How to Make Climate Action More Enjoyable with Elizabeth & Jiaying Zhao

Elizabeth Dunn (0:00)

We can fight climate change in ways that actually make our lives more joyful. And I think climate movement has emphasized emotions like guilt and shame and fear and anxiety. And there are good reasons for this. And I think negative emotions are powerful and they can mobilize people and get people to look up and take notice. But they're very exhausting over time. And so positive emotions can actually help make us more resilient.

And happiness is like nature's reinforcer. If we adopt a new lifestyle change that we actually enjoy, we're going to be much more likely to stick with it, which is exactly what we need in tackling the grand challenge of climate change.

Guy Kawasaki (0:46)

Hello, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast. Today in particular, I want you to notice this hat.

This hat is the Royal Canadian Air Force hat because we have two remarkable guests from Canada, one of my favorite countries in the world. So these two guests are both professors at the University of British Columbia. The guest names are Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying Zhao. They are psychology professors and they are going to discuss a seemingly oxymoronic, completely hard to grasp the concept of joy combined with climate change behavior. So yeah, we are going to thread the needle and we're going to talk about saving the planet and making you happier.

They have written a book, this is the book. It's called Leave the Lights On and we will get into why they name this book this book. But welcome to the show, Jay-Z and Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Dunn (2:08)

Thanks so much for having us. Great to be here.

Jiaying Zhao (2:10)

Yeah, great to be here.

Guy Kawasaki (2:11)

Seriously, I cannot think of a Canadian that I've met that I did not like. I just love Canadians. You know, I love Canadians already. Imagine when you become our 51st state. Oh my God. I'm going to.

Elizabeth Dunn (2:25)

Too soon.

Guy Kawasaki (2:26)

Too soon. I bet you cannot say that every American you've ever met you like, but we won't go down that path. So before we get into this climate discussion with Joy, backing up a little bit, both of you are kind of experts in what makes people happy. So can we just start off with that base question of what makes people happy?

Elizabeth Dunn (2:52)

Yeah. So I've really spent my career studying this question, and I think one of the key answers is social relationships. So our feelings of connection to other people seem to be one of the really paramount factors that shapes our happiness. But what I love about this topic is that it's something people talk about late at night. Everybody has opinions about what matters for happiness, but it's actually something we can study rigorously and scientifically, and that's what I love to do.

Guy Kawasaki (3:21)

So are you basically reinforcing? I cannot remember his name right now, but he's the current director of the Harvard Happiness Project, this longitudinal study. And I think his kind of conclusion is what makes you happy over the course of your lifetime is your social relationships. It's not money or cars or houses or anything like this.

Elizabeth Dunn (3:42)

Yeah, I would say money matters too. So my first book was called Happy Money. And in that book, we talked about actually how you can use money better in order to promote happiness. I don't think anyone should turn down raises. But I think the message is it's worth taking some extra time to prioritize our social relationships.

Guy Kawasaki (3:58)

So do both of you buy the concept that after $75,000 or so, there's like a rapid decline in the marginal value of money. And I really wonder how happy Daniel Kahneman was. But what's the latest on that kind of theory that after this relatively low minimum, money doesn't matter as much?

Elizabeth Dunn (4:19)

That specific finding has actually been debunked. So Danny Kahneman did an adversarial collaboration with another researcher named Matt Killingsworth. And together, they actually found evidence that more money does continue to provide more happiness. You just need to have enough data on really rich people to be able to see that. And you have to look with a very, very kind of fine microscope, metaphorically speaking, because the effects are smaller as you have more money. So for example, if I could hand you $10,000, that would make probably some difference for your happiness. You'd probably feel good like right after the podcast. But I could make a much bigger impact on somebody else's happiness if I gave it to somebody who was just starting out and struggling to make ends meet. And we've actually done research where we literally did that, where we gave people $10,000 each and looked at how much of a difference it made for their happiness. I can say with scientific confidence that how much money you have does matter for your happiness, but the impact of additional money matters much more at the lower rungs of the income ladder.