Predict The FUTURE, Feel Ready for ANYTHING and Prepare for the World AHEAD | Jane McGonigal

datter's law says any useful idea about the future should at first seem ridiculous and that's really important to hold in our minds right because you know on one hand it's easy to prepare for futures that sound normal that feel like a kind of continuation of today but it's the weird stuff that catches us off guard data's a lot trying to shock people or knock people out of the normalcy bias exactly so we all have this normalcy bias our brain is designed to make sense of the world in a way that doesn't overwhelm us and so it it wants to believe that patterns that have been true in the past or things that are true today will continue to be so because if we're constantly waking up every day being like ah how do things work now like oh what's going on um it's too stressful it's too overwhelming and so the brain normally assumes things will continue as they are but what that means is it can be very hard to wake up and realize this thing that used to be true is no longer true or this assumption i had is no longer helpful jane mcgonagall welcome to the show thank you excited to have you here so futurist game designer two things that i am obsessed with so when i heard that your new book was coming out about that imaginable i was immediately hooked and intrigued i think that we're living through an incredibly disruptive radical transformation moment you talk about that in the book this idea of future shock walk us through the whole idea of being a futurist because you're a futurist not like in a um oh i'm in my garage building technology but you're a futurist in a way that i think everybody needs to wrap their head around you distressingly accurately predicted what we just went through in 2020 with kovid so walk us through what it means to be a futurist and how on earth in 2010 you detailed the things that we just lived through yes okay so much to chew on well maybe maybe we should start with future shock which um you reference um because people might be wondering you know what is futuristic where does this come from so in 1968 alvin hoffler wrote a book called future shock and this is sort of the birth of future's thinking and he was looking around society and noticing that people seemed overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change and you know in the 1960s it was a very tumultuous time there was literally people getting shot yes social upheaval new technologies big economic disruptions and he was observing the psychological impacts of change happening so fast and people feeling anxiety feeling overwhelmed feeling like there's too much uncertainty they couldn't confidently plan for what was next and he theorized that this would have a society-scale toll on our collective well-being and so he tried to invent ways of imagining what might be next first of all so that we could be ready for anything and not be shocked right and secondly so that maybe we could learn how to be more in control of the change that happens if we can see change starting then we could make our own decisions about do i want to accelerate this change i love where the future is going let's make it faster i want to be a part of it or do i want to try to to stop it slow it down reverse it mitigate the harms you know control the risks and from that 1968 book this whole movement emerged and i got involved with futures thinking after i finished my phd studying the psychology of games and one thing i learned i was actually scouted to be a futurist like at the institute for the future which is uh the oldest futures organization in the world they look for people who are actually doing things like in their garage inventing new technologies um you probably know allan k's quote that the best way to predict the future is to invent it so i was trying to invent new genres of games that would allow gamers to apply their skills to real world problems and the institute said well you know sounds like you've got an idea for how the future could be different come come make some games with us and see what happens which is how i wound up in 2010 running i think that was my third big future forecasting game a simulation where tens of thousands of people the one we did in 2010 and 20 000 people living their lives almost like a role-playing game you know like dungeons and dragons are on a table but instead of being around the table you're around a social network online and you're imagining how you would react to different future crises and that game evoke we asked them to imagine a respiratory pandemic that started in china that was complicated by misinformation conspiracy theories by a group called citizen x which sounds like uh q anon and there were historic wildfires on the west coast and there was supply chain collapses and we just asked people you know what would you do how would you try to help um this was the third big game that i did this and uh you know not only were the forecasts the scenarios that we asked people to imagine turned out because that game was set ten years in the future so we were imagining 20 20. so bananas um but but the things that people said they would do people really did and it's what makes me excited about this art form these social simulations is you know people predicted they would go to church even if they were contagious because it was so important to their identity and that turned out to be the big super spreading risk and people said i'm going to go to work you can tell me to isolate or stay home but i need to make money so if the government doesn't pay me to stay home i'm going to go to work even if i'm sick we saw that happening and people who couldn't afford to work from home we're more likely to get sick moms said wait if schools are shut down because of these issues how am i going to take care of my kids am i going to become the teacher am i going to not be able to work and of course we saw a mass exodus of women from the workplace so you know there were all these social consequences that experts in public health and epidemiology did not predict but our players just ordinary people knew what they would need or knew how a crisis would affect them personally and when you collect that from a thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand people you can actually predict pretty accurately things that otherwise would be hard to anticipate so this is an idea that is hiding in plain sight that is more transformational than i think people realize so when i started reading your book my wife and i play a game in business that we call no what would it take which you call ridiculous at first and i have the chills like hearing you say that i was like oh my god like that's exactly what lisa and i are doing when we have these crazy big ideas that we want to do something insane um and you have to get yourself into a well i look at it as a problem-solving mindset so there are of course a million reasons why we're never gonna you know have our kids come home from school that would be ridiculous well it's ridiculous at first and then you begin to realize you may be thrust into a position where it's the only sensible solution and if you stop at it's ridiculous then you never get to that next thing which actually allows you to predict the future pretty accurately as you said when you start looking at a whole group of people but as people begin to understand okay hold on if i actually get myself past the fact that this is self-evidently ridiculous and now just no what would it take what would it look like how will this play out and they run that scenario you can find i think of it in terms of solutions you can find solutions in business that other people because they stop at the ridiculousness they never even think through to find that there actually are all these really interesting ways that you could do it but in your context if you stop it that's so ridiculous that will never happen then you get blindsided by 2020. so how do we and obviously i've read the book so i know the punchline but how do people get into that state where they actually can essentially sit in the future i mean there's so many habits that are good for that um i want to pick up on you know you've introduced this phrase that i love ridiculous at first and that comes from something that professional futurists call datter's law after jim datter who's another founder of the field and datter's law says any useful idea about the future should at first seem ridiculous and that's really important to hold in our minds right because you know on one hand it's easy to prepare for futures that sound normal that feel like a kind of continuation of today but it's the weird stuff that catches us off guard data's allowed trying to shock people or knock people out of the normalcy bias exactly so we all have this normalcy bias our brain is designed to make sense of the world in a way that doesn't overwhelm us and so it it wants to believe that patterns that have been true in the past or things that are true today will continue to be so because if we're constantly waking up every day being like ah how do things work now like oh what's going on um it's too stressful it's too overwhelming and so the brain normally assumes things will continue as they are um but what that means is it can be very hard to wake up and realize this thing that used to be true is no longer true or this assumption i had is no longer helpful and so so we want to have these ridiculous first ideas one so that we can shake ourselves from our normalcy bias and also because the kinds of futures that we might want to make they might be so transformative that other people say you know well that's unimaginable or that's unthinkable um you know a lot of people who got involved for example with the universal basic income movement this idea that people just get money for nothing it's so ridiculous but we're able to prove with pilot studies and capture people's imagination to actually you know what let's actually take this seriously this ridiculous at first idea um and so we also want to think of ideas that just sound absurd because the kind of change we want is probably going if we're thinking boldly and we're trying to really make a difference in the world people will dismiss it um but should we talk about my favorite habit or technique for for coming up with ridiculous at first ideas so i created this brainstorming game called 100 ways anything can be different in the future and it's really easy you just make a list of things that are true today and then you without overthinking it just rewrite every fact so that the opposite is now true and then you look for clues that might explain why this upside down fact could be true so i run this game with with all kinds of organizations and communities a few weeks ago i was doing it with local government leaders in the state of california so mayors and city managers and state legislators and so one of the facts about the future we're thinking about the future democracy one of their facts was well there's a minimum voting age in california right like you have to be 18 to vote in elections so we're coming up with the facts and then we just without thinking just rewrite what's okay what's the upside down version of this there is no minimum voting age okay so you just make these make these facts then you have to go look for clues well one what does it mean there's no minimum voting age so like babies can vote okay what we do as futurists is we come up with these ridiculous at first statements and then we just start typing them into google we type them into social media and we we look for people who are talking about these ideas or doing them you can go into google scholar and it turns out people are actually advocating at policy centers serious intellectuals that we should lower the minimum voting age to zero because young people have the most on the line and they're going to live their whole lives with the decisions that we make especially around climate action and so now we've got all these government leaders thinking like oh california you know minimum voting age zero what would that mean and i always when we come up with these ideas i always ask like what's your emotional reaction would you be excited to wake up in the future would you be worried i had no idea what they would say i thought maybe they would really hate this future because it it's so weird and they really liked it most of them rated on a scale we'd do like a scale of one to ten how excited are you and they were like seven eight nine so i'm like i'm getting ready just even for me that's a signal of change that that people working at government were so intrigued by such a strange idea and how do you because one thing that i liked in your book is you encourage people to um don't just pollyanna don't just negative think how do you get people to balance that because like in california if i run the thought experiment it's a one-party state i get why they would love it but if you have a more contentious state then it becomes who has the most offspring because of course if you have a three-year-old they're gonna vote the way that you want them to so how do you help people navigate second and third order consequences as they think through a future that they want to create so that's a great question first of all you could definitely crunch some numbers and you could try to figure out um like what would shift how would the power of balance shift running thought experiments on that already it seems like younger voters probably would really change just the political landscape i mean if if you're having especially you know kids are going to vote the way their parents want but teenagers preteens it does kind of change what what might become central election issues which i think is exciting but it might not pan out in the ways that we think but we do we actually we have a tool called draw out consequences where we do basically chains of causes and effects okay if this happened then what would happen and that happened then what would happen and you try to create these these chains um to get to kind of surprising outlier consequences but the the simplest thing you can do whenever i have a scenario is before we start playing with it everybody has to think of one thing that they would be excited about or one thing that could go right in this future something to be better in this world and one thing that could go wrong or one thing they would be worried about so if we have like 500 people coming to play with a scenario we instantly have a list of like 500 possible you know benefits but also 500 risks and then that sets the groundwork for as we try to draw out these consequences people can say like oh okay let me think about that well what might happen then and so we do try to have this balance of positive and shadow imagination because really any future is going to have complications but also perhaps unexpected benefits where people use it as an opportunity to create positive change even with the pandemic i mean many people are trying to use this as an opportunity to rethink how we do things might wind up having lasting positive impacts on work or learning now one thing i know you've looked at certainly on the game side is that people don't always make rational decisions so one thing i found really interesting when i first became aware of economics there was still sort of the lingering tale of humans make perfectly rational decisions and my first introduction to uh the fact that we don't was dan ariely and his idea of predictively irrational that we are far more complex and bizarre creatures than we think we are that people will lie but only to the point where it doesn't change their internal sense of i'm not a liar like he you know points out all these really interesting facts so one you're you're crowd sourcing the future predictions which makes a lot of sense which will take into account then all of the different biases and the fact that people are different and you know they aim at different things but as you think about at an individual level how do you bake in the predictably irrational parts of the human psyche i actually spend a lot of time asking people how they would feel in different futures and i have this whole set of emotions this is not something i write about in the books it's kind of fun that you're asking it's like another tool that i didn't have room for um and we have this whole set of emotions and we asked people like okay can you imagine you know we're playing the idea of the next pandemic let's say the next pandemic it's not a contagious virus it's tick-borne so you freaked me out with that in the book i was like oh god yeah get ready we're all going to be wearing our socks like above our pants and that's going to be good fashion so like you're ready to transcend that detailed way that you walk people through this alpha gal yeah alpha gal crazy um was unnerving given that you did this 10 years ago with the pandemic so not to derail us from the point you were about to make but how accurate do you think that prediction is yeah that's a good question okay let's let's follow the chain i love you're like laying out all these breadcrumbs for me to follow i feel like hansel and gretel okay so um i asked people like how what can you imagine a time where you might feel embarrassed if you were living in this scenario or time you would feel proud or a time that you would feel loved or grateful and we try to create a landscape of stories you know it becomes a story that we're all telling together and it helps me understand what might drive behavior if if we understand you know what are people angry about in the future or what are people grateful for it really helps you get a much more um nuanced sense of as you said these are rational decisions we make when we were playing with pandemics back in 2008 2010 we had people wear masks in their everyday lives the players we had about 8 000 people we said wear these to school wear these to parties wear it on public transportation and tell us how it feels and just based on how it felt emotionally to these individuals and you know physically what they were reporting we knew early in 2020 it was going to be very hard to convince people to adopt this new behavior even though it seems so rational right so you so we ask these questions about feelings that's how we try to bake it in um the alpha gal crisis is definitely um so it's very i think it's very realistic i think you know we will absolutely be living in a future where more people have been sensitized to this sugar molecule right so there's a already there's a disease it's called alpha gal syndrome it's from being bitten by a tick it's being bitten by a tick is it a a cousin of lyme disease is it related to lyme yeah it's the same creature that passes it on yeah so the tick has this molecule the sugar molecule in it um and it comes from how it you know from deer and things like that and it accidentally mixes with your blood so when it's biting you it's some of this sugar molecule from the tick gets injected into your bloodstream and your immune system reacts like it's the bubonic plague it's really just it's literally just sugar it's something that's in animal products like beef or gelatin but your body because it came in this weird way into your bloodstream from a bite your body says okay whenever i see this we're going full you know five alarm fire and people develop severe allergic reactions to any animal product not just getting bitten again but if they you know eat a vitamin gummy that has gelatin in it or they they have any animal product or mammals mammalian meat products right um and uh but which is in more things than you realize right like a lot of toilet paper gelatin to be soft you know so you have to like literally in the future you might have people carrying around you know like their own toilet paper the way we're i don't know carrying around sanitizer now and we think about these details just to help people imagine it will we definitely live in a world where you know 10 of americans have this or more um already in the united states in the south the southeastern section more than a third of people when you just randomly pick people off the street and test their blood they've already been bitten and already sensitized so you know one or two more bites or if they continue to eat a diet that's really high in mammalian meat products every time you get exposed it increases your allergic risk so we definitely could see this it depends on what we do like any future scenario one of the reasons why we want to imagine it before it happens is maybe we could change it you know it's not inevitable that we will continue to change our environment so that tick populations grow it's not inevitable that we'll eat diets that put us at risk i mean there are lots of ways it's not inevitable that scientists won't you know figure out a treatment right there are so many pathways to affect this future the reason we imagine it now is one to just prepare ourselves with knowledge i mean i for one uh definitely am more conscious about being tick safe just because i don't need any more spice in my life right now and that if it does start to unfold i won't be shocked i won't be like frozen in old ways of doing things i'll be able to adapt faster but also like to to lend my support to people who might be trying to prevent this future in any way i can so so yeah it's not inevitable but i mean for sure it's something we should be ready for because it's already happening these signals of change are already underway yeah so walk me through why it's beneficial to think through this stuff so as somebody that has struggled with anxiety i know that you can get yourself in a twist by rehearsing what i call rehearsing failure so you're obsessing like i used to think of it as well i'm just planning my escape route so if i get into a situation my anxiety goes crazy like how am i going to back out of this and what i found was oh this meeting or whatever i'm about to go in i'm just thinking of the 30 ways that it could go wrong so that i have an escape hatch for each one of them but once i flipped a switch and said i'm just going to let the the disastrous scenario catch me off guard so that i'm only rehearsing the success so i'm looking at the 30 ways that it could go right making sure that i'm ready for those that i know how to move in that case and what it was doing was just literally obliterating my sort what i call background radiation my anxieties my fears they just they never had a chance to incubate because i wasn't giving them any energy now that means that at some point i'm going to get totally caught off guard and be like whoa i did not see that coming because i've only thought about the good things but when i think about the dramatic reduction in anxiety that it brought to focus on this is going to work this is going to be amazing imagining myself winning that was really helpful but in the book you explain something and i bought into it totally that there actually is certainly in this sort of anti-future shock way there's a real benefit to thinking through this stuff yeah and i will say you know when i first started working in this space i did not expect people to feel less anxiety by imagining these catastrophes i actually felt bad i would you know i because i had been making you know more traditional video games and i was inviting people who liked my work to come play with these scenarios and like uh like i know it sounds scary but like it'll be fun trust me and i didn't know if it would work but over you know more than a decade of doing this people come out of imagining these scenarios fired up super empowered it's part of why i wanted to write this book to dig into the psychology and neuroscience because it doesn't initially seem to make sense there are a couple key factors to it and by the way i say like you it's not enough just to like read about these scenarios or talk about them or like listen to a podcast or watch a show you will feel anxious what changes people's mindset is playing with the scenarios it's like if you're hungry and you just look at a plate of food it doesn't help you have to eat it so you have to actually play with these scenarios if you just read about them or listen it it doesn't have the same transformative effect but so the first thing the biggest thing if you vividly imagine something and you only need to do it for five minutes so you don't have to you know every day wake up what you know what am i doing to prayer literally you do this one time in your life for five minutes so that your brain is essentially you overcome the normalcy bias and it becomes something your brain believes is possible okay so like one of the scenarios in the book is a government mandated internet shutdown for cyber security reasons just turn off the internet for two weeks or four weeks and and governments around the world are doing this now um so how would you prepare for that and you imagine it literally for five minutes okay then just file it away what happens is if you wake up and the future you imagined is now happening instead of being shocked or denying it like this can't be real you know that slows people down they're not able to adapt or act quickly your brain actually has a positive emotion which is pre-recognition your brain says yeah i knew this could happen like i was smart enough to take this possibility seriously and that doesn't mean you were able to prevent it um or stop it from happening but it's it's a positive emotion it gives you confidence it gives you a sense of readiness and clarity and to start your process of having to adapt or deal with a crisis or disruption from a state of confidence and clarity rather than anxiety confusion feeling helpless it's it really changes the way that you emotionally experience things that can create a lot of suffering so that's one thing the other thing is that when i have people play with scenarios the big thing we focus on is what would you do to help others also what kind of help would you need and it becomes like a matchmaking right people are saying like ah this would be a problem for me and oh i have a solution for that and this is actually an incredible way to build confidence for any situation we kind of get out of our own head and think about being of service to other people and that service mentality that that identifying our skills and our strengths and our values and passions that would you know help someone else in a crisis that allows us to to think about these hypothetical possibilities again from a position of strength of confidence of being ready and it gives us more insight into our own strengths and skills that we don't have to wait for an actual catastrophe right we might start to get more in touch with the kinds of actions or businesses um that would be something we could do today so people tend to leave these scenarios fired up which is which is good and i did not i did not expect that it was something i had to watch happen again and again as players participated and uh to this day the alpha gal syndrome i was just saying at a book event last night this is people love this scenario and i was really surprised i thought it might like traumatize people especially coming out of one pandemic to think of another pandemic but what i learned is people want the opportunity to imagine us doing better we did kind of a not a great job with this pandemic so they're like they want to imagine what's what's the next version where everything you know goes goes better um and even the host of this event she was like yeah i love that scenario too it was my favorite so it's like you just don't you just can't imagine until you actually start imagining how something that seems so stressful could actually make you feel good but talk to me about the degree of specificity that was one thing that i found really interesting like even with the alpha gal thing in the book you really go into like here's how entrepreneurs will react i was like wow that really is true um and that it was so obviously predictable once you start thinking okay what would entrepreneurs do what would moms do what would businesses do like it was really interesting but you have this like hyper degree of specificity that you encourage people to do not it's heavy it's 100 pounds that kind of thing yeah well i mean so one technique for bringing specificity to these scenarios is we ask you to just live with it almost like an augmented reality layer on top of your everyday life just in your imagination yeah it's like just like kind of background um imagination it's like you so you might go into a cafe like a coffee shop and be like okay if we were living in an alpha gal crisis what would be different here you know are you going to like a backyard cookout one of the things that i learned in researching this scenario is that if you have the syndrome just smelling airborne meat um continue into anaphylactic shock it's super crazy so then i start imagining well i have lots of friends who like cookout culture is important to them so what are they doing on weekends does this become the new social division between people who have to of mask up around meat or do we adapt do we like come up with new new cultures what's what's the new pregame or the new backyard ritual and we can't i mean i can't predict on my own what the specificity would be but when you have lots of people looking at the things they care about you know we did a we did an oil crisis simulation years ago and one of the most enthusiastic participation groups was a nascar enthusiast and they were like we have to be able to imagine how this fort could continue even in the absence of traditional fuel and so if you look at a scenario from what you love from what you know what you have your own lived experience or or expertise with then you can get specific and so um for me you know i might look at things like running how does running culture change or how did being a mom change or how does gaming industry react and so we just you bring your expertise and suddenly it's not you know if we're if we're thinking about in the abstract we just have a really hard time but then it gets when we bring our own you know our whole selves to it we realize we have so much information about what could change just based on our own wisdom that we bring to the future all right my friend i have a big announcement my incredible and talented wife lisa is about to launch her new book radical confidence in it she has managed to perfectly capture the process of how to go from feeling lost and insecure to taking control of your life and doing amazing things despite feeling fear sometimes a lot of fear now let me tell you nobody knows lisa better than me but when i read radical confidence for the first time and heard her describe what it was like for her to go from having these big exciting dreams as a kid to then as an adult scheduling her life around the tv shows that she wanted to watch or how lonely and isolated she felt instead of pursuing her dreams it was brutal for me i would never say though that it was worth it for her to go through all of that just so that she could write something down that allows others to avoid it but i will say that at least she was able to capture the strategies that she used to break out of that rut find her voice and begin doing incredible things despite her insecurities and fears that she wasn't going to be good enough to achieve great things so while it hurts me to know the dark place that lisa went through i really am excited for people who are going through something similar right now to read this book radical confidence is an instruction manual for how to become the hero of your own life even when you're scared to death look i know better than just about anybody how easy it is to get off track in life or to just not have yet found your calling and it's even easier for people to feel so insecure and unprepared that they don't even want to pursue the things that they want but what lisa shows people in radical confidence is that the radical part is that you can accomplish extraordinary things even when you feel fear that's what radical confidence is being afraid and unsure and having a tool kit that allows you to still make massive progress pre-order your copy today because if you act now you can claim the bonuses that lisa has created for you at radicalconfidence.com they're only available if you pre-order so act now then once you've done that we'll get back to today's episode all right guys read the book and get ready to be the hero of your own life peace out [Music] yeah one thing that as an exercise i found really interesting in the book and i could see how it would play out well and in the book you give three scenarios if i remember right and you're like i want you to spend the next 10 days two weeks whatever actually living it like you were just explaining but like okay hey you're gonna have to wear a mask as you go to the barbecue what kind of mask do you wear yeah oh you wear your favorite football team amazing what does it feel like is it rough is it smooth and like as you what something interesting happens to the brain when you force yourself to keep answering these layers of questions like the the visual starts to become real and you can really internalize it versus so here's an interesting idea i very rarely talk about this out loud be curious to hear your thoughts so in business there's a concept i'm always trying to get young entrepreneurs to understand that emotions will make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect because your brain just sort of smooths it in fills in the gaps you imagine like alpha gal crisis yeah i would be fine i would just avoid the ticks in the woods but you're not really getting in to understand no no now they're migrating to the beaches and they're you know whatever 10 times more present than they were this is not some minor thing like it's really escalating and so getting out of emotion and getting into what i tell people to do is journal because you need to be able to write it down in a single sentence yes so that got a reaction so well yeah i mean my favorite technique is journaling from the future when people ask me like what can i do to really benefit from playing with a scenario i say well write a journal entry because free write for five minutes but you have a you have a goal your goal is to get as many vivid details into this journal entry as possible and i want you to score yourself afterwards i want you to go back and count out you know how many how many visual details colors shapes how many auditory details were you describing something you could hear tactile details if you were talking to someone did you write down you know the words that came out of their mouth so you can count up tally up the number of details the more detailed your journal entry the more effective it seems to be for increasing your ability to think strategically and creatively about a future and to overcome the normalcy bias right if you have three details like you might need to try again 30 details you're done you're ready and when we really want to create deep understanding of a scenario we do have people do it for at least 10 days so every day for 10 days take something you're actually doing okay so i'm you know getting dressed this morning okay what am i wearing in this future that is different from what i would wear today and how am i making that decision and how do i feel about it how do i look and sometimes people will you know it's not just writing you can take selfies from the future you can kind of create artifacts from the future well um you know so one of the scenarios in the book is imagining uh climate mass climate migration and there's a political movement to be more um supportive of people who have to move due to extreme heat or drought and the party it's called the welcome party right we should be welcoming so i just made a t-shirt with welcome party on it and the symbol of this you know fictional party is a monarch butterfly so i'm drawing monarch butterflies on it and uh yeah and you made that up the the symbol and all that stuff yeah yeah yeah yeah to help people imagine right um and we have we have ideas like you could make a you could take a picture of a monarch butterfly and put it in your window as like a sign to other it's like this is a safe house like if if you are so totally behind me developer this is right building the details and so you know that's one of the skills that i do try to teach in the book is how do you create visual artifacts of the future symbols things you can wear things you can show others and then yeah take photos put it on social media start a conversation or have someone ask you like what's the welcome party oh let me tell you about this weird scenario i'm trying to figure out when i would move and if i would move where i would go and if i had to go what would i need and would it be are there laws to support it could i find you know do i am i ready do i have the language skills um and so we create these you know things that spark conversation um so yeah you're writing these journal entries and you're you're doing it every day for 10 days and you're making your artifacts and taking your selfies and if you do it for 10 days around 10 different things that you know or activities you do or communities that you're a part of you get this incredibly rich view of a future where you've essentially turned yourself into an expert on this future and you know the most the most people that i've had participate in in one of these you know long form explorations of a scenario was about 20 000 and i would like to see you know 200 000 or 2 million and hoping that we start to build this as a skill set and a practice because we want people to have deep expertise about the future before it happens not just you know some you know futurist nerds who can see it coming so speaking of things that futurist nerds can see coming let's talk about cryptocurrency so the more i look at so uh getting into crypto has really reframed my sense of what the future is going to be ray dalio has really formed like what my sense of the future is going to be and when i put them together i do worry that we're coming into some pretty rocky times and so i know you speak very intelligently around cryptocurrency so as you one have you run any scenarios around this have you done this kind of gamification around it um yeah i mean look the future that i'm encouraging people to be ready for is significant government regulation and in governments having their own cryptocurrency alternative um so trying to understand what would a central bank digital currency look like how would it operate what would you get i think and maybe this is exactly where you're going so as you try to predict that what what are you thinking about in terms of like what made you think oh the governments will run their own well so i mean look the the bread and butter of future forecasting is collecting signals of change right so it's from what's already from what's already happening it's our raw material and so you know we have this huge database at the institute for the future all of our researchers we are required ideally every day at at least one signal of change that you're seeing and we look for trends and patterns so you know i mean one important signal change is that literally every government that has a sovereign currency is experimenting is planning they are looking at it they have teams tasked with designing a cryptocurrency for the federal government another signal that i found absolutely fascinating is china's decision to launch its own national cryptocurrency and to give it away for free so how do we make this currency popular how do we start to you know we don't we don't want to just have to ban bitcoin we want to entice people to say i would rather get i would rather be a part of this ecosystem because the government's giving it to me for free and they get they were getting different companies to offer incentives so digital you want already rolled out yeah wow i didn't know that i knew that they it was coming yeah i knew that they booted bitcoin but i know they'd already rolled it out now and it depends on you know what nations do you think will be essentially cultural thought leaders in the coming decades a lot of nations look to china now as as the ideal you know able to respond quickly um you know that combination of authoritarian power but bold sweeping future visions you know they're not trying to go backwards they're trying to go forwards um if you if you ask just ordinary people in many countries around the world they'll say well we'd rather be like china than like the us so when when a government does something like that there you know that's an important thing to look at and you know we see the signals growing the current biden administration just announced i think a couple weeks ago that they are starting their own development of a central bank digital currency and then the other you know why do i think this is plausible i mean there's so many cool things as you know that you can do with programmable money it makes sense that governments would want to have this it's it's such a more powerful way to stimulate and impact the economy so if you want to give out cash stimulus but you don't want people to just save it because you're trying to provoke spending you can send out programmable money that expires in 30 days or you can make it location specific you can only spend it in this region that was hit by you know a hurricane or trying to rebuild um there are really cool things you can do with it you can you can have money that accrues um negative interest if you save it right so let's say you don't want a company like apple sitting on piles of cash right um they have they it gets shrinks instead of accruing interest it it gets you know you have less money if you're not spending it so just the fact that you can do so many powerful things makes it seem pretty obvious that governments are going to want to have that power and use it and they will probably try to regulate the existing cryptocurrency market industry in order to be able to create demand for that their own product and i'm not i mean it is there are definitely reasons to be worried about such a future i also think i mean i think there's some really cool aspects to it i mean i i could see reasons to be excited for the government having this infrastructure so we try to keep that balance of positive and shadow imagination because if you're only worried about it then you won't see the reasons why it would happen and you have to be aware of other people's positive motivations why they're excited about it or then you really will be blindsided you know this will never happen because it's obviously a terrible idea yeah that that brings me back to ray dalio so he catches a lot of flack because he's very um i mean he might say just sort of objective but i'll say he's pretty positive about china and what he's watched them do and he's always like you can't judge like somebody else's value system you can say that it's not yours but you can't judge their value system and it's interesting to see how this will play out around different value systems how people think about it um [Music] there is certainly a shadow imagination side to the traceability of what will certainly happen with um the governments having a digital currency that they can track everything like somehow because of bitcoins early like when it was under under under the radar people made the mistake of thinking that that was a wise way to do criminal behavior that's the worst possible way ever literally they can go back and track this whole record years ago so yeah that would be really really absurd and so of course that will be a feature not a bug of anything that governments do which does make me worry a little but in terms of value going digital it's going to happen and as you said it's a value system one of the things i always try to stretch people's imagination around is the competing values of privacy and transparency or accountability we know in china it's not just from from the government culture wide they there's more of a value for transparency and accountability and so when you think when you look at all the facial recognition technology that's being rolled out there to a lot of americans this sounds like a dystopian nightmare but people there will say well i feel safer or there's been positive change people change their behaviors people my community they're they're better people now now i that doesn't mean i'm not a supporter of you know any but but the idea that we would never allow that technology to gain a foothold in american society i think a lot of people believe that they believe that the value of privacy is so strong that we're not going to see mass adoption of this technology you know which is a mistake and one signal of change that i look at here is when when law enforcement started using information the genetic data information from people uploading their their dna to get their ancestry oh yeah that's how they cut that's how they caught the uh the golden state killer you know yeah oh i see you anymore well as somebody who grew up like uh terrified of all these serial killers who were never caught i mean i'm actually quite excited that law enforcement now they can go to like 23andme and they can search for relatives if they have dna from a suspect they can figure out okay well here's somebody this is like a second cousin let's look for all of their cousins and uh and they've identified some of the most notorious unsolved so you know zero can not hear about it i don't know but for me it was like i could finally sleep at night uh and these cert these people live like loom large in in my you know anxiety now when when law enforcement first started doing this there were all these thought pieces like opinion pieces about this is this is an invasion of privacy people don't expect when they upload their data to you know to learn you know what are my ancestral origins they don't expect it to turn be turned over to law enforcement so there was this sense that maybe there would be a regulation we would stop this will crack down but they didn't anticipate is how excited so many people would be women in particular that people who for decades were committing these acts of violence are now brought to justice and now imagine living in a world where that kind of criminal activity is no longer possible to undertake in the same way again i'm not saying you know the technology is good or bad or this is like totally uh a utopian situation but if you are blind to why some people might look you look at it as invasion of privacy other people look at it as a relief like thank god at last people will be held accountable we have to hold these competing values in mind as you said because the world may decide to go in a different direction and just because privacy has been one of our highest values in the united states for however many centuries now doesn't mean it will continue and we have to be really mindful of what people actually feel and what they actually want and it might challenge our assumptions signals have changed man you've put words to something that to your point about future shock and this feeling a bit like the 60s where changes are suddenly happening at such a radical pace there are so many signals of change happening right now some good some bad and it will be very interesting to see because if people are dismissing it and they're not looking at it going okay this this is a signal man this is not like oh you should or could dismiss this like it really needs to be the thing that informs how you think through what the future is going to look like so i don't know if you know who ralph paul is but he's very um big in the cryptocurrency world he's a macro investor and he said something and when i was reading your book i was like oh my god like this is so you're the missing link between this notion that raoul paul has so this is what he says is the secret to his success he says he steps into the future and then he looks back and says what would have to have been true for us to end up here but the part that's always been missing is how do you step into the future and so your idea of the journaling and the creating details and the really taking these signals of change and like amplifying them and where do they go that allows you to get into the future and then you can look back and say okay either what would we have to do to change this so that we don't end up in this imagine future but at least you have a sense of what that imagined future is so you can be looking backwards i think you quote in your book that idea of it's a sad memory that can only be used in the future looking backwards it's a poor form of memory that only works backwards that's lewis carroll it's from from one of his um alice in wonderland such a cool idea yeah and you know so i think most people are familiar with the term future forecasting so we also have this term future back casting and it's particularly useful when you have a future that you want to wake up in you know i want to wake up in a world where three-day work week is the new norm let's say um or i want to wake up in a world where cars are banned in los angeles whatever you know we just like we have a feeling like i think this would be a great future now we probably want to you know imagine in detail look for unanticipated consequences to make sure we really want the future but let's say you've got a future you want um then you do you back cast and you can go back and do we do a lot of news headlines from the future where we try to imagine tell us you know each year what was the pivotal news story that reflects this process of change or this escalation of an idea or a movement or behavior and so yeah backcasting is really great it's especially great when you have a future that you want and while i for whatever reason i have personally more fun imagining the futures we don't want that's my sort of jam i think a lot of people will will be more inspired and motivated to really articulate those best-case scenario features while i'm over here doing the worst case ones and imagining that vividly and then doing this back casting because it just gives you ideas for what to do and i always say try to backcast all the way to as far as what could you do in the next 24 hours to make this future more likely um just force yourself to roll up your sleeves and do something to start trying to have an impact on this future and i'd be so curious to know how that breaks along gender lines the whole idea so reading about the female brain and what's the difference between the male and female you've got so men there's no real investment in having children it's a very it's the cost of producing sperm whereas for women that's like a real thing nine months plus you know caretaking beyond that and i heard it described that females have a detective's brain which is why they're interested in serial killers my wife is obsessed every time i turn around someone is shrieking getting stabbed to death on the tv and i'm like how do you watch this stuff yeah and that has been anecdotally like a thing in my life where you know women will get together and talk about oh yeah watching the serial killer show or they just have a real deep fascination with that and the thought of you you know imagining the ways that things could go wrong so you can backcast and make sure that we don't end up there i don't know that you would be alone in that i think that i would my sort of hypothesis and who knows if i'm right but my hypothesis would be that there would be a disproportionate number of women who really want to look at that that their mind just gravitates to how do i avoid this bad thing uh which brings a real genius to the equation because if somebody isn't doing that then we're really going to be in trouble you know i mean it's a good instinct you have a good intuition you have when i think about who shows up to participate in these simulations and to play these future forecasting games there is a slight majority women who show up so um which which is not true for the field i mean the field of future forecasting historically has been predominantly men but um but when it comes to actually playing these games we do see um a lot of women too so maybe it's our detective mind i like that that's interesting very interesting all right i would be super remiss as somebody so right now at impact theory we are developing a i hesitate to call it a video game but it's so close to that that we'll just for now we'll round it to that but i have a very strong thesis that video games in the next three to five years are not going to look like there will still be all the classic games we have now because they're just amazingly fun those will all exist but there will be this new kind of gaming a better way to say it um that will come out of web3 and so what makes web3 interesting to me is what i'll call wallet aware encounters so i i need better names for all this stuff because it sounds sort of unsexy and i think it's the coolest thing in the world um but have you read ready player one of course okay so huge difference between the movie and the book but in the book he describes what i think this new wave of web 3 gaming is going to be which i will call game like experiences so you've got a even in the book you've got the sort of battle royale style where we're in a combat zone and we're doing our thing but then there's i mean in the book it's probably 95 percent is a non-combat zone and it's all these weird experiences somebody builds uh a replica of their hometown and you can go in and if you go in the arcade and you you know beat this game then it opens this door and you go in and you meet this person and that to me is where a lot of new style gaming is going to be because i can look at your wallet as technology and inside of your wallet will be what i'll call affinity cues so you'll tell me what you're into just by what you own and so i can see that and i can customize an experience and then so that's sort of early phase one right so my wife has a book coming up called radical confidence and we're doing an nft drop around it she's got this whole thing in real life she really does this uh that she calls her bad boots and so she has struggled with insecurity and so she found ways to sort of build herself up through her clothes and self-signaling and all this stuff so we're gonna make these 3d boots and then if you have those boots on then we can create an experience for you you know you walk in and uh you know let's say that we create an experience where you meet lisa and some of her other entrepreneurial friends and you're suddenly in this space and it's game like but it's not like you're collecting coins or shooting people it's a different kind of game experience but cued off of this thing that you have in your wallets now and the reason that i'm bringing this up to you is rule number one of game design find the fun yeah have you thought through like because you're doing this in real life like in fact i would call these things evoke and the other one that you did as sort of game-like experiences yes so again i'm not collecting coins but there there is like a i'm a part of a group there are more people playing it we're coming back and we're sharing something and so there's this sense of like you said it's an rpg have you thought at all about sort of where web 3 goes from here and what this looks like yeah i mean my research on web 3 and gaming has been primarily around getting paid to play and what the new economies might be like so i will start by saying what you describe sounds really interesting so i will be paying attention to it as a new signal of change and putting it into our institute for the future database so thank you for putting that on my radar i mean my own uh i would say it was almost 10 years ago i was doing a big forecast for a chinese game company and i the core of my forecast was you know in the future people will expect to generate income from playing your games and uh this idea that gamers pay you for your game is going to be completely flipped upside down that they're going to be incredible revenue streams around gaming and through gaming and and owning our assets and being being paid by the game companies for the value that we create because most games the the real value is from the community of players the esteem that you give each other the the ingenuity and creativity that you bring to these worlds um and so yeah like get ready for a totally new financial ecosystem and they thought it was the most ridiculous idea not not ridiculous at first but ridiculous they're like we just don't they're like game companies would never agree to we're just like the revenue is just not going to be shared it's just not going to happen and i think what was this i want to say it was like 2 000 maybe whoa yes wow yeah i need to i need to be following everything you guys are doing way more closely that's crazy yeah i don't know how you came to that that fast but damn i think i gave a talk at the um rsa conference at moscone about this maybe about five years ago where i was laying out all the the signals but so yeah for me that's a real interest and to think about not just how it changes gaming but how it changes work and you know if you can create essentially a basic income for yourself through playing what kinds of work might you not be willing to do i mean it's already hard enough now to get people to do low wage work um if there are alternatives that are more like things that we naturally have a passion for we're really going to have to rethink who who does the rest of the work and um so it's exciting i think it's exciting um that's where my research around web 3 um has been so have you been paying attention to what i'll call a sort of civil war between traditional gamers and web3 gamers yeah oh yeah what do you think is driving that because there is so much vitriol it's insane well i mean one of the big problems is that traditional gaming is is using this technology to extract more money from players not to share the revenue with them and so i think you know the traditional gaming community sees it as a cash grab rather than trying to innovate for the good of the gaming ecosystem or community um you know they're trying to sell nfts to get more money but it's not a it's not a they're not making a persuasive case that this is actually going to benefit gamers by participating in this um and i think that's where a lot of the the friction is right now there's nobody's presented um within traditional gaming uh a convincing case that well if we bring this technology into these communities that that it will have benefit so i think so they're thinking that the game companies are using nfts as a way to be further sort of parasitic extractive yeah like you know i mean game game gamers and game developers have had a difficult relationship since in some ways since the shift to freemium models where um oh yeah it's you know free to play but then they keep trying to get you to pay for more moves or more energy and all these upgrades and access um and there's a sort of nostalgia for the day where i could just buy a game and play it and i didn't feel like i was constantly i'm trying to pick my pocket all the time and like it created a sort of adversarial relationship i still every time i do an interview and somebody's interested like we got to talk about game economics it's so exploitative um people feel really i there was this feeling of being abused and exploited by the new game economic models and so i think that and it's i mean it's essentially a kind of trauma that the game industry inflicted on its own community and so i think it's hard to see clearly if there are opportunities with this technology because so many gamers are used to i would say more of a bad faith and and game companies are moving away from it now um fortnight was kind of a breakthrough right where um yes you can pay more money but it doesn't give you an advantage in the game right um it's more expressive and status but you can't pay your way to the top and that felt more fair it felt like like a more just economic model and so i think we just need to kind of live through fair economies in gaming for this to make sense and build any real interest or enthusiasm yeah it's interesting being on the web 3 side of this and being like oh man gamers are going to love this because i'm an avid gamer old school gaming been gaming since atari even still to this day i game and i was so smitten with web3 as soon as i got what it was going to be i was like oh my god this is so amazing and so then really expected oh games will be like one of the first places that this is adopted you now own your skin and it's not just you know something that you have but you can't really sell it um and then you know you watch enough youtube videos and you realize whoa like there's this real pushback but from the web3 side it's like i i get it because if you're thinking that this is just going to be a siphoning tool that the game developers are going to use and maybe it is maybe that's what traditional games will do with it but they will ultimately be supplanted by games on the web 3 side my only beef is that the web 3 side is approaching it from play to earn instead of play and earn yes which i think is is also going to have its moment of like where we watch game economies collapse in on itself and there has to be an intrinsic value to the game right to be sustainable i want to i want to i want to make money playing my favorite games not some weird new system you know what i want to say um i think the one of the biggest problems where uh this like movement is shooting itself in the foot accidentally with gamers is the how the idea of a metaverse a singular metaverse where you can have interoperability really sounds naive to game developers because you know we don't want yeah like i don't want you bringing your fortnite weapons onto my animal crossing island what am i supposed to do do you know what i'm like okay you're you got it i think that's another it's like it from a it's not just from a technological standpoint it's from a cultural social standpoint we don't actually want interoperability of all of these web three assets in the sense that we don't like you may design things that i don't want to exist in my experience so getting back to what you're creating you know this idea that in my wallet you'll have my affinities and you'll know me so you know not to bring any weapons onto my island i mean that makes a lot of sense and it sounds like a much more plausible way to get to a future where we do see that integration of the gameful experience with this tech yeah so i think one thing that's going to happen is so it's what i call the metaverse archipelago so right now and the bet that we're making is that it's going to be unreal engine and you've got a bunch of people in the web 3 space developing games inside of unreal engine and that um [Music] if they do what i'm talking about these game-like experiences then you've really got a shot because there's parts of the game that don't require weapons so we don't have to worry about balancing and things like that but if you're just walking around the the experiential side of the game then you've got your consistent identity which i think will be a big thing jane i can talk to you about the stuff forever we will talk about it again i think let's stay in conversation because i'm excited about what you're doing absolutely so i'm going to now be obsessively following every word out of your mouth given your ability to predict the future fair uh where can other people do the same so besides the book which is called imaginable we also just opened at the institute for the future our first public center for social simulation and imagination training it's called urgent optimists plural because there's a bunch of us dot org and you can come and get a new scenario every month and play these games with me and find other people reading imaginable and work through the games and scenarios together i love it guys she's helping us all predict the future i can't say anything more powerful than that in terms of reasons to go read the book following her you will be richly rewarded and speaking of things that will reward you if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace