Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism (#579)

“Just write a journal entry from this future. It will literally change your brain forever. That future is now forever imaginable to you, and it only took five minutes.“
— Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) is a future-forecaster and a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games that improve real lives and solve real problems. She’s the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future and the lead instructor for their series on the Coursera platform. She also teaches the course How to Think Like a Futurist at Stanford University.

Jane is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality Is Broken and SuperBetter, and the forthcoming Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today. Her TED talks on how games can make a better world and the game that can give you 10 extra years of life have more than 15 million views. Her innovative games and ideas have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, O magazine, and The New York Times, among many others.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

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The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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#579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism

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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…

Want to revisit Jane’s previous appearance on the show? Listen to our conversation here, which finds us discussing real-world problems solved with games or by gamers, how Jane’s career path was guided by recovery from a concussion, the health benefits of Tetris and Call of Duty, post-traumatic growth and post-ecstatic growth, favorite documentaries, efficacious morning rituals, and much more.

#93: Jane McGonigal on Getting More Done with Less Stress and The Health Benefits of Gaming

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Jane McGonigal:

Website | Twitter

SHOW NOTES

Good video games to play for quieting your mind before bedtime, and an update on research we discussed during Jane’s last visit that linked Tetris positively to preventing episodes of PTSD. [07:16]
Find yourself waking up for a few hours in the middle of the night? It’s perfectly natural. Here’s how to deal with it. [11:13]
From a research standpoint, why is Tetris uniquely effective at treating PTSD? [13:34]
McGonigal to McNostradamus: what spooky thing happened when, in 2010, Jane led 20,000 gamers in a social simulation trying to imagine the world of 2020? 10 years later, what does Jane consider to be the most important outcome of this exercise? [15:31]
Further predictions from this 2010 simulation and another one that ran simultaneously — including a tick-borne pandemic that could make people allergic to meat (and how the world might adjust to such a scenario). [22:25]
What predicted threat does Jane see as having a silver lining, and what economic concepts and policies have recently “radicalized” her? [40:59]
Predictions for the future of cryptocurrency as politics get involved, and how current play-to-earn gaming platforms may have to adapt. [50:25]
Cult recruitment and podcasting in the age of trust warfare. [54:21]
Pornography always finds a way. [1:00:11]
What is urgent optimism? [1:10:38]
Future Fridays and habits to cultivate for feeling good when contemplating an uncertain future. [1:13:58]
Future power examples: small preparations Jane has found helpful toward easing her more comfortably into what tomorrow has in store for us. [1:18:54]
Do you have an action plan for total electrical blackout or climate migration? Here are some preventative and reactive steps Jane’s been thinking about, and how I address such problems to people who may be politically disinclined to consider them at all. [1:24:44]
Three questions you can ask to measure your urgent optimism and give you a sense of which of those three habits or skills you might want to practice more, and an example of how Jane’s recently applied these questions. [1:31:46]
Jane details an Urgent Optimist group activity you can join to better spot the future’s hopeful signals — especially if you’re hardwired to only see what’s in a shadow of perpetual pessimism. [1:39:41]
Journaling from the future as a form of specificity training. [1:43:14]
Who Alvin Toffler was, and how Jane feels about his maxim that “it’s more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be 100 percent right” about the future. [1:47:29]
Why Jane thinks the technological solutions to climate change will rely more on socio optimism than techno-optimism, and what these solutions may look like. [1:52:05]
Jane’s recommendations for people who would like to study incentives and how they might be applied to solving the world’s biggest problems. [1:57:10]
Further resources, audience asks, and final thoughts. [2:00:58]

MORE JANE MCGONIGAL QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Building urgent optimism is like following a string out of a labyrinth. You’re taking all these twists and turns. You’ve got your radar up, so you’re going to hear about weird new risks. You’re going to hear about cool new uses. And I like to think it’s essentially a process of opening your mind.”
— Jane McGonigal

“What if the future that you think is most likely to happen is not a good future? Do you want to be right, or do you want to actually prove yourself wrong and help us all wake up in a better reality?”
— Jane McGonigal

“Right now we’re just playing with ideas, and we’re thinking about how our actions today could lead to a better, or a weirder, or a riskier world.”
— Jane McGonigal

“I don’t think universal basic income is a radical idea, but I’m on that train. I want people to work less and care more. Care for their kids, care for themselves, care for their communities.”
— Jane McGonigal

“I’ve seen the numbers on the four-day workweek, which I think isn’t going far enough. I’m already imagining a three-day workweek as a global norm, because there’s no reason—with automation, with AI—we need to work this much. Every time we’ve invented new technologies of productivity, economists have predicted that we’re going to use that to create more free time for leisure. … It only happens when companies experiment with shorter workweeks.”
— Jane McGonigal

“There’s an incredible new positive emotion that we don’t even have a word for yet that artists can use, storytellers can use, therapists can use, by using drones to give us a viewpoint we’ve never seen.”
— Jane McGonigal

“It works for me, Jane McGonigal, the game designer, to have become a futurist because what are the most fun games to play? It’s really not the game you play by yourself. It’s the game that you’re playing in big groups.”
— Jane McGonigal

“Just write a journal entry from this future. It will literally change your brain forever. That future is now forever imaginable to you, and it only took five minutes.”
— Jane McGonigal

“If we can create more abundance in the future, we fight less. There’s less sense of other people being competition. If we all have what we need, that’s a world where I think we can be a little bit happier and nicer to each other, and I would like to live in that world.”
— Jane McGonigal

“We take action to make the future we want more plausible, or take action to make futures we don’t want less likely. And that’s the power, not accuracy. It’s the ability to imagine and take action that we’re really trying to get better at.”
— Jane McGonigal

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Vern

2 years ago

Sorry, could you please point me to the right place to locate the incentive resources Jane promised to get back and share at the Show Notes? Thanks!

Admin

Team Tim Ferriss

Reply to Vern

Hi, Vern.

If you keep scrolling up from the comments here, you’ll see a section called Show Notes and, above that, Selected Links. At the end of the selected links section, you’ll see the links to the Game Theory (and related) resources.

Best,

Chad Millette

1 year ago

Are the new game theory references Jane was going to provide included in the references?

Reply to Chad Millette

Hi, Chad.

Arvid Johansson

I do not believe Jane should present the theory of first sleep and second sleep with that amount of certainty. According to Matthew Walker, there is no strong anthropological findings to support this claim. Furthermore there is no evidence in biological rhythm, brain activity, neurochemical activity or metabolic activity to suggest that a first sleep and second sleep patern is true. Walker claims it is a myth based upon anecdotal findings from the middle ages.

What does have support anthropological findings from non-industrialized communities and human rhythm is two phase of sleep. One continuous sleep in night and one nap in the afternoon. It is still present i cultures with siesta.

Read chapter 4 in Matthew Walkers book Why we Sleep for more information.

kenest

Reply to Arvid Johansson

Thank you, Arvid, for pointing out this questionable theory about 2-part sleep, my reaction exactly.

Great interview though in every other sense. Kudos to Jane and Tim!

M. Andrew McConnell

Tim – On this one you mention several times that you “need to get out of your head.” Not to be entirely self-serving, but I have a book coming out in June titled “Get Out of My Head: Creating Modern Clarity Using Stoic Wisdom.” I know in the past you have asked people NOT to send you any more books since so many people do, but if you are interested at all in a copy, it would be an honor and privilege to get you an advance copy in whatever format you want. Thank you for all you do.

Sean

This lady loves the world economic forum. Kind of weird.

Reply to Sean

WEF mouthpiece. Thank you for a terrifying view of where WEF is trying to steer the globe.

Also, global youth dissolutionment is some bull shit. Studies that use a survey to ask 16-25 year olds is not going to capture absolute certainty on any subject. She sounds like your typic Cal Berkeley radical.

karen berry

Disturbing radical.

Oh and don’t worry, the government and philanthropists are going to buy everyone healthy food. Great job.

John

Yes she clearly wants to adopt socialism across the board. She was giddy about millennials staying at home doing nothing. Disturbing to say the least. This was too far left for me.

Reply to John

Absolutely agree.

Bob Johnsen

Unrelated to this podcast, I’m commenting on today’s five bullet Friday – had no idea Tim was a fan of heavy rock. We manage rock and metal bands like Slipknot, Megadeth, Flogging Molly and a lot more. Let me know if we can have you and the team down to any gigs! 👍🏻🤘🏻

It is claimed that Bill Gates also predicted a major pandemic a decade ago, but how does that knowledge help anyone? Four our part, we warned investors of a 2020 market crash six months before the pandemic outbreak; safely exiting stocks and investing into gold, silver and Bitcoin, which then rose by 50%, 100% and 800% within the next two years.
We also warned investors of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) back in 2006, a full two years before the market collapsed. Crystal balls? No, just watching some little-known economic indicators and connecting the dots. Maybe it would be cool to have us on the show, especially if you want to know what is coming next for stocks, property and crypto 🙂

Warren

Any “promoter” of the WEF and socialism, is suspect in my eyes. Unfollow and unsubscribe. Of course she predicted Covid, she’s on the same team.

Jane McGonigal, like Justin Trudeau and others who align themselves with the World Economic Forum for a New World Order, are dangerous mentors. I am now reevaluating all I have read by you. This has put your judgment in question for me.

Afik Faerman

Clinical psychologist and researcher here. Awesome conversation and I enjoyed it very much.
Regarding the feeling people feel viewing drone footage – look up the Overview Effect. It’s a cognitive (arguably, spiritual) shift astronauts experience when viewing Earth from space.
Frank White might be an interesting interviewee for the podcast!

nstuck

This is my second time watching this one and I absolutely love it! Thank you for such a fascinating conversation. Btw, found CV Dazzle in search for adversarial makeup, diggin’ it!