Jane McGonigal || Playing Games with the Future

Jane is a world renowned game designer who challenges players to tackle real world problems such as poverty, depression, and climate change through collaboration. Jane is also a future forecaster, serving as the current director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. Her games and forecasting work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, The Economist, CNN, NPR, and more. As a two time New York Times bestselling author, she has recently published her

third book called Imaginable. In this episode, I talk to Jane about the intersection of gaming and future forecasting. Jane as searched that games are not just for escapist entertainment. They could also be used to help prepare us for what's to come. Imagining fictional simulations can inspire us to make present changes which can influence our personal and collective futures for the better. We also touch on the topics of creativity, psychotherapy, forecasting, hope, and tech. It's in my

great delight to now bring you, Jane mcconnagall. It's great to be back in I feel like I was one of your very first podcast guests. I know, like episode one or two or something like, very low back at that. We should look back at that, because I feel like you were there like ground zero. Well literally it might have been the first, Like I'm sure it was like the first three episodes, like there were no live episodes when I talked to you, it was right in the

ground floor. Yeah, you were right there. So thank you for believing in me back back in the day. I really appreciate it, and I still I still believe in you, and I love this new book that you wrote. Before we get to the new work, and may been some time since our listeners remember the last conversation I had with you, maybe you could tell them a little bit about what a futurist is and and how in the world you created such an amazing unique niche for yourself

by combining futurism with game design. I can't think of too many other people that have have really are in that niche. Yeah, if you find someone else in that niche to, yeah, yeah, it's it's I just love that, that's all. I'm all about creativity, and I love you know, self actualizing unique creative potentials like you've done. So. Yeah, if you could just you know, we step back a moment, just tell people a little about those two things. Yeah, sure, I mean, I guess my career as a futurist began

before I knew what a futurist was. Scott, I'm sure you know the saying from Alan Ka the computer scientist, the best way to predict the future is to invented, And I was. Yeah, in my early game design career, I was running around telling people, we need to make a new kind of game, a game that really helps people actualize themselves in their real lives and not just a virtual world. I had all these ideas and theories, and I was doing research as a grad student at Berkeley,

but what I was describing didn't quite exist yet. And one of the things I was trying to, you know, bring into existence was a type of game that would allow people who regularly play video games to apply the same mindset and creativity and flexible thinking to real world problems. So I was imagining a future where gamers were really playing in service of humanity's long term well being, but like, there weren't a lot of games that a gamer could

play for that purpose. And I wound up connecting with the nonprofit organization in Palo Alto called the Institute for the Future, which you have visited, Scott. They're great people, yeah, And they said, well, you know, maybe you can make some games to help people imagine the future, and we'll see what gamers are good at when it comes to

the future. And so I started creating essentially social simulations of the future, which is kind of like a Dungeons and Dragons game, like where you sit around the table and you go on this imaginative adventure together, but instead of it being like six friends around a kitchen table, it might be ten thousand people around a social network, and we're all imagining what if we woke up and it was the worst pandemic the world had seen in

a century. What if we woke up and there was this crazy misinformation conspiracy theory group on social media, and all your friends and family were thinking crazy things and you didn't know how to help them. And we're trying to imagine worlds we might wake up and think about how we could prepare for those futures or help others, or maybe even avoid them by taking action today. And that turned out to be not such a strange idea.

When I first started saying gamers could definitely do important things with their gaming skills, we just it took a while to sort of prove the concept because we started making these games in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, twenty ten. All the games are set ten years in the future, so we had to kind of, you know, wait a decade and see, you know, did imagining the future actually help people who participated or help us learn things that we could put

into action once the real future arrived. Have you always been imaginative like when you were a kid, Because the thing that binds both those things is obviously an appreciation of imagination. I've read so when you were young, were you did? Were your daydreamer? In school? I was a huge daydreamer. I'm just when if you were huge day I used to get in trouble for it. I mean, I did not get in trouble for daydreaming, but I was always inventing games and immersive worlds on the playground.

So I would be, you know, okay, here's the situation. I grew up in the eighties, so we were always imagining nuclear war, which we stopped imagining for a few decades, and now suddenly we're imagining it again. But we'd say, okay, imagine, you know, it's a nuclear war and we all have to hide, and here's and on the playground we'd be making a bunker. I mean, I was always trying to design imaginative experiences for us to sort of play in.

I guess you would say, I mean, some of them were fun ones, but there was a lot of now that you mention it, I love this. This is like a therapy session for me. There was always like there was like a survivalist. I don't know if that was just growing up in the eighties. You were always watching after school specials where terrible things happened to kids. You would get kidnapped, you would get locked in a basement. Do you do you remember like growing up because a

neurotic Jewish mother who would drive to the stop. Yes, yes, so I do think. Yeah, my friends are my twin sister and I were definitely always imagining like, okay, how would we handle this terrible situation? But it was it was It didn't feel anxious at the time. It felt playful and imaginative. So maybe maybe that's where I have the ability to to, you know, find it fun to imagine things that other people describe as hard to think about. I mean, like imagining, you know, a migration crisis is

one of the things that I'm asking people to play with. Now. You know, there are a lot of things that make it i don't know, painful to think about or create anxiety. But I find that you can use the psychological safety of games, you know, because when you play video game, right, they're all in apocalyptic worlds and wars and and you know, terrible disasters, and we don't experience that as overly threatening.

So maybe in these future simulations, we can use that psychological safety of games to think about things that are otherwise painful or challenging to think about. Yeah. So what I'm hearing just reflecting that back on you, is that one of your superpowers is what my mentor, Dromo Singer called positive constructive daydreaming, and he differentiated that form of daydreaming from neurotic daydreaming, or he called it guilty dysphoric daydreaming,

which is a different style. And then he actually differentially that from a third daydreaming style, which was poor attentional control, which is what people aid ADHD you know, tend to have difficulty with. And that's a different kind of daydream But it seems like you really had the superpower even a young age for positive constructive daydreaming. He said it

was the one most link to creativity. It was the one most link to being able to plan your future in a productive way and not getting so neurotic about the content of the daydreams, but using it as fodder for planning. So that's where i'd place you in that sort of factor analysis of daydreaming styles. I love that. I'm sure everyone listening is also like self diagnosing. Now

it's funny. I mean, the one of the things that has been weird about becoming a futurist is sort of sneaking up sideways on some psychological literature that's not in the field of future studies or futures thinking, which is very much in some ways, there's a lot of content to it. You're imagining a world in which everybody gets universal basic income, or a world in which cars are banned in cities, like you're trying to imagine specific futures.

But in the psychology field, there is, you know, a burgeoning interest in the use of the future for positive mental health, right our ability to be motivated by the future, or if we can envision the future with more specificity,

it can help either control anxiety. If we control our imagination, we can choose what to imagine instead of the constant cycle of negative scenarios who get stuck on or with depression, trying to trying to make it more specific, because I think in depression people suffer from a vague imagination, which can affect their ability to plan and motivate themselves. So

it's interesting. I'm not a psychologist, but when I imagine the future, I do imagine a convergence of these fields a little bit more than there has been where psychologists could work with futurists. You know, futurists can give you the content for the imagination and psychologists can help design you know what types of habits or community rituals you

know of imagining the future could could help us. It just improve our well being, and not just at an individual level, but at a at a community level, right a demographic level. Well, Dan, didn't you write a report for the Imagination Institute? Yes? I thought you did a terrific job with it, So I want to give you credit. Thanks, And like, I mean, what do you what do you think, Scott? I mean, there is there aren't a lot of researchers researching.

I think like general future is thinking practices where we imagine ourselves ten years from today. But I feel like we need to bring some futurists into the room so we can make it, make it a little more concrete. Imagine yourself ten years from today and you have a neurosensing device that allows you to participate in a social network where you just broadcast your emotions or your thoughts unfiltered, not even typing anymore. But just you know, we can

like put put actual scenarios in there. Look, I love it. I love the idea of adapting the work you've done for use in clinical psychology settings. I think that's what you're getting at. And there's such amazing potential there that has been completely unrealized. But this relates so much to my mentor Dromo Singers work. That's what I would love to get a copy of a book in your hands. The book is real quickly if I can find it

quick in my bookshelf. But it's called imagery and psychotherapy. Oh. He developed a whole form of psychotherapy that is just not used much today, which uses dreaming and imagery and imagination in the future, specifically to help people with mental disorders. And I'm going I'm buying a gift as a gift to you. I'm gonna buy it. If you give me an address to send it to, I will be happy

to do that. It's good, and I'll do I'll do a little mini workshop within the institute on it and sort of educate my peers and colleagues because it's interesting. There is a whole there's been some weird, interesting intersections with with with future forecasting, and I don't know, maybe less like in current forms of psychotherapy. So this idea that there are futures that sort of percolate as almost

like a subconscious narrative across society. There was a researcher by the name of Pollock who said that you know, the story we tell about society's futures, if they're utopian, it usually suggests that society is flourishing, and if we tell dystopian stories, we're on a downward trajectory. But there was a sense that like almost in this kind of Youngian like deep subconscious that we all have a sense of the future that's coming that manifests in our stories

and narratives. And you know, I mean there there has never been any sort of fact checking, longitudinal studies of that theory. It's just sort of a it's just sort of interesting theory. But there's I think there's long been in future forecasting, even going back to the like one of the founders of the field, Alvin Toffler. His book Future Shock was about the almost a trauma of having to like move into the future when the future feels

very disruptive or very changed. And you know, he had the sense that if technology changes too fast, or social norms change too fast, or laws changed too fast, the economy change, we get we get like, we get frozen, we get anxious, we have a sense of powerlessness. So I guess in the way like futures and feelings are very much bound upked. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah. Once it hijacks you're amigdala, it's like, forget about it. You're going down a dark path there. Once it hijacks your midild,

forget about it. That's a that's like a pull quote if there's like a teaser for this episode. Once it hijacks you, Yeah, I wrote it's so true. I wrote an article about like the myth of the neurotic genius, because there's this idea that like genius imagination comes from a sort of crazy neurotic brain, and I actually showed the nerves science so that I was like, actually, it's not true. That's not true. Really good imagination is not

one that's hijacked by the AMGDA. I think maybe that's a case of like people who are stuff are often moved to make art, and so it's like the art becomes a coping mechanism rather than you need it to create. You don't need suffering to create it, but if you are suffering, you may be very much moved to like meaning making and sense making. That's a genius point you just made, because everyone, like everyone correlation like it's causation, right, and you just like broke it down. You're like, I

think it's moving in this direction. I know that I create games when I'm in deep despair, so that is my that is my sort of form of self healing. Yeah, yeah, me too. I really resonate with that deeply. Well, tell us a little about the distinction you make in your book between positive imagination and shadow imagination, because I think that maps on nicely to some of the other things

we were talking about. Yeah. Well, you know, when we consider what a future might be like at the Institute, we do try to consider both the benefits of this future, reasons to be excited about it, problems we might solve in this future, but also to balance that with well, are there maybe some unintended consequences, some risks, some harms,

but vice versa. Also, when we're imagining a future global risk or threat like climate change or pandemics, we can also try to imagine, well, what might improve in society as we come together to solve these problems, or what new technologies or social movements might come into being that would ultimately lead us to a better future. I think what we find is most people tend to have sort

of natural bias towards one or the other. Like if you give me any scenario, I can just tell you, Scott, like I can think of a hundred things that we could do to help have long term benefit. Like I just naturally go in that direction of looking for positive action to take. But that can be really unbalanced. So say there's a new technology, Well it might have all kinds of systemic harms and effect different people differently, or new policies, and you know, I need some help balancing

out my positive imagination with the shadow imagination. So when I play with scenarios, I try to bring lots of people together who can represent their own values and their fears and their worries and their interests and their communities, and we can kind of, you know, think about, well, it sounds like a great policy, but if this group's not included, then it's actually going to exacerbate economic inequality.

And if it's just for ordinary people, I find that it's like a good practice like to to if you feel really excited about something, can you balance it out with increasing your awareness of potential risks. But that's really all part of a bigger mindset that I call urgent optimism,

which I mean like positive in shadow imagination. It's it's in service of feeling this urgent optimism that there are problems to be solved, changes we need to make, and that there are new ideas and policies and technologies and social movements that can help us make that change or address that risk. So we're not frozen, we're not stuck in all ways of doing things. And I'm trying to fuel people's fire for the future by helping them not

feel so much, you know, anxiety or powerlessness. I love that. Yeah, you're urgently optimistic, virginally optimistic. Yeah, yeah, I see you did there? So did you did you coin that term? I did? And the weird thing is I coined it originally in my research on video gaming because I was trying to explain what happens essentially at a neurological level.

Why will a gamer fail ninety nine times at a level and they are convinced at the hundred times they're going to succeed, Like, why why is it that most gamers spend eighty percent of the time failing and they still say they love and activity. What is happening in the brain to keep them motivated and optimistic and high energy and high attention even when they're getting all this

negative feedback. Because I was thinking, if we could replicate this, even to a small degree at school or at work or in our personal pursuits, we might be able to stay engaged longer with tougher problems. So I first noticed it in Gamers, and you know, I think we probably talked about that on the first episode that we did together. You know, that just that constant sense that something good could happen in the game, Like we're making these decisions.

We're making up to sixty decisions a minute, and every time we make a decision, we're getting that little expectation in the brain something that could happen. My score could go up, I could hit the weapon, like I could get an advantage. It's it's this incredible abundance of hope. And because we get the feedback so quickly, we can essentially like supercharge that anticipation and reward cycle. And so

so anyway, it happens very easily in games. It doesn't happen quite as easy with regard to the future, because it takes like ten years for the future to arrive.

We don't get positive feedback. We don't get any kind of feedback when we think about the future unless we essentially try to can we engineer some feedback, which is why you know, I try to get people to play games with the future, so at least we can imagine some feedback in this situation, so that it feels like you're really playing with it and not just kind of waiting for the future to happen. Oh wow, I just came up with a title for this episode, playing Games

with the Future. I like it with Jane McGonagall, I love that. So you did this. You have many examples of this, and I thought now it would be good time to go through some examples. In two thousand and eight and twenty ten, at the Institute of the Future, you ran simulations that predicted human behavior in the face

of a global respiratory pandemic. Now that's incredible, right, Like you you simulate this precise detail from social distancing to me asking, to wildfires and even the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories and the unbridgable political divide. So in a sense,

what you're saying is you called it. Okay, Scott, Yes, And and my dream is to be the worst futurists of all time because all the things that I yeah, all the things that I predict, I tend to focus on global risks, right, So I want to be wrong. I want people to look at me and say, Jane, why were you worried about this mass migration? It never happened.

Don't you look silly? Like, don't you feel silly? And I want to be like, no, because we avoided it through action today, Like, of course, as the future is, you want to prove yourself wrong. But we did, I think sort of inadvertently back up into a really interesting study of can people can individuals accurately predict at a systemic societal level weird stuff that experts did not think

would happen? Right? So, one of the questions that we asked the participants in the two thousand and eight game, which was called superstruct was imagine that you've been asked to isolate or quarantine for a couple of weeks. Under what circumstances would you disobey? Would you refuse to isolate? What would you leave the house for? And the number one thing that people said was for religious worship, to

go to church, to go to synagogue, right. They felt it was so deeply ingrained in who they were, that it was so important to their identity and to participate in that community. And we were so actually very early on in the actual twenty twenty pandemic. We have religious leaders who participate in the institute's community, you know, priests,

we have ministers, people who lead worship. And I said, you have to go virtual because one of the most clearest facts that we got out of the simulation with people are going to prey no matter what the CDC tells them. And it turned out that that was the number one super speader risk worldwide. And people went if they were positive, they went if they were exposed. And so, you know, I there is I think a misconception that individuals are bad at predicting their future states and Scott,

you probably know there's there's some there's some research. I don't know what, like yeah, forecasting, right, like we're never as like happy, Like purchases don't make us as happy as we think they really were the future of our emotions, our happiness, right, But I feel like maybe that has been over extrapolated in the sense that I what I am starting to believe this is We've had multiple games

where people had to live through what they imagined. The first one was World Without Oil, where people imagined oil gas reaching a certain price point, and and then it did, and we're well, okay, are you driving less? Are you carpooling more? Are you working from home? Like? What are you? And people did what they said they would do. And I feel like, maybe we can accurately predict our likely reaction to a novel situation or crisis. Maybe maybe we can't.

You know, maybe we would have predicted I'll be miserable in a pandemic, and it turned out that people were actually found ways to be happy because we're so emotionally resilient. Maybe feelings aside, I do. What I see in our games is when people actually had to live through things they accurately predicted. You know, we had people practice wearing masks in the two thousand and eight game because we're like, well, what do you you know it'll be an important skill

in a pandemic, Let's try it out. But what we saw was in terms of the novelty of the physical discomfort that people were reporting, the social awkwardness. Another thing that we said at the beginning of the real pandemic is like this is even though it sounds like a small and rational action to take, there's going to be problems. So people are not going to want to follow this

simple advice. It's going to get complicated, and so yeah, so I think, you know, I'm I'm excited about trying to revisit this idea about like can we predict our own futures? Because I think there is on one level, it is absolutely true that we are experts on our own futures in terms of understanding our values, our needs, you know, what we would likely be afraid of, or what would drive us to take action in defiance of

you know, advice or or common sense. So yeah, this is another one of those areas where I think there's good, good dialogue to be had in the future, like what can people predict about their own future accurately and how might we leverage that intelligence because in some ways I think ordinary people are proving to be better experts on the future than the experts. Well, this is really interesting

what you're saying. It kind of contradicts some of the psychology evidence to a certain degree, and in a good way. I'm glad that you're contradicting this psychic because some of it's pessimistic showing that people are really well, I don't

know if it's pessimisic. So, but here's the finding. People predict that under a catastrophes like that, they say, well, if I in both hordonic directions, so if they say, if I win the lottery, I'll be this happy, so so happy, and they're usually not as happy eventually after

like a day than what they predict. And then it opposites in the other direction as well, where people will say, well, if I lost all my arms and legs, you know, I would be this unhappy, you know, But then they look to see people who don't have arms and legs just how you know, sad it is for them and the people who in the past have you know, people get a car accidents things like that, and they adapt to So there's kind of like an overarching point I get from all that research is that humans have an

amazing resiliency as well as kind of an innate kind of thermog regulation thing that constantly gets us back to some baseline, that biological temperament that we have, Like we different our set point, but we all have a sort of biological temperament. So I'm wondering how that sort of evidence research details us with what you're saying. Yeah, I mean if we accept that that is correct, which I have read much of that literature, and I generally accept

that it's correct, even in my own lived experience. Right. So that's affective forecasting, But behavioral forecasting is different. So like Scott, for example, what if I said a year from today. Okay, so it's March fourteenth, twenty twenty three, and you're on an airplane and you've got a parachute on, and they're asking you if you want to jump. Do you think you could fairly accurately predict whether you are likely to jump or to wait for the plane to

land and walk off the plane. Oh my gosh, what a what a question. Now, now I just have a follow up question, what are the probabilities they give me that thing is going to land? It's like it's a pleasure, it's a pleasure ride, Like I don't know what's happened. You've been like your friends are like, we're going parachute. I mean basically, so it's not a catastrophe in the place,

could you it will land? But could you accurately do you feel like I feel I could pretty accurately tell you that short of them paying me ten to twenty million dollars, I would not do it. It's just not in my nature. I'm not brave enough. I'm interested in thrills enough, and I think I'd be traumatized by it, so I would I would avoid it. I'd have flashbacks the rest of my life. So that's what I would feel. And I am pretty confident that if you put me on a plane a year from now, that is how

I would act. Now, maybe something would change. But do you feel like you could give a pretty accurate prediction? I answer, and here's what if I if it was sprung on me, If it was sprung on me without any I had no idea this was going to happen. Like I'm on the plane with all my friends. They we're having fun there. Oh by the way, Scott, we're jumping. I could say with very high confidence it ain't going to happen, folks, ain't going to happen. I'll take the

videos on Instagram for you, right right. My nuanced answer is that the way knowing me, that's something that could potentially excite me that idea of doing that someday if I worked my way up psychologically and I started with like five feet where I jumped off a plane five people above the ground, that went up and build up to it. Yeah, me, I don't think I'm going to say so that's great. So see, you're using your own knowledge of yourself to make the most accurate prediction you

can and under what circumstances your prediction would change. So my theory is now having run I don't know, a dozen of these simulation games and being able to follow up with people to varying degrees like life. Actually sounds similar to the scenario that we imagine that if you were to get one hundred people together to make a prediction like that most of them, you know, a high a very high majority, not just like fifty to fifty chance,

but a high majority would would accurately predict. Because we know ourselves, and although we change, we we can, we still we look good. We've good intelligence. We're like we're like the CIA or FBI for our own minds. And so I think you know, one of the one of the big scenarios that we're playing with now, this idea of what if up to a billion people on the planet need to move forced migration due to extreme heat, drought,

WildFly wildfires and that sort of thing. Right, That's that's right, smack in the middle of expert estimates for migration in the next few decades. Right, So what if we were to try to I'm imagining move people equitably and intentionally instead of having people sort of risk life or death trying to illegally get into countries get on ships that are sinking. What if we established a global effort similar

to trying to roll out the COVID nineteen vaccine. What if we had a decade to roll out a planned, equitable, safe, economically supported migration to the most climate resilient places on Earth? Who want to have denser cities where we might see more than creativity and innovation and productivity and all of that. Right, And so one of the things I'm asking people is simply what their risk for climate or what their tolerance for climate risk will be, what their decision making process

will be. So there's a survey that participants take and ask questions like how many days of extreme air pollution are you willing to tolerate a year before you feel like it's time to move. How many days of extreme heat like over o one hundred and twenty degrees? How many days without power because the power grid is brittle and due to extreme weather? How many days of well whatever, you know all the the climate risk factors. And then and also where would you move? Where would you consider moving?

Like list your top destinations if there was financial support to move? And northern California is no longer safe because of the wildfires, which that's where I live, Where do you think you might go? And so one trying to stimulate imagination in individuals just for themselves so that they're not like that they've never thought about it, let's at least start thinking about it in case we have to move, but also just to collect some information about I guess

how fixed are we going to be? Like, look at what happened with the pandemic, and it was moving from city to city, and yet the rest of the world is like, Eh, it's just China, Okay, wh's just Italy Okay, it's just New York City. And I'm curious about how quickly or slow we might be to start moving people

before there is extreme suffering? Are we going to wait until things are really really bad and we don't have a lot of time and people are soft, or is there a chance maybe if we start imagining now that we might actually start moving people around the planet in a way that supports human flourishing and less you know, like not leaving people trap behind borders. And I think

we could get some good intelligence by asking people these questions. Now, Yeah, this is so important, and I guess I'm wondering, You've done great experiments on this for your recruit participants and do this formally. How can the scale up right? So how can like everyone on Twitter get a chance to participate? Yeah? Okay, So the Institute for the Future just opened its first online simulation center where any member of the public can join.

Amazing and we're doing a few things. There's a monthly scenario club, so it's like a book club, but for scenarios. So this Wednesday we're having our first meeting, and it's in multiple meetups because we have members from literally all over the world. We have over eight countries now in our community. We just opened a few weeks ago, but it's great, great for building empathy see the future from

different points of view. So we're doing Scenario Club. We're doing twice a year social simulations full on, spend ten days deeply imagining a specific scenario. We're looking at decision making around geoengineering. How will the planet decide if we're going to inject self a particles into the atmosphere to block the sun for ten years? Will we get off fossil fuels? Things like that? How will we get informed consent from all of humanity? So you can come and participate.

We're doing game nights future for Gasting game nights, and I'm hoping that by bringing people together to play these games with each other and with me and other experts at the institute, they'll take these skills and habits and games. And in my book Imaginable, there's a whole chapter like, so you want to run a social simulation, here's how, and you know, walkshoo step by step through the creative process.

Because I don't think, I don't think it's going to be a case where we have, you know, two hundred

million people playing the same simulation. As much as I would like, you know, them to be as popular as you know, Fortnite or Minecraft, I think more likely this will be a skill that lots of people have and can create their own simulations and their own scenarios to examine different futures, whether it's inside a company to imagine like long term implications of a new product or service or building, or within a city, you know, a township,

a school. Yes, that's that's how I hope it will scale out, not as one big game that necessarily we all have to play at the same time, but as many hundreds of thousands of scenario designers and simulation developers all creating their own futures. Sounds like a fun position to be a scenario designer. That's cool. Well, here's some challenges in the next decade that are really important to think through. To think the the unthinkable human migration issues

due to climate change. I looked into that moon after reading about that in your book, and I was like, holy cow, that we're really not prepared. I mean, there are people who just don't even want people to migrate into America, and it's like, Okay, can we think a little more broadly about the about this because there might become a day where, to no fault of anyone, you know, they can't even live where they are anymore, and that could be you by the not you gene. But you

know what I'm saying. The people who are said no migration, you know, like to say, well, look this could be you if okay, so how have you changed the asteroid forecast? Another big pontential threat that opened my mind up big time, those threats. The future of food is medicine. Incredible. You really brought in my mind with that, and I looked into I did research in all these because I was like, I'm so nerdy and I'm like, oh my gosh, is true. And I was like, oh, now I'm like obsessing over

like these issues. But anyway, it is a pretty much a proven fact with it. This is one of my favorite things to stety is if you play with the scenario, it essentially creates more salience for that topic in your brain, Like you'll get a reward hit when you see information

out in the world about it. So it's like, if you play about food as medicine, if you hear about new pilot programs to give away free fresh fruits and vegetables instead of having to pay this money for healthcare treatment later, it's going to just blinking neon vegas lights to your brain and you totally It's like you just totally start to see the clues everywhere. It's a little trippy, but you know it's cool because you learn faster, You

notice a change faster because everything's jumping out at you. Well, I changed my meal delivery service this week to all vegan. You're ready for that. You're ready for the alpha gal crisis. I don't know if you got to that one about the tick tickborn pandemic where we just kicked off a big simulation of that in our urgent Optimist community last Friday.

People getting ready for a world in which I mean it's people are excited, you know, I mean it's Ostensibly the simulation is about the next time we face a pandemic, will we learn from COVID and do better? But I didn't want to re traumatize people by having a simulation about a similar contagious virus. So we're simulating a tickborn pandemic where it doesn't spread from person to person. It

spreads via ticks. It's not a virus, it's you develop an allergic reaction to a sugar molecule that's found in mammalion meat products. Like this is a real thing that exists. We're imagining it. And on one hand, what I hear from a lot of people like where will they find hope for the future. They want to believe that will do better next time? And even today I just saw always an op ed in the New York Times will

we do better next time? Everybody's trying to figure out, you know, reasons to feel like there's hope we've learned, Yeah, to make meaning out of what we've lived through. Right, But at the same time, you know, with these these are games, I want them to feel like they are psychological safe spaces where you're not going to You're not going to have to just be overwhelmed with negative emotions in order to do the mental imagination. So yeah, we changed it to something well, I mean like we change

it to the tickboard thing. But man, people are into it. They're thinking about because it helps them imagine making changes that I feel like they want to make anyway, like a more sustainable plant based diet, which in this pandemic you would have to undertake because it could literally kill you if you have meat. You know, it's weird how scenarios work like that. It's like, we may never live

through a tickboarrem pandemic. But you can play with the future scenario and it can change your behavior today and in ways that you support your health and happiness. And so it's it's like this weird you know, we're thinking about the future. It's changing our bea today. And yeah, it's like it's almost like the time space continuum is collapsing a little bit in our minds. It's incredible, it's amazing. God bless the default mode brain network. Yes, thank you

for teaching me about that. Thank you, Because it's all all of future imagination. Can we do that? I'm imagining the sound of the lab. Yeah, I mean that's that's where the future imagination is because you can't get that information from the reality that's around you, right, there are no facts about the future. It has to come from your own creativity, inner stream of consciousness. Yeah. And then another big challenge that I had been aware of before,

but you'd derided me. Just how things can go wrong here the peril and promise of facial recognition technology. Oh boy, that could lead to some really not just bias bias is good, but discrimination, which is not good. Yeah. Yes, And I think you know I was in doing the

research for this book. I was unbelievably, I don't know, unnerved by discovering that the pandemic actually accelerated this technology because the companies that create facial recognition software they had to figure out how to recognize people with masks on, and they did it. All of the leading facial recognition companies Now they only need to see this little tiny sliver of your eyes, and so suddenly the technology is

leap frogging. And you know, I'm asking people to imagine a world in which it's not just the government or police. It's on our apps, it's in dating apps, it's in our social media sites. And I always say, Scott, I'm like obsessed with trying to help people find ways not just to imagine the future, but to feel like more

prepared for it. And one of the things I'm like, if people get you know, like, oh, facial recognition, which that I do, you can go to YouTube and you can look for a video tutorial on how to apply adversarial makeup, so you can apply makeup that confuses the algorithms, and you know, it's going to be like a dance because of the algorithms. I'm sure we'll get better and

then we'll have makeup. This makeup on me, you would look like you were from the eighties because there's a lot of geometric like geometric shapes, like you have like a big triangle over one eye, like in purple, and like I'm kind of big in this. I've been I've been inspired by Andy Warholely to kind of change my look. So maybe maybe that would be the direction. I've been trying to think of what direction going, but maybe that

could work. Okay, Scott, I love that for you. I love that life choice for you, because then you would become a walking change. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, like literally you're from the future. People be like, Scott, what are you doing and you're like, let me tell you about facial recognition, and yeah, totally undred percent yes. And it would also make me I've been warning some improv techniques from Second City, so yes, And it also would signal like rebelliousness, which

is cool. It's cool, it's cool, like, yes, it's right. He's like I don't care about anything, right, Rack, I did make me be like no, I'm like standing up against the system, tying to it's steal information. It's very punk rock to wear adversarial makeup. It's true. Maybe that's

why I like it. It's like my midlife crisis. I need to be like rage against the machine again with my facial But then I'll tell you've got on the other hand, So I have people imagine the scenario that we use to imagine how facial recognition might affect us.

Is I have you imagined that you're out in public somewhere and you pick a us place, because we wish trying to make it as specific as possible, because it really works better when it's not just vague facts but like a like a real movie playing in your mind. So I say, you know, pick a pick a street in the city you live, or pick a restaurant or a store, your some pace you'r someplace specific, and you notice somebody picking up their phone and there's this gesture

in the future. It's just just like click, whoop and then down and it's like the sign that you've been face yeah, face scanned and or face searched. Right. I think it's how we I had described it in the book, and and I just asked you, like, how do you feel? And does it does this does your feeling change depending on who's face searching you? What if it's like a really attractive person, What if it's a kid. What if it's somebody in a uniform and we're kind of like

it does it probably does? It probably does feel creepy. I asked people to can you imagine a situation in which you would be happy to be face searched? Because we have to figure out why is this technology even going to be adopted in the first place. I mean, there must be benefits, there must be conveniences, there must

be social opportunities attached to it. And so I think what's really going to blindside us is if we think a technology sounds so dystopian we just can't even believe it would ever be adopted, Like I think a lot of people feel that way about facial recognition. They are so convinced that it is just, you know, big brother dystopian. It will definitely be regulated, it will definitely not be pervasive.

Normal people will not be into this. I think we could use a little help imagining why ordinary people might be into it, so that we're not so shocked and unprepared to make good decisions like we made terrible decisions about social media. I would say, as a society like how we would use it and what we'd use it for, and how we would regulate it. So maybe if we uh and literally, because people thought it was a joke, we were like, oh, what do you you're tweeting about

what you ate for? B what's that a picture of your you know, shoes? Who's good? Like it was? It was dismissed as so you know, patently stupid that nobody's going to use it. It's not going to be important, you know, So we miss the opportunity to shape the future when we're dismissive. So it's just, you know, as you said earlier, it's a balance of positive and shadow imagination. We need a little more positive imagination so that we

might anticipate what would lead people to embrace facial recognition. Yeah, I love this And what also love about what you're doing is you are applaying some science, some systematic systematicity. Is that a word? Is that a word? That is a word ray systematicity? So can you tell our listeners a little bit about the scoring methods that researchers use in scientific studies to document the benefits of futures? Thinking, mmmm,

let's well, there's lots of different ways to measure. There's ways to measure skill at future imagination, and there's ways to I mean, what should we should we start with skill at future imagination or should we start with like's how do you quantify that? Yeah? I mean it? Yeah. So one is the vividness. So you can literally you ask people to speak out loud, or you can measure

by taking somebody's story that they tell. So I could say, Scott, picture yourself walking on the beach ten years from today. Just describe it, take a few moments to write it down or just speak it out loud, and then you just count up the number of details. Right, So is there sounds, sites, smells, emotions, Did you describe who you were with? Is it a specific person or is it vague a friend you know? Did you describe what you were wearing where their colors involved textures? So the more details,

the higher the specificity score. And this is something that I work with people all the time to increase the specificity of their imagination because one of the reasons that we do future imagination is to overcome normalcy bias, so that you are the more specific your imagination, the more plausible you rate a possible future and My mission is to get people to believe that risks we dismiss and downplay and underestimate, like a pandemic or mass climbate migration,

Like that it's real and we should take it seriously and don't just don't let your brains normally biased just because it's never lived through it before. Don't let your brain, you know, get stuck assuming it will never happen. So the more of details, the more likely you are to think it's plausible. So I work with people's constantly, like, make it more like the most detailed description you can. You you said hello to your you know neighbor, Well

write the quote. I want to know the exact words that came out of your mouth and facial expressions your neighbor made when you've shared the news, so we get very So that's one thing we can measure. We can

measure immersiveness. So we ask people after they imagine, God, imagine yourself walking on the beach ten years from now, I can just ask you to rate, like on a likeer scale, how how much did you have the feeling of as if you were already there, as if you were preliving it, or how absorbed did you feel so we rate on immersiveness, we can also rate future imagination

skill on flexibility. So you could go through this whole imagine yourself ten years in the future on the beach, and then I'll be like, okay, Scott, I want you to reimagine this. Change as many details as you can change your physical you know reality, if you were totally you know, your body was exactly how it is today. I want you to change what's different about your body

ten years from now. How does it feel to be walking on the beach differently, change the change the time of day if it was the morning now it's And you see how many details you can change while still coming up with a realistic or plausible story. And so you count the number of changes, and then how again on a likeer scale, how realistic does this new reimagining mean? And so if you're able to come up with highly highly realistic but also everything's different, that's the sign of

your your mental flexibility around imagining the future. So there's just techniques, and you know, when I work with students, we're just practice these little habits. But one of my favorite ways to measure the benefit is so like pathways for future action. So I might have you imagine climate migration, and then I would say, Scott, how many how many things can you think of that you could do today to be more ready for this future or to influence how this future turns out, like if you want to

prevent it or change it in some way. And again you just score somebody on how many things they can list. You know, they could say, well, I could research what the most climate safe cities and countries are likely to be. I could see if I have any legal pathways to migration. I could learn a new language so I can welcome people who move from Indonesia. I could learn how to cook food from Indonesia. Since you know the game says

many people are likely to move from there. I want to be ready to help people feel welcome by cooking for them. The more things that you could list things you could do today that can considered having more pathways to impact the future. It's similar to the idea of like pathways of hope. How do you feel your self efficacy? I am sure you yeah, So that would be another way, And a lot of people feel like they have no way to impact the future. So this is actually very meaningful.

If you can go from being like I don't know what to do about climate change. To having a list of like twenty things that you can do that help you be ready for it or change it or shape it can really create a profound shift and just our emotional state today because we don't want to feel powerless. We want to feel powerful. Thank you so much for listening that, because I was wondering how you measured some

of these things. For instance, it said that as an outcome of that simulation in two thousand and eight and twenty ten, with the Global Respiratory Pandemic simulation, those who participated in the simulation were less shell shocked when COVID nineteen hit, and we're able to act and adapt faster to change. To me, that's incredible and just speaks volumes to the benefit of your approach. I was just curious scientifically how you like measured those two things, like less

shell shocked and ability to adapt faster to change. Yes, yes, well, in that case, you simply kind of ask people how surprise were you, How Like when did you start making changes in your routine or in the supplies you were gathering, So that would be a different that's a different that's a different type of measure, right, because the other measures are more about like changing in the moment. Now for that one, you had to wait, yeah, for reality to

show up to see if it made a difference. Yeah, for sure did Were we able to get one hundred percent of the same participants? Nori Eletricia, Oh, yeah, Well, because it wasn't set up as a longitudinal study. And that's this has been my big my big like call to the community is that we have to start doing longitudinal studies here. I mean, we're claiming to impact the future. We got to follow up. There's only been one big longitudinal study of these types of methods, and it was

on business performance. So companies that practice these types of you know, scenario development and collecting signals of change, they you know, make more money, they have more innovation whatever. I mean, if you're a capitalist that it sounds great, you know, go for it. I'm like more working at the level of you know, change the world, reform society, you know, our personal well being. So no, it was

very scattershot. I would say I wouldn't I wouldn't take my experience with superstruct or evoke in terms of how it impacted our experience with future to be. It's not don't it's not anecdotal, but it's very qualitative and I really want there to be more and better evidence about

this in the future. The one randomized control trial that was conducted on the second game of Voke, the World Bank did an impact evaluation where they had some players play this game and imagine helping with a future scenario in which it was also about forced displacement due to violent conflicts, so similar to what we're seeing in Ukraine.

They were imagining that in Colombia and what they would do to help, How would they use their skills and abilities to help themselves, their family, or others in their community. And they found that people who played this future's game, they had more pathways to actually impact the future. They were able to, at the end of it, name more actions they could actually take. They felt more confident that global challenges could be solved, more optimistic that they could

use their own skills and abilities. They were better able to articulate actual, concrete, realistic things they could do than a peer group that took traditional university coursework in social change, social entrepreneurship, political action. So there was something about the scenario that led to statistically significant increases in that confidence, that hope, that that future power or self efficacy. But again, nobody has followed up that study was you know, five

or six years ago. If they ever have to live through it, does it actually impact them? To be honest, I don't know of anybody who would be set up for that. Now, if you have ideas for you know, we need a grant. Basically, we need some We need somebody with a long term grant because it's going to take ten years to follow up and figure this out.

It's a lot of things. It takes that, but it also takes having for the real foresight and imagination to be able to have some surnay then ten years this thing will happen, right because imagine you imagine that there's nowhere to follow up with right that didn't happen? Yeah, yeah, right, it's no, but it's good. It's true. It's hard, and

is this something I've struggled with my whole career. It's like, you want to you want to create a body of scientific evidence to support these ideas, but it's it's hard to do. It's hard to do really rigorous studies of such uncertain domains, and like you said, if we don't know if we're ever going to live through it, how do we design. The only thing we can really measure

is how people feel today. And so that's where most of the research that I've seen is this thinking about the future make us feel better today, and that's at least there's something there. We'll be confidently Tha, something good, Yeah, something good. You're doing really great work. Hopefully we get enough, you can get enough funding, some data. Buy a crystal ball. I hear they're expensive. Joke. Okay, okay, a sorofski crystal there was Those things are in the millions probably. So

I want to end on this quote. You've been really gentius with your time. When to end here with your quote said that says, imagine doing something incredibly new and exciting for the next ten years years of your I want you to be able to imagine yourself doing and creating amazing things that would have been unthinkable and unimaginable before you had the futures thinking tools to inspire you.

So want to enter that note and encourage our listeners to do that, you know, energize their lives, give them hope bye by by thinking the unimaginable in their lives in a positive direction. Thank you, Jane. The work you're doing, even though it's not long as Jounel, is still amazing and awesome and you're very You're so unique in this space. So thanks for chatting with me today on this Ecology Podcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast.

If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.