Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 191 | Jane McGonigal on How to Imagine the Future

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

The future grows out of the present, but it manages to consistently surprise us. How can we get better at anticipating and preparing for what the future can be like? Jane McGonigal started out as a game designer, working on the kinds of games that represent miniature worlds with their own rules. This paradigm provides a useful way of thinking about predicting the future: imagining changes in the current world, then gaming out the consequence, allowing real people to produce unexpected emergent outcomes. We talk about the lessons learned that anyone can use to better prepare their brain for the future to come. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Jane McGonigal received her Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a writer and Director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. She teaches a course at Stanford on How to Think Like a Futurist. She has developed several games, including SuperBetter, a game she designed to improve health and resilience after suffering from a concussion. Her recent book is Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything–Even Things That Seem Impossible Today. Web site Institute for the Future page Urgent Optimists Amazon.com author page Wikipedia Twitter

On this episode of Plant Killers, we'll explore one nation's most notorious fruit and vegetable killer, bad dirt. What makes Bad Dirt so bad? The answer? The ingredients. But fear not, true crime enthusiasts. This story has a happy ending. Miracle Grow organic raised bed and garden soil. It's made with quality organic ingredients from upcycled green waste like compost and aged bark. Unlike the other guys who can't say the same, looks like Bad Dirt's murdering days are over. Thanks to Miracle Grow. Join us next time on Plant Killers. Your social media feed delivers plenty of advice. But it doesn't know you. It doesn't ask questions. It doesn't give physical exams or order tests. Doctors do. At the American Medical Association, we believe the best care starts with a real conversation

with someone who understands the science and your unique health. So stay curious. Ask questions. But when it's time to make decisions, make them with a doctor. Learn more at AMA Health vs.hype.org. That's AMAHealthVShype.org. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I forget whether I've told this story before, but back in the early days of the World Wide Web, so not the Internet. The Internet goes back further, but the idea of web browsers, right, there were first text-based web browsers. There's one called Links, L-Y-N-X, which is a pun because you clicked on a link. Eventually, there were image-based web browsers. Mosaic from N-C-S-A was everybody's favorite thing.

And then ultimately, Netscape. Netscape was the real time when not only could you see images in your web browser, but it was relatively fast. You didn't have to wait for 10 minutes for a page to download. And also Netscape was important because it was commercialized. They had an initial public offering, and people were very, very excited. And as an early adopter of the web, I was there. I used Netscape all the time.

I was very excited. I had no money to invest, so I was not part of the big bubble in the Netscape stock prices. but I was asked by my friends who had no idea what the web was, like, what's the big deal? Why is this going to be so important? And I honestly couldn't do a very good job of explaining why it was going to be important. I had an intuition, had a feeling this was going to be a big deal. I would have invested in Netscape had there been money. But when people asked, like, how are they going to make money off of that?

I really couldn't answer. I did not have a good idea. Like I could point to actual web pages that existed, but they were largely along the lines of, you know, a video camera pointing at a coffee maker. So you could see whether there was coffee in the coffee maker or not. And no one was impressed by that. You could order pizza, but people knew how to order pizza by using the phone. So again, what was the point? Anyway, the point of the story is the future is hard to predict.

Even if you know something specific is going to happen, the implications of whatever it is going to happen. the implications of whatever it is going to happen can be very, very hard to anticipate. There's so many moving parts in society, in technology, in the world, that predicting the future can be very, very tricky. So today's guest, Jane McGonicle, started out and became well known as a game designer and also author, and has moved into being a futurist, systematically predicting, imagining what the future is going to be like. And you might wonder what is the connection between these two things. but if you're a game designer, I don't mean games like Solitaire or Candy Crush. I mean, these massive multiplayer games where you have an avatar and there's a world.

You've built a world and there are rules. They might not be the same rules as our world. But you can kind of see when you put it that way what the connection is between game design and futurism. Because when you're predicting the future, you're trying to simulate an extraordinarily complex system. And oftentimes you can't actually make the prediction yourself. You have to let people follow the rules of the game and see what's going to happen. It is very often the case that things happen in these massive games where the game designers themselves did not predict it. That's exactly the kind of thing you have in the future.

You might imagine doing a simulation of the future giving a bunch of people different parameters, different changes that society has undergone, different technological or scientific advances, and asking them, how they would adapt. I'm not going to give away any of the secrets here, but Jane's message is that we can become better at thinking about the future, at imagining what's going to happen. We can train our brains to do it. Games are one way of doing it, but there's other ways of thinking about the future in more productive ways. Anyone who lived through the past couple of years can no doubt understand how important it is to get a better handle on what the future is going to be like. So, let's go.

James McGonagal, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. This is very exciting because as I just told you before we started recording, I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for a long time to talk about games and gaming, but now you've come out with a completely different book imaginable about futurism, thinking about the future, but I still want to start with the games, if that's okay. Because I do think it actually, it makes sense to me how you started out as a game designer and then became more of a futurist.

So maybe I'm sure that there are some heavy gamers in the audience and some not so much. So why don't you give your sales pitch or explanation for how important gaming is to the modern world? Sure. Well, so you know, my research background is studying the psychological impacts of playing video games. And when I was doing my PhD, I became kind of obsessed with the sense that gamers were developing skills and abilities that might have some transferable benefit to our real-world problems. And I mean, I came to this, you know, obsession because gamers were saying, give us something real, right? And all these online communities and forums,

they seemed hungry for non-virtual challenges to solve. And so I kind of made it my business to figure out, could we invent a new genre of games that it still feels like play, but it really taps into that unique skill set of flexible mindset and creative thinking and collaboration and collective intelligence and this kind of unbelievable resilience that gamers have where if they can't figure something out right away, they stay with it. And, you know, it just seemed like such a great skill set to apply to things like climate change

and ending poverty and imagining a better world. And that's how I kind of transitioned into becoming a game developer myself, trying to experiment with different genres of games that might connect games. abilities with real world challenges. Well, and one thing that you point out right there is that there is a tremendous amount of effort and intellectual exertion right now being put into the world by gamers. And I don't know whether in your mind a gamer is someone who is just playing some console or PC game, or does it count to play Solitaire on your iPhone also?

Well, I mean, does it count? I've spent like 20 years now studying the psychology of games. And solitaire could count for something. It could count for your regulating your thoughts and emotions. You're using the game to turn off, you know, depressive rumination or to stop, you know, panic attack. And it's, you know, you're controlling your imagination to not have anxious thoughts. I mean, yes. I mean, solitaire on your phone could count for something.

Solitaire on your phone, especially if you've been playing it for 20 or 30 or 40 years, as many people like they find a game they like and that's the only game they play. I mean, that does not necessarily lend itself to developing collective intelligence skill set because you're playing by yourself. There's a certain, there's a certain like superpower, the ability to learn new systems quickly that comes from playing games that you've never played before, new interfaces, new genres, new challenges. So, I mean, I always say, like if you want the benefit,

and skillsets of gaming, you really do want to be trying different games and particularly ones that many other people are playing because so much of what's interesting about gaming comes from that collective collaborative culture. Yeah, and maybe this is just worth spelling out for again, probably there's some people who just don't do this at all. And maybe they have an image of games as mostly you're shooting other people or aliens or something like that. but the social aspects and not just social in the sense that you're collaborating and cooperating, but there's a different kind of society that appears within the game. And this is something that is a brave new world that many people already dived into, but many people are completely shut out from. Yeah.

And I mean, like one of my favorite examples from recent gaming history is Pokemon Go. So Pokemon Go, amazing augmented reality game, it just kind of dropped without a lot of preliminary instruction, like, here's what to expect from this game. Here's how it works. Here's how to play it. It just kind of dropped. And within 30, I think it was 30 days, 30 to 60 days, it was half a billion downloads. It was the fastest growing product or service in human history going back to like the invention of fire or the wheel.

Never before we'd seen more people try something new faster. And what was so fun to watch was this explosion. of wikis and forums and YouTube videos and walkthroughs and screen captures. People trying to figure out, how does this game work? What are we supposed to do? What are the tricks and tips? And what's like the full spectrum of possibility here? And the players taught themselves.

They taught each other. It was like this scientific investigation. We could all develop hypotheses. Am I supposed to do this? If I play it like this, will it work? and everybody was learning together and documenting this game together. And I mean, I kind of just love that Niantic drop the game without a lot of explanation because it allowed this incredible explosion of collaborative collective investigation. And for me, that's what's most interesting about any video game culture, whether it's Minecraft or Fortnite.

You know, people are exploring the full possibility space or pushing on the limits of the code and the problem. space and there's so much just creativity and sharing and teaching in all of these games. And and so I, you know, that to me, that's what's exciting about it. And it's very social, you know, but it's, but it's social in an interesting way that really, really values teaching and co-learning and helping, even if the games are competitive, even if you're shooting virtual weapons at each other, you know, it's still this intensely collaborative, collective culture. And I love that. And we should, we should bring it to all aspects of our lives. Well, there seems at a practical level maybe to be a barrier to entry if you're, you know, a person of a certain age who did not grow up doing this kind of thing. And, you know, you look in the store and there's these consoles and these, you know, these people spend hours and hours every day doing this and how can you compete? I mean, do you think that everyone? Should roughly speaking be thinking about or participating in games like this?

Or do you think that it's a, you know, for some people it's good and for others take it or leave it. No, I mean, I do think essentially every human being should participate in some gaming culture in the same way that I would say every human being should read and should exercise. I mean, it does seem like essential fuel for our creativity and our mental resilience and the range of positive. of emotions that we feel. Now, I will, I, I never tell anyone to go out and buy a gaming console, unless they're, like, into it. You can play, just use your phone. Use your personal computer. There's an infinite number of games. And I always say if you're, if you're not sure where to start, I mean, just post on social media. Ask, ask, ask your friends and family, what's, what do you think I should be playing right now? And are you willing to teach me if I don't know how to play it?

because, you know, one of the biggest social benefits of playing these games is you develop something in common with other people in your life. You know, I mean, I'll never forget how important it was to me when my daughters were born seven years ago and I started spending a lot more time with my mother-in-law who was helping us care for twins, which is, you know, a lot of work. And she started playing Candy Crush Saga, which was like the only game I had the energy to play, went after our daughters were born. And she just emailed me a few weeks ago saying that she had gotten to level 3,000 and was so glad she hadn't given up.

She was going to stop at like level 250. And it's just, it's, it's this thing we still have in common seven years later. I'm not still playing this game, but I understand it. We can talk about what's challenging about it. I can log in and send her some gifts to help her. You know, if she's stuck on a level. Building this common foundation, it allows us to, to keep the conversation going.

People interact more and have conversations about real world topics more with people that they play these games with. Even if we're just like doing, you know, Pokemon Go raids together virtually, you know,

every few weeks, we're more likely to talk about other stuff. It just creates this rhythm of interaction and this common foundation. So yeah, if you don't know what to play, ask people you already have relationships with what they're playing.

People you might like to talk to more often, have something more in common with that common experience. And then, yeah, make them teach you. It's great. People who love games love teaching other people how to play. So it lets them be in that position of mentoring of coaching, which is, again, a huge positive social benefit. Well, you make some provocative statements about the emotional or psychological impact of games. I mean, there's both who we are in the game and then how that affects our personality outside. You've said that we are our best selves. when we're inside a game.

What do you mean by that? And I should say, often we are our best selves. Sometimes we get stuck and not all gaming communities are equally positive. I mean, there are certainly toxic gaming communities and there are games that I don't participate in because people do kind of get angry at each other too often. So I will say, if we're talking broadly speaking, that gaming does develop this. psychological self-efficacy, right? So games are designed to be challenging and hard and frustrate us. And if we play a game, we have to be willing to be frustrated. We have to be willing to be challenged, to be bad at something, to get that feedback like, nope, not good, not right, not working. And so we

develop this ease and comfort with not being good at something the first time we try it, of managing these negative emotions, which with frustration and confusion and uncertainty, and we put ourselves in a position to get better at dealing with them by staying engaged with the game. And games are designed, you know, very carefully and purposefully so that alongside that frustration, there's hope. There is, you know, always something around the corner that might make you a little bit stronger in the game or give you a tip or you can go online and you can learn from other players. You're not in it alone. Even if it's a solo game, you're never in it alone. So we look at. We look at learn to ask for help from others or advice from others. We learn to try again. And truly,

it's just, it's such a wonderful way of being, being comfortable with needing to grow, needing to improve through our own effort and attention. And it does seem to be transferable to other situations. There have been laboratory studies where you can separate people into groups that frequently game and people who don't, or you can get people who don't, or you can get people who don't game and you can put them through a six-week gaming boot camp and then see have they changed their response to, you know, purposely difficult work, you know, intentionally impossible puzzles to solve? You know, do they try more strategies? Do they stay engaged? How fast do they give up? Are they likely to turn to the other person in the lab and ask them for help?

You know, we see that these behaviors, they, they can translate to our real world interactions, not just in the virtual world. And what I have found in my work with gamers and also, you know, validator reflected in the research literature is that actually having conversations about this skill set helps it translate. So, you know, I have kids. When I see them not giving up in a game, I make sure to validate that and reflect that back to them. be like, that's amazing. I know you've been trying to get off this level for a while. How many times have you tried? A hundred times. Gosh, I love how determined you are. I love that you're someone who doesn't give up when things are hard. You know, when we talk to each other and reflect this skill set, then people, whether they're kids or they're grownups, everybody, we're more likely

to see ourselves as this is part of our identity. I'm someone who doesn't give up. I'm someone who can always come up with a new idea or strategy. I'm someone who knows where to get help or not afraid to ask for help. And we bring that with us. So, you know, yes, that is, that is the core benefit. And we should, we should lean into it and we should get it. And meanwhile, you alluded to this already, but these people are learning skills, whether it's concentration or puzzle solving or whatever. And so it is very natural to ask, because I guess to back up a little bit, the flip side of everything you're saying is couldn't these people be doing something more productive with all the time that they're putting into the games? And I think that part of your answer is, why not both? Why not do it

at the same time? Yeah. I mean, like just to kind of put the amount of human effort being poured into games still into context. So think about a game like Candy Crush Saga, which I don't know, the game flipped in around for almost a decade now, I think. The amount of time that people are still spending playing this game is equivalent to the three biggest organizations on Earth. So I think it's like it's like Walmart's McDonald's and the Chinese Army. I forget exactly what the three organizations are. But the amount of human labor spent solving candy crush levels is equivalent to the three largest organizations on Earth and how much time is still spent every day.

And so it is natural to ask like, could we siphon a little bit? of that off. I mean, it's like not all of our time has to be productive. There is, I mean, you know, my God, I'm not saying like all play has to have a serious purpose. But yeah, maybe we, maybe we spend one of the 20 hours a week. We spend gaming, playing games that help us build that bridge between what we're good at in these virtual environments and what the world really needs, which is more creativity and the ability to anticipate, you know, for me personally, my passion is gamers anticipating future risk, future global threats, how we could prepare, how we could respond, how we could help others, whether it's pandemics or mass climate migration or

unanticipated consequences of geoengineering efforts. That's where I think, you know, come, spend one of these 21 hours a week you're spending gaming on one of these cool future forecasting games. Well, as a game designer, have you discovered that things happen in the game that you, the designer, did not anticipate just because it is kind of handed over to a bunch of smart people trying to solve puzzles in a different way? Oh, absolutely. I mean, that right, so game developers call that emergence. It's when you design a certain set of challenges or rules or behaviors and then players show up and they're doing something totally different from what you anticipated, which is why, you know, when it comes to forecasting the future, I don't think you can do better than to invite a bunch of people who, who have that facility of surprising you and surprising each other because, you know, when we, one of the, one of the issues we have in really being prepared for the future is we have this kind of normalcy bias where we assume things will continue the way they are.

We expect the future to be more or less like the present. And we kind of need some people to surprise us and shake us up and say like, wow, you think that's what's going to happen. Well, if I were in the future, you know, here's what I do. And when I design these future forecasting games, I always try to assign a certain subset of the community to be, you know, what I would call the griefers, which are people who's only job in this simulation is look at what other people are trying to do, the solutions they propose, the positive actions they say they would take and try to mess it up. Like what would you do to break it, to block it, to twist it into something that create social division? you know, because we know like if one thing, there's a subset of the gaming community that's quite good at, you know, antagonizing other people's best effort. So we can even, we can even put

that to good, you know, by allowing them to channel that energy into complicating, you know, the other positive strategies that people suggest. So that, again, we're more prepared for in the real worlds when things, you know, do tend to become more complicated or there may be opposition that we didn't anticipate. So what's interesting, I think I get this, but let me say it out loud so you can tell me whether I'm just projecting onto what's going on. I can certainly imagine trying to understand more about the future through simulation, right? I mean, war games or something like that, try to do that.

You can just put a computer to work, you know, ask what will happen. No, no. But, exactly. Put a computer to work. Put people to work. But go ahead. Yeah. No, I think this is exactly the sort of new thing that you're saying is that there's more room to be surprised if rather than just putting the computer to work, you develop a framework and let human beings with all their quirks and idiosyncrasies run free and then see what happens. Yeah. I mean, here's the problem with computer simulations. Like, let's say we're trying to simulate a pandemic. So we're going to input some algorithms. into this computer that says like, okay, if the virus is this contagious and this many people

continue to socialize or go to work, this is how many cases. You're basically inputting what you think are reasonable parameters. And then they crunches numbers and it says, great, this many people will get sick. This many people will die. This many people have disability, whatever. Okay, that's fine, assuming your assumptions are correct. but what we saw with this pandemic is people do all kinds of things that experts did not anticipate. Oh, you have a positive test.

You should say home. No, I'm going to church. You know, like, I mean, well, you can't go. You're sick. Don't go to work. I have to work. How am I going to make money? You haven't sent me a check to stay home.

So I'm going to, you know, wear a mask. It's totally reasonable. It's like, no, mask, resistance. Like if you just set a computer simulation to simulate pandemics, you're going to miss this incredible complexity of human emotion and needs and what drives us and motivates us. And, you know, so when I do a simulation of a pandemic, what I do is I get, you know, the first time we did this, we had 8,000 people, the next time 20,000 people. We say, okay, we're going to spend some time together, six weeks, 10 weeks.

we're going to tell you about this fictional scenario, this pandemic we're living through, other complicating factors like supply chain disruptions or misinformation theories, you know, spreading on social media. We'll give you some extra, you know, as the game unfolds, more information about what's going on. All you have to do is tell us what you would do, what you would feel, what you would need, how you would try to help others. And if we can ask you questions, just give us your, your, your intuitive response based on what you know about yourself what are you likely to do so you've been

told to isolate for two weeks under what circumstances do you violate this order like disobey these instructions the number one thing people said back in 2008 when we first started simulating pandemics was for religious worship that it was like so fundamental to their their values their sense of purpose and meaning that they are going to go to church even if it's dangerous or even if they're not supposed to. And of course, that turned out to be the number one super spreading risk all over the world, Italy, Korea, the U.S. This is where all the initial outbreaks were happening and people were disobeying.

And it's where a lot of the early tension in the United States came from the biggest resistance to shutdowns were from religious communities who saw it as a First Amendment issue. And so it's like a lot of the social divisiveness was coming from experts' failure to anticipate how important this would be and how divisive it would be. And, you know, we asked people to practice wearing masks, right? So, hey, six-week game. Try taking a real mask out. We gave people masks.

We said, you know, wear it to work, wear it to a party, wear it on public transportation. Like, what do you think? Could you do this in a real pandemic? What would be weird about it? You know, how comfortable is it? And, of course, we saw, you know, people, it wasn't. So it wasn't just like people wanted to or didn't want to. We saw that there was like a physical endurance aspect to learning to be comfortable wearing a mask that was not easy for people who'd never done it before to pick up.

We saw that people really were frustrated by not being able to see each other's faces and that the sort of social disconnection of it. So, you know, we anticipated that it would, even though it seems rational and it seems easy to just adopt this behavior, that it was going to be much more difficult. in communities that didn't have a practice or culture of it, right? If you had a grown up used to this. So, you know, for me, this is my passion. It's not, it's not, we don't want to leave it to a few computer algorithms because who knows if our algorithms are right. People are the algorithms in these social simulations and we let them surprise us.

We look for patterns in what they're saying or predicting. And, you know, it's based on this idea like people can be experts on their own future. And if we have this kind of bottom-up intelligence, we'll be, you know, we'll be more prepared for surprising social consequences that really aren't so surprising, right? Like one of the things I'll never forget, pretty much in every scenario we've run, the moms show up and they say, well, who's going to take care of the kids in this scenario? It could be a pandemic in schools closing. It could be an oil crisis.

So the buses stop running so no one goes to school. Moms are always showing up being like, ah, what's going to happen? Am I going to have to stop work? to take care of the kids. And, you know, again, we saw this mass exodus of women from the workplace to do caretaking when schools shut down. I mean, when you run these scenarios, you do get a sense for the types of social consequences that should be more front of mind, should be, you know, even we had somebody from who was living in upstate New York, who was experienced with long term, the long form of Lyme disease and how doctors dissoned,

dismissed this for, I don't know, decades. People are saying it's all in your mind. Is this psychological? You're depressed. You're stressed. You're anxious. And predicting, well, they're probably going to be long forms of this imaginary pandemic. And, like, and of course, you know, they were right. But the stuff tends to get dismissed by experts at the outset of real crises. So, yeah, that was a lot. But you could see I'm very passionate about letting ordinary people into this process. and the power of collective imagination. Well, I'm actually, as we're having this conversation, sitting in my guest office at the Santa Fe Institute,

where they love complexity and emergent collective computation. And emergence is a favorite word here at the Mindscape podcast. So this is all just, you know, candy to us. But in fact, let's let me ask more about the nitty-gritty of this kind of simulation that you do. I presume you're using computers here. Is it what, asking a whole bunch of people to donate an hour a day? Or is it in a virtual world or they just answering questionnaires?

Great. Okay. So we set up social networks for these games. So the actual game interface looks, depending on the game, and we've tried different versions of it. It might look like you're on Twitter or might look like you're on Facebook or look like you're on Discord. And the core mechanic is just participating in normal. social media activity. There might be polls to take, surveys to take, so we can get, like, get data in a way that is easy to analyze, like statistically. But the main thing that you're doing

is you are posting little updates, little text updates, or photos or videos of what you imagine yourself doing in this future. And it's very social. People start having conversations. If you're imagining what moms are doing and you might find the other moms and you imagine together. And depending on how long the format is, you might spend just two whole days to basically doing nothing but being immersed in this. So a lot of the ones that we've run, it's like a 48-hour thought experiment. Everybody's online. You might have, you know, a thousand, two thousand, three thousand people just basically sunrise, the sunset, we're in it, we're imagining it, and then it's done. For the longer form ones, you know, I said,

six weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks, maybe you drop in once a day for, you know, 15 minutes. So you come once a week for a few hours to really deeply immerse yourself. But the end result is usually thousands of player generated stories that we can then analyze for, you know, key themes. We can do sentiment analysis. We can follow up with essentially like deep ethnographic interviews. if we saw people doing weird stuff that we want to understand better. My PhD was in performance studies, which is a field that has an ethnographic, a deep tradition of ethnographic research where you're studying human behavior

by just getting in there, long conversations, looking for the rich details of what people want and feel and need. And so it's a combination of polls, surveys, sentiment analysis. looking for key themes, trying to cluster the stories, and then following up with deep ethnographic research. And it's, it's, I wrote this book, you know, imaginable because we've been practicing it at the Institute for the Future now for a little over, I guess I'm about 15 years now. And, but it's kind of like a rare art form. It's like a rare skill set.

And I'm hoping that other people will read the book, learn how to design these social simulations. So there's, you know, step by step. I break down the creative process, the tools, how you might want to build it, how you might want to analyze it. And I'm hoping that, you know, in the future we have in the same way that like when home video cameras became available and suddenly everybody could be a filmmaker, right? and then blogs existed.

So now everybody can be a journalist, right? So I'm hoping we can all be simulation designers in this future, kind of democratize the skill set. And instead of just playing with the scenarios that I come up with or my fellow researchers at the Institute for the Future come up with, you know, every organization can be running their own scenarios and every foundation and social movement. That's something we can all do together.

And in the real example, In the real world of a pandemic or some future shock event, there's both what the individuals are doing and then there's the external forces that are pushing them, right? The government gives them money or doesn't give them money, shuts down air travel. So how much structure do you as the simulation runner have to impose on what's happening over time in this kind of – is it simulation? Is it the right thing to call it? I call them social simulations. Sometimes we call them future forecasting games or immersive. scenarios. This is like one of the cool things about working on the bleeding edge of a new genre.

Nobody calls it the same thing yet. So I'm trying social simulation now. For me, that's the that best sort of summarizes what we're doing, rather than a computer simulation. It's a social simulation playing out on these social networks from the future, right? So we will usually plot out a series of updates to the scenario that allow players to examine different dimensions and these sort of external forces. So it's exactly right. We might say, okay, here's in Superstruck, which was the first one in 2008, where we were looking at the respiratory distress syndrome that we imagine. We would say, okay, the government has decided not to provide economic support for individuals who are asked to isolate or who have gotten sick.

And, you know, so, you know, then we saw the players reacted to that by creating essentially like an activist movement to demand for this disability to be recognized and care, people to be paid to be caretakers for their loved ones who had, you know, and, you know, free is great, but only if it's useful. Free credit scores from some apps can differ by as much as 100 points from your actual FICO score that 90% of top lenders use when you apply for a credit card, personal loan, car loan or mortgage. That can mean a higher interest rate, a bigger monthly payment, or worse. Denied. My FICO gives you your actual FICO score, the score lenders use straight from the company that created it.

For the moments that matter, get the score that matters, your FICO score. Visit myfico.com and get started for free today. some of that actually did happen during our real COVID-19 experience. And I think it was, I think if we have more people playing these games, it will be that in itself will be an important skill that we develop. Like, what do we ask for during a crisis? Like, let's practice demanding what we would need or calling for change or really understanding what kind of help.

mutual aid needs to emerge. It's, you know, and not just sort of wait until the real crisis hits and everyone's like, ah, what do we do? Yeah. But so we do provide these narrative updates. And, you know, in the case of, let's say, Evoke was the big one I did with the World Bank in 2010. We had a weekly update. And in Superstruck, I think we were dropping it like twice a week. In World Without Oil, which was one of the first big future forecasting games that had about 1,200 players that were daily updates for 30 days. So you're, you can sort of experiment with different,

yeah, and the fast ones, the 48-hour ones, we do it every hour and you, you know, theme or updates. So I don't know, we're still, I'm still trying to figure out what is the best timeline. What I've sort of come to is it's ideal if people can spend at least 10 days in a scenario because it allows it to percolate and like really simmer in your mind and you can get past your obvious ideas into more complex and nuance and surprising ones.

And it also gives you time to see what other people are saying and imagining so that it's more of a collective activity. So that's, so right now I'm trying the 10 day. And you spend, you know, an hour a day in this future for 10 days, which I think is a, people can commit to 10 days. Six to eight to ten weeks is a harder commitment to me. Yeah, that's a lot of life. It's hard to predict the future that far in advance.

Right. And there's always the question whenever you have human beings involved, bless their hearts, but they're not always reliable or honest, right? I mean, have you found that the ways that the people in your social simulations responded are more or less accurate? Or have they been nicer in the simulations than they are in the real world, et cetera? Oh, that's a good question. No, I mean, I don't think people are, I don't think people are really nice. I mean, I try to focus people's people on, I guess, like, their values, their needs, um, things that, things that it is like relatively easy to make accurate predictions about.

So, like, one of the examples that I use is, um, you know, if I were to ask you to imagine, um, that for whatever reason you're on an airplane and, you're, and they will allow you to parachute out if you would like for fun. It's a safe. Like, you know, could you predict, do you think a year from now if you are likely to say, no, thank you, I'll wait till the plane lands or you personally would jump out? Like, what do you think? Could you predict that?

And if so, what would you? Are you jumping or are you staying until you land? I mean, I guess that would depend on why I got in the plane in the first place. So I'm trying to get somewhere. I'm just going to let the plane land. If I'm just thrill-seeking, then I might jump out. Okay. So, but you have a pretty good sense, right?

I could tell you for sure. I don't care what the scenario is unless it comes with like a $100 million check. I'm going to stay on the plane until it lands. I do not want to. I feel like that would traumatize me for the rest of my life. I'd have flashbacks. I don't want to do it. Some people actually pay money for the privilege of jumping out of planes.

Right, right, right. So it's like I guess I want to say like what we have seen now that we've actually had the chance to live through crises that are similar to the ones we're asking people about, I mean, in general, people in general did what our players said they would do. I've tried to do research. I've, you know, interviewed, in-depth interviews, 150 players in-201 to find out, like, did you do in 2020, what you imagine doing? And I would say that in general, while people may change their behavior, and especially

for having imagined it, what we saw with World Without Oil is that just having imagined adapting to an oil crisis, and people imagine themselves doing all these cool, sustainable, creative things. I think that did prime them to actually do it when we, a year later, the gas, so this was in 2007. In 2008, you may recall, we did have a bit of an oil crisis. And players reported doing things that they had imagined doing. Now, I think it may have been just a priming effect.

Like once you vividly imagined it and you see yourself as someone likely to take an action, it increases the likelihood. So it's not that they were necessarily correct in predicting what they would do, but having predicted it made them more likely to do it. So on that hand, I think there's an interesting connection. But moreover, just general predictions seem to map onto society. If you have enough people participating, I wouldn't try this with 10 or 20 people. But, you know, when you have a thousand or 10,000 or 20,000, you start to, I think, have a diversity of participants where you'll get a more statistically significant, like, correlation to what might play out in real society. Well, I definitely want to ask more about the priming thing. But first, since you've been mentioning the simulation or simulations that you did about a global pandemic, I'm not saying it's your fault that we actually got a global pandemic, but you were thinking about it 10 years earlier.

And you said that in large measure, what you saw in the simulation played out in reality. So, I mean, let's just dig into a little bit more to what extent that was true. Are there things that truly surprised you when the actual pandemic hit, whether it's sort of misinformation or political polarization or vaccine denial? Did you anticipate all of these things? Or were there some things that we've learned a lesson because you just missed those important aspects? Yeah.

I mean, two of the things that we very accurately anticipated was the threat of misinformation, right? We spent a lot of time talking about the infodemeology crisis that we might be anticipating, asking participants what would you do to try to get accurate information? How would you tell what was, you know, real and what was misinformation or just a conspiracy theory? How would you try to help friends and family who are getting bad information? So we did spend a lot of time talking about that. And I think, you know, were correct in seeing how problematic and difficult that would be for people to navigate. What we did not anticipate, you know, was essentially, I guess, like, governments giving up or people in power acting in a kind of bad faith way to downplay the severity or I definitely think that was. I can't recall that coming up at all.

Just the sort of the idea that some people would just say whatever. That was not something we predicted. And it wasn't really anything that our players, you know, predicted. We didn't see a big, I don't recall that coming up at all. That like, well, some people are just going to go about their everyday lives. People accepted the, like, the crisis aspect and went with that. So it definitely gave me some food for thought for future scenarios. So I was really lucky.

I finally got to attend a conference that I've always been wanting to attend this past year called the Planetary Defense Conference. I don't know if you know about this. It's space scientists and political leaders come together to talk about and share science and actually run simulations of what might happen if an asteroid were heading towards the Earth, near-earth objects that pose a threat to human life. And what's really great is seeing them start to factor, even just from having lived through this pandemic, things like, what if we forecast an asteroid is coming, but people downplay.

Nobody wants to evacuate because the government's saying, you know, could a government leader say, this is stupid, don't worry about it? Would there be conspiracy theories if people learn about this area of science and you can actually go online and see current forecast now? All the objects are tracking, what the percentage it might hit, what the severity of it might be. What if people start to misuse this to so panic or to create social division? They're starting to look at what we live through, these things that I didn't, predict and I don't know anybody predicted this sort of global shrug that that happened in so many

places. They're starting to factor that in and had sessions on how they would deal with, you know, misinformation and public trust in this area of science. And so, so yeah, we do, no matter how creative, imaginative, amazing, our simulations, and thought experiments are, let's assume we'll still be surprised by things, but then we can factor that into our next efforts or our next scenarios. Well, and having done that and now having been in a pandemic for a while, do you have insight, you think about what our actual future post-pendemic is going to be like? Are we returning

to normal? Will we always be wearing masks? Is it a different world, do you think? Well, you know, one of our research methods is we look for signals of change. So, you know, evidence that change is happening, some shift has occurred or it's just some new behaviors that are taking place and they might become more common over time. One of the big signals of change that I'm really latching onto from this sort of heading into a, it's not post-pandemic yet, but I don't know what it is. It's like it's the normal pandemic. moment or the pandemic has been normalized. What's coming out of it, there were two major studies that found that despite all of the misinformation, conspiracy theories, resistance to mask wearing, at the global scale, public trust in science and scientists has increased as a direct result of seeing the vaccines developed, their efficacy, the efficacy. The efficacy. of certain recommended interventions like mask wearing. So despite all the divisiveness and the emergence of people really resistant, more people

trust science more now than before. And public understanding of the scientific method and how science works to produce insight and recommend actions and interventions has increased globally. So people trust science more and understand science more, even if it's doesn't feel like it because of all the fighting going on on social media. Yeah. And to me, you know, I like to think one of the long term, I think, I think, I think, I think, is at some level, many people will trust science more and the scientific community is really

on top of this issue now, like realizing how do we build trust in science, how do we communicate more effectively. How do we make science not a politically divisive issue? Because as we face, you know, climate change and all the things are going to be dealing with in the future, we do need to build and repair trust in science. So I think that to me, that's like when I'm looking ahead. I'm really looking at that and how we're going to pour energy into that and creativity into that. And hopefully we're off to a good start because most people who live through this are like, wow, that worked. Awesome. Let's do more, let's do more science. Yes, science is helpful. It's on our side here. And good, because this is moving us, I don't want to let go of

that priming issue that you mentioned. In other words, the idea that once someone has gone through the simulation and imagined what it would be like, they are better prepared for what actually happens. And so this gets us into a lot of the emphasis of your book, which is, even if I'm not involved in the simulation, how do I prep my brain for things that are going to happen in the future? Because it's very hard to do. We're in ruts, right? We have a view of the world today and absent anything else, it's probably going to be like that tomorrow. But of course, it won't. predicting how it won't is the hard part. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting you say that like if I don't participate in these simulations because I do think, I mean, so one of the things I'm trying

to do in the book is build this general skill. So people can find their own signals of change and create their own scenarios and run their own mental simulations where they just imagine in their own mind or they can do social simulations with other people. I mean, I do think at some point you have to pick up these habits and practice them for it to work. And the smallest habit, like the easiest habit, is this collecting signals of change. So making it a habit, you know, I say like, pick Fridays, so future Fridays. Once a week, just do a Google news search for something that you're interested in, like future of food or future of democracy. See if you can find a new story about a new policy idea, a new scientific breakthrough, a new technology that's being developed, a business model,

a social movement. Try to find evidence of some form of change that is now starting to happen. And then you're planning that in your mind because our failure of imagination, like the reason why we can't anticipate these surprising futures is that if we don't plant, you know, vivid details of what the future might be like into our minds, then it has nothing to draw on, right? Like imagination, it needs to reach into that hippocampus for some facts, like some evidence, some clues. We can't just conjure up realistic possibilities unless we are looking around the world. and collecting these signals. So that's like the sort of the,

the most rudimentary, like, imagination habit I want people to develop is, and it works better when you do it with other people. So you can, like, make a commitment to text a friend once a week. You're going to have a, you know that I'm sending you a signal and you're going to have to send me a signal, or you do coffee meetups or, like, brown bag lunches at work. You try to make it social.

So because I think all of this works better as a community practice, just like games, you're more likely to play a game if somebody else is playing. it and waiting for you to show up. So yeah, collect these and just plant them in your mind because then what your brain will do is when it goes into default mode and it's just like you're not paying attention to what's around you, you're just imagining, you're like sort of daydreaming. It will draw on these signals of change that you've planted there.

They're just waiting in your hippocampus to be recombined in novel ways so that you're, you're now thinking about, well, you know, this is like, this is the first time I've seen so many people with drones. Like when I went to this like protests and everybody had drones and they were using the drones to document. So like now when I'm just daydreaming, I'm going to put drones in my daydream and try to imagine like what are what are people using them for for activism or art or storytelling or journalism or stalking or spreading good news or whatever we think like, you know, we need to collect these details so that our imagination is not fantasy. It's grounded in real changes that are already happening. I was definitely struck in the book by your emphasis on the idea of mental time travel because that's something we talked about in the podcast,

but usually in the context of consciousness, cognition, self-awareness, the difference between human thinking and other species thinking, the ability to imagine different hypothetical futures, right? And you're sort of, there is, even though we can all do it, imagine different hypothetical futures, we still tend to react a little bit to the moment. Like when the pandemic hits, we're not instantly thinking, oh, I will use the next six months to do my pet project, right? We're thinking like, I got to go buy toilet paper. And this is kind of what you're suggesting is that it's not just a phenomenon, but a habit of mind that we should cultivate. Well, first of all, I mean, the future can be a wonderful place. Like we've talked a lot about risks and threats. But going on these mental

time trips far into the future. One of the interesting things it does is if you're just trying to imagine what you might be doing 10 years in the future. So I give people this very practical exercise. I say I want you to like open your digital calendar. So if you use Google calendar, Apple calendar, whatever, tab forward to 10 years in the future, which if you didn't know, you can schedule events 10 years from now. You can actually go 100 years from now. I mean, these calendars are very future ready. So go 10 years into the future and put. put something on your calendar for 10 years from today that you would be excited about. And ideally something you can't do today.

And, you know, if you're feeling really gameful, like invite someone else. Like send the calendar invite to your best friend or to your partner or, you know, to like kind of bring someone into your imagination. And what we see is that when people imagine what they could do 10 years from now, they tend to imagine things that are different in a couple of key ways. one is we tend to we tend to think about maximal situations so best possible things biggest goals most exciting most meaningful when we imagine what we might do today or tomorrow or next week or even next year we tend to think more minimally we're more focused on what is realistic

what is what is feasible what can I definitely accomplish when we tend to think on further timelines our brain just sort of experiences this creative freedom and the sense of hope. Like, you know, yeah, 10 years, that's a lot of time to get ready or things to change. And there's nothing. I mean, go to your calendar. Do you have anything on your calendar for 10 years from today? No, it's a blank slate, right? You have no to-do list for, you know, March 31st, 2032.

You can do whatever you want. So there's this freedom of imagination. And so, you know, this practice of mental time travel, it's definitely not just about preparing for risk or, you know, getting ready for disruption. It can also be about getting in touch with our sense of hope and purpose. And then we can allow ourselves to imagine, well, what would it take for this calendar event 10 years from now to actually happen? But we've got a lot of time.

There's no rush. You know, I would say like instead of making a New Year's resolution, we could make, we could make a 10-year resolution so that we haven't failed, you know, by the first week. or the end of the first month, we're giving ourselves the luxury of a decade to change or to achieve. So that's one thing. And then another thing that we see is that when we imagine 10 years out, we tend to give more emphasis to our deepest values or priorities. So the things that drive us, the things that make us feel like this is my purpose in life, whether it's being a good parent or learning something new every day or creating art that inspires others or, you know, whatever,

whatever we feel is like true to our sense of purpose, that stuff comes up right at the fore when we're imagining whether it is a crisis scenario, what do you do in this pandemic? Like musicians talk about writing protest songs against the government for not funding the, you know, the long care treatment for this disease or whatever. People put their deepest values and strengths and service of the future in a way that we don't always make time for or prioritize in the rush of the present, especially if we feel over-scheduled or we feel like time poor. We're not in control of our schedule. We're not in control of our time.

We don't have enough time to do what matters. So, yeah, there's this sort of like mental health aspect, self-care aspect that is also a part of mental time travel. And so it makes it makes it kind of like the future is a is an inspiring place. It doesn't have to just be like a scary place. We can we can inspire ourselves too. I guess the closest thing I've ever done to that is several years ago I got a payment for, you know, a book royalty check and my wife, Jennifer and I invested it in very, very nice bottles of wine that we would save for our 10th, 15th, and 20th wedding anniversaries, right? Oh, amazing. It totally works. Like you're literally waiting.

for that year to come up, such as you can, like, go out and go to a nice restaurant and drink your wine. And what, I mean, what a beautiful and poetic act of commitment to each other. And it's saying, I mean, of course I imagine being with you in 20 years. Do you want to hear a funny story that was in a version of the book that I wound up cutting? Because I, you know, I get excited. I write twice as much as needs to go in the book. Of course. Okay.

So I was interviewing people who had played these games to find out, did it impact your real world behavior this year during the pandemic? And somebody said, oh, my God, I have the best story for you. It's like playing these games. It totally changed my life. Real world action. Here it is. So she had played a series of forecasting games called first five minutes of the future

where you get these really like lightning round scenarios. And then you journal for five minutes as if you were in this future, just what you're doing in the first five minutes. So the scenario might be you get a text message. It's like the emergency alert system saying that there's a government mandated internet shutdown. The whole internet shutting down for two weeks for cybersecurity threat. What do you do in the first five minutes? And it's going out in an hour.

So see you later, internet two weeks. What do you do in the first five minutes of getting this text? And so you just journal. How do you feel? Who are you going to talk to? Like what are you worried about? So she did like five of these over the course of a week. And then she said at the end of it, the action she decided to take was,

filed for divorce. And I was like, what? Wait, what? How did that happen? And she said, and I was like, oh my God, this is so profound. She said, every journal entry, when I was writing what I was going to do, who I wanted to talk to, like what I was planning, how I react. She said, my husband wasn't in a single one of these, these moments that I was imagining. I wasn't talking to him about it. I wasn't asking him, like, he just wasn't there. And it sort of drove home for her, you know, that they've been growing apart, that they've been refusing to deal with it. Anyway, you know, fast forward. She played this game.

She filed for divorce. They're separated. She's really happy. She's living of what she feels is a better life. But she wasn't able to acknowledge what needed to be done until she really sat with those futures and realized that like when she really has permission to think about her future, she didn't, she didn't put a minute. And so, you know, it kind of gets back to that idea of like when we go 10 years out,

either like you, you're seeing the people you care about who you want to, you prioritize and you have this place for them. Or maybe we see, we imagine things that like if we don't change, do we want to be stuck 10 years from now in the position that we're in now? So I just like, the future is a gift to allow us to really challenge our assumptions about, you know, what should we spending our time on now or who is important to us? what can we do today? Just by imagining the future, we might change our perspective on that.

Well, you know, life is hard enough from moment to moment that people can, I know I am certainly in my science career, I know for a fact that I have spent way too much time thinking about what I got to do in the next few months or a couple of years and not enough time about what I need to do 20 years down the line. So it's a very interesting exercise to do. And one of the things that came clear from the book is the usefulness of the special. specificity of imagining the future. It's just, it's not just like, oh, I imagine that I'll be happy. It's that I'll imagine I'm driving a blue car, you know, something that really anchors you in that particular

specificity of that future scenario. Yeah. So I always teach people these specificity induction techniques. So I find that writing journal entries is a really good way to make sure that you're vividly imagining the future almost as if it were a memory that had already happened, right, that you could recall and write in a journal. And there's actually a scoring method where after you write for five minutes, you count out, you count up the number of details. So visual details. Did you mention a color, a blue truck? Okay, plus one, that's a one detail. Were you describing what you were wearing or a pain that was in your body or what the weather was like or what song is playing on the radio, you know, who's with you, what words are coming out of their mouth? The more vivid, specific

detail that you bring to imagination, the more that this imagination or memory of the future can change how you feel an act today. So, for example, if you're trying to overcome normalcy bias so that if, you know, the next pandemic, maybe it's a tick-borne pandemic instead of a viral contagious disease, it's spread from ticks, if you have vividly imagined yourself pulling your socks up over your jeans because that's the new fashion because everybody's afraid of getting this, you know, these tick bites. And you're so as you're getting dressed in the morning, you're imagining, well, what if I were in the scenario? And you can, the more of these details you have, the more, the more your brain treats these hypothetical possibilities as worth taking seriously.

And you pre-feel them with a stronger emotional intensity, which can essentially, it makes all of these topics more salient to you in the future. So let's say, you know, the next time there's like a weird news story or people are talking on social media, you're going to pick up those clues faster because your brain says this is a topic that matters to me. You've locked it in. You're going to get that dopamine hit from the next headline that you see. Whereas people who haven't vividly imagined it, their brain doesn't have a connection to this topic. They don't. So anyway, yes, for all kinds of reasons, more specificity is better. And you can count up the number of details. And you can try to work on being somebody who has more details or you can rewrite your journal entry. If you only had five details, okay, I'll say you've got another five minutes. Now I want to see 15 details in there. And it doesn't really matter what the details are, right? If you're imagining a blue truck or a red truck, it doesn't matter, but it matters to your brain in that it makes this future more imaginable, literally more imaginable. When you try to think about it, it's going to bring this movie into your mind or this,

this 3D environment into your mind so you can really revisit it and think about it and allow it to motivate you or inform your actions. So you've mentioned the importance of realizing that we can imagine futures that are not just disaster scenarios and terrible things happening, but also good things happening. And there's a balance to be struck there. For anyone who's listening to the Minescape podcast 200 years in the future, not only are we right now in the recovery period of a pandemic, but we're in month two of the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, right?

And which has the potential in some hypothetical future scenarios to grow into a superpower clash and a nuclear war. I mentioned this on Twitter recently. I was accused of peddling disaster porn rather than being realistic. But so, I mean, rather than saying my own opinion, let me ask you, how do you balance the worst possible things happening from the best? Is it sort of cheap and easy to air too much on one side or the other? Or is there a happy medium? I love this question. I'm going to try to answer it very slowly and methodically because it's very important.

Okay. So what I encourage people to do and what we practice at the Institute for the Future is to have an active balance of what we call positive imagination and shadow imagination. So positive imagination that's made up of the futures that we want, the world you want to wake up, in where, you know, economic inequality has been solved. Racial injustice has been solved. Cars are banned from cities. Like whatever, whatever futures excite you that you would like to wake up in. That's your positive imagination. Then you've got your shadow imagination where you are willing to acknowledge real risks and threats like nuclear war still a threat, even though we stopped talking about it as much for a couple decades, you know, let's actually bring that back up

into our consciousness. And so the need for new approaches to nuclear disarmament, I mean, we need to get out of this weird stalemate and figure out, you know, people in nuclear security would argue it's got to be new methods for disarmament because this is taking too long and it's not, it's not having any lasting or transformative impact. So you've got the shadow imagination, you've got the positive imagination. And what becomes important is that you can assess new situations, developing situations, using what's in your positive imagination and in your shadow imagination. So let's say there's some new technology you're excited about, right?

The new unfolding situation is a neuro-stimulation technology. This is something I'm actually very interested and excited about. There, that there is the possibility for neural implants to essentially cure intractable depression. And this is exciting. Okay. I can use it to fuel my hope for the future of mental health care. But maybe I can also think about these other things in my shadow imagination,

like economic inequality, who will have access to it. Think about the rise of authoritarian politics. Will somebody come up with a misuse for this technology? How are we going to regulate it? So if you're excited about a future, let your shadow imagination inform it. Likewise, with the war that we're living through now, we want to balance, you know, the justified dread and anxiety and despair we have over this suffering.

Can we look for ways that the positive futures we've imagined, can we pull those positive imagination, those positive futures into the presence somehow and create a connection? So one thing that is always on my mind, is one of my top futures, is the future of migration. particularly around climate change. And I'm worried that we might force people to say trapped behind geopolitical boundaries and live in parts of the world that are now no longer conducive to human life because of extreme heat or extreme drought. I'm worried that we're not going to transform our border policies or migration policies

fast enough to prevent mass suffering. I'm very interested in climate migration and new approaches to that. So I've been trying to encourage people to imagine what change we might experience. how we might become more welcoming to refugees, how we might change the conversation so migrants aren't a threat, but that it's something that we can have a more positive narrative around. So, you know, this is one spark of hope for what I'm seeing is the unprecedented response to refugees leaving Ukraine and how they're being welcomed and the details, the specificity of it. People are meeting them at the border. They are bringing things.

they are opening their homes. They are trying to show up for this crisis. Now there's a level of racism involved. You know, Poland wants to accept these refugees because they're white and they're Christian. But so at the same time, they're going to have a lived experience of being heroic in this way. The world is going to witness this. People like my kids might grow up having this narrative in their mind. This is what we do.

We welcome people in crisis. We open our homes. We open our communities. This is great. This is what we do now. So I try, now I'm trying to bring that future I want, a future where we can welcome each other when we're in crisis across borders. I'm trying to bring that and connect it with what's happening now. And is there anything I can do to help this be a tipping point for the culture of migraiseries?

so that coming out of this, again, going 10 years in the future where hopefully the war is over and we have not sustained any nuclear damage. I mean, hopefully we're going to go 10 years out. How are we using this experience 10 years from now to develop a more humane approach to human movement or whatever it might be? So it's this dance that we do when we think about things that seem positive. Let's make sure we're bringing in the awareness of risks or injustice or inequality, whatever. And then if we're thinking about if we're living through crisis and disruption and suffering, how do we find a place for the futures we want still and try to create those connections? I don't know if you saw just the other day a new poll came out.

It seemed to indicate that for the first time in decades, a majority of Americans would like to see more immigration than we currently have rather than less immigration than we currently have. Great. I love it. You know, also I saw a headline that for the first time we had more deaths than human than births in the United States, which is another reason to consider more migration, right? Like aging populations, we're not going to be able to sustain life as we know it without young people. So, I mean, and that's the thing when you start to like pay attention to say.

signals of change, you start to see, like, well, there are lots of drivers of change that might be pushing, you know, in the same direction. And it helps you think, like, yeah, we're really on the precipice of a new way of thinking about migration. Like, I'm going to get ready for that. Yeah. Well, and it's very related to another thing that you mentioned in the book. I interviewed Paul Bloom on the podcast. He had this wonderful book against empathy. And I was completely against, against empathy. So we had a fun disagreement. Because his argument is, you know, we should be rational rather than empathetic. Empathy is something that we are more likely to have for people who are like ourselves,

and that biases us. And in your book, you very nicely contrast that kind of empathy, which is easy empathy, with hard empathy, the empathy that we have to work to get for people who are unlike ourselves. And that plays a role in maybe being a good person, but also just in accurately thinking about the future. Yeah, exactly. And it's one of the reasons why I like running social simulations rather than just giving people future scenarios to sort of sit in their own mind, try to bring communities and groups together so that we can see how other people react to a scenario. And I was doing this for a while around universal basic income, which like people have these sort of abstract opinions while it's not right to pay people for nothing or. if we give people UBI, they'll just stay home and play video games or it'll, it'll, you know, create a sort of laziness. People have like these, I know, I'm in favor of universal basic income. So I'm saying those arguments, you know, in a tone of voice that probably conveys that I don't,

I don't find them to be persuasive. But so, you know, let's develop some hard empathy for people whose lives might be transformed by universal basic income. You know, I can hear it's like, I might say to someone, I hear you say, you don't need universal. personal basic income. You prefer to earn your income through work, that that is meaningful to you and purposeful to you and you have a job that allows you to do that. Great. Now let's talk about, let's let's let's have some other people share what they would do if they had this money. Oh, like this person says that I would quit my second job so that I could spend more time with my kids if I had this income or, you know, I would like to be more involved in volunteering in my

community and maybe I could work less and volunteer more. I could, instead of hiring somebody to take care of my parents, maybe I could be more involved in that. What people say, you know, when you can actually hear real people respond to hypothetical future scenarios, it takes us out of this, I don't know, this sort of abstract opinions or politically divisive, like feelings, and we can just understand that there are reasons why some people might want a particular future or likewise why people might not want a particular future. You might have all these people excited about a new technology or a new policy that they think is going to lift humanity.

And then you might talk to people who historically have been marginalized or harmed by new technologies and they would say, well, here's, you know, let's think about this a little bit more. because I would be worried about this. It doesn't mean that their fears are founded necessarily, but it's good to know that there's going to be resistance or that we need to heal this preexisting trauma in order to get people to accept this new possibility. So hard empathy, we can develop it by just actually seeing the future

from other people's points of view. And to do that, we can play these games together. We can have, you know, we started a scenario club at the Institute for the future. We have 850 members now who come together once a month to just, it's like a book club meetup, except instead of talking about a book, we talk about a future scenario and what we would feel and we vote on whether we're excited about it or we're worried about it. And it's just, this is a good skill also to develop this ability to get outside our own reactions and intuitions. And actually hear from other people, this is how it would impact me or this is how I would feel about it.

Well, it also sounds like it's crucially important for the idea of democracy, which is under threat in various different ways. But, you know, everyone thinks that the people who disagree with them are the real threat to democracy. And I increasingly worry that no one is willing to accept, or anyway, it's becoming less common to accept that democracy is about living with people who disagree with you, right? to me, that's not going to go away. That that's what we have to learn to do if the system is going to work. I love that. I mean, what an interesting, like, rebrand for democracy. We do at the Institute for the Future,

spend a lot of time thinking about the future of democracy and how to preserve it and revitalize it. And that's a very interesting idea, like, that we lean into that instead of, because I do think you're right. Like, a lot of people approach democracy as, as a struggle to convince other people, essentially, that you're right and they're wrong. Right. So how do we rebrand it and think about coexisting and, you know, maximizing the non-zero outcomes?

And like it. I like it. You're right that we don't think about it that way. That could be really helpful. I'll try to come up with a scenario for scenario club. Excellent. That thinks about democracy, the new. it's like the new way that we talk about it. What will it be? Okay, I'm on it. Good. Glad to do that. And, and, you know, maybe it's useful to wind up here with just some big picture

speculation because you've given us a lot to think about in terms of how to visualize the future and how to get our own brains out of the ruts that we're in. So let me just ask, you know, and we always let our hair down near the end of the podcast. What have we learned? You know, what have you, what do you think are the things that the person, person on the street should expect about the future from these simulations that you've done, positively or negatively? What are you optimistic about? What are the big worries that you have that people aren't worried enough about? I mean, I think big picture, what I'm telling everyone is we need to be more flexible. We need to be more willing to change plans or change

practices, whether it's, you know, I live in California where now we have a wildfire season and certain things aren't safe now during certain times of the year, like being outside. We're going to have to get flexible about, for example, the school year calendar. People don't want to be in California during wildfire season, but it starts the same time that the school year starts. Are we going to start to have more flexibility around this practically ancient tradition? It's not ancient. It goes back to like, you know, when industrial schooling began. But this is a flexibility in our calendars and our practices, you know, until we rebuild our electrical grid, I mean, there may be less stability and

power supply. Are you more flexible and ready to like, you know, just go with this, go with the flow. If you don't have energy, do you have what you need? Like, I don't mean this in like a scary apocalyptic way. I think it's just going to be how we maintain our well-being is just to accept that things can change on short notice or permanently. And heading into the future with that, that we don't want to grasp to expectations. Just be ready. You may need to, you may need to behave different.

or schedule differently or let go of a plan that you made and make a new plan. And then, you know, I said it before, but I think movement around the planet is going to, is, and it excites me. Because, you know, if people can move a little more freely on the planet, they can go someplace where they can contribute to society more. They can, they can work, they can create, they can care for people. I mean, I think if we're willing to rethink our assumptions about human rights to move freely and to seek out opportunity or safety, I think if we lean into that, we could design higher density cities than we've ever lived in before. And that could be amazing for a new renaissance of what is it like to live with so many people bouncing ideas and

culture and the social experience of that. So, I mean, I'm saying, like, pay attention to what's going on around that and lean into that and be ready for that, not in a scary way, but in a, you know, could we establish a new human right to move freely? Could we live in higher density in a way that is incredibly green and art flourishes and, you know, ideas flourish? Let's, let's be ready for a decade or two of transformation there. So this is a perfect place to end the podcast because I always like to end on an optimistic note.

But nevertheless, I still have one more question, which is as a fellow Californian, what does your earthquake kit look like? I mean, whatever. We've got lots of water. Our main thing, we've got flashlights and water. That's our main. And, yeah, the earthquake, the earthquake one is, yeah. It's a tough one. It's interesting.

Water is the big one. Water is the big one, and it's hard. Because you can survive without food for a while. But if you need to get your own water, that's going to be. So we have a lot of, we have a lot of water. Since you said ending on an optimistic note, can I also suggest if folks want to join our scenario club or actually we're going to be running two social simulations at the Institute for the Future this year, one on client.

migration and one on geoengineering decision making and unanticipated consequences, they can join us at urgent optimists, plural, because it's a bunch of us.org. They can join the scenario club because I want people to like, I don't want people to just, I want people to read the book imaginable. And I also want them to join the community of practice so that, you know, this is collective imagination we're talking about. So I don't want people to just read the book on their own. I want them to come and now play together with others. urgent optimists. That is very good. Good. That is an excellent optimistic place to, and I will put a link to it in the show notes. Awesome. And everyone can visit. So Jane McGonagall, thanks so much for

being in the Mindscape podcast. Thank you.