The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 460: Jane McGonigal - How To See The Future & Be Ready For Anything

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Text HAWK to 66866 for "Mindful Monday" Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12  https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games — or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She believes game designers are on a humanitarian mission — and her #1 goal in life is to see a game developer win a Nobel Peace Prize. She is a two-time New York Times bestselling author: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World and SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully. Her TED talks on how games can make a better world and the game that can give you 10 extra years of life, are among the all-time most popular TED talks, and have more than 15 million views. Jane dedicates this book to her sister Kelly... "who lives six minutes in the future." They are twins. "It's so helpful having her. If she can achieve something (TED Talks, Books), I could do it too." Being able to predict the future is not enough. You have to be bale to pre-feel it. Write down your long term plans. "Talk about a world you want to wake up in." "Any useful idea about the future should sound rediculous initially." "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." How to think like a futurist? In the corporate world... Carve out a role for yourself to fight short-terminism. Fight short term thinking. Play the long game. Create future planning habits in your organization. Dare to daydream. Take ownership - Create moments of joy... Be of service to others. A 30 second practical activity: Imagine 10 years from now... Where are you? What woke you up? Who are you with? The 3 questions to give you a baseline sense of your "future mindset" When you think about the next 10 years, do you think things will mostly stay the same and go on as normal? Or do you expect that most of us will dramatically rethink and reinvent how we do things? When you think about how the world and your life will change over the next 10 years, are you mostly worried or mostly optimistic? How much control or influence do you feel you personally have in determining how the world and your life change over the next 10 years? How to predict the future? Unstick your mind Think The Unthinkable Imagine the Unimaginable Imaginable - How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything– even things that seem impossible today One of the issues that cause depression is it doesn't allow you to imagine a future. For us as leaders, we need to be able to imagine a positive future for ourselves and our team. Be a spotlight for other people's good ideas. Bring attention to it. Be known as someone who spreads positive gossip Living in the present. Giannis – "When you focus on the past, that's your ego... And when I focus on the future it's my pride... And I kind of like to focus in the moment, in the present. And that's humility. That's being humble."

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Try it. Risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals Hawk. Enter promo code Hawk for 83% off and three extra months for free. That's surfshark. Dot deals slash hawk. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. text Hawk to 666866. Now on tonight's featured leader, this is a great one. It's Jane McGonagall, Ph.D. She's a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games. Her games are designed to improve real lives and solve real

problems. Her TED Talks are among the all-time most popular and have more than 15 million views, and she's written multiple bestselling books, including her latest, which is called imaginable. During this conversation we discuss the three questions to ask yourself to gauge your future mindset, then how leaders can become better long-term thinkers, and then the importance of setting ambitious 10-year goals for yourself. You're going to love this one. It's Jane McGonagall. All right, Jane, thanks so much for being here.

welcome to the Learning Leader Show. Thank you, Ryan. I'm glad to be here. I'm a fan and I'm excited. Wow. I mean, that's really cool. I appreciate you saying that. So I usually when I get a book, especially of a notable author who I really admire and have looked up to for a while like you, I flipped to the back to the acknowledgement sections, which I did for yours. But I also flipped to the front. In the front, the book's dedicated to Kelly McGonagall, your sister, who lives six minutes in the future. What does that mean? So Kelly, who some of your listeners may know from her TED Talk. 3.43 on this show. Yes, on how to make stress your friend. And she teaches at psychology at Stanford. She was born six minutes before I was. And that's like a natural

leadership position being the firstborn twin. Everybody treats you as more mature and wiser. And And it definitely affected our relationship growing up and continues today. What is that twin relationship like, given that you both have gone out into the world. You do your work. You've both made separate names for yourselves. You're still obviously attached. You have the same last name. And there's a lot of love there.

But what's that been like growing up and then now as you both created what you have for yourselves. It was really helpful for me to, you know, to see somebody go out and strive for goals that I hadn't thought of for myself and achieve them. Because when you have an identical twin, it's somebody with the same DNA as you. They grew up in the same house, the same educational opportunities. And so if she would achieve something, I would say, well, wait, I should do that too. She went off to do her PhD at Stanford and then, you year later, I'm like, oh, I never thought of doing a PhD, but I'm going to try that too. And then I gave a TED talk and she gave her TED talk. And we're just like constantly being able to almost

like simulate a second life, you know, and and be like, wow, that worked out for her. I have the genes. I have the destiny and my DNA to do it too. So you kind of get to go for twice as much as you might otherwise. Is it competitive? I mean, not anymore. You know, as you, I think, get older, you realize nobody in the world really is as happy for your success as somebody close like a sibling. And so we try to be happy for each other and not competitive. That's really cool. I mean, I identify this with a younger brother close in age where we both played sports and went on to do some cool things. And I'm with you. Like he won a Super Bowl in the NFL and I was just like it was one of the greatest days of our family's lives it was just amazing that

I've I've said to this said this to him before like your work and in our work in some cases has created so many amazing moments for our family like how could you not how could you not be grateful for that you know like it's so cool so I sense like a little kinship that you guys probably have something similar yes that's beautiful how you said that and you know sometimes when I get asked to speak to students or people starting out in their career years, the biggest piece of advice I give them is be happy for other people who are succeeding. Don't begrudge other people who've maybe gotten further than you faster because in reality, most of the people who are successful, there's a lot of people who like them less than they

used to. There's like envy, jealousy, bitterness. And if you can actually support people when they're successful, I think, you know, people would be surprised to realize that that's like, That's a superpower. That's a strength. And people will remember when you were happy for them instead of being, you know, jealous or genuinely happy. Like I do this little bit in talks with your who. And one of the parts of your who is who's beside you. And one of, I think, the definitions of that is that there's a no judgment zone.

So you can call them when you've really stepped in it. You've really messed up. But on the other end, they are genuinely excited and happy for you when it goes, well, not like the fake, oh, good job, but then they're behind your back, but they genuinely like, yes, let's do this. You know what I mean? That's, I think that's a critical component. So anyway, I just wanted to start with love because I think it's so cool what both of you have accomplished.

So I want to talk about a number of things with you, Jamie, because I, as I was reading through all of your work, obviously this book and some of your past work, TED Talk, all of that. I was thinking of like the future. I was thinking of the pandemic and thinking of the pandemic. like that. And one of the issues was I felt people were more nervous and anxious about uncertainty than they would be just getting bad news. And so maybe you can share some of the science behind that because I think one of the things leaders can do is help create a little bit of certainty in an uncertain world. How do you view uncertainty in the fact that I think there is

science out there that states people would rather receive bad news than just have this uncertainty of, oh, my God, what's going to happen? Yes, that is absolutely true. I mean, let me speak to it from my perspective as a game designer. One of the benefits of playing any kind of game, whether it's Fortnite or Minecraft or a simulation of a future pandemic, is that you get to try different strategies and you get to play with different creative approaches. And this really actually allows you to be more comfortable with uncertainty because if there is a whole spectrum of possibilities, you can play with them so that you have an idea of what it might feel like or how you might react or how it might go. And I do think that gamers actually do have a little more comfort with uncertainty because they're used to that very expansive possibility space. right. We're not always trying to shut it down. Like even a game like chess, you know, when you start

the game, there are more possible games to be played than there are atoms in the universe. Now, that is not hyperbole and you can run the math on it. And so you have to be comfortable with anything could happen and just continuing to, you know, experiment. And, you know, experiment. And be ready and make your next move with the information that you have. You mentioned running simulations and the wild thing at the beginning of this book that I was, I told you before, it was almost unbelievable, like literally unbelievable. It's like, I don't like that word, but in this case, it almost was that you, and I want you to explain this, you ran a pandemic simulation before it happened.

Can you share more about this as well as some of the follow-up as it then happened? And maybe what some of the people who were a part of that game design, a part of that simulation, had to say when it went from this simulation versus real life. Yes. So, you know, if people have seen my TED talk about how games can make a better world, I actually describe these two simulations in that talk because we had just played one and we were just about to start another. So these two games, they were called Superstruck and Evoke. So, you know, people like, oh, I do remember Jane talking about we were going to bring

ordinary people together and ask them what they might do to try to adapt and survive different global crises. And at the heart of both of them was a respiratory pandemic. And we were running these simulations in the years 2008 and 2008 and 2000. But the actual game was set in the years 2019 and 2020. And, you know, the scenario included details like it started in China. And there was this global misinformation campaign, conspiracy theories being spread by a group called Citizen X in our game. You know, obviously parallels to Q&N in the real 2020.

We were talking about how pandemic response might be complicated by extreme wildfire. on the west coast of the United States, how it might be complicated by infrastructure breaking down, like unprecedented power grid disruption. I mean, all these things that actually happened in 2019 and 2020. And when all of the real pandemic started unfolding, I started getting calls from people who remembered that I had run this game. We had more than 30,000 participants who spent 10 weeks just thinking, okay, what would I do? how would I react? What would I need? How could I try to help? And you have to understand these simulations. It's not like a computer program where I design exactly what I think will happen. And then

you say, okay, I would do this. And then the game tells you, okay, well, you survived or you didn't survive. Nothing like that. It's all social intelligence. It's all people telling stories. We collected hundreds of thousands of stories and then ran analysis to find out, you know, what are people going to do even if it's against the law. Where will they go? You know, what will they need? Under what circumstances will they isolate in quarantine? And in what circumstances will they say, I'm just going to risk it. You know, we were forecasting that the fights over masking. We were forecasting that if we didn't pay people to stay home, it wasn't going to happen. We were forecasting moms having to drop out of the workforce because if schools were

closed, who's going to stay home with the kids. So people are calling me at the beginning of the pandemic, and I'm saying, great, here's what we learned. Here's what you expect. You know, get ready. And I was advising, you know, people from like top executives from Silicon Valley companies, government foundations, international governing groups. And so at first I was like, okay, great, we predicted it. Everybody will listen to us, you know. But of course, you know, what I discovered it is being able to sort of accurately predict the future, it's not enough. You have to get people themselves to pre-feel these futures. They're not, they're not going to listen. If what you say sounds counterintuitive or surprising, which the future often is, unless they have purposely

unstuck their minds already, they're still going to be stuck in old ways of doing things or they'll get frozen with anxiety. And then, you know, so I spent the last, um, almost two years talking to people who participated in these games to see, well, were you able to act faster? Did you adapt more successfully? Did you feel better? Did you kind of avoid some of that overwhelming anxiety and trauma? And the short answer is yes, definitely. Well, I would have, I would not have believed any of this if you would have told it to me when you ran out. I said, okay, cool game, you know, but that's obviously never going to happen. Like even if something comes over, we'll figure it out.

You know, if we have to chill out for a couple days, whatever, but we're not going to do this for years. So I wouldn't believe you. So I'm just curious, and maybe this is a stupid question, but like, what are you, what are you testing now? What are you simulating now for 10 years from now or however long from now that we wouldn't believe is even within the realm of possibility? Right. So for this book, I came up with 12 scenarios that I think are worth testing. One of the most practical ones, sort of really down to earth, is what happens when we switch

to digital currency, programmable money, right? This is a very practical thing. It's definitely going to happen. Almost every nation with a sovereign monetary system is already doing this. They're getting ready to, you know, it'll be a combination of cryptocurrency and just traditional database. But, you know, when there is a complete record of every unit of currency where it's been, where it's going, and we can program it, right? Like, the government could give out economic stimulus that money that expires in 30 days if you don't spend it, right? They

could create negative interest. If you're just sitting on a pile of cash like some companies are, Apple, right, that there's negative interest on it because they want that money getting reinvested or paid out to employees. So that's just an example. When we're just all digital and, you know, we're not just talking, again, the sort of cryptocurrency culture now is not government, not central-backed digital currencies, but the governments are going to do it too. And that's something to get ready for.

I mean, as an aside then, are you like investing in Bitcoin, Ethereum, other other cryptocurrencies, NFTs. Are you, like, are you into that? I am not super into that because I mean, I'll just give you my perspective, right? So I've been very successful in my career, made a lot of money. And I made a decision about a decade ago to invest all my money in municipal bonds. So I make all of my interest helping communities build schools, build hospitals, build bridges. I don't really play with the stock market. I don't play with crypto because that's just sort of my commitment to the future. If I'm going to make money, I feel really good about making that interest off of building things that are good for the world. It's kind of a unique, I think,

perspective. I'm sure I could make more money, but I haven't, I've got plenty of money. And I'd rather, I'd rather, I'd rather my investments, you know, I can drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and be like, I help rebuild this. I'm in my brain. I love it. So there's questions. And so I'm a prompt-driven thinker and writer and speaker. And so I love that your book is packed with questions throughout. And I want to ask some of them. I want to surface some of these questions that you are posing throughout the book. I encourage people to get it. It kind of will mess with your mind a little bit because it'll just make you think so much. That's pretty rare.

I mean, like, I give you credit because I don't know how you write a book like this out of thin air. But you said there's three questions to give you a baseline sense of your, quote, future mindset. So let me just start with number one. And we'll go there first and we'll see what happens with two and three. So when you think about the next 10 years, do you think things will mostly stay the same and go on as normal? Or do you expect that most of us will dramatically rethink and rethink? reinvent how we do things. Why is this question number one of the baseline sense of your future mindset? Well, first of all, what's your number for that question? Where are you? 10, everything changes.

I know. I'm more closer to a 10 than I am a 1 because of, I mean, immediately everyone just probably thinks of themselves and where they were 10, or me, okay, I shouldn't speak from. I think of myself and where I was 10 years ago, how the world has changed, how I've changed, how I've changed, my career, my life. And it's basically all completely different when it comes to personal, professional. I mean, I do this full time now. Even five years ago, I wasn't doing it full time. So let alone 10, there wasn't even a thought. So that's why I'm more of a, of to the, to the far end of, I have no idea. This is why when you ask me, what are you going to be doing in five years or in the interview question, I'm probably the worst at answering that. Because I'm just going to be like, dude, I don't know. I mean, like, I know I have like a North Star, but I don't know really what's going to happen.

You know, so I'm closer to a 10 on that question. How about you? Oh, I love that. I mean, I'm like a 10 also, and I'll explain why this question is so important to think about. But I want to say, like, I, you know, I think if you dig into these future imagination training skills, you'll definitely be able to come up with vivid ideas for five or 10 years out. I know, you know, and I've heard you talk about, you really do have huge plans and, and visions and goals for yourself.

And so a lot of this, you know, future thinking, imagination training will help you bring the kind of specificity to it that helps other allies come along with you and whether you're raising money or you're trying to create a movement or you're trying to motivate yourself. But we start with this question because having an, what I call an unstuck mind, not getting stuck in patterns from the past or the assumptions of how things, are today and will always be. This is so central to success and happiness in life. We know, starting with depression, right? One of the symptoms of depression is having a fixed mindset. Like, nothing can change, nothing can get better. Neurologically, if you can jumpstart your

brain by activating the pathways that allow you to anticipate change rather than constantly obsessing over the patterns of the past, it's just like, good for our happiness and well-being. It's good for innovation. You want to really be thinking creatively and challenging assumptions and the more you anticipate change, the more likely you are to come up with these really visionary ideas. If you're trying to change the world, you know, through activism, a social movement, it can be really hard to keep the momentum and motivation. it takes a long time for things to change. But if you can keep that sense of, well, you know, how far have we come?

You know, how long did it take for these other movements? Then as long as you believe that change is possible in that 10-year timeline, it can help you stay motivated with things that it does take a long time to change. And I like the 10-year timeline because if you look at history, you know, it took 10 years for Facebook to go from one user to a billion users. It took Bitcoin to go from 10 years to just being an idea in a scientific article to having almost a trillion dollar market cap. It took 10 years from the very first protest against racial segregation to the successful passage of civil rights in the United States. I mean, 10 years, we can get a lot done in 10 years.

And so that's kind of how far out I encourage people to look so we can say, open-minded and have that sense that anything can be different, even things that seem impossible to change. So do you build out these plans for what you want to do in your life, in your career, five years, 10 years? Like, do you do that? Are these written down somewhere? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So so famously towards the start of my career. And so it's interesting, it's not so much as goal setting. I like to talk about the world I want to wake up in. And, I want to be a part of making that world, but it's not necessarily something I would check off my own list, like, you know, publish a book or earn a PhD. I mean, that's just like normal stuff.

Not normal. I like to talk about, well, you know, anybody could write it on a list. But I like to talk about, you know, I think of it like in the term of movie trailers. Do you remember like all these old movie trailers, 80s and 90s and the 2000s, they would start with a voice that said, this is a world. which, and it'd be like something weird, like, water no longer exists or like everyone, you know, must defend their lives, whatever. And it tells you the, like the context for this crazy story. So I think about 10 years out, what do I want to wake up in that would make people say, that's impossible or like I can't even imagine that. I try to describe that. So early in my career, I said, I want to wake up in a world in which a game designer has won a Nobel Prize.

And I was thinking maybe the Nobel Peace Prize. And this is, I started my career very active in groups like the Game Developers Conference, the International Game Developers Association. I was trying to get everybody excited about understanding the real impact on people's lives that these games have psychologically, socially, mentally, all of that. And so, you know, I just, as a provocation, what kind of games would we be making that this would not be ridiculous sounding, right? I love ridiculous sounding futures.

If you visit us at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, we have painted on our big front gallery window, this phrase, any useful idea about the future should sound ridiculous at first, right? Because we want to like shock ourselves with either, you know, the crises or disruption we might wake up in or these goals are very. visions that they're so transformative people dismiss them. So anyway, that was my, that was like early in my career. I said by the year, 23, that a game developer would at least be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, look at the clock. Look at the calendar. It's been gone on for 15 years,

Ryan. I've got one more year. So if any Nobel Prize nominators are listening, this is it. This is the year. Are you a believer in like talking things into existence of say more because like I go back and forth on this stuff. Honestly, like I go back and forth on goal setting. I go back and forth on keeping things to yourself versus putting them out there into the world. And you know, I'm honestly conflicted on these things. And this year I've publicly stated goals and put them out there for everyone who listens. They know them. They're not a lot.

They're aligned with my values. so it's a different year. So I'm kind of shifting more towards this way. But this kind of talking, I've seen like professional golfers hold up the notes app on their phone after they won a champion. I think it was Justin Thomas. He held it up. He's like, look, here are my goals.

And they were wildly ambitious, especially at the time he set them. And then he like basically hit all of them. And they were crazy, big, big, big wins and all this. So talk to me about like about why you do this and why you think this is. is something that we all should do. Well, I have a story for you, actually. So this is the story of how I became a professional futurist, which has everything to do with essentially talking things into.

What a cool job, by the way. Like, could you have imagined when you were 12 that this was a thing, that this could be like your life's work? I guess. Had no idea it existed as a career path. So I got scouted to become a futurist. And so it was, this is like back in 2007. So I had just finished my PhD like a year or two before at UC Berkeley.

And I was studying how we could create new kinds of games to let gamers try to help with global challenges. So like this idea of massively multiplayer science is actually pretty common now. I was one of the first people to write about let's just give games. gamers data sets from real scientific research efforts. So now you can play Galaxy Zoo and help you know, astrophysicists look for things in space or you can play fold it where you're folding proteins in these 3D virtual environments to help come up with new ways to cure diseases. I was trying to figure out, yeah, let's get gamers. Let's use some of this billions of hours we're spending every week to harness just a little bit because we can like 95% of gaming should be

fun and that's great. But like let's have five percent also for simulating pandavics or you know discovering new things in space. So I was running around doing that and I got invited to the Institute for the future to give, they called it. It was like a lunchtime talk. Which is real at lunch. Just tell us about what you're doing. We're kind of interested to hear about you. And I gave my talk about what I was doing. And they're like, yeah, okay, you should, why don't you, you know, quit your job, which I had a full time game design job. Like quit your job. come here and just kind of like hang out with us. We don't have a job description for you, but we think, you know, maybe you could make some games for us or research what games might

become with new technologies or new genres and just basically come hang on this. And I'm like, okay, I do want to change the world and I don't want to work for, I was working for very traditional companies at the time. So I did it. And what I learned is they do this all the time at the institute is that you've probably heard the saying. Alan Kay has said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. So it turns out that a lot of futurists are people with a vision for the future who are running around, doing crazy things, building prototypes, running experiments, starting social movements.

And they're able to predict the future because they're actually essentially bringing it into existence through their passion for whatever change or innovation they're trying to make. And I mean, my first like successful track record as a futurist was, you know, with my first book, writing reality is broken. We should be inspired by games to change schools and work and health and all of this stuff. And I mean, I think that book was proven right, not because I saw the future coming, because I got a lot of people excited about this idea by. by helping them imagine what it would feel like to wake up in a world where work was more like a game or school was more like a game or working out was more like a game. And then you just, you get people excited by sharing this vision and then they come along and help you make it real.

And so, yeah, that's the secret. Like if you want to be a futurist, just start doing crazy things that could change the world. And then you'll get recruited and taught all of the secrets of actual professional skills. That sounds easy. Sounds easy. All right. Let's do that. No. Okay. So there's two kind of off-ramps. I want to go on for a second and then we get back to the book. One, I've thinking about like the avatar of the person that I speak with a lot who listens and this is, this was me and it still is me to a certain extent. Jane, when you think about someone who, let's say they're a VP of sales at a big company. Okay. And they're right now listening to this and they're intrigued. They love your stories. I think your career path is wild. and like, this is really cool. But then they also say, how does this apply to me?

How does this apply in my, here's my world. I'm trying to achieve a number so that I, you know, I hit the goals that are set forth in front of me by the company. I'm trying to build an amazing culture within my business and my team. I'm hiring. I'm firing. I'm dealing with fires every day that I have to put out. And so when they think of a futurist, they think of someone who can, who can almost

see into the future. They think of game simulation. what advice or what would you say to that person knowing now that these are their goals where they're like, Jane, this sounds really cool, but does this really apply to me? Because I'm just trying to kind of build this little world inside of my business so I can keep getting promoted and make money and have a cool job and have a great team. That's the thinking. Whereas some of this stuff may seem kind of in the other lane from somebody like that. Yeah.

I mean, let me give a couple sort of practical suggestions because, you know, obviously, I teach how to think like a futurist for Stanford University's continuing studies program. So I'm getting execs from, you know, all over Silicon Valley. People fly in from all over the world to take this. This is very much a, I think a core competency for people who are in business or trying to create any kind of change in the world. And so we do talk about sort of practical things. one is just to try to carve out a role for yourself within the organization as fighting short-termism. Now, you know, I mean, if this is not something that's on people's radar right now,

we are moving into an era where short-termism will be seen as one of the biggest threats to successful business and innovation, right? We are moving out of the era of move fast and break things and we'll clean it up later. that's done. People are going to be held accountable for being able to anticipate the long-term impacts of the products and services they create, whether it's on our mental health, or it's on the environment, on climate, on sustainability, on economic, you know, equality and inequality. We have to be thinking long out. And there's research showing that organizations that have habits baked into their,

they're just daily and annual processes, these future thinking habits at 10 years out and longer, they grow faster, they have more profit. It's very much, it's not just sort of about like, you know, feeling ready, being ready. I mean, this is an important part of core business practice.

And one thing that you can do if you're not doing anything yet, around it is we talk about signals of change and having a culture of collecting and sharing signals of change. So a signal of change is just something that's real, that's happening today, that you can look at and say, hmm, this is something new and weird is happening here. And you try to anticipate how your work or your organization or community or life would be different if this signal of change became more common. And, you know, I'm doing some work for booksellers now because I'm selling a book. And, you know, they're looking at some pretty interesting signals around book banning, right? There's a rise of, you know, trying to ban books from libraries,

ban books from schools. And every time a new book gets banned, it's a signal of change, you know, that booksellers might find themselves at the heart of a new culture war, the same way that doctors and nurses who never saw what they did as being controversial, because of the pandemic, suddenly find what they do at the center of social division and they have to, they have to take this almost political position when that's not how they see themselves. We can see books getting ban now is a signal that maybe booksellers are looking ahead to it's not something they would have asked for but they need to prepare for. And so being able to look for these signals of change, bring them to your meetings, put them in your strategy documents, your vision documents,

and just make sure that there's a, that's on people's radar around your organization so that you're not just like getting whiplash and responding to things, you know, catching up and fixing problems you've already created. Just kind of fight that short-termism and start baking in these processes like collecting and sharing signals of change. The living, I've been in a place where, and I get it, like I've never been the CEO, so I don't understand the challenges of that person was going through. But like this, like we have to hit the quarter meeting like we'll do anything to hit the

quarter, including, you know, go straight to that line and maybe even, I don't know. And that's not that, that just isn't very fun, you know, like if I don't hit the quarter, I'm going to get fired. You'd hope a board or whoever would set up a place like, let's think long term. Let's not like live quarter to quarter of, oh, no, we're getting close. We're short. What can we do? And then you, you mess up things for the future just to achieve whatever number and just not, it's not fun. then fire people and all this stuff happens just to hit the profit number for that quarter. I love that thought of like fight short termism. I think that's really good.

I was thinking of this too, Jane, as you were talking, I think I saw an interview with Jeff Bezos. I'm sure you've watched this one where somebody's like, well, you know, what do you think is going to change coming for? What do you think is the biggest difference is in the future of Amazon or just business in general? And he kind of flips. He's like, I like to think of what won't change. and he says, what won't change? Do you think about that? Do you have these things like, what's going to stay the same? What won't change moving forward in five to 10 years? Yeah, well, I mean, so it's funny. I run futures thinking trainings at least once a week.

And one of the games that I play with people, it's called Stump the Futurist. And I have everybody make a list of things they think cannot, will not change in the next 10 years will definitely still be true. And then what I do is I have my colleagues from the Institute on call, and they literally go out and start researching to find signals of change that even these seemingly impossible to change, you know, true for all of evolutionary history that they could actually change. You know, people will say like, oh, you need genetic material from a man and a woman to make a baby, even if you're doing the IVF, even if it's, you know, very high tech, you still need, you know, a man and a woman. and then we'll go out and find, well, look, you know, did you know researchers at Cambridge University are pretty far along in figuring out how we can create human embryos using genetic material from two women or two men? You don't need the opposite sex material at all.

And, you know, I mean, even these are like our basic assumptions. So while I will say, yes, you know, will people still fall in love? Yeah, probably yes. Will we, you know, still need food and oxygen to breathe? I mean, probably yes. Although when people say things like that, then I go quick, start Googling, you know, future of oxygen. We don't need, we, a lot of times to unstick our brains, we just go into Google Scholar

or Google News and we search for the opposite of whatever we assume. So just the other week, I'm in Google typing humans don't need oxygen to breathe. And then what comes up? Well, it turns out researchers in Germany are figuring out this kind of photosynthesis, artificial lung so that we could breathe carbon dioxide instead of oxygen like plants. If we're on Mars, there's not a lot of, you know, oxygen. How are we going to breathe? So, I mean, yeah, you want to think like, I think we'll still want to fall in love and,

you know, we'll, I think basic neuroscience will, you know, we'll want to be motivated by challenge and things like that. But otherwise, I'm all in on, you know, anything can change, even things that seem impossible. The second question of your three questions to give a baseline sense of your future mindset. When you think about how the world and your life will change over the next 10 years, are you mostly worried or mostly optimistic? How about you, Jane? Oh, I mean, I'm at heart an optimist.

I call myself a, I'm a techno-optimist. techno optimist and a socio optimist, meaning I believe in science. I'm so excited like MRI vaccines. They're going to fight cancer. They're going to cure so many prevent cure. You know, so many diseases. I think humanity is going to be freed. Think about just even cancer alone, the tremendous burden, the emotional burden, the psychic burden, the trauma, the loss, the financial burden, the strain on health care system, you know, science is just going to solve so many of these problems for us. And I'm very excited about that. I'm excited about geoengineering. I think we are going to find ways

to solve the climate situation and we'll still have to adapt, but I believe with carbon sequestering and, you know, being able to deflect maybe the sun for a decade or two a little bit by injecting particles into that atmosphere. I'm very optimistic. But at the same time, I also, you know, think terrible things are going to happen and we need to be ready for them. It's why we simulate things like the pandemic. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to move out of California where I live due to wildfire season, getting longer and longer. I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm, you know, I'm always thinking how many bad air days can I handle, like how much, how many evacuation warnings can I live with a year. So, you know, we call this like having a balance of positive and shadow imagination.

You want to be realistic about the growing risks and threats, but you want to fill your brain with all of the new technologies and policy ideas. I love universal basic income. I'm excited about waking up in a world where we have UBI. you want to fill your brain with things that give you hope so that you don't have to look away from the bad stuff because you're able to face it knowing that there are solutions and good people trying to figure it out. Number three is how much control or influence do you feel you, italicized, personally have in determining how the world and you, you, you, italicized, personally have in determining

how the world and your life change over the next 10 years. I love this question. There's a lot there, a lot to get to because I am a big believer in discipline and taking ownership and responsibility, meaning if something bad happens or good happens, I'm going to take ownership over the fact of what did I do that cause this good or bad thing to happen? And I think that's a core competency for leaders is to take ownership. Even if this definitely comes up in parenting, you know, a kid does something stupid. You know, you've got to take ownership. That happens.

But at the workplace, this happens with our own poor decisions or good decisions. So I'm a believer in this being a 10. I don't know if I'm right, meaning on a scale of 1 to 10, I think I would like to think I'm going to take complete ownership over determining how my life changes over the next 10 years. What do you think about this, Jane? Okay. First of all, I am so impressed with you. I think literally I'm pausing because I'm racking my brain.

I've been asking these questions for a decade now and tracking responses. I've had responses from more than 50,000 people. I literally think you are the first 10 I have ever come across. And this is what, well, you know, I mean, and this must, I think this partly explains why you've been able to build such a powerful community and inspire people. Because who doesn't want to be closer to a 10? I mean, I think, well, let me let's look at like what's going on in the world. So there was this huge study that was published in the Lancet Journal of Global Health. And it found they talked to more than 10,000 young people.

So what was the age? It was ages 16 to 25. And they found that 56% of them said they felt that humanity was doomed and they personally have no future. Why? Because they're feeling like climate change is. unstoppable and they are they are feeling like so depressed and anxious about what they perceive as government's failure to act to help or to create change right so if if more than if a majority of

young people globally feel that humanity has no future and we're doomed i mean you would see they're not like a 10 on that scale right because what are you going to do um i think a lot of people feel overwhelmed by forces outside our control. And one of the things that I do in my work at the Institute and in this book is help people, you know, figure out, we can't control the winds of change, right? But we can raise a sale, right? We can find a way to, to, I always say,

there always has to be a way to create moments of joy, to do work that is meaningful, to be of service to others, no matter what world you wake up in, whether it's a pandemic or global migration due to climate change. One of the, one of, I think, the most important forecasts in this book is like, are we ready to live in higher density than most of us do today? Because pretty much any serious climate expert you talk to says large regions of the earth will be uninhabitable due to extreme heat. We're just going to have to move up to 2 billion people. In the United States,

going to probably have to move 50 million people. We're just going to be living a little more tightly packed in on the earth's surface. Are we ready to be welcoming? Are we ready to have that density of humanity build up around us? You can be happy in that future, even if you don't like the sound of it. You can find ways to be of service to others. You can find ways to do meaningful work. And that's where the control for me comes in. And you are probably somebody, no matter what future you wake up in. You're going to get to work. You're going to figure out how to use your unique skills and abilities to help the community

or help others and be creative and innovate. And that's why I often will have people start, you know, at a one, two, three, four, or five. And we can start using techniques to move them up that scale, closer to a 10 where we're not controlling how everything turns out, but confidence that we can have a meaningful life and do good things and find joy no matter what world we wait for. I think I guess part of my answer too is if, and I mess this up, but of really trying hard to focus on what is within my control and trying hard to not think,

too much about the things outside of my control. And that sounds, that's much easier, you know, said than actually in practice. But I think that's part of why I feel that way of, I just think taking ownership over your decisions and being responsible for the results that you create, good or bad or in between is a, is a core leadership excellence competency. Where are you on that, by the way, on a one to ten on the third question? I mean, I would say like a good seven or eight. Why are you not a 10? Well, I'll tell you the biggest barrier obstacle to me being a 10 is I worry about the growing social divisions and lack of trust in whether it's science or our fellow, you know, citizens or the government.

I, you know, a lot of my optimism comes from believing that we can figure it out. Like humanity can figure it out, right? Like, you know, asteroids. Well, thank God. People have basically figured out how to deflect them, like all those movies about apocalypse because we get hit by an asteroid. I mean, there are people out there who figured out we can nuke them. It's going to be fine.

They simulate it every two years. They're on top of it. Like, I find my optimism that humanity will figure it out, but that I do get, you know, I'm not at a 10 because I think, well, humanity can figure it out, but people may be motivated to, you know, disrupt us successfully enacting solutions, you know, or that, you know, we, I worry, like, I mean, if we can literally prevent cancer through MRI vaccines, are we really going to still be fighting about vaccines or can we just get over it because who does not want cancer to be gone? Who has not been personally affected, you know, and had grief in their life over that.

But that's, that's for me, that's like the, the fuzzy area. It's the, it's a, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's just, this movie just came out. Have you seen it on Netflix? Yeah, like, don't look up. Yeah. Like you're describing the movie. Yeah. Which is just, I didn't know it was, uh, it was what it was before I turned on.

I remember looking over to my wife saying, what's going. Oh, oh, like, I didn't realize it was one of these types of movies that, like, just making fun of whatever. I do, speaking of the asteroid, and this is, because this is a question that I'm going to start asking even more, but I've, I've randomly gotten there and I'm going to be more intentional. And I think for people who have sustained excellence over time, there's usually a person behind the person. What I mean with that is, like, maybe it's a mentor or somebody there. And in your book on future scenario number two, the question is, have you checked the asteroid forecast? Let's say the impact date is May 1st, three years from now.

After hearing this news, who do you want to, like, whom do you want to talk to about what this means? And I think this is my way of getting to the, like, who is the person or the people behind the person that is you, Jane, that have played like a significant role in making you who you are where there's a love there now, you're grateful for them. maybe it's a single person. I would love to hear who the person behind you is. Oh, what a beautiful question. I mean, I might point to a community first. So there are a couple of Zen monasteries in the Bay Area that I have been lucky enough to be

involved with going back to the early 2000s. So the Palo Alto Zen Center and the San Francisco Zen Center. And, you know, whatever your idea of Buddhist monks are, if you haven't participated in a Zen center community, I mean, there are artists, there are, you know, former CEOs who have retired and dedicated themselves to this new training. There are activists. There are, it's just, it's such a cool community of people who in my in you know I always when people say like what is what's your work really about like what are you really trying to do for me it's to witness the suffering that exists and try to alleviate it as best I can whether that's through designing a game that allows people to feel joy even if they're dealing with depression and anxiety or creating

a simulation so that when people show up in a difficult future, they're not suffering. They're like ready to go and act. In general, like the Zen community and just being able to witness that people are suffering. I don't, I feel like we don't acknowledge enough how hard life is for most people and how important it is to see, you know, that that every one of us wakes up whether it's a physical health challenge, it's mental health, it's social challenges, it's how much energy we're pouring into goals that it's like taking all of us to stay engaged. I think we should, we could, I don't know, I try to bring that awareness of suffering to what I do so that I can play a part in alleviating it.

I think that one of the biggest parts of when you talk about the traumatic brain injury is like the lack of ability to see a future, the lack of ability to see a potential. And as, as you were saying that and telling that story, it just made me think of like the happiest and most fulfilling moments is usually when I see like a really exciting future selfishly for myself or my family. But, but I, but I think we all initially think of that and then maybe even for the world. But that's a really big part of it. And I think that's a huge takeaway for me and probably for,

hope for others is to think about if, okay, first seeing it for yourself, but then also if you know somebody that's struggling, that that is one way to potentially help. And I don't know exactly how you get there to the point of that, but just knowing that that is an avenue and a place that we want to get to where you can see excitement in the future of some. This is why experiential gifts are so amazing because you give them the gift that we're going to go on vacation to Disney World and then you get the excitement of opening it, then you're thinking about it, then you're getting ready for it, the anticipation, then you actually go, then you have the memory dividends afterwards or the pictures. There's so many amazing things about it because you feel

the future. I think like that's a critical takeaway from all this, from a leadership perspective. You're leading a team. You're leading your family. You're leading yourself. Is thinking about creating some sort of excitement towards what's possible in the future. And I can give you a 30 second practical activity to like what if you don't know what should be in that vision, right? So you what you do is you just try to imagine yourself waking up 10 years from today and you start with whatever it is that wakes you up. What woke you? And I'm asking you to imagine a future that you would like to wake up in, right? So is it an alarm clock or is it somebody calling you?

Who's calling you? Like, who would you be excited to get a call from 10 years from today? You know, or is it the sound of an animal? Like, are you hearing certain, like, birds or where are you? What woke you up? And then, you know, look next to you. Who's next to you? Are you alone?

Are you with a partner? Is it the same partner or a different partner? You start to construct. I don't know as good. It's a different partner. Oh, I, I recently had somebody really changed their whole marriage based on imagining 10 years in the future. It can happen. But you start to fill in it, but you start and you don't have to as you wake up. Okay. What mood are you in? You know, why are you in this mood?

What are you excited about? What's what? What are the thoughts running through your mind? What are you going to get dressed in today? Why are you putting that on? Like how does it fit? What do you? And you start just, it turns out we can learn so much about our truest hopes, our deepest values, just by, imagine I still is waking up from that very initial moment. The more vividness and detail you bring in, the more you learn about, you know, that is something that could drive me or that is a goal I could set or a skill I could develop or a relationship I could build. I love that exercise. I love it. That's really practical and useful.

Do you have time for one more question, Jane, before we go? You're meeting with someone earlier in their career, maybe a recent grad, early 20s, mid-20s. I know this happens for you all the time probably. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you give to that person? Biggest piece of advice. Be a spotlight for other people's good ideas. You know, I think too many people try to put the spotlight on themselves. But every good thing that has happened to me in my career has been because I saw someone else doing something I thought was cool.

and I did everything I could to bring attention to it. You know, I would write just like a blog post about everything I thought was amazing about this game that someone else had designed. Or if I, you know, had a chance to like teach a class, I'm going to make their book, the center of my class, and I'm going to tell everybody why I think this person is so brilliant. And if you can find lots of people whose work you admire, whose projects you admire, and you're just like this, just radiating love and appreciation. I just feel like that is the best way to draw people into your orbit,

either the people you're writing about or talking about or people who are inspired by the same things. And so like less about you, less about promoting yourself. It's actually by promoting other people that you develop your own, like, the trust level and the brands and all of that. That comes from people saying, yeah, they really, I want to see the world the way that they do. So you have to, you have to show the world that you're seeing and not just pointing this. So cool. Spread positive gossip. Yeah. Talk kindly behind the backs of others. Right. I think that's, that's a teaching thing we try to say in our house of like find opportunities, create opportunities to speak kindly behind someone's back. as opposed to what most do and be known as someone who spreads positive

gossip. This is so good. Jane's book is called Imagineable How to See the Future Coming and feel ready for anything. Even things that seem impossible today. It will flip you upside down and make you think which is what I don't know how you do it because I immediately think of like

when this page was blank and now we have this, how did she do it? So huge props, Jane and thanks so much for being here. I would certainly love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Oh, thank you, Ryan. I mean, at the very least,

let's have something on a calendar for 10 years from today and we'll revisit. I wonder what we'll be doing then. I don't know if how we can, how we can, I'm guessing it won't be Zoom, but we'll figure something out. It'd be great.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. I think you can sense in my voice from that conversation with Jane how much I enjoy and appreciate the science that she brings to the conversation

and she's super entertaining. I hope you liked it as much as I did a few takeaways from my notes. As a leader within your business is our job to fight short-term thinking, create future planning habits. This is a great part of the conversation. And then when she was talking about her traumatic brain injury, one of the issues that causes depression from it is it doesn't allow you to imagine a future. For us as leaders, we need to be able to imagine a positive future. both for ourselves as well as our team in order to achieve and exceed the goals that we set. And then at the very end was so cool, be a spotlight for other people's good ideas.

Bring attention to them. Be known as someone who spreads positive gossip. That's the type of person that I want to hang out with. I would assume you would too. Once I'm going to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message, spreading positive gossip about this show, the Learning Leader Show. And because you've continued to do that and you continue to write reviews and rate the show, hopefully five stars on Apple Podcasts, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful.

Thank you so, so much. Talk to these two.