this moment?

CLAYTON: One of the negative things we can get out of this is just seeing more and more people be OK with folks settling their grievances with guns. We see arguments that start in bars that end in shootings. We see conflict in homes that end up with entire families dead straight up. And I understand where the jokes are coming from. And, you know, a couple have elicited a little, like, oh, they kind of ate it with that one.

I don't want the lesson that people take from this to be like, oh, well, I could just - oh, my gosh. I'll shoot somebody, too, and then my message will get out - right? - because we've seen that sentiment lead to some of the most devastating high-profile mass shootings in our nation's history because someone said, I got a grievance. Y'all got me messed up, and I got this gun. Watch what's going to happen.

DEMBY: Abene, you are incredible. I've learned so much here. Thank you so much for coming and trying to think about this and trying to make sense of this very bananas story. And obviously, the story is far from over. I mean, this trial is going to be an obsession. So thank you for coming on.

CLAYTON: Thank you so much for having me. It was a great discussion.

DEMBY: That was Abene Clayton. She covers gun violence for The Guardian. We're going to take a quick break, but when we get back, I'm handing the mic back over to Brittney Luse the Great. She's going to get into why you should have gratitude not just on the holidays but all year round. As for me, I'm Gene Demby, and as for you, you're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR.

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LUSE: We are fully into the holiday season. It's a time when a lot of us will reflect on the things and the people in our lives that we appreciate. And my guest today is someone I'm really grateful for. Dr. Laurie Santos, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.

LAURIE SANTOS: Thanks so much for having me on the show.

LUSE: Oh, my gosh. My pleasure. I mean, first of all, I got to say - longtime listener, first-time caller. I have been listening to "The Happiness Lab" for years. Your podcast sometimes has just kept me from the brink.

SANTOS: (Laughter).

LUSE: Laurie is a psychology professor at Yale, and her podcast, "The Happiness Lab," is full of tips on how to be happier, all of which are backed by psychology. And Laurie says one emotion we should pay more attention to is actually gratitude. Now, I am someone who has a gratitude journal, and I have to say it has just done so much for my life, even on days when I'm feeling so low that all I could be thankful for is that I don't have a broken nail or maybe I'm going to eat tacos for dinner.

That gratitude journal keeps me mentally on track. So I'm already on board the gratitude train. But in our very individualistic culture, one that does not prioritize this feeling except around this time of year, gratitude can be harder to access. So I'm revisiting a conversation we had last year about how and why we should use gratitude to feel better year round and not just around the major holidays.

So before we get into gratitude, for our listeners who might not know, how did you find yourself starting "The Happiness Lab"? Like, what was happening that made you realize, like, you got to make this? We need this.

SANTOS: Yeah. Well, the origin of my interest in studying the science of happiness broadly was when I was a faculty member who lived with students on campus and I was seeing their mental health crisis. This is pre-COVID. This is, like, in 2018.

LUSE: Oh, wow.

SANTOS: And, you know, so many students were reporting feeling depressed and anxious. And I think at the time, I wasn't very happy either. You know, I'd hear them talk about certain things and realize, like, oh, I'm also not thinking about things in the right way. You know, just an example, I'd see a student and be like, hey. How's it going this week? And the student would be, like, oh, if I could just get to the weekend, or if I could just fast-forward and get to spring break. And part of me was like, oh, man, you don't want to fast-forward your entire college career. It's such a precious time. But then a bigger part of me was like, yeah, oh, my goodness. If we could just get to spring break and fast-forward...

LUSE: (Laughter).

SANTOS: And so I thought, you know, I'm a psychologist. I know the kinds of things we can do to improve our mental health. Maybe I should develop a class for students to teach them all these evidence-based strategies they could use to feel better. The class, the first time I taught it, became Yale's largest class in over 300 years. A quarter of the entire student body signed up for the class. And so that sort of made me realize that...

LUSE: Wow. I'm sorry. That is a lot of people.

SANTOS: It was a lot of people. There were lots of logistical, you know, issues, you know?

LUSE: Yeah. I was like, where do you teach them? Like, in the...

SANTOS: Yeah - concert hall.

LUSE: In a stadium?

SANTOS: Turns out concert hall.

LUSE: Yeah.

SANTOS: Stadium's too cold...

LUSE: Oh, wow.

SANTOS: ...You know, in January. But yeah. It really hit a nerve on campus. But what was interesting is that it also hit a nerve off campus, right? You know, a number of news outlets heard, you know, that the biggest class at Yale was this class about happiness. And, you know, the reaction was sort of like, OK, that's great for Yale students, but what about the rest of us who need these strategies, too? And so that was when I started to realize that, you know, people needed this content.

LUSE: So, I mean, even for those who don't celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas or any of the major winter holidays - because not everybody does - what makes gratitude such an important practice?

SANTOS: Yeah. So it has a couple of interesting benefits. One is it's just a practice that feels good. So gratitude in and of itself is an emotion, right? You know, when you realize you're grateful, when you realize there's so many good things in your life, that feels really good.

But gratitude has all these other benefits that we don't realize. It's this pro-social emotion that - and pro-social emotions are ones where we start to think about other people rather than ourselves. They're emotions that make us want to do good out there in the world. David DeSteno, who's a social psychologist - he's found evidence that when you think about things that you're grateful for, if you happen to walk out of that experiment and somebody is having a - you know, slightly faked, in our psychologist way - emergency, you'll step in, and you'll help that person who's having an emergency. So you're more likely to physically help out in the world when you've experienced gratitude.

But an even cooler thing about gratitude is that gratitude makes us want to help our future self, right? It causes us to want to invest in our future happiness 'cause, again, it feels like the cup overfloweth for me right now. I could, you know, put some work into helping out future me.

LUSE: Like paying it forward for yourself, even.

SANTOS: You're paying it forward for yourself. And you see that in a couple different domains, right? One is that when people experience more gratitude, they eat healthier - right? - 'cause it's kind of like, you don't need that treat now. You'll kind of, you know, eat a little healthier for your future self. And when people experience more gratitude, they're more likely to save for the future. It's kind of, again, I don't need that immediate reward financially right now 'cause, you know, again, my cup overfloweth. I'm cool.

LUSE: I got to see that one play it out in my own life. I haven't seen that one yet. I'm trusting you. I'm trusting you.

SANTOS: Yeah. So I think there are these benefits for us in terms of gratitude. But a huge benefit of gratitude is that, especially when we express gratitude, it can really increase our relationship happiness. Couples who self-report being grateful to one another wind up being happier in their marriages and so on. And there's lots of evidence that the act of intentionally remembering what you're thankful for in your other relationships - just, like, you know, in your family, as a parent, as a child, as a friend - these are the kinds of things that can increase our relationship bonds. Professor Sara Algoe is a professor at the University of North Carolina. She has what she calls the find, remind and bind theory.

LUSE: Ooh.

SANTOS: And so the idea is when we find good things about people - I find all these blessings about my relationship with you, say - that reminds me, like, oh, my gosh, I love this person. I have such a strong relationship with this person. And then that causes certain actions where we bind, right? So I think about, you know, this friend I haven't talked to in a long time. I'm like, man, she's so funny. She's so good to me. She's taken care of me in tough times. I'm really grateful for her.

I find those things. I feel really bound to her, and what do I do? I'm like, you know, I'm going to text her, or I'm going to call her, or I'm going to do something nice to her, right? You engage in these behaviors that build that relationship up. And so this is one of the reasons I love gratitude so much, you know, around the Thanksgiving dinner table because, again, I'm not sure about your family, but a lot of families out there are a little complicated, right? You know, we don't always feel like those relationships are as close as they can be. And just engaging with gratitude not just about the random things but about the people around us can really make us feel closer.

LUSE: All right. I'm going to take a quick break, but we have so much more to dig into. I'll be right back.

Even just you talking about it actually kind of, like, spreads warm throughout. When you put it that way, it makes me think about something that I noticed that my husband does. He always thanks me for doing normal stuff - so, like, if I got him a glass of water or if I did the laundry, you know, just things, like, around the house that normally, you know, everybody's supposed to do and, honestly, a lot of the time he's doing more of. But I noticed it was so nice because it made me feel like he had noticed my effort to do something...

SANTOS: Yeah.

LUSE: ...To be thoughtful or notice my effort just to, like...

SANTOS: You feel seen.

LUSE: ...Not even to be thoughtful but just to be considerate. Yeah. And even just that act of noticing really had such an impact on me, and it's something that I have made a point of doing for him as well all of the time. So, I mean, I'm sure if somebody were to observe, they'd be like, you're really just thanking each other constantly for, like, doing everyday stuff. But it's nice.

SANTOS: But it works.

LUSE: It's nice to see, like, somebody notices. And I think the noticing is part of it, too.

SANTOS: And this is another kind of almost, honestly, psychologically a little strange thing about gratitude, which is that we don't really get used to it as much as we think. So most good things in life are subject to what's called hedonic adaptation. We get used to it, right? You know, so if you won the lottery today and won the lottery again tomorrow and won the lottery again this weekend, like, all of a sudden, you'd be like, all right, I'm bored with the money, right? You know, if you eat the same kind of, you know, flavor of ice cream cone over and over and over, even though it's delicious at first...

LUSE: You get bored.

SANTOS: ...You get bored. But gratitude doesn't seem to work that way. You know, a compliment that you're given on Day 1, if you get a new compliment on Day 2, if you're thanked on Day 3, it tends to sort of have the same kind of happiness impact over time. And that's awesome because it means that, like, you know, you're not - even though you said, like, well, you know, we just go around thanking each other, you don't actually get sick of it. It still has the same kind of happiness impact and the same relationship-building impact. And that's...

LUSE: So nice.

SANTOS: ...Relationships, you know, with our spouses and our partners. There's also lots of evidence that gratitude in the workplace can be incredible for people's performance. One study by the psychologist Adam Grant looked at this. He actually tested individuals who had a kind of thankless job, university fundraiser callers. So these are, like, the students at your old college...

LUSE: Oh, yeah.

SANTOS: ...Who call you for money.

LUSE: (Inaudible) phone-a-thon. Yeah.

SANTOS: Total - just hang up on them.

LUSE: Yeah.

SANTOS: Total thankless task, right? So he wanted to know, OK, what are the kinds of things that would improve their performance, you know, get them to make more calls, maybe make more money? You know, you think, throw a pizza party or, you know, all these things. But he just said, what about gratitude?

And so what he did was he had the - you know, the big boss at the university show up and genuinely thank half of these fundraisers. So you come in, and you say, look. You know, we're really grateful for what you do because you do this stuff. So it's just a, like, sincere expression of gratitude. What he finds is that those callers increase their rate of success. They increase the number of calls they make. This is powerful, right? Like, so many of us have jobs where we work on Teams, where we work with other people.

LUSE: Yeah.

SANTOS: And the sad thing is I think a lot of times, we are grateful for what those people do. You know, thinking back to my "Happiness" team, I have, you know, technology directors who help me, and I have my students, and I love all of them. You know, today I could list on my hand, like, gosh, they did this for me today, and they came up with this cool idea and so on.

LUSE: Yeah.

SANTOS: But we don't often say it. And that's kind of sad, right? We're missing out on these benefits when we don't express that we're really grateful for other people.

LUSE: That is such a good point. Like, sometimes, at the end of the day, my husband and I will both kind of, like, report nice things that we saw somebody else do or something. Those nice things or those things that you appreciate don't always get back to somebody.

SANTOS: You might not share it. Yeah.

LUSE: Even if you feel that appreciation.

SANTOS: And one thing I think we can do to remedy that is to remember that, like, we haven't missed our opportunity, right? You know, if, Friday, you're having that conversation with your husband and you're like, you know, so-and-so at work - NPR - they did this awesome thing, and you realize, oh, I didn't actually tell that person that, when you get in on Monday, you can say, you know, I was actually thinking all weekend about how nice it was that you did X, Y and Z. Thank you so much.

And, like, I think, in our brains, we think it'll be awkward if we're like, remember two weeks ago, you did this thing for me? Thank you. The person will be like, well, that's weird that you're bringing it up. But no one ever thinks that. People only think, like, oh my gosh, that was so sweet that you thought about me for that long. And so, you know, the remedy for kind of missing out on sharing what you're grateful for, especially if you're grateful for somebody else, is, like, just tell them. There's no kind of expiration date on it. You can actually share it whenever you notice it and feel it.

LUSE: I do feel like, though, in the everyday sense, modern life, the entire 2020s decade so far - the times we're in now have made, at times, gratitude harder for me to reach.

SANTOS: Totally. Yep.

LUSE: And I don't think I'm alone in that. Do you have any tips on how to locate and amplify gratitude, especially during tough times?

SANTOS: Yeah. Well, I think one thing to remember is another thing we get wrong is just this idea that positive and negative emotions are on a continuum. We can, at the same time, experience a lot of positive emotion and negative emotion. You know, this is why we can experience things like a moment that feels bittersweet, where it has the bitter part and the sweet part.

And I think this has helped me with experiencing a little bit more gratitude. It's to recognize that when I'm grateful for the people around the table, when I'm grateful for this meal, when I'm grateful and just noticing and savoring, you know, the smell of my coffee, that doesn't negate the true anger I might feel about what's going on in the world or the true fear I might feel about what's happening, you know, with the climate or the economy or something else. We can hold those moments at the same time.

And I think that's really critical because, you know, sometimes, you know, it would be sad if the terrible events of the world made us not appreciate what we had around us. And sometimes that moment of gratitude is the sort of thing that's going to help us get through the tough times, right? If we want to buffer ourself and experience resilience to kind of get through all the nasty stuff that's out there, we need some positive emotion to help us out. And gratitude is the kind of thing that you can go for just by noticing - really intentionally paying attention to the good things.

And I think so many of us kind of noticed that during the pandemic. I don't know about you, but I found myself having these moments where I savored tinier things in the midst of that. It takes a little bit of intention and effort. But if you put in that intention and effort, you will wind up feeling a lot better.

LUSE: Oh, my gosh. You're just making me recall all these moments I feel so grateful for. I have a young niece, and she used to live in New York until recently. And she was very small. She was, like, a toddler during, you know, lockdown. And I remember, like, the first time we could really hug. She squeezed me so hard, and it felt so nice. It was just like, oh, my gosh. Like, you know, it was like finding - it was like an oasis in the middle of the desert.

SANTOS: Yeah.

LUSE: Thinking about gratitude, we live in a highly individualistic culture, and gratitude requires the acknowledgment of how we're all helping each other, that we don't do it all alone. What would it look like for us to have gratitude as a societal value or at least one that's more present in our society than it currently is?

SANTOS: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I sometimes like to think of gratitude as something that people in public health should be pushing more for, right? I mean, I just mentioned that gratitude will allow you to save more. It'll let you eat healthier. It'll let you form better relationships, right? It can make you feel less lonely 'cause you feel more bound to the people around you. And so I actually think we should be almost prescribing gratitude for people. Again, it sounds so cheesy, but when you start to realize that it has this whole host of benefits, it means we're going to be feeling more connected to people. It's a really, really powerful tool that I think we're not using enough.

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LUSE: Thank you so much, Laurie. This was a great conversation.

SANTOS: Thanks. See; you're already expressing gratitude, so good work.

(LAUGHTER)

LUSE: Thanks again to Dr. Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale and host of the podcast "The Happiness Lab." You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

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LUSE: This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...

BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.

ALEXIS WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Alexis Williams.

LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.

COREY ANTONIO ROSE, BYLINE: Corey Antonio Rose.

LUSE: Our executive producer is...

JASMINE ROMERO, BYLINE: Jasmine Romero.

LUSE: Our VP of programming is...

YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.

LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.

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