#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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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!


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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]


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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss
Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh
Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin
Hart, Margaret Atwood, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie
Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth
Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah
Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine
Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary
Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael
Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria
Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de
Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly
Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard
Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael
Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan
Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit
Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim
Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval
Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth
Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard
Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid
Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick
Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Balaji
Srinivasan, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew
Huberman, Dr. Michio Kaku, and many more.


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