“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.
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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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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.
SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
- Connect with Jane McGonigal:
- Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal | Amazon
- An Institute for the Future Community | Urgent Optimists
- Futures Thinking | Coursera
- SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully by Jane McGonigal | Amazon
- Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal | Amazon
- Jane McGonigal on Getting More Done with Less Stress and The Health Benefits of Gaming | The Tim Ferriss Show #93
- Jane McGonigal: The Game That Can Give You 10 Extra Years of Life | TED Global 2012
- Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World | TED 2010
- Pokémon GO
- Candy Crush Saga Online
- Tetris
- Tetris in the Lab: The Surprising Link Between PTSD and the Classic Computer Game | The Oxford Scientist
- Wordle
- Quordle
- The Forgotten Medieval Habit of ‘Two Sleeps’ | BBC Future
- EVOKE: An Online Alternate Reality Game Supporting Social Innovation among Young People around the World | World Bank
- During a Pandemic, We Urgently Need to Stretch Our Imagination by Jane McGonigal | Institute for the Future
- Superstruct | Institute for the Future
- Global Risks Report | World Economic Forum
- Superthreat: Power Struggle | Superstruct Wiki
- The Epidemic You’ve Never Heard Of | Alpha-Gal Information
- Premeditatio Malorum | Daily Stoic
- COVID-19 Pandemic from a “Normalcy Bias” Approach | Journal of Community & Public Health Nursing
- Lyme Disease | CDC
- Doxycycline | RxList
- 650003: Alpha-Gal IgE Panel | Labcorp
- Self-Preservation Six | Enneagram Central
- Platforming Youth Voices in Planetary Health Leadership and Advocacy: An Untapped Reservoir for Changemaking | The Lancet Planetary Health
- From the Great Resignation to Lying Flat, Workers Are Opting Out | Bloomberg
- Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) | Investopedia
- The pros and cons of universal basic income – College of Arts & Sciences
- Guaranteed Income Is Evolving from Charity to Public Policy | Vox
- A Three-Day Work Week? One Startup Experiments to Draw Talent | Bloomberg
- Food As Medicine: It’s Not Just A Fringe Idea Anymore | The Salt
- Axie Infinity: Infinity Revenue, Infinity Possibilities | Not Boring
- Uber State Interference: How TNCs Buy, Bully, and Bamboozle Their Way To Deregulation | National Employment Law Project
- President Biden to Sign Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets | The White House
- $9.5 Billion Spent Using Chinese Central Bank’s Digital Currency | Reuters
- Make Anything You Can Imagine | Roblox
- Global Fantasy Football | Sorare
- China’s ‘AI Newsreader’: Which of These Isn’t Real? | BBC News
- In Me I Trust | Science
- This Audio Editing Tool “Deep Faked” My Voice (Actually Useful or Scary?) | Pat Flynn
- Eric Schmidt — The Promises and Perils of AI, the Future of Warfare, Profound Revolutions on the Horizon, and Exploring the Meaning of Life | The Tim Ferriss Show #541
- 15 Best Instagram Story Filters for Selfies | Elite Daily
- Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? | The Atlantic
- Ready Player One | Prime Video
- Breakthrough Technology for the Brain | Neuralink
- Ranked: The 50 Most Visited Websites in the World | Visual Capitalist
- Children of Men | Prime Video
- Everything is About Sex Except Sex. Sex is About Power | Quote Investigator
- 12 Monkeys | Prime Video
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson | Amazon
- Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show #573
- How Urgent Optimism Can Drive Player Action in Gamification | Gamification
- Why People Are So Bad at Thinking about the Future by Jane McGonigal | Slate
- No-Kill, Lab-Grown Meat to Go on Sale for First Time | The Guardian
- Reality Drone Selfie | Jane McGonigal, Twitter
- 21 Ideas for Interesting & Useful Ways to Use Your Drone | Droneblog
- The Tens Of Millions Of Faces Training Facial Recognition; You’ll Soon Be Able To Search For Yourself | Hackaday
- Adversarial Makeup: Your Contouring Skills Could Defeat Facial Recognition | Hackaday
- 6 Apps to Chat and Text with No Internet Connection via Mesh Network | Gecko & Fly
- Could the US Government Shut Down the Internet? | Quora
- Introducing the People’s Network | Helium
- Why Texas’ Power Grid Still Hasn’t Been Fixed | The New Yorker
- The Great Climate Migration Has Begun | The New York Times
- Hobbes’ Moral and Political Philosophy | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Human Rights Video | Witness
- Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can | The School of Life
- World of Warcraft
- League of Legends
- What Is Sangha? | Lion’s Roar
- Future Shock by Alvin Toffler | Amazon
- Solar Radiation Management | Wilson Center
- What the UN Ban on Geoengineering Really Means | New Scientist
- Want to Save More or Beat a Disease? Try Entering a Lottery | Wired UK
- John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities | The Tim Ferriss Show #566
- Clawback | Investopedia
- The Basics Of Game Theory | Investopedia
- Approaches to Modelling Emotions in Game Theory | UCLA
- Cognitive Hierarchies and Emotions in Behavioral Game Theory | California Institute of Technology
- The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson | Amazon
- Termination Shock: A Novel by Neal Stephenson | Amazon
- Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown | Amazon
- Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes by Frans de Waal | Amazon
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
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.
PEOPLE MENTIONED
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