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

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Viore Clothing, spelled V-U-O-R-I, Viore. I've been wearing Viore at least one item per day for the last few months, and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out. It can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case. I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that least in my case, I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish. And I just want to read something that one of my employees said. She is an athlete. She is quite technical, although she would never say that.

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Starting point is 00:05:18 Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. sleep.com slash Tim. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Jane McGonigal. You can find her on Twitter at AvantGame, A-V-A-N-T, game. Jane is a future forecaster and a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games that improve real lives and solve real problems. She's the director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future and the lead instructor for their series on the Coursera platform. She also teaches the course, How to Think Like a Futurist. We're going to dig into some of the frameworks, I imagine, at Stanford University. Jane is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken and Super Better. And her newest book is

Starting point is 00:06:29 Imaginable, subtitled How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything, Even Things that Seem Impossible Today. And we'll get into some of her exercises and also simulations, and it might be pretty eerie and amazing. So we will get to that. Her TED Talks on how games can make a better world and the game that can give you 10 extra years of life have more than 15 million views. So jelly. So jelly, Jane. That's a lot of views. Her innovative games and ideas have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, O Magazine, and the New York Times, among many others. You can find all things Jane on her website, janemcgonigal.com. Jane, welcome back to the show. It's nice to see you.

Starting point is 00:07:20 Thank you, Tim. It's really nice to see you. Now, I thought I would just immediately make this super self-indulgent and use this opportunity to ask you about sleep. Because I know that we have spoken about sleep before, but for me, and I'm sure a lot of people, recently my insomnia has just been going for extra credit. And typically, there are two causes, I would say. One is just too much caffeine. Not much I'm going to ask you about that. That is something I should just self-regulate. The other one is a hyperactive, high RPM, just mental processing that happens. And sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. But the feeling that I'm laying down and my brain just will not turn off.

Starting point is 00:08:06 And I know that you have experimented with various things before bed. Have you any recommendations for me or anyone else listening? I have two recommendations. One uses video games and one uses the future. So the video game one, pretty easy. Video games allow us to control our thoughts and imagination. They focus our attention on a problem that isn't real. It's a game and we can be swapping candy tiles or catching Pokemon or whatever we're doing in the game. And it allows us to shut down the busy thoughts, the hyper mental stimulation. And it does seem to be pretty effective as a bedtime routine.

Starting point is 00:08:54 The only side effect is that you might dream or hallucinate about the game when you fall asleep. So you might see those Tetris blocks falling when you close your eyes, but that's not too bad a side effect. It's better than Ambien, I think. Yeah, I imagine so. I just wanted to layer onto that really quickly because you also mentioned in our last conversation how Tetris can be used to mitigate post-traumatic stress disorder, and in a sense, kind of visually overriding what could become a sort of compulsive, repetitive cycle of imagery caused by the trauma itself. And that really struck me. Do you have any games that you favor for this, if you were going to be using a game before bed and for how long would

Starting point is 00:09:46 you suggest? First, some good news. The researchers at Oxford University who first did that study about using Tetris to prevent unwanted flashbacks from traumatic events, they had previously done the studies in the lab. They actually started testing it in the field for people who had experienced violence or accidents that sent them to the emergency room. And they were able to replicate the findings in the field since we last talked. So there's even more evidence that it works. For preventing PTSD or just for bedtime, 10 minutes is the dose that's been tested. I mean, it's pretty easy just to pull out your phone. I've been using lately Quartle. So I don't know if you have found-

Starting point is 00:10:29 Don't know this. Quartle is the super masochistic version of Wordle, which everybody's been playing. How do you spell, what is it, Quartle? Quartle. Quartle. Quartle. It's Q-U-O-R-D-L-E. So it's just like Wordle where you have five guesses to get a five-letter word, except you're doing four words at the same time with the same guesses. So you have to allocate your guesses to try to maximize information about all four words.

Starting point is 00:11:02 And you're looking at all four words. And I do it every night before I go to bed now. And it's great. I mean, you literally can't think about anything else while you're trying to solve four or five letter words at the same time. Wow. So I interrupted because I have no tact and just wanted to talk about the PTSD from the last conversation and segue from that into your recommendation related to GAMS. You said you had another recommendation related to the future. You and I have talked before about this mantra that a lot of futurists have. I think it's in one of your books that in order to look forward, we try to look back at least twice as far and look

Starting point is 00:11:42 for patterns in the past and human culture and history. And there have been a lot of people talking lately about a past pattern of sleep. I don't know if you have come across this. So before we invented electricity, the normal human sleeping pattern was to be awake in the middle of the night for two to three hours. And people used to sleep in what they called first sleep. And then they would be awake and they would do stuff. They would often do chores or have intimate conversations with whoever was sharing the bed with them, which wasn't always a partner because people used to share beds with more people. Right, family members. Yeah. And then they would, after a few hours, they would go back to sleep for a second sleep. And it seems like a lot of people, if your insomnia is when you're falling asleep, you know, do the game thing.

Starting point is 00:12:32 But if your insomnia is in the middle of the night, you may actually just be more in tune with natural human sleeping patterns. And the rest of us, because of the type of stimulation our brain gets from electric light or artificial light, we have a weird modern sleeping pattern. But I find that a lot of people can relax in that middle of the night awakeness. And I've definitely gone through periods of my life where I've fallen back into that to sleep cycle. And if you know that it's natural and actually kind of the original human sleeping pattern, it can take away some of the anxiety and you just, you can get amazing stuff done in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep. And if we can kind of let go of the worry, this is weird, something's wrong with

Starting point is 00:13:22 me, I have to fix it and think about, you know maybe in the future, we'll go back to the way we used to sleep in the past, or not try to force people out of it. Maybe it will just be like two ways of sleeping. I've always done my best writing in the middle of the night, two, three in the morning. And fortunately, in my case, or unfortunately, it's on set some. So it sounds like I should try the game. Do you know why the Oxford researchers chose Tetris? Did they test other games and then choose Tetris? Was it just the ubiquity and kind of simplicity, awareness of the game?

Starting point is 00:13:59 What was the reason? The main reason is that Tetris is widely known to be the most visually stimulating video game that has ever been designed. And what the researchers were trying to do was essentially to take over the visual processing center of the brain because unwanted flashbacks, the reason we experience them is that in the heightened emotional period after a trauma, our brain keeps replaying it over and over again, especially in this incredibly intense visual form of imagination. And if it gets really locked in during those first 24 hours, it essentially becomes a pattern for the brain that is very hard to disrupt. And there are therapies, but people will go to therapies for years to try to break that pattern. And if you can stop it first, it helps. So, and everybody, you know, you've had this experience, you close your eyes, you see the falling bricks. There are other games that work. Candy Crush is

Starting point is 00:14:59 great. Any visual pattern matching game where your brain is looking at colors, looking at shapes, looking at how things are arranged in space will be really good. Quartle works for me because I'm not, I mean, I wouldn't use Quartle for a trauma, but it works for me for insomnia. But depending on how much, if you're trying to stop visual thoughts, if you have a really vivid imagination, the visual games will work better. And if it's just sort of abstract thoughts, you can really play any game that you like. So let's segue to the foreshadowing to Nostradamus McGonagall to Mick Nostradamus.

Starting point is 00:15:40 Oh my God, I love it. I'm getting a t-shirt that says that. Oh man. So please describe what happened when you led more than 20,000 gamers in a simulation in 2010, because it is pretty spooky. I should just very quickly explain that one of the kinds of games that I specialize in creating is something called a social simulation, which is where you get thousands of people to spend several days or weeks on a fictional social network. So basically build Facebook from the future or Twitter from the future. And people come and they share messages and photos and videos and stories about what's happening, but it's all imagined 10 years in the future. And to get people all imagining the same future, we give them scenarios. So we say, okay,

Starting point is 00:16:33 it's 10 years in the future. And one of the most popular simulations I created, we ran it in 2010 with the World Bank and it was set 10 years in the future, so the year 2020. And we asked them to imagine a series of cascading global crises, and how would they feel? What would they do? How would they adapt? How would they try to help others? And it started with a respiratory pandemic that started in China. And then there was a misinformation and conspiracy theory group called Citizen X that started to spread all kinds of crazy information and people couldn't figure out what was really going on and they weren't trusting the government. And then they started experiencing historic wildfires on the West Coast due to climate change. I mean, it was essentially everything that we

Starting point is 00:17:26 actually lived through in 2020. But back then it was fictional, it was hypothetical. And we asked people, first of all, we want to just get some collective intelligence. Like, let's say you've been told to isolate for two weeks, can't go to work, can't go to school, can't go out. Under what circumstances would you break this order, right? Is there something that would make you feel compelled to go out, even if you've been told not to, you're contagious, you're at risk? And the number one thing people said was for religious services, because it's so deeply ingrained in their values and the community is so important to them. We also heard weddings, funerals, and of course, these turned out to be the super spreading events,

Starting point is 00:18:12 the hardest to shut down when the real pandemic happened. People said, you know, I'm worried about schools being closed and how I'm going to work and take care of my kids at the same time if suddenly we can't send them to school anymore. A lot of women expressed concern that they would be the ones who'd have to stop working. Of course, in 2020, there was a historic exodus of women from the workforce to take care of kids home from school. I mean, what was really interesting is the players back then were able to effectively imagine what they would feel and need and do and predict a lot of things that during the actual pandemic, people said were surprising. You know, we asked people, we ran another simulation called quarantine back in 2008,

Starting point is 00:18:59 looking at the year 2019. And we asked people during that simulation to wear masks. We gave them masks, we sent out masks, and we said, just try and wear these in your everyday life. And we asked people during that simulation to wear masks. We gave them masks, we sent out masks. And we said, just try and wear these in your everyday life. And like, what is it like? And how comfortable is it? How socially awkward is it? When do you really need to take the mask off? And would you be able to adapt to it? And what we heard was it was going to be very hard to adapt. And there were so many social norms in the way and the physicality of it and the difficulty of expressing our emotions and feelings and connecting to others. So we're like, great, were so many social norms in the way and the physicality of it and the difficulty of expressing our emotions and feelings and connecting to others. So we're like, great, even though it

Starting point is 00:19:30 sounds like a really rational intervention during a pandemic, when the real pandemic rolled around, we're like, this is going to be really tricky and people aren't going to want to do it. It's just amazing how much we could learn that when the real pandemic happened and all the other intersecting crises, people said, well, that was unimaginable or that was unthinkable. But no, people are experts on their own futures. And if you ask them before the crisis happens, before the disruption happens, you can get really actionable evidence. But Tim, can I tell you what for me is the most important thing that happened as a result of all these people?

Starting point is 00:20:08 Tell me all the things and then I have many follow-up questions on this story. Please continue. I started hearing from people at the start of 2020. I mean, people at the World Bank who had worked on the simulation and they were like, oh, are we reporting out? Are we like following up? Because this is the world looks exactly like we imagined, but also from participants, from players. And they were writing me very early on before most people were even paying attention to what was going on. They told me like, you know, ever since that game, pandemics have just been on my radar. It's like, I pick up the information faster than other people. I notice the change faster. They were writing me in early January when most people were not really thinking this

Starting point is 00:20:50 was going to affect them outside of China. People were writing me throughout 2020 saying, this has been terrible, but I feel like I experienced less anxiety and depression than my friends and family. I felt less shocked. It didn't take me as long to accept reality. Tim, I don't know if you remember, we were fighting reality early in this process. People did not want to change. Businesses did not want to send their workers home. I think a lot of people are still fighting reality, but yes. I spent the last two years studying all of the people who participated, how they suffered less during the real crisis. And it wasn't even necessarily like, well, some people avoided getting sick better than others. But it was that the first feeling they had, the first emotion they had when this all happened was pre-recognition, which is an incredibly positive emotion. It's like you said, Nostradamus, that feeling of having been right. I knew this could happen.

Starting point is 00:21:51 I saw this coming. That makes us feel smart. It makes us feel capable, confident, powerful, even when we're in all this uncertainty and disruption. And having that be your brain's first reaction to a new adverse situation, it turned out was really powerful. It allowed people to feel less shock, not get frozen, not be in denial, overcome normalcy bias faster, and get on with adapting and helping themselves and others. We're going to, of course, get into many facets of seeing the future coming or seeing, envisioning the future coming, different tools, different games. But let me double click for a second on this 2010 simulation. So there are two questions that I have. The first is,

Starting point is 00:22:47 how did you, or how did the team, or how did someone else arrive on these particular scenarios? And then the second question is, what other scenarios were there, if any, that did not come true or that have not yet come true? So there were really two big simulations we were running at the time. One was Superstruct, which I was running with researchers at the Institute for the Future. And the other was Evoke, which I was running with the World Bank. And I would say that one of the biggest inputs into deciding what scenario to simulate was a new resource that had just been published for the first time. The World Economic Forum published its first annual report on global threats, which they now

Starting point is 00:23:32 do every year. But this was the first time they had published it, and they were asking business leaders, government leaders, creative people, the smartest people they could find, the most powerful people they can find, and ask them, what's keeping you up at night? How likely do you think the things that are keeping you up at night are to happen? They ask really smart questions like, what do you think is the most underrated or underappreciated risk or threat where it's more likely than people think, it's going to have a bigger impact than people think? And by the way, I want to share with you what was recently reported as the most underrated risk because I am totally, I feel it. I believe it. I think we need to prepare for it. So we were using that. And you know, I always say like, it looks in retrospect, like really amazing. We totally predicted the

Starting point is 00:24:20 future. We had a whole scenario on supply chain disruptions. That was a big part of it. And that definitely happened. We had one of the scenarios called power struggle was about geopolitical disruption surrounding oil and gas and fuel, which, I mean, has sort of happened on and off. One of the things we were looking at in that scenario was what would happen to countries that rely on fossil fuels for their economy? And would they successfully transition their economy out? Like some countries in the Middle East are trying to prepare for a future now where the world doesn't need all this oil. But then you have countries like Russia right now, which is trying to use gas and oil as leverage against the rest of the world. You can't sanction us. You need our fossil fuels. And think about what might happen if we do make that

Starting point is 00:25:13 sacrifice and say, you know, we're going to accept higher prices. We're going to accept radical temporary reduction in our carbon emissions to not be held hostage by this government. So that was the scenario we were looking at. It didn't all happen at the same time. I was wondering if there's anything we said that was like super, super crazy. I'm going to come back to that because we had 10 predictions in Evoke and we had five in Superstruck. But you don't have to be like a genius. You just have to pay attention and not deny reality. If you're willing to have some trust in science, some trust in expertise, people know what's coming. The public health people know pandemics are coming before they hit us. The next one they're worried about is a tick-borne pandemic. Maybe it would be fun for us to talk about it

Starting point is 00:26:01 because it's going to make us all allergic to meat and think about living in a world where we have meat allergies. Let me interject for a second. So my mom actually has allergies to mammalian proteins due to the Lone Star tick in this particular case. Oh my gosh. So we have firsthand experience. And I've had Lyme disease twice. So we both have firsthand experience. and I've had Lyme disease twice, so we both have firsthand experience.

Starting point is 00:26:26 So could you elaborate on that, and then we'll move on from the doom and gloom. But I do think this premeditatio malorum, as say Seneca or the Stoics might word it, this envisioning worst-case scenarios is a valuable skill. Or just, it's not even necessarily obsessing on worst case. It's envisioning what underestimated threats could be or inevitable threats, if you just look at the secondary tertiary effects of trend lines that are already converging. Could you say more about this tick-borne disease? Yes. I will say you are absolutely right. You do not have to dwell on apocalypse. So I write about a study in Imaginable

Starting point is 00:27:09 that showed that five minutes of vivid imagination was enough to overcome normalcy bias. So normalcy bias is when we believe that the future will be like the present or the past, and we really underestimate the actual risk or likelihood of novel changes or disruptions. But five minutes of vivid imagination. And vivid imagination means not just thinking abstractly about it, but like trying to go to the future in your mind, like it were a virtual reality world where you can like look around. What's

Starting point is 00:27:41 the weather like? Who's with me? What is my body like in this future? You're really trying to get in it. So one of the futures I think people should spend five minutes vividly imagining is a future in which this alpha gal syndrome, which I'm very sorry to hear that your mom has it, it affects more people. So the numbers are really rising. We're actually doing a simulation about this scenario starting at the Institute for the Future tomorrow. I'm like super busy planning to kick this off right now. And I mean, the signals look pretty significant. In the United States, there are regions of the country, particularly in the southeast, where 33% of people have already received at least one of these tick bites and already have sensitivity to this sugar molecule that shows up in animal products. So it's meat, but it's also gelatin. So if you're eating gummy vitamins, you can't do that anymore. There's gelatin in toilet paper to make it soft.

Starting point is 00:28:37 Gelatin in encapsulation also. If you take capsules, most capsules contain gelatin. And I took my family to Japan where I've spent a lot of time as an exchange student and just love the place. So I finally took my family there and we had to take my mom to the emergency room because she had dessert that had gelatin in it, often used for binding purposes. And it is surprisingly ubiquitous. starting to see is if you have a lot of exposures to these molecules, even airborne meat can trigger a really dangerous allergic reaction. So if somebody's doing like a cookout, a backyard grill, even just smelling the smell of meat cooking. And so I'm just trying to imagine what happens to our eating lives, to our rituals and traditions, to the restaurant industry, to groceries, to the world, if one in 10 people on the planet are living with this. And it is when we come up with scenarios,

Starting point is 00:29:52 we're looking for signals of change, evidence that certain futures are becoming more realistic or more probable. Ticks are now moving into areas they haven't lived before in New York City. It used to be urban parks were safe. Well, researchers just found disease-bearing ticks in all of the public parks in New York City. Here in California, we have them on our beaches now, which they didn't used to be hanging out on the beach. The beach was a safe place. Now there are ticks on the beach. So it's like, this sounds terrible. Probably we don't want to think about it. We don't want to spend too much time thinking about a future where we're all living with this. But I promise if we spend five minutes imagining it now, we will notice change faster over the next

Starting point is 00:30:37 decade if we need to prepare for it. We'll be ready. We won't be shocked. We're not going to be in denial. We're going to be ready to help ourselves and others so give it five minutes just imagine waking up and some of your family members have this alpha gal syndrome or your employees do or students at your school do it's just what's different now look around what are people doing differently what are some of the assumptions underlying the expectation that this will continue to spread at a high rate? I mean, one of the theories that I've come across, just because growing up on Long Island, you were in the middle of the red on the CDC map for tick-borne illness, and certainly most people have associated it with the Northeast, right? Lyme, Connecticut, then lending its name to Lyme disease, et cetera. But what are some of the assumptions that underlie the expectation of growth? One that I'll throw out there is climate change leading to two issues, in some cases overlapping breeding cycles, but also not killing ticks. And therefore, you just have this accumulation

Starting point is 00:31:48 and multiplication. But are there other things you'd like to highlight? Climate change is the big driver right now of increased tick populations. Also, changing how close humans live to the wildlife interface. So as we're developing into areas where we're up against forests and mountains and other natural areas, we become more in contact with animals that carry ticks. Another reason that it might increase is if you have a lot of exposure to meat and animal products after you get bitten by one of these ticks. So the first time it bites you, you may not notice anything, which is why I say 33% of people in the Southeast have already developed the beginning of this sensitivity. If you get another bite, it increases, but also if you just continue eating a lot of meat, you develop more and more sensitivity.

Starting point is 00:32:46 So this is like one of those allergies where the more you expose yourself to it, your body gets angrier every time, heightened immune response. So not just in the United States, but in other parts of the world, meat eating is on the rise as people come out of poverty and they want to eat more of a Western diet and more protein. So it's not just happening in the US, but we're seeing in other countries, people are essentially setting up their bodies to be more reactive to this molecule. One of the things I talk about in the book is there is a preventive strategy. If you were to start eating less meat or exposing yourself less frequently to this molecule, if you did become impacted, you're less likely to experience such a severe reaction that you would need to go to the hospital. Not everybody would want to do that, but it's something you can do.

Starting point is 00:33:39 It's in your power. I'm always looking for things you can do to feel ready, be ready, set yourself up to survive or thrive no matter what happens in the future. Now, just to play stand-in for some people in the audience, they might say, well, wait a second. I think Jane is probably a vegan or has some secret mission to reduce meat consumption and therefore is biased. But let me, so you can speak to that if you'd like, but let me just mention, you could go the other way. The exercise doesn't have to lead that direction. You could also say, well, and I'm not suggesting that people do this, but it's not found in fish, reptiles, birds, or people. So alligator farms, ostrich farms. I mean,

Starting point is 00:34:20 you could go in a different direction. Cricket protein. You can eat crickets. You can eat poultry. I think it's still fine. I think shellfish is still fine. But it's funny. In this scenario, I actually have one of the things that we anticipate happening is people who are convinced that alpha-gal syndrome is a hoax. So they think it's a lie perpetrated by the plant-based industry to increase profits,

Starting point is 00:34:46 or it's the work of a feminist militant vegan global secret society called the Alpha Gals designed to scare people into adopting a vegan lifestyle and possibly lowering their testosterone by eating less red meat. So we're already anticipating the misinformation and conspiracy theories. You know what? I was vegan for a while. I'm not a vegan anymore. So you cannot pin that on me. I'm not currently... Although I do. I mean, I don't eat red meats for whatever that's worth, but I'm ready for this future. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Dry Farm Wines. I'm a wine drinker. I love it.

Starting point is 00:35:29 Love a few glasses over meals with friends. That said, I hate hangovers. It kills me often for multiple days. Right now, all of the wine in my house is from Dry Farm Wines. Also, for my last two book launch parties, all the wine has been from Dry Farm Wines. Why is that? Because in my personal experience, their wine means more fun with fewer headaches. Dry Farm Wines only ships wine that meet very stringent criteria. Close to sugar-free, so less than 0.15 grams per glass. Lower alcohol, less than 12.5% alcohol. Additive-free, there are more than 70 FDA-approved winemaking additives. The fewer, the better in your wine, lower sulfites, organic, and produced by small family farms.

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Starting point is 00:37:10 Other questions, and I don't know the answer to this, but for instance, in the case of Lyme disease, and I'm not giving medical advice, I don't play doctor on the internet folks, but because I've had it twice and the second instance, which was very severe, we've talked about it before, so I won't labor the point, but basically felt like I had early onset dementia for about nine months. Joints were so sore, it took me five to 10 minutes to get out of bed in the morning. Was forgetting friends' names, things like this, slurring speech. I waited for the appearance of symptoms, incorrectly assuming, as many locals where I grew up do, that if you don't have the bullseye rash, you don't have Lyme disease. Incorrect. There are many instances where dermatologically you're asymptomatic, but then develop Lyme disease. So in my case, again, I'm not recommending anyone do this,

Starting point is 00:37:54 talk to your doctors, but I always carry a supply of doxycycline, which is a common antibiotic. And in the case of any embedded tick, so not a tick walking on the surface of my skin, but any tick that is embedded. And just to paint a picture for folks getting immersed, like you said, if you go walking, let's just say in Montauk on Eastern Long Island, and you take a hike on public land, there's a very good chance at certain times of the year that if you pull your socks up over your pants, do everything right, put on some type of spray, you'll come back with 10 to 20 ticks on you. And that is avoiding tall grass. It is incredible how much that density has increased. And you see different seasons where it's just absurdly, absurdly dense. However, where I was going with that is if we're looking at some of the ripple

Starting point is 00:38:46 effects of this type of phenomenon or just this type of story, the meme of this prediction spreading, if it were to spread, does doxy or do other medications have any prophylactic or kind of the morning after pill-like effects on being bitten by Lone Star Tech? I don't know. But if that were the case, you could envision a world in which all of a sudden you have 10, 20 different ripple effects just caused by, say, stockpiling antibiotics or other drugs. Absolutely. So antibiotics don't work to prevent the sensitivity from developing, but one of the ripple effects that we forecast in this scenario is a run on EpiPens because you might suddenly have going from hundreds of thousands of ER visits in the country for anaphylactic shock in a year to

Starting point is 00:39:46 tens of millions of ER visits for this. And, you know, one of the things we talk about, well, entrepreneurs will start selling EpiPen holders and you can like wear it, strap it to your thigh or strap it to your arm. There's like a fashion that develops around the socks that we wear over our pants, like in the future, that's the Instagram influencers are gonna be selling the socks that go all the way up over your pants. I mean, you can imagine all kinds of things happening, but I say like, okay,

Starting point is 00:40:16 well, what if you wanted to spend five minutes a day feeling more ready for this future? I mean, learn how to use an EpiPen. If you don't know how to use one yet, that's a good one. Learn how to do a tick check. You can actually go to your doctor today and request a test. I think LabCorp will also do it. So it doesn't really matter if your doctor's into it or not. You can go to LabCorp and request a blood test to see if you have sensitivity to the alpha-gal molecule yet. So you can know if you're at risk. And if you're not at risk, great. Because again, the first bite usually is not a problem. But maybe you want to

Starting point is 00:40:51 know that you actually have sensitivity to this. And that might make you try a little bit harder to avoid the tick bites in the future. Now, is this the threat that you were alerting to earlier that the World Economic Forum had put into the more current editions, or is it something else? No. Well, okay. And I promise we're not going to spend the entire time talking about threats as much as people follow Enneagram. I'm a self-preservation six, so sorry. But what was that threat? Well, in this one, I think there like a silver lining to this threat i'm actually kind of excited about this threat if that sounds a little bit weird and um twisted

Starting point is 00:41:30 so the number one most underrated threat was global youth disillusionment so basically young young people saying, F it. I don't buy how we've organized society and I'm out. I'm not doing toxic productivity. I'm not doing the capitalist grind. I'm not going to live my life the way that global capitalist forces want me to. And if you want to look for evidence, where do we see evidence of global youth disillusionment? I don't know if you saw, there was a landmark study published in February of this year in the Lancet Planetary Health Journal. And it's the biggest study of its kind ever. They interviewed over 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25 in 10 countries, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North America, Latin America. And they found that

Starting point is 00:42:26 56% of young people feel that humanity is doomed and they personally have no future. Two-thirds said they primarily feel anxious, hopeless, or afraid of the future. And the number one reason that they gave for these feelings was confusion about government failure to act on climate change. Like they literally think the world is going to burn and they're not here for anything except radical dramatic action. And you can kind of see also little bits of this and like the great resignation in the lying flat movement in China. Do you know about the lying flat movement? I don't, but tell me more. What the lying flat movement in China. Do you know about the lying flat movement? I don't, but tell me more. What is the lying flat movement? It's just young people saying, sorry, not going to get a full-time job. I don't need to spend all

Starting point is 00:43:16 this money. You don't have to pay me so much because I'm just going to buy less or live at home with my parents. That would make me happier. So it's like lying flat, like I'm just going to lie down. And literally they lie down a lot, but it's more of a meme. The idea is that I just don't believe that this is necessary, this hustle, this grind, this global grind. It's not good for the planet. It's not good for my mental health. And I don't like it and I'm out. And so the idea that, I mean, on one hand, this is posed by the World Economic Forum as a global risk or threat because what if young people

Starting point is 00:43:50 just don't wanna do the work anymore, right? What if they don't wanna buy the stuff anymore? What's that gonna do for the economy? But on the other hand, I'm kind of excited for, well, it's also a risk because people who are disillusioned, I shouldn't make light of this, people who are disillusioned are more likely to be drawn to extremism and terrorism. So that is also, that is a major risk. And I also find it exciting that we might be, you know, kind of like the 60s was a big decade for social change and just radically changing our norms about gender and race so fast maybe we are going to be able to ride the wave of global youth disillusionment to something that i think could be better i've been radicalized a bit by you know the seven years

Starting point is 00:44:39 since we last spoke i definitely uh want to see big, radical, crazy change. If you're open to it, just chat for a second about the sort of unspoken subtext of that statement. This is kind of a lazy question, but with respect to what you just said, what has happened for you or whatever you felt or whatever you come to realize in the last seven years. I mean, I've learned about modern monetary theory, which I think is super interesting. Have you ever had an expert on modern monetary theory on your show? I don't know if I have. I definitely encourage you to get someone on to talk about how countries with sovereign monetary systems can afford to do more than we are. I won't try to be an economist on this, but there's a new understanding of money that makes it possible for us to really seriously

Starting point is 00:45:35 imagine universal basic income, which I've gotten more informed about universal basic income and how it changes people's physical health or mental health. There's less crime. I mean, it's just, it's a good thing for society. So I've been kind of, I don't want to say radicalized because I don't think UBI is a radical idea, but I'm, I'm on that train. I want people to work less and care more, right? Care for their kids, care for themselves, care for their communities. I've seen the numbers on the four-day workweek, which I think isn't going far enough. I'm already imagining a three-day workweek as a global norm because we, honestly, there's no reason with automation, with AI,

Starting point is 00:46:20 there's no reason we need to work this much. I mean, every time we've invented new technologies of productivity, economists have predicted that we're going to use that to create more free time for leisure and cooking. It hasn't happened. It only happens when companies experiment with shorter work weeks. The only thing that actually leads to people spending time on themselves and each other in ways that benefit them physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally is when the boss says, well, I'm going to pay you the same

Starting point is 00:46:51 amount of money, but for a shorter work week. And it's been tested on as much as 20 hour work weeks. I mean, I know you, you know, all about working less, but you know, they've been able to pilot 20 hour work weeks, which I actually think is the ideal in terms of how much productivity do we actually have in a day, especially for people who are creative or they're thinking, they're producing four to five hours a day is the absolute max. Yeah, the consensus pretty much for almost every writer I've spoken to, and I like the writing example because it's quantifiable, both in terms of time and in terms of output, say just words per day, is around four hours

Starting point is 00:47:33 is where a lot of who I would consider very productive, many would consider prolific, writers max out per day. So we're looking at, let's just call it 25 to 30 hours of concentrated work in that case per week. Let's see. What else can I tell you about that? Part of being a futurist is you get exposed to new ideas and new evidence a little bit faster. So you can kind of get excited before other people. So one of the areas of evidence, new evidence that I'm excited about is looking at programs that give free, basically unlimited fruits, vegetables, fresh produce to people who want it. Not means testing. So not just like poor people, not just people who are on

Starting point is 00:48:20 food stamp programs, but just take a community, give them a bag, say, you can fill this up. You can take this to any farmer's market or grocery, fill it up with whatever you like to eat, any fresh fruit or vegetable. It's totally free. Programs that give away this kind of food for free to people see such a radical improvement in health, such a dramatic decrease in healthcare costs. These programs are being piloted all over the country. People who are interested can look for the Food is Medicine movement. It's a coalition of food producers. Who subsidizes this? Who pays for this? So the government is actually, the U.S. federal government has given money to these programs to test it. You would

Starting point is 00:49:06 never know about it. I don't know why this is not more common knowledge. It's like hidden away in some farm bill. I mean, there should be more awareness of this. And then there are also philanthropists who are funding it. There's health insurance companies doing pilots because they think they can spend less money on healthcare of people. If it's just easy, and you know what I love about it? It creates this feeling of abundance. So in imaginable, I ask people, just imagine you have this tote bag with a QR code on it that's attached to your profile. So you can take this bag wherever you want once a week and just get whatever you want for free. And just how good that feels. And we can imagine that when we go to a market, we can look around and just imagine, what would I? And the

Starting point is 00:49:51 feeling of abundance instead of scarcity, of having what we need, the emotional quality, like this is not just a physical health intervention. This is a mental health boost to feel like we have what we need. And if we can create more abundance in the future, any way we can do that, we fight less. There's less sense of other people as being competition. If we all have what we need, that's a world where I think we can be a little bit happier and nicer to each other. And I would like to live in that world. So I'm going to ask you about urgent optimism in a moment.

Starting point is 00:50:30 In a moment. First, I want to just bounce some non-professional thoughts slash, I wouldn't say in some cases, predictions off of you and just get your thoughts. So the first one is, you mentioned universal basic income. And what we're already seeing in places like, say, the Philippines with Axie Infinity is people playing to earn. So playing a game, earning income to the extent that there are so many players on some level that represent such a significant percentage of a politician's constituents that they can now impact elections. And this trend, I think, is only going to explode. I don't see any countervailing force.

Starting point is 00:51:21 Maybe there's some regulatory action, but regulatory action is often determined by political action. Politicians like to be reelected. So it really depends, which is the same way that, say, Uber took a lot of cities, right? They could harness the power of their, in this case, users and drivers, but mostly users, not even people making their livelihood automatically, to kind of overthrow policy in a sense. There's so many things about what you said. I'll throw two things out at you, okay? So one aspect of it is cryptocurrency, right? In Axies Infinity, they're earning money by essentially mining cryptocurrency as they play.

Starting point is 00:52:00 There is definitely going to be regulation. You know, Biden's talking about setting up regulation of cryptocurrencies. The scenario that I think is most likely in this space, because of all this unregulated exchange of income and wealth, is that governments will absolutely create their own cryptocurrency, central bank cryptocurrencies, and there will be incentives to not use what are now what you call traditional cryptocurrencies that are unregulated or unattached to a national bank. There will be financial incentives. So in China right now, they hate Bitcoin. They're banning it. They want people on a government cryptocurrency so they can track every transaction. They want to know where your money's going. China's a surveillance state, right? They're giving it away for free. Hey, try this new cryptocurrency. Here's a bunch of money. And they want to get more of this currency into circulation so that it replaces traditional cryptocurrency. And then they get the data and people have sort of been, I don't want to

Starting point is 00:53:01 say lured into it. 100% lured into it. If they're being bribed with money on a hook, yeah. So one of the dilemmas that I pose in Imaginable is, would you take that offer? Let's say you can trade in your traditional crypto or traditional cash for 20% interest, 100% interest, one-time offer. I want people to imagine being ready for this wave of regulation but also for this wave of potential financial opportunity if you're willing to use a government's cryptocurrency that too could be a big wealth generator but i think people will be

Starting point is 00:53:39 paid to play games through a completely different economic system, which is the game companies themselves getting into a revenue sharing system with players. Because we know, you look at Roblox, people already getting paid for creating games within this gaming world or ecosystem. The companies are trying to figure out how to make gaming sustainable and healthy and viable for the long run. And so we are going to see definitely ways to earn a living playing games, but it might not be in a crypto sense. It might be in a more traditional sharing revenue sense. And I'm very excited about that. I don't want to take us too far down like crypto metaverse lane, but another question that I have

Starting point is 00:54:28 as I think about this, and there are many experiments being run right now in the sense that you have Axie Infinity as one very large scale example, although in the grand scheme of things, I think still in the first inning, you have companies like SoRare,

Starting point is 00:54:42 which tether real world performance in sports to not just virtual gaming, but then betting on top of that. It's fascinating. And one question that has come to mind for me as I'm thinking about the secondary, tertiary, and so on effects is, which occupations will first or most likely experience mass defection, brain drain? So who are we going to lose? Which services are going to experience a gap that may not be automatically filled by automation if the automation is slower in terms of mass adoption than the play to earn, which I think will take off.

Starting point is 00:55:23 But those are some of the questions I'm asking. Let me throw out a couple of other ones. So another is AI created or curated, whether with attribution to some team or anonymously, in effect, cult leaders or religious figures. Because you can presumably ingest vast amounts of data about a potential target population or craft a particular

Starting point is 00:55:46 figure who is nearly indistinguishable from a photorealistic human. And China has already, of course, China is far ahead on a lot of this. And they've had even as recently as I want to say, maybe two years ago, so I'm sure the technology has improved dramatically, but they had real newscaster, AI newscaster, same person side by side. And the test was to see if you could tell the difference. And it was hard. It was really hard. You are hitting on something very important. I mean, we are definitely entering into decades of essentially cognitive warfare, and we are definitely going to have to protect ourselves. One thing that I've seen that makes me, you know, pay attention, I want to be alert to this future, is the blending of people in your social network with the face of this like artificial persona that they've, so let's say there's a cult leader

Starting point is 00:56:47 that they want to establish a following around. You can blend that person's face with the face of a person's mother, father, romantic partner, and create, it's just the slightest tweak. You and I would think we were looking at the same cult leader face, but the algorithms can go to your social network, pick your closest relatives or people you interact with most often on the network, use their faces to slightly transform the face of the cult leader. So every single one of us is seeing, now I haven't seen examples of cult. They're just doing this in studies, just to be clear. And then people trust. They say, how trustworthy does this person look to you? Well, the trust goes up when their faces are blended. I guess it depends on the relationship

Starting point is 00:57:35 with the family member. But yes, I get the basic idea. I mean, so it's not hard to imagine. It's like trust warfare. It's taking people that you have trust in and hijacking it to build your trust. They can do it. I mean, right now it's being positioned primarily for politicians as a way to make yourself look like somebody, a person would want to vote for, you just slightly morph your face to look like someone's mom, or for marketing to make spokespeople more relatable. 100% we're going to see that happen. I mean, like 10 years from now, you and I are going to be like, oh, can you believe that? So the game becomes, what do we do about it?

Starting point is 00:58:22 A lot of people are interested in moving to a more of an audio culture and audio information culture because there's so much deepfake video and so much deepfake imagery being generated by AI that we might have a longer timeline where the audio landscape is more factual or trustworthy. I'm going to push back and say there's deepfake audio already. There is, yes. It's horrifying, horrifying.

Starting point is 00:58:50 This is great. I love how you're pushing back. The technology exists, but what does not exist yet is the data sets. Whereas we have facial information about virtually everyone on the planet. Unless you're me and you've recorded 600 episodes of a podcast. I'm fucked. Podcasters are the first people at risk here. But I think about that future because I'm often asked by technology companies to think

Starting point is 00:59:13 about unanticipated harms of their products and services. They don't want to wake up in 10 years and realize they just destabilized democracy again or what have you. So all of these smart speakers that we talk to, right? And so we're talking to Siri or Alexa or the Google Assistant. Well, that's learning a lot about our voice. And it may be that early adopters of those devices, if those systems get hacked, are at a new kind of privacy or security risk. The way we used to worry about our social security number being hacked, maybe our audio signature being hacked might become,

Starting point is 00:59:52 but this is still in the realm of play. I still think this is fun to imagine. It's not as serious enough. It's not like the alpha gal syndrome where like, oh, we should really do something. Right now we're just playing with ideas and we're thinking about how our actions today could lead to a better or a weirder or riskier world. Well, let's get weird. So I encourage people to listen also to my last conversation with Eric

Starting point is 01:00:16 Schmidt around AI. It may make you want to curl up into the fetal position and just weep, but I think a lot of these things are closer than we expect. And so that leads to my next question, which is one I probably wouldn't ask Eric, but I will ask you because we've spent some time together. And I feel comfortable asking you because your breadth of exposure and thinking is very wide in this world of looking into the future. So let's talk about two things, I guess, sort of physical augmentation and manipulation. So let me say one thing about what you just said also earlier. If someone has data on your likes and interests, presumably one could. You like Rihanna? Great. When we show you an ad for a fill in the blank and we know you're a female, we're going to like take 10% of her attributes and blend them into whatever AI face is talking to you. But if we look at, for instance, some of the trends that I'm already seeing, I mean, my girlfriend showed me a number of filters on Instagram that I could not believe.

Starting point is 01:01:16 I mean, people are using these filters and it turns them into nine or 10 out of 10 attractiveness models. It's pretty mind bogboggling to see the side-by-sides. So my next question is going to be related to sort of porn and virtual sex. Because younger, as I understand it, and I don't have the direct source or citation for this, but it seems to be that younger generations are actually having less and less sex. And there could be many different causes. There probably are many different causes. But it would seem to me that in a world of kind of ubiquitous beauty, if people are able

Starting point is 01:01:56 to modify that, and ubiquitous kind of extreme sex, that a certain insensitivity develops, right? Where the real world pales in comparison. And I follow VR, less so AR, but VR reasonably closely. And I do think Ready Player One is probably closer than we would like to think. But I imagine when you have technologies like Neuralink and direct computer brain interfaces, which could be good for a lot of things. But my feeling is that virtual sex and immersive porn is probably not going to use haptic suits. So these suits that just have a vibration in your chest or something is very dissatisfying.

Starting point is 01:02:42 Ultimately, when it gets to certain types of things, like if you're getting shot by a ghost in a video game, fine. But if you are having sex with someone, probably not the sensation you're looking for. But it seems to me that as with many technologies, porn is going to probably drive a lot of the pushing the envelope. So this is a very, because like no one will ever admit to going to a porn hub and yet it's like the fourth most visited website in the world or something. How far away do you think we are from that or how do you think about this? Because I think the destabilization that it will exert, not just upon people, productivities, the disruption of relationships, possibly

Starting point is 01:03:23 procreation, putting aside the kind of children of men movie type scenarios, which is a whole separate thing. This could even be, I could see it being weaponized where like they're, I mean, politicians get involved because of the sort of macro effects that these things have. Maybe I'm just spinning a science fiction yarn, but what are your thoughts? Okay. I'm like taking so many mental notes as you talk by the way tim you are an excellent futurist i want to invite you you have visited me once at the institute for the future i would like to invite you back sometime i want to pick your brain for some of your wild scenarios because they're they're informed right you talk to so many interesting

Starting point is 01:04:02 people that you you hear these signals coming. So let's see. Okay. So first of all, yes, definitely. Porn is almost always at the vanguard of new technologies. It's one of the biggest drivers of, like sex and porn will drive adoption of new technologies. There's a huge interest in neural implants, as you suggest.

Starting point is 01:04:23 I do think there is considerable interest in developing neural implants. First wave will be for mental health, for treating intractable depression and suicidal ideation. That will be the first wave. Second wave, maybe sex and fun. And you could definitely imagine a society in which our orgasm needs are met by a neural implant rather than through physical sex. And what I find fascinating to think about is, you know, could we map out all of the possible consequences, maybe some positive, maybe some negative, but what happens when we don't have to have physical encounters, essentially? We're seeing that through porn, but the difference between neural stimulation is it wouldn't

Starting point is 01:05:22 need to use imagery. So I actually think it would be better in some cases to get an orgasm through neural stimulation rather than through porn, because a lot of the porn that's being created today is, I think, really, what's the word I want to use? There's a lot of violence in it that if you look at the research for why younger people are having so much less sex, the biggest reason that's coming up in the research right now is that women see the choking the slapping the hitting in the porn it's become normalized and they don't want to be choked and slapped and hit they see sex is more violent than it traditionally has been. And so we've got this

Starting point is 01:06:05 whole generation of young women who look at the imagery that's being consumed and produced and think like, I don't know, that doesn't seem like something I actually want to be experiencing. If we didn't have to be creating these visual representations, people might actually come back to sex if they weren't being shown versions of sex that they personally did not want to participate in. May I add something to that? Yes, because it's all crazy and hypothetical. Yeah, no, I think a huge part of it is that males become desensitized to the appeal of, let's just call it everyday or normal sex. Because if you can have a threesome or foursome with like, you know,

Starting point is 01:06:54 nubile young women who will enthusiastically do anything, even if it doesn't include violence and these other sort of acts of aggression, let's say it's not that. Let's say it's just all fun and games. But if you kind of have access on demand to the most outrageous fantasies that you could possibly have instantaneously with broadband, I think there is a desensitization also, I think, sex drive from males who are, I think if we want to call a spade a spade, typically sort of initiating interest or sexual advances, if they are constantly depleting themselves physically, there are kind of physical self-regulatory mechanisms that will lower sex drive. So I do think that's a huge part of it. Right. And it could change culture i mean if men

Starting point is 01:07:46 are just acting differently if women are acting differently so much of society is right now oriented around finding sexual partners our grooming our physical routines our social encounters like our dreams our hopes that we imagine for ourselves. If we were to put that time or energy, I'm positing that we're not getting addicted to this stimulation. It's highly regulated in the way that you can't, I don't know, buy more than X amount of stimulant medication. It's controlled. I'm assuming it's going to be controlled. If it's not, we're in a lot of trouble. But people were just pouring their energy, their male energy, their female energy, their genderqueer energy into whatever

Starting point is 01:08:29 else they might want to do other than just trying to find a mate. It's going to be really interesting. In a way, it's as radical as not having to work 40-hour work weeks and the time and energy that frees up for other things. I think it is so fundamental that I think it's going to rock everything because I was looking up the source, Oscar Wilde said, everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. Now putting aside the meaning or the interpretations of the last line for a second, which I think is interesting, but that's a whole separate podcast. But it's like, if you look at, I'll just speak from the male perspective, because I mean, the vast majority of what men do in this world, certainly up in sometimes exceeding the point at

Starting point is 01:09:15 which they have kids, revolves around preferred mating abilities. That's it. It's like all of it, the fucking cars, the fucking money, the power, it's all going straight to sex. So when you start to remove that incentive in the real world, holy shit. Oh my God. I love it. Okay, Tim, 100%, I'm committed. I want to simulate this future. So we have a scenario club, a new scenario club at the Institute for the Future. It's like a book club, but you just come and talk about different future scenarios each month. And we imagine ourselves and what might happen and the ripple effects. And I'm going to do this year a future of sex scenario for our scenario club, which by the way, is open to the public.

Starting point is 01:10:05 So I hope people listening who are like incredibly have their brain on fire thinking about this possibility that you have put in front of us. They should come to Urgent Optimist, which is our future imagination club, and they should join Scenario Club and come imagine the future of sex with us this year. You have planted that seed.

Starting point is 01:10:23 I'm going to water it. We're going to see what it grows into. On which website can people find that? That is urgentoptimists, like plural, because there's a bunch of us,.org. Okay, urgentoptimists.org. We'll also put it in the show notes. So lest we allow the apathetic youth amongst us just turn into some version of 12 Monkeys or worse. Encourage everybody to rewatch that movie, by the way. You should also rewatch Ready Player One

Starting point is 01:10:53 and Children of Men and possibly reread Snow Crash, but that's a whole separate thing. We need more movies about futures we want based on that list that you just led. I know. I know. Although, we were chatting before recording about my conversation with Margaret Atwood, and she writes a lot about near-term kind of dystopian, people would consider dystopian futures, but she's very optimistic, which is interesting. So let's talk about cultivating optimism or definitions of optimism. What is urgent optimism? Urgent optimism, that's actually a phenomenon I first identified when I was studying the psychology of gaming. So something interesting happens with people who play video games often is there's a certain neurocircuitry pattern that gets really strengthened and easy to activate

Starting point is 01:11:39 that involves the reward system and the learning centers that makes us feel like I got this. It's like the neuroscience of I can do this. And we feel more physical energy, more mental focus, more hope that something good could happen, more expectation that we can make something good happen through our own efforts and actions and abilities. And what my research eventually showed was that essentially every video game is like a psychological experiment. It's like a training ground to convince people that they have power, right? You go into the game, you make choices, you take actions, the virtual world changes, you get better, you're improving your skills, you're achieving goals. This whole experience and journey of essentially building the sense of power that we have to impact the world and achieve more ambitious goals in relation to

Starting point is 01:12:48 reality and in relationship to the future so that we're not just feeling this when we play a game, but when we think about the future of sex or the future of food or the future of religion or the future of democracy, whatever we want to think about, that we feel that same sense of urgent optimism that I know for sure there are things I can do today that will impact how the future turns out for the better through my own power. And there are three habits that you can practice that build urgent optimism. By the way, the best way to do it is just to play these future simulations. I mean, that's like the fast track. That's the cheat. I tend to, as you've probably noticed, when I play out the future scenarios, I almost always

Starting point is 01:13:30 go negative. That I think is part of my superpower. So it's like I saw COVID coming from a mile away. I was able to prepare, make a lot of decisions that were great decisions early. But I'm sort of constantly future pacing to the next disaster, right? And people like what they're good at. It's like stretchy, flexy people like yoga, even if yoga didn't make them stretchy, because they get to be like the Michael Jordan of the Hatha flow or whatever the hell. Good. I'm glad you said that. So urgent optimism does not mean thinking that everything is going to be good. It does not even mean imagining better futures. In fact, urgent optimism is often something we develop

Starting point is 01:14:11 by thinking about, as you said, the next risk or threat or disaster. But the key is we have to practice these three habits and we have to take it to a full cycle. You might be stopping someplace where we don't get, we actually, it doesn't actually feel good yet. So we got to do these three things to feel good. The first step is mental flexibility. So mental flexibility, it's the opposite of having a fixed mindset or being stuck in assumptions that the future will be like the past. So to get mental flexibility, you're always looking for these signals of change. You're paying attention to weird stuff that's happening that maybe has never happened before. You're putting kind of like your ear to the ground so that you

Starting point is 01:14:55 can notice change faster. One way you can increase mental flexibility besides just trying to pick up on these signals of change is just to vividly imagine scenarios that other people would describe as unimaginable or unthinkable. So like we are just trying to go to this future of sex with the neural implants, or we're going to the future of where we can't trust video or faces anymore. When you put yourself into this future and you just, what would it feel like when I look at my computer screen? What emotions am I feeling?

Starting point is 01:15:26 What am I seeing that I've never seen before? That overcomes the normalcy bias. So the first thing you're trying to do with urgent optimism is just to not be the person who gets stuck saying, that could never happen. Or like, I don't know, I can't even imagine it. So I probably don't have to worry about it. We're trying to improve our ability to imagine things that never happen. So that's mental flexibility. The second practice is realistic hope.

Starting point is 01:15:54 So realistic hope, and I'll give a really good trick for this, but realistic hope is having a balanced mindset where you are both aware of the risks and threats and make sense to worry about and prepare for and ready ourselves for, but also all of the new technologies, the new policy ideas, the new solutions, social movements, all the positive stuff that could make a better future or help us avoid these risks or transform it into something that is a world we actually want to live in. And one of the simple habits that I teach people to do is just go to Google and type

Starting point is 01:16:31 solution for whatever problem you're worried about, you know, solution to climate change. Instead of just worrying about climate change, type it into the Google News and see what weird solutions, like learn more about carbon capture, learn more about geoengineering and solar radiation management. We have to fill our brain with the pathways forward as we're also holding in mind the risks and threats. And this is just like, most people tend to have more of one than the other. So we're trying to balance it out. Who, me? Who, me? I just want to add one quick thing because this is a good place to put it. Just in the process of doing research for

Starting point is 01:17:09 this conversation, I found another example of using Google that might be, this is from you, that might be helpful also for that improvement of future-focused imagination of the so-called impossible or unimaginable. And that is making a list of things you're interested in, like food, travel, cars, city you live in, shoes, dogs, music, real estate. This is from slate.com. And I think it's from one of your courses at Stanford, which is how to think like a futurist.

Starting point is 01:17:42 And it is once a week, just do a Google search for the future of dot, dot, dot. Yes. Once a week. So I say, make it Fridays, future Fridays, easy to remember. And you just type into Google and I suggest Google news because what you're looking for is new stuff that you don't already know about. So you want the latest and yeah, you type in future of food and you can learn about, let's say lab cultured meat. Maybe that's something that you would be interested in knowing that maybe you're a vegan today for animal cruelty reasons, but in the future there will be actual meat tissue grown in a laboratory condition without an animal having to be killed.

Starting point is 01:18:25 That might give you hope for the future if you're kind of a, you would rather not be vegan, but you have your ethical concerns. So yeah, you just type it in, future of whatever, and collect those signals of change. And it helps you build your mental flexibility. I don't have to be this way my whole life because the future might give me a different opportunity. Things don't have to continue the same my whole life because the future might give me a different opportunity. Things don't have to continue the same way. We can do it differently. So we got to, I think we got through two, right?

Starting point is 01:18:52 We got to realistic hope. What else do we have? You're mentally flexible. You're practicing realistic hope. The last thing is future power. Future power means you can make a list of things you can do today that help you either be more prepared for the risks and threats you're worried about or prepare for an opportunity in these future worlds or that will change the world in the way that you want it to change. So you're like collecting these just little actions. So I'll give you a few examples of things that have been good for me. Okay.

Starting point is 01:19:24 Learning how to operate a drone for me, very empowering. Drones are clearly going to be a huge part of our culture and infrastructure in the future. I want to know how to operate one, particularly the ones with cameras, because that is really interesting to me. It's interesting to me for art, for storytelling, for journalism, for documenting human rights violations or being a witness to things that the world needs to know about. For all of these reasons, I just ordered not an expensive drone, a cheap drone on Amazon and learned how to fly it. I taught my kids who are seven years old now. I taught my daughters how to use it too, because it's just something fun and easy we could do to be ready for a future in which it would be good to know how to use a drone.

Starting point is 01:20:11 Another one, have you heard of adversarial makeup? No, I have not. All right. You got five minutes. Go find a YouTube video for how to apply makeup that interrupts the algorithms used in facial recognition. Oh, that's cool. During the pandemic, people were like, well, we'll just wear masks. And well, if we don't want to be surveilled by our faces, we'll wear masks. Well, during the pandemic, there were so many people masking that all of the big facial recognition companies

Starting point is 01:20:42 had to learn how to recognize people just by this little band of our eyes. And the pandemic actually inadvertently made this huge advances in facial recognition because companies now, they only need to see this little bit. But you can apply eye makeup to throw these algorithms off their game. And it's better than wearing a mask, I think. You know, it's more comfortable, it's more social, and it's fun and it's expressive. So yeah, you know, we might wake up in a world not too far from now where people on their phones

Starting point is 01:21:16 have facial recognition apps. I mean, we're not just talking about the government or police having this technology. We're talking about it being in every dating app and every social network. I want to, who's that person? Learn all their stuff about them. So, you know, you want to be ready for this future. Take five minutes, learn how to apply makeup to interrupt it. I'll give you one. Can I give you one more? You can give me five more if you'd like. I'm not in a rush. So one thing that I really want to recommend people do in five minutes, if they haven't done it yet, is to install an app on their phone that can be used to create a mesh network.

Starting point is 01:21:53 Do you have any mesh network capabilities on your phone? On my phone? No, I don't think I do on my phone. I have used mesh networks and I've used them at home, but please explain. You can get an app like BridgeFi and what they do is if the internet goes out during extreme weather, during a government mandated internet shutdown, which happens in dozens of countries right now, India is a big internet shutdowner to kind of control information and prevent people from organizing. So you can essentially make your own internet. So if you have enough people with this mesh network on your phone, you can communicate to somebody's phone within a football field's distance, and they can communicate

Starting point is 01:22:37 to someone a football field's distance. So if you get a community, or you get an urban center, a bunch of people, you can essentially recreate the internet using just the Bluetooth capacities of your devices. Now, Amazon is actually trying to do this as well, kind of secretly. If you have a smart speaker from Amazon, they want to essentially have it be ready to act as a mesh network, which on one hand, people are like, oh, I don't want information being connected with other people's devices. But to me, my mind goes to the future where the government's shutting down the internet for cybersecurity or to stop misinformation or because it's an authoritarian government and they're shutting it down.

Starting point is 01:23:21 And we have a company like Amazon being like, not so fast. Here comes our mesh network. And they bring up this totally alternate internet. So that can't be stopped by the government, which by the way, in the United States, it's written to the constitution. The president can shut down the internet. Legal scholars have recently looked at this and basically the same communications act that allows the president to shut down mail and phone. You could shut down the internet too. She could shut down the internet. Get your phone ready to make your own internet. Put an app on, five minutes. So I have not used that yet. I will. I'll try it

Starting point is 01:23:58 out. Although I guess there might be a chicken and the egg kind of situation. Do you need to convince other people to do it or is it like Google Maps where it's gathering data because so many people already have it installed? There has not been a tipping point yet, I would say. So I mean, you're getting there early, as we like to say at the Institute for the Future. You'll be one of the people who lets others know, hey, get your phone ready to be in a mesh network in case we need it. So right now, yeah, spend the first five minutes putting it on your phone and test it with someone you live with, a friend, a partner, whatever. Test it so you know how to use it. And then if you have to converge in an urban center at some point in the future

Starting point is 01:24:37 to recreate the internet, you'll be ready. But it'll help if more people have it. So you might spend five minutes also telling someone else to put it on their phone. So another technology that I don't understand well, so the engineers and computer scientists out there may have criticisms, but is Helium, which is in effect to create decentralized wireless infrastructure and is very much web-through based. I didn't realize that helium.com, that must have cost a nice pretty penny. Hope they had a good broker for that. But what you're describing and then thinking of helium and other sort of alternate communications means, have you done, I imagine you probably have, scenario planning? And we are going to

Starting point is 01:25:23 come back to these three steps. I'm going to ask you about specificity training also. But before we do, let's talk about blackout scenarios. So whether that is through cyber attacks, and this is very current news, right? I mean, the possibility of cyber attacks on the grid, the possibility, although I think it's less likely, but a brute force attack with, say, an electromagnetic pulse bomb over the Great Lakes or something like that. There have been books written by people I would consider informed and credible about

Starting point is 01:25:56 this type of threat. Have you done any scenario simulations around that? I did do a simulation called Dark After Dark, where we asked people to practice not using anything with artificial light source after sunset. This is for a slightly different scenario than the blackout scenarios, but it was an interesting way to develop essentially calluses for a world in which you might not be able to open up your laptop or turn on your like that we would have darkness, true darkness. Again, that was an experiment in just how people's behaviors would change and how much they were willing to change. So it's more of like an experiment than a future forecasting effort. But I absolutely think it's worth preparing for. I mean, just even in general, the reliability of our power grid is very much weaker than it used to be. We saw what happened

Starting point is 01:26:57 in Texas. Suddenly there was extreme cold. Oh, I was there. You were there for that, Tim? Oh my gosh. I was very involved in trying to get water and so on to people who, if that had gone on three more days, I mean, there would have been thousands of casualties. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. We just got lucky. It was pure, just meteorological luck. Yeah. So two things around. So one is you be aware, right? So now we have mental flexibility that maybe we can't expect the power grid to be as reliable in the future. That's the first step, right? We acknowledge the possibility, right? And then we look to places where we might have more power to avoid or survive or change it, right? So a lot of people that I know are thinking about climate migration right now. They're starting to think about- Yeah, I'd love to hear more about that. That's my obsession. Climate migration is my number one personal mission I'm on to prepare people for up to a billion people to move and possibly to have an incredibly more open and transparent immigration system than we have

Starting point is 01:28:06 today so that people aren't trapped behind borders and climate hell, but also in our own lives, even moving internally within our country. In California, so many people I know are like, I don't know if I want to live under extreme wildfire threats for three or four months a year. I don't want to live with this air pollution from the wildfire smokes. I don't want to live under extreme wildfire threats for three or four months a year. I don't want to live with this air pollution from the wildfire smokes. I don't want to live with power being preventively cut off. I don't know if you've had this experience where I live. I was in Cali and PG&E rolling blackouts and all that stuff. Yeah. And they just shut it off because they haven't put the wires underground. So when

Starting point is 01:28:41 there's winds, they just turn off your power for up to a week. And you're expected to work and learn and live and cook, even though literally they're just like, no power today. So we have to think now about where we're willing to live or what we're going to raise hell about, like getting power lines underground. I don't think a lot of people have that as their number one thing to protest and raise hell about, but we might want to think about securing our power grid as something as worthy of radical activism as what we've seen social movements in the past around. And is the getting lines underground, aside from being more aesthetically pleasing, is that to prevent easy sabotage or are there other reasons in your mind?

Starting point is 01:29:30 It's just more secure underground in every way. In California, we're having more high wind events. Right. And so they just snap and then they spark a fire and then it's three months of hell. So that's the main reason. But yeah, it increases security overall. One of the games at the back of Imaginable, it's called Welcome Party, and it's an invitation to explore your own tolerance for climate risk. So there's a set of questions to ask yourself. At what point is it a tipping point for you to leave?

Starting point is 01:30:08 How many days without power a year? How many days of extreme air pollution? It's just asking these questions now so that you don't wind up like the frog in boiling water who never hops out. Yeah, totally. And just a recommendation, if I could throw something out there, because I live in Texas, clearly a broad spectrum of political allegiances and a broad spectrum of beliefs that go along with that, if you sort of accept whatever the party has as its Ten Commandments and so on. I think that climate change can provoke a really strong negative response in a lot of people. But if I simply word it as increased extreme weather events, you sidestep the whole thing. Another piece I would say is whether or not you believe that this is human-caused, largely or in part, skip that part of the, I know this is

Starting point is 01:31:06 going to be controversial, but I'm saying just to get the foot in the door, if you're talking to someone who may be resistant to that, because that will be one of the first fights that many people want to pick, you just say, forget about that. Let's say this is a natural event. Nonetheless, if we want to actually maintain our infrastructure and do A, B, and C. We have to contend with extreme weather events. So let's just assume it's all natural. It doesn't really absolve us of the necessity and advantage of thinking about how to cope with these. Specificity training. What is specificity training? I know these two words separately, but in the context of what we're talking about, what is this?

Starting point is 01:31:46 Can I put a pin in that really quickly? Because I just thought of one practical thing. Make it a pin cushion. Go crazy. I was just thinking of one practical thing we could do that your listeners might like, which is, can I just tell you the three questions that you can ask to measure your urgent optimism and give you a sense of which of those three habits or skills you might want to practice more? So it's really simple. And I'd say you can pick this for any topic. So it might be the future of

Starting point is 01:32:17 psychedelics for mental health treatment might be something you're interested in, or it could be the future of college education. So pick a specific topic. And then you ask three questions. When you think about the next 10 years, how much do you think this topic will change on a scale of 1 to 10? So 1 is almost no change. Everything stays the same. 10 is extreme change. Almost everything is dramatically rethought or reinvented. So on a scale of 1 to 10, how much change do you expect? 1 to 10. On a scale of 1 to 10, when you think about the changes that are likely to happen in the next 10 years, are you mostly worried or mostly excited about them? So 1 is extremely worried, 10 is extremely excited. And then one to 10, how much influence or control do you have personally in how this

Starting point is 01:33:10 change happens? So one is almost no control or influence, and 10 is almost complete control or influence. And not only is it helpful for us to think like, oh, I need to practice some more realistic hope, find some reasons to hope if I have a low number, or I need to pay more attention to the World Economic Forum's global risk report. If I'm like at a 10, maybe I should try to learn more about the risks. It's so cool to share numbers with people. And man, do I love talking to people who are at sevens, eights on nines on topics that I'm at a one, two or three about is super fun. So I just wanted to put that. It's like a practical fun for you. Talk to people about it, share your numbers, and think about how you might

Starting point is 01:33:50 practically increase your urge and optimism on the ones that you have lower numbers for. Could you give a personal example for yourself on a particular topic, industry, situation that we haven't discussed yet. It could be one that we've talked about if that lends itself, but that would be super helpful for me because when I hear these questions, I can see the value in answering them. And I find that my default, so I'm not asking for a solution to my particular malfunction here, but I think it correlates very highly to the kind of existential malaise and apathy of a lot of young people. Although I'm definitely too bearded and too bald to be considering myself young at this point.

Starting point is 01:34:33 Nonetheless, though I can answer question one pretty easily for most things. And then I think generally I skew very pessimistic. Yeah. I have a very Hobbesian view of humans in general, which is maybe another issue. And then three, with respect to the agency, sometimes I feel very little agency or I feel a lot of agency, but I don't know if I want to be just going through just a forest of headaches and difficult humans with a machete for most of my time.

Starting point is 01:35:07 Yeah. If the upside isn't certain. So could you give an example of something in your life that you've sort of applied these questions to? Let's go back to drones. So drones create a lot of anxiety in people for good reason. They create noise pollution. They create visual pollution. They can be used for surveillance, remote policing, privacy intrusions. Warfare. Warfare, right. And I started seeing drones just out in the world, seeing signs like no drone zone. I didn't know, is that a law? Is that a recommendation? I realized I didn't know

Starting point is 01:35:45 what the rules or policies were around drones. I didn't know why. Why are we spending so much time and money developing this technology? All I ever hear about are a lot of the risks. So for me, drone was a space that I wanted to explore and maybe build some urgent optimism and not optimism in the sense of I'm going to become an evangelist for drones and I'm going to be like, the future is great. I don't have to worry about it anymore. But to increase my confidence that I can imagine a future with more drones, I understand what it might mean, the risks, the opportunities, and that there are things I can do to be ready for it or help shape it. So I started talking to people, looking on

Starting point is 01:36:26 Google Scholar, finding drone hobbyist communities. What are people using them for that is not terrible? So I learned about witness.org actually has a drone training program for people to document war crimes, human rights violations, authoritarian governments doing terrible things to create irrefutable evidence. So to be a witness for this, drones as a form of activist journalism and documenting reality. I learned about the emotions that we feel when we look at aerial footage. So drones, it turns out, can create a kind of visceral feeling that I don't even know if we have a word for it yet. It's a strange new positive emotion where we have an almost this kind of godlike omniscience because we're seeing everything from above, we're moving, we're like swooping through the air like

Starting point is 01:37:17 an eagle. There's an incredible new positive emotion that we don't even have a word for yet that artists can use, storytellers can use, therapists can use by using drones to give us a viewpoint we've never seen. I was just going to say, my ask of my audience is somebody come up with a clever German word for whatever that feeling is and put it online because there's got to be some way to slap a bunch of adjectives and nouns together into a word that'll get that done. Thank you, Tim. That is an amazing suggestion. What else did I learn? I went to Google News and was like, just show me what people are doing with drones right now. And I learned that just a couple of months ago, the first organ was delivered for a transplant that they couldn't

Starting point is 01:38:06 get this organ. I think it was a heart. They couldn't get it there fast enough, except for delivering it by drone. So the first emergency medical delivery. So learning about the positive uses while also learning about what are the rules and policies, who decides? To me, it became fascinating rather than anxiety producing to expose myself to who is in charge of drones. Is it the FAA? Yes, in part. Is it local parks

Starting point is 01:38:35 and recreation? Yes, in part. Because in order to have future power, we have to know who's making the rules because I need to know what the rules are, who's shaping them, who's advocating for what. It's like building urgent optimism, it's like following a string out of a labyrinth. It's like you're taking all these twists and turns. You've got your radar up, so you're going to hear about weird new risks. You're going to hear about cool new uses. And I like to think it's just like, it's essentially a process of opening your mind. And if there's something you care about, these habits of looking for the clues, and if you're negative looking for, well, who's excited and what are they excited about to kind of create the

Starting point is 01:39:16 balance, who's in charge, who has power now? So you can even understand where power is being concentrated. What are the companies that are most advanced in this technology? It's literally just, it's a practice. It's a practice like meditation where we just have to kind of show up with this curiosity, actively collecting these clues every day. So I can see how the pursuit of the sort of metaphorical drone as you follow the strength through the labyrinth with doing this type of data collection would help a lot with answering question number one when you think about the next 10 years do you think things will stay the same or

Starting point is 01:39:56 will they change tremendously kind of one to ten number three i can see how you'd figure out what you may be able to do, whether that's learning the technology, whether that's buying a predator drone to take out other drones, which are being used in many contexts, including sporting events. You could figure out from an agency perspective what you can do to increase the good, decrease the bad. I'd love to talk about mostly worried to mostly optimistic, one to 10. I got you. And this is a very personal question because I tend to focus on the negative because I'm like, hey, we didn't last this long by underreacting to threats, right? Humans are programmed to kind of overreact to threats for survival purposes. And not saying that should

Starting point is 01:40:42 be the case, but it's like, even if we're all screwed and going to just die in a fireball of self-imposed disaster, there are times when I would like to not think about that and be more optimistic, even if it's just a suspension. I got you. I mean, that is literally why I run social simulations, because I don't want you going into this mental spiral of doom and gloom. First of all, people are at different places naturally in terms of pessimism or optimism, anxiety or hope. Just we're born that way. There's a hardwired nature. It's a biological component.

Starting point is 01:41:21 When we do these social simulations, when we play scenarios with scenarios together, you come to the scenario club, you're going to be exposed to all of these different points of view. And it's why it works for me, Jane McGonigal, the game designer, to have become a futurist because what are the most fun games to play? It's really not the game you play by yourself. It's the game that you're playing in big groups. Unless it's VR, Neuralink porn, then maybe. A good callback. Right.

Starting point is 01:41:54 But we really like these big game worlds we're all playing together. It's World of Warcraft. It's League of Legends. It's Pokemon Go. We want to be in community. We want to be a part of a bigger game. So Tim, you got to get out of your own head. Oh, Jesus. Do I ever? It's easier than, I mean, you can do this yourself. You can go look for sources of hope

Starting point is 01:42:16 yourself. But like, so for example, in Urgent Optimist, we have a week-long Signals of Hope scavenger hunt every month. It's a group chat. You just sign up for the group chat and everybody sends each other the signal of change that makes them feel most hopeful for the future. And we have different categories that you can go look for. Like, show me a signal of hope around the future of food. Show me a signal of hope for the future of climate adaptation.

Starting point is 01:42:40 And I mean, you're basically flooding your brain. It's an active habit. You have to intentionally expose yourself. Go look for these positive clues. But if you're not good at it, then get yourself in a community. The same way when I learned to meditate, I didn't do it by myself. I went to a sangha and I went to sit in a room full of people who already knew how to meditate so that I could develop that skill and be held accountable. I like to do this futures work with a community to hold each other accountable, to see the risks and to see the reasons to be optimistic. Teamwork makes the dream work. Yeah, I do need to get out of my sort of hamster in a wheel on my own head. I'm going to mention a few things and then I'm just going to pass the baton and you can pick up whichever one you want. I'm mixing up my singular and plural here, but okay. Choose your own future forces, journal from future or journal from the future,

Starting point is 01:43:37 the first five minutes of the future. Which of those would you like to snack on right now? Great. Well, we did put a pin in specificity training. Oh, yes, we did. We did. Absolutely perfect. So journaling from the future, it's a form of specificity training. So what is specificity training? Most people, when they try to imagine the future, there's just too many blanks. If I were like, imagine yourself waking up 10 years from today, your brain is like, you could imagine yourself waking up tomorrow. You know what room you'll be in, what bed you'll be in, maybe what you're sleeping in, what your body will feel like.

Starting point is 01:44:12 You have your particular moment in time. If I say 10 years from now, are you going to feel better or worse? Are you going to be with a different partner or not? We don't know. Is there going to be extreme climate change and you're going through some extreme weather? It's harder to fill in the blanks. So one way that we train our brain to be able to think more effectively and creatively about the future is through practices that increase the specificity of our imagination, the number of vivid details. And you can actually measure if somebody's like,

Starting point is 01:44:42 okay, I imagine waking up and it's really hot because there's extreme heat in San Francisco now, which is really weird. We didn't used to have temperatures over 100, but now it's like 110 every day. You could go back and count the number of details, 110. That's specific. That's more specific than just saying it's hot. And you can count every color, every sound, every emotion. I'm feeling dread because I don't want to run my air conditioner or whatever. I'm feeling excited

Starting point is 01:45:11 because I've access to this new thing. Every detail counts and you can score yourself on the specificity of your imagination. And one technique to improve the specificity of your imagination, which is linked to, again, more creative thinking, more effective thinking, better strategies, more motivation to do something. Specificity is good. You keep a journal from the future where you write detailed entries of what you might experience as if they had already happened. So you have to treat the future like a memory and

Starting point is 01:45:46 you're trying to capture it. Or you can think of it as like journalism, but most of us are better at just writing a personal diary than some kind of journalistic account. And when I run these social simulations of the future, the main thing people are doing is just keeping a journal. So, okay, I woke up today and I got the lab results that I do have alpha-gal syndrome. I have initial sensitivity. This is how I felt. This is the time the phone rang. This is who I told.

Starting point is 01:46:13 I told my husband first. You start to tell the story. You imagine it in vivid detail. The number one thing this accomplishes is that it obliterates normalcy bias. Once you have vividly imagined a future, it is literally imaginable and you will no longer deny the possibility. You will not underestimate the risk. You will spot evidence of change faster. This is why my book is called Imaginable because we want to be able to imagine the world either that we might wake up in or that we create

Starting point is 01:46:45 through our own actions that is better than a world today. So, you know, any of the scenarios that listeners have heard in this episode, they can just go do this now. Literally pull out a notepad. I find it works better when you write by hand because you don't want to edit or censor yourself. So we recommend free writing. You set a timer for five minutes and just write for five minutes, whatever comes to mind with as many details as you can. Pick one of these scenarios, future of sex, future of deep fakes, future of whatever we

Starting point is 01:47:14 were talking about, drone, art and storytelling, whatever you want, and just write a journal entry from this future. It will literally change your brain forever. That future is now forever imaginable to you. And it only took five minutes. Who's Alvin Toffler? Alvin Toffler. Wait, before I say who's Alvin Toffler, the other thing is when we write these five-minute journal entries, we can share them with each other, which is how we get out of our own heads. So that's another reason why you write it down. You don't just want to imagine in your head because I want, Tim, I want to read your journal entry. I've done enough of that. So Alvin Toffler, he essentially created popular future thinking as we have it today. So in 1968,

Starting point is 01:47:58 he wrote a book called Future Shock. And it was coming at the end of this incredibly turbulent time in the United States where our gender norms were changing. There was a Civil Rights Act finally passed. The economy was changing. People were feeling like they were unmoored, new technologies. And he had this theory that if too much changes too quickly, that it is like a trauma. We get shocked, we feel overwhelmed, we feel paralyzed, we feel hopeless, unable to cope. And he was observing that there was almost like this mass trauma, too much future, too fast in the 60s. And so he had this idea that we could essentially prevent future shock from happening again if we were better able to imagine the like bowling clubs, but you would come together to practice new future skills and it would become this like rite of passage. Instead of getting a driver's license, you come and you learn these like 10 new future technologies to prepare you so that you don't the field. And all of us who do futures work today, we kind of owe him a debtffler, that he had a maxim, which is truncated in front of me, but I'd love to just hear you explain or expand on this a little bit. It's

Starting point is 01:49:52 more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be 100% right, in quotation marks. Could you speak to that and any other sort of maxims of his that you like? Well, here's the problem with trying to be right about the future. And there are definitely people who are interested in this. There's like a whole other school of futurism called super forecasting, where you're just trying to be as specifically correct as possible. What will the price of oil be on this date a year from now? What is the exact number of troops that will be sent into this conflict? You're trying to be very, and people try to be as accurate as they can. What Toffler was saying, and what I believe

Starting point is 01:50:30 to be true, is what's the point of being right other than you can feel smart, you can say, aha, I told you so. Maybe you can protect or prepare yourself. But what if the future that you think is most possible, the future you think is most possible, the future you think is most likely to happen, it's not a good future. I mean, do you want to be right? Or do you want to actually prove yourself wrong and help us all wake up in a better reality? So this obsession with being correct about the future, even though I'm proud of having accurately foreseen certain changes or certain disruptions, I would be much happier if we never wake up in a world where alpha-gal syndrome is so common because we all got more sort

Starting point is 01:51:23 of interested in tick health and like nobody gets tick bites anymore. Cool. Problem solved. That was a stupid scenario. That never happened. I'd rather be wrong. And so Alvin Toffler's trying to encourage us, and I encourage everyone, is we stretch the imagination to consider what's possible. And we look for clues as to which possibilities are plausible and what might make an outcome more or less plausible. And then we decide, we take action to make the future we want more plausible or take action to make futures we don't want less likely. And that's the power, not accuracy. It's the ability to imagine and take action that we're really trying to get better at. I'm going to ask you about technologies or approaches or plausible technologies or approaches that you're excited about or have spent time on related to extreme weather events, aka climate change or carbon removal, etc. But before I get to that, I'll just say,

Starting point is 01:52:26 I think one of my challenges in finding optimistic people to act as a countervailing influence to my inherent innate pessimism is I'm so fucking tired of techno optimists who are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can do whatever we want. Like we'll figure it out later. That stuff drives me crazy.

Starting point is 01:52:43 But to be fair, humans are really good at spotting obvious trends. And I can't remember the exact timing, but at some point, the price of oil was going up, going up, going up, going up. And someone projected, well, by this point in time, this day of the year, 10 years from now, five years from now, it'll be a bazillion dollars per barrel and China will overtake us and this, this, and this. Underestimating or missing completely the fact that when the

Starting point is 01:53:12 price of oil gets to a certain point, technologies that are currently economically infeasible or that yet haven't not been created because the cost is too prohibitive suddenly become very profitable like fracking and so on. And so that predicted future did not happen.

Starting point is 01:53:28 So there is something to be said for people underestimating the rate of innovation, but the kind of, yeah, yeah, it's all going to be fine, techno-optimist stance that you find at the extreme really drives me nuts. So I would love to know, because it's of personal interest, with climate solutions or regenerative agriculture, carbon removal, what do you think

Starting point is 01:53:52 are some of the most interesting things that you're seeing or expect to see? I don't see these technological solutions as requiring techno-optimism so much as they require socio-optimism, meaning that we would somehow find a way as a society to enact these potential technological solutions. So the very last scenario in Imaginable, and it seems to be everyone's favorite, people just love it, is called The Ten-Year Winter. And it tries to imagine how we as a society might decide to go all in on solar radiation management, which is a real geoengineering technology that has been, in many people's opinion and my own, grossly under-investigated and experimented with because people are rightfully worried about unintended consequences. But many people also believe that there is absolutely no way to keep this planet inhabitable in as much space as we inhabit today. If we don't want to run out of two continents worth of livable space, we probably are going to have to do something to control temperature while we get

Starting point is 01:55:06 to clean energy, while we stop carbon emissions. So that's going to take a while. We may need to explore things like solar radiation management, where we just partially block some of the radiation. And so we're trying to cool the earth by injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere. There are scientists ready to test this. There are delivery devices that have been created. They want to send them up into the atmosphere. They want to test, can we send this stuff up there? We want to run simulations and models of, it might create maybe inadvertent flooding or flood risk. I mean, there are things that will have to be grappled with, but if we don't start talking about and imagining it now, we're not going to have time to actually develop the technology in the process. Who decides to do geoengineering?

Starting point is 01:55:54 Are we going to let one company or one country unilaterally act? I mean, what if China just says, whatever, we're done with climate risk. We're going to solve this problem. We're just dimming the sun for the whole planet. You can thank us later. Is that going to be possible? Right now, the UN has a moratorium on all geoengineering experiments and efforts. It's treated the same as setting off a nuclear weapon. They want to stop people from doing it. We need mechanisms to debate, discuss, educate, and innovate so that if we have to do this, we're not doing it stupidly and we're not doing it in crisis mode. So man, do I want people to

Starting point is 01:56:40 start thinking about what would it be like to possibly have to make this call? Who do we trust to make it? How will we get informed consent from humanity to do geoengineering? That's going to take a while to figure out. We need to start now, today, talking about how we will accept this risk if we need to take it and how we will try to mitigate the harms for people who might be harmed by unintended consequences. Yeah, it sounds like a great scenario to role play also, because I can imagine, I mean, if you look at property rights in the United States, for instance, I believe that there is ownership of some degree of airspace. I don't know what the limitations are, but above one's land property, let's say.

Starting point is 01:57:29 So I could envision, especially countries that are being hard hit, harder hit perhaps than other places in the first world, or they may be first world themselves, deciding if it hasn't been sort of spec'd out already from a legal and political perspective, that they own the airspace extending all the way up to the end of the atmosphere. And God, it seems if we can't coordinate around COVID on a global level, it seems unlikely that we're going to get a calm conclusion slash consensus and peacebuilding effort on this

Starting point is 01:58:06 from politicians who are incentivized by short-term rewards largely. And I should say, just because I want people to know this about you, that you also study incentives. And we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but I do recommend that people read, I believe this was a piece you wrote for Wired. Tell me if I'm getting this right. It's on wired.co.uk, but related to lotteries and social problems and using prize wheels, say, for inpatients who test negative for opiates and things like this. So I want people to appreciate that you're not just waving your hands and saying, hope people figure it out. You're also studying the mechanisms by which the positive rewards or negative rewards, right? If there's a, in a sense, I mean,

Starting point is 01:58:56 it's kind of hard to categorize this, but like regret lotteries for weight loss studies, which you have to forfeit your winnings if you haven't met your weight loss goals, which is actually super effective. Had had an economist on the podcast recently who talked about the effectiveness of a clawback incentive, which was what that would be. Do you have any recommendations for people who would like to study incentives and how they might apply? Because we're all self-interested creatures, and I guess the trick is to make us, whether we like it or not, beings who act in enlightened self-interest. Even if it's just to better ourselves, we end up bettering others.

Starting point is 01:59:29 Any resources that could be in any of your books, that could be in articles, if people want to learn more about incentives. Do you have any thoughts? You should look for the new game theory, which comes out of economics and to some degree political science, assumes that we're all rational actors and we're going to do what is almost mathematically the most optimized choice. We're going to make it. We're going to take it. And people were winning Nobel Prizes for it for decades. I think are waking up to the fact that we make choices for all kinds of irrational reasons. And a proper game theory, a new game theory should take in the past that we can be motivated intensely by humiliation. I mean, like there's so many incredibly powerful emotions that drive our behaviors and trying to essentially invent a new game theory that does not treat people as

Starting point is 02:00:46 rational actors. Because if anything we've learned over the last couple of years is that people will make very irrational decisions based on emotional and psychological drives. Are there any names, any writers, or places you would suggest people go if they want to dig into that? Anything they'd search on Google? Let me come back to you for the show notes. How about I send you, let's send your fans to the show notes for follow-ups on that. All right, perfect. Because I want to get something good for them.

Starting point is 02:01:15 Okay. We will add those to the show notes, everybody. Tim.blog slash podcast and just look for Jane. You can search Jane. You'll be in good company. You'll be right next to Jane Goodall. So people will have all the superstar Janes in one place and you can find this. I would also recommend people read, there's a book called Chimpanzee Politics, which is fascinating. It

Starting point is 02:01:36 was written by a field biologist, but I believe this was used by Newt Gingrich at one point or so. He claimed to help sort of seize control. And fascinating. There's a lot of overlap, a lot of overlap between us and our dear cousins. So Jane, people can find you on Twitter at Avant Gain. They can find you on the website, Jane McGonigal, M-C-G-O-N-I-G-A-L.com. The new book is imaginable subtitle, how to see the future coming and feel ready for anything. Even things that seem impossible today, perhaps, especially things that seem impossible today. And we'll include a link to imaginable in the show notes as well. And you can find it everywhere books are sold. Is there anything else that you would like to

Starting point is 02:02:18 add today? Anything else you'd like to discuss or request and ask of the audience? Anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up? Thank you, Tim. I mean, my big ask is that we do not waste this historic opportunity that we have to create the change we want to see in the world. So you and I, we've talked a lot about the future is we don't want, but we might wake up in any way, how to be ready. But there has been so much change so fast over the past two years that I think we all realize that the kinds of ideas we would previously have dismissed as unthinkable or unimaginable, we can change, right? We had a failure of imagination. We were stuck. We just saw humanity do things that would have seemed completely ridiculous and impossible, changing how we live, how we work, how we learn, what we value. So I wrote this book not just so we could be ready for the hard stuff, but so that we can all see ourselves as being gifted with an unprecedented opportunity to create positive transformation.

Starting point is 02:03:26 People are ready for change. Our minds have been broken open by the pandemic and all the other crazy stuff we've lived through the past couple of years. And so let's see ourselves as living through a truly historic and special valuable moment. We may never again have this opportunity to create quite so much transformative change so fast. And I want to just ask everybody, don't waste it. Let's not waste this moment. Let's truly change things that need to be changed. Hear, hear. And it can be as simple as doing a few exercises to envision the future so that you feel a greater sense of urgency, which will give you an indication of the steps you can take now.

Starting point is 02:04:11 The small steps that you can take, even if that's just finding drone hobbyists so that you can have some selection of positive implications of the technology. And to see how you can steer away towards that or away from the negative. And Jane, I just love our conversations. This is so fun for me. I've taken a million notes here. I didn't get to ask you about cookie rolling, which that's going to have to wait for another time. But I really recommend everybody check out the book. I think these are, to my mind, first and foremost, psycho-emotional tools for developing not just resilience, but anti-fragility, which is different. It's where you can thrive and train and help others to thrive in what are certain to be uncertain times. And times of great flux, I don't think that is going to slow by any

Starting point is 02:05:07 stretch of the imagination. So I do think overwhelming change or potentially overwhelming change is the new normal. And so I'm so happy that you've written this book. People should check it out. Again, folks, it's imaginable subtitle, how to see the future coming and feel ready for anything. Jane has a good track record, very good track record, and has thought very deeply about this. So she has not just the theory, but also the street cred. And I recommend people check it out. And, uh, you know, I say that too, cause I just love hanging out and what a, what a fun conversation. So thank you for making so much time. Yes, absolutely my pleasure.

Starting point is 02:05:45 And I hope we get to revisit this conversation and see how our imagination lines up. And we can talk about the actions we took and what we actually accomplished. So I will look forward to that. 10 years from now, Tim, you and me. 10 years from now. Maybe sooner.

Starting point is 02:06:01 And for God's sake, people, go buy just a few hundred dollars worth of backup water. Like for fuck's sake, I don't know why I've seen this everywhere over and over again, hurricane Sandy, the Austin freeze. And they're like, that was a hundred,

Starting point is 02:06:13 one in a hundred year storm. It'll never happen again. And then there's like a year or two later, it happens just like, if you have a fire extinguisher in your house or you wear your seatbelt when you're driving down the highway, buy some extra water. You can go a long time without food.

Starting point is 02:06:24 Anyway, think about backup power too. So I'll leave that for my prepper send-off. And Jane, I'm so excited about the new book. I'm so happy to reconnect. And for everybody listening, we will have links to everything we discussed. Jane will also send some resources to my team to put in the show notes about new versions or new iterations of game theory such that we don't model the world after the assumption that humans are rational robots, because clearly we are not. And I think the resources section will be really powerful. So that'll be at Tim.blog.com slash podcast. Just search Jane and it'll pop right up. And until next time, everyone, be safe out there.

Starting point is 02:07:09 Be just a little kinder than necessary. Train yourself to be optimistic. Don't just sit in your house doing laps around the couch or chasing your tail in your own head. And thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. And thanks for listening. Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over

Starting point is 02:07:51 that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me in

Starting point is 02:08:37 the last few years. I've come to conclude it is the end all be all. That all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on.

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

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