191 | Jane McGonigal on How to Imagine the Future

0:00:00.0 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I forget whether I've told this story before, but back in the early days of the World Wide Web, so not the Internet, the Internet goes back further, but the idea of web browsers, right, there were first text-based web browsers. There was one called Lynx L-Y-N-X, which was a pun because you clicked on a link. Eventually, there were image-based web browsers, Mosaic from NCSA was everybody's favorite thing, and then ultimately Netscape, Netscape was the real-time when not only could you see images in your web browser, but it was relatively fast, you didn't have to wait for 10 minutes for a page to download, and also Netscape was important because it was commercialized, they had an initial public offering and people were very, very excited, and as an early adopter of the web, I was there, I used Netscape all the time, I was very excited. I had no money to invest, so I was not part of the big bubble in the Netscape stock prices, but I was asked by my friends who had no idea what the web was like, "What's the big deal? Why is this going to be so important?"

0:01:08.3 SC: And I honestly couldn't do a very good job of explaining why it was going to be important, I had an intuition, had a feeling this was going to be a big deal. I would have invested in Netscape had there been money, but when people ask, how are they gonna make money off of that? I really couldn't answer. I did not have a good idea. I could point to actual web pages that existed, but they were largely along the lines of video camera pointing at a coffee maker, so you could see whether there was coffee in the coffee maker or not, and no one was impressed by that. You could order pizza, but people knew how to order pizza by using the phone, so again, what was the point? Anyway, the point of the story is the future, it's hard to predict, [chuckle] even if you know something specific is going to happen, the implications of whatever it is is gonna happen, it can be very, very hard to anticipate. There's so many moving parts in society, in technology, in the world, that predicting the future can be very, very tricky. So today's guest, Jane McGonigal, started out and became well known as a game designer and also author and has moved into being a futurist, systematically predicting, imagining what the future is going to be like.

0:02:26.3 SC: And you might wonder what is the connection between these two things, but if you're a game designer, I don't mean games like Solitaire or Candy Crush, I mean these massive multi-player games, where you have an avatar and there's a world, you've built a world, and there are rules, they might not be the same rules as our world, but you can kind of see when you put it that way, what the connection is between game design and futurism, because when you're predicting the future, you're trying to simulate an extraordinarily complex system. And oftentimes, you can't actually make the prediction yourself, you have to let people follow the rules of the game and see what's gonna happen.

0:03:01.9 SC: It is very often the case that things happen in these massive games where the game designers themselves did not predict it, that's exactly the kind of thing you have in the future. You might imagine doing a simulation of the future, giving a bunch of people different parameters, different changes, the society's undergone, different technological or scientific advances, and asking them how they would adapt. I'm not gonna give away any of the secrets here, But Jane's message is that we can become better at thinking about the future and imagining what's going to happen. We can train our brains to do it. Games are one way of doing it, but there's other ways of thinking about the future in more productive ways. Anyone has lived through the past couple of years can no doubt understand how important it is to get a better handle on what the future is going to be like. So let's go.

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0:04:08.0 SC: Jane McGonigal, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:12.6 Jane Mcgonigal: Thank you. I'm very excited to be here.

0:04:14.6 SC: This is very exciting. So as I just told you before we started recording, I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for a long time to talk about games and gaming, but now you've come up with a completely different book, imaginable about futurism, thinking about the future, but I still wanna start with the games, if that's okay, 'cause I do think it actually...

0:04:32.1 JM: Sure.

0:04:33.1 SC: It makes sense to me how you started out as a game designer and then became more of a futurist, so maybe... I'm sure that there are some heavy gamers in the audience and some not so much, so why don't you give your sales pitch or explanation for how important gaming is to the modern world?

0:04:49.0 JM: Sure. Well, so you know, my research background is studying the psychological impacts of playing video games, and when I was doing my PhD, I became kind of obsessed with the sense that gamers were developing skills and abilities that might have some transferable benefit to our real world problems, and I came to this obsession because gamers were saying, "Give us something real," and all these online communities and forums, they seemed hungry for non-virtual challenges to solve, and so I kind of made it my business to figure out, could we invent a new genre of games that it still feels like play, but it really taps into that unique skill set of a flexible mindset and creative thinking and collaboration and collective intelligence, and this kind of unbelievable resilience that gamers have, where if they can't figure something out right away, they stay with it, and it just seemed like such a great skill set to apply to things like climate change and ending poverty and imagining a better world, and that's... That's how I kind of transitioned into becoming a game developer myself, trying to experiment with different genres of games that might connect gamers abilities with real world challenges.

0:06:29.0 SC: Well, and one thing that you point out right there is that there is a tremendous amount of effort and intellectual exertion right now being put into the world by gamers, and I don't know whether in your mind a gamer is someone who is just playing some console or PC game or does it count to play Solitaire on your iPhone also?

0:06:51.3 JM: Well, I mean... Does it count? [chuckle] 'Cause I spent 20 years now studying the psychology of games, and Solitaire could count for something, it could count for your regulating your thoughts and emotions, you're using the game to turn off depressive rumination or to stop a panic attack, and it's... That you're controlling your imagination to not have anxious thoughts. I mean, yeah, so Solitaire in your phone could count for something. Solitaire in your phone, especially if you've been playing it for 20, or 30, or 40 years, [chuckle] as many people like they find a game they like and then that's the only game they play, I mean that does not necessarily lend itself to developing a collective intelligence skill set, 'cause you're playing by yourself. There's a certain super power, the ability to learn new systems quickly that comes from playing games that you've never played before, new interfaces, new genres, new challenges. So I always say if you want the benefits and skill sets of gaming, you really do wanna be trying different games, and particularly one that many other people are playing because so much of what's interesting about gaming comes from that collective collaborative culture.

0:08:07.4 SC: Yeah, and maybe this is just worth spelling out for, again, probably there's some people who just don't do this at all, and maybe they have an image of games as mostly you're shooting other people or aliens or something like that, but the social aspects and not just social in the sense that you're collaborating and cooperating, but there's a different kind of society that appears within the game, and this is something that is a brave new world that many people are already dived into, but many people are completely shut out from.

0:08:37.2 JM: Yeah, and one of my favorite examples from recent gaming history is Pokémon GO, so Pokémon GO, amazing augmented reality game, it just kind of dropped without a lot of preliminary instruction like, "Here's what to expect from this game, here's how it works, here's how to play it," just kind of dropped, and within 30, I think it was 30 days, 30-60 days, it was half a billion downloads, it was the fastest growing product or service in human history, going back to like the invention of fire or the wheel, [chuckle] never before have we seen more people try something new faster. And what was so fun to watch was this explosion of Wikis, and forums, and YouTube videos, and walk-throughs, and screen capture, people trying to figure out how does this game work, what are we supposed to do, what are the tricks and tips, and what's the full spectrum of possibility here? And the players taught themselves, they taught each other. It was like this scientific investigation, we could all develop hypotheses.

0:09:43.6 JM: Am I supposed to do this? If I play it like this, will it work? And everybody was learning together and documenting this game together, and I kind of just love that Niantic dropped the game without a lot of explanation because it allowed this incredible explosion of collaborative, collective investigation, and for me, that's what's most interesting about any video game culture, whether it's Minecraft or Fortnite, people are exploring the full possibility space or pushing on the limits of the code and the problem space, and there's so much just creativity and sharing and teaching in all of these games, and so that to me, that's what's exciting about it. And it's very social, but it's social in an interesting way that really, really values teaching, and co-learning, and helping. Even if the games are competitive, even if you're shooting virtual weapons at each other, it's still this intensely collaborative collective culture, and I love that, and we should bring it to all aspects of our lives.

0:10:55.4 SC: Well, there seems that a practical level may be to be a barrier to entry, if you're a person of a certain age, who did not grow up doing this kind of thing, and you look in the store and there's these consoles and these people spend hours and hours every day doing this and how can you compete. Do you think that everyone should, roughly speaking, be thinking about or participating in games like this, or do you think that it's... For some people, it's good and for others, take it or leave it?

0:11:23.0 JM: No, I do think essentially, every human being should participate in some gaming culture.

0:11:32.8 SC: Good.

0:11:33.2 JM: In the same way that I would say every human being should read and should exercise. It does seem like essential fuel for our creativity, and our mental resilience, and the range of positive emotions that we feel. Now, I never tell anyone to go out and buy a gaming console unless they're into it, you can play... Just use your phone, use your personal computer. There's an infinite number of games, and I always say, if you're not sure where to start, just post on social media, ask your friends and family, what do you think I should be playing right now, and are you willing to teach me if I don't know how to play it? [chuckle] Because one of the biggest social benefits of playing these games is you develop something in common with other people in your life. I'll never forget how important it was to me when my daughters were born seven years ago, and I started spending a lot more time with my mother-in-law who was helping us care for twins, which is a lot of work, [chuckle] and she started playing Candy Crush Saga, which was the only game I had the energy to play after our daughters were born. And she just emailed me a few weeks ago, saying that she had gotten to level 3000 and was so glad she hadn't given up, she's gonna stop at level 250, and... [chuckle]

0:12:57.2 JM: It's this thing we still have in common seven years later. I'm not still playing this game but I understand it, we can talk about what's challenging about it. I can log in and send her some gifts to help her if she's stuck on a level. Building this common foundation, it allows us to keep the conversation going. People interact more and have conversations about real world topics more with people that they play these games with, even if we're just doing Pokémon GO Raids together virtually every few weeks, we're more likely to talk about other stuff, it just creates this rhythm of interaction and this common foundation. So yeah, if you don't know what to play, ask people you already have relationships with, what they're playing, people you might like to talk to more often, have something more in common with, a common experience, and then, yeah, make them teach you. It was great. People who love games love teaching other people how to play, so it lets them be...

0:13:51.4 SC: That's true.

0:13:52.3 JM: In that position of mentoring, of coaching, which is again, is a huge positive social benefit.

0:14:00.3 SC: Well, you make some provocative statements about the emotional or psychological impact of games. There's both who we are in the game and then how that affects our personality outside. You said that we are our best selves when we're inside a game. What do you mean by that?

0:14:16.3 JM: And I should say often we are our best selves, [chuckle] so sometimes...

0:14:19.9 SC: There are footnotes.

0:14:21.7 JM: Sometimes we get stuck and not all gaming communities are equally positive. I mean, there are certainly toxic gaming communities, and there're games that I don't participate in because people do kind of get angry at each other too often, so I will say if we're talking broadly speaking, that gaming does develop this psychological self-efficacy, so games are designed to be challenging and hard and frustrate us, and if we play a game, we have to be willing to be frustrated, we have to be willing to be challenged to be bad at something, to get that feedback, like, "Nope, not good. Not, right, not working."

0:15:01.4 JM: And so we develop this ease and comfort with not being good at something the first time we try it, of managing these negative emotions, which frustration and confusion and uncertainty, and we put ourselves in a position to get better at dealing with them by staying engaged with the game, and games are designed very carefully and purposefully so that alongside the frustration, there's hope, there is always something around the corner that might make you a little bit stronger in the game or give you a tip, or you can go online and you can learn from other players, you're not in it alone, even if it's a solo game, you're never in it alone, so we learn to ask for help from others or advice from others, we learn to try again. And truly, it's such a wonderful way of being, being comfortable with needing to grow, needing to improve through our own effort and attention, and it does seem to be transferable to other situations.

0:16:00.9 JM: There have been laboratory studies where you can separate people into groups who frequently game and people who don't, or you can get people who don't game and you can put them through a six-week gaming boot camp and then see, have they changed their response to purposely difficult work, intentionally impossible puzzles to solve, do they try more strategies, do they stay engaged? How fast do they give up, are they likely to turn to the other person in the lab [chuckle] and ask them for help? We see that these behaviors, they can translate to our real world interactions, not just in the virtual world, and what I have found in my work with gamers and also validate or reflected in the research literature, is that actually having conversations about this skill set helps it translate.

0:16:58.3 JM: So I have kids, when I see them not giving up in a game, I make sure to validate that and reflect that back to them and be like, "That's amazing, I know you've been trying to get off this level for a while. How many times have you tried, 100 times? [chuckle] Gosh, I love how determined you are, I love... I love that you're someone who doesn't give up when things are hard," when we talk to each other and reflect the skill set, then people, whether they're kids or they're grown ups, everybody, we're more likely to see ourselves as this is part of our identity. I'm someone who doesn't give up, I'm someone who can always come up with a new idea or strategy, I'm someone who knows where to get help or not afraid to ask for help, and we bring that with us. So yes, that is the core benefit, and we should lean into it, and we should get it.

0:17:43.9 SC: And meanwhile, you alluded to this already, but these people are learning skills, whether it's concentration, or puzzle-solving, or whatever, and so it is very natural to ask because I guess to back up a little bit, the flip side of everything you're saying is, couldn't these people be doing something more productive with all the time that they're putting into the games, and I think that part of your answer is, "Why not both, why not do it at the same time?"

0:18:09.6 JM: Yeah, I mean, just to kind of put the amount of human effort being poured into games still into context, so think about a game, Candy Crush Saga, which I don't know if the game [0:18:18.7] ____ been around for almost a decade now, I think, the amount of time that people are still spending playing this game is equivalent to the three biggest organizations on Earth, so I think it's like Walmart's, McDonald's, and the Chinese Army. [chuckle] I forget exactly what the three organizations are, but the amount of human labor spent solving Candy Crush levels is equivalent to the three largest organizations on Earth in term of how much time is still spent every day. And so it is natural to ask could we siphon on a little bit of that off? It's like, not all of our time has to be productive, there is...

0:19:00.0 JM: My God, I'm not saying all play has to have a serious purpose, but yeah, maybe, maybe we spend one of the 20 hours a week we spend gaming, playing games that help us build that bridge between what we're good at in these virtual environments and what the world really needs, which is more creativity and the ability to anticipate. For me, personally, my passion is gamers anticipating future risk, future global threats, how we could prepare, how we could respond, how we could help others, whether it's pandemics, or mass climate migration, or unanticipated consequences of geo-engineering efforts, that's where I think, come spend one of these 21 hours a week you're spending gaming on one of these cool future forecasting games.

0:19:48.0 SC: Well, as a game designer, have you discovered that things happen in the game that you, the designer, did not anticipate, just because it is kind of handed over to a bunch of smart people trying to solve puzzles in a different way?

0:20:00.7 JM: Oh, absolutely, that right. So game developers call that emergence, it's when you design a certain set of challenges, or rules, or behaviors and then player show up, and they're doing something totally different from what you anticipated, which is why when it comes to forecasting the future, I don't think you can do better than to invite a bunch of people who have that facility of surprising you and surprising each other, because one of the issues we have in really being prepared for the future is we have this kind of normalcy bias where we assume things will continue the way they are, we expect the future to be more or less like the present, and we kinda need some people to surprise us and shake us up and say like, Whoa, You think that's what's gonna happen?

0:20:44.6 JM: Well, if I were in the future, here's what I'd do. And when I designed these future forecasting games, I always try to assign a certain subset of the community to be what I would call the griefers, which are people whose only job in the simulation is look at what other people are trying to do, the solutions they propose, the positive actions they say they would take, and try to mess it up. What would you do to break it, to block it, to twist it into something that creates social division? Because we know if one thing, there's a subset of the gaming community that's quite good at antagonizing other people's best effort, so we can even... We can even put that to good by allowing them to channel that energy into complicating the other positive strategies that people suggest, so that, again, we're more prepared for the real world, when things do tend to become more complicated or there may be opposition that we didn't anticipate.

0:21:51.6 SC: So that's interesting. I think I get this, but let me say it out loud so you can tell me whether I'm just projecting on to what's going on, I can certainly imagine trying to understand more about the future through simulation, I mean war games or something like that, try to do that, do you just put a computer to work, ask him what will happen?

0:22:09.3 JM: No. No. No.

0:22:12.1 SC: But...

0:22:12.2 JM: No, no.

0:22:12.4 SC: Exactly.

0:22:12.5 JM: Don't put a computer to work put people to work, but go ahead yeah.

0:22:15.8 SC: No, I think this is exactly the sort of new thing that you're saying, is that there's more room to be surprised if rather than just putting the computer to work, you develop a framework and let human beings, with all their quirks and idiosyncrasies, run free and then see what happens.

0:22:33.0 JM: Yeah, here's the problem with computer simulations, like let's say we're trying to simulate a pandemic so we're going to input some algorithms into this computer that says like, Okay, if the virus is this contagious and this many people continue to socialize or go to work, this is how many... You're basically inputting what you think are reasonable parameters, and then they crunch these numbers, and it says, "Great, this many people will get sick, this many people will die, this many people with disability," whatever. Okay, that's fine, assuming your assumptions are correct. But what we saw with this pandemic is people do all kinds of things that experts did not anticipate, "Oh, you have a positive test? You should stay home." "No, I'm going to church." Well, you can't... "You're sick. Don't go to work." "I have to work. How am I gonna make money? You haven't sent me a check to stay home, so I'm going to work." "Wear a mask. It's totally reasonable." It's like, "No, mask, resistance." If you just set a computer simulation to simulate pandemics, you're gonna miss this incredible complexity of human emotion and needs and what drives us and motivates us, and... So when I do a simulation of a pandemic, what I do is I get...

0:23:58.6 JM: The first time we did this, we had 8000 people. The next time, 20,000 people, we say, Okay, we're gonna spend some time together. Six weeks, 10 weeks, we're gonna tell you about this fictional scenario, this pandemic we're living through, other complicating factors like supply chain disruptions or misinformation theories spreading on social media, we'll give you some extra as the game unfolds, more information about what's going on, all you have to do is tell us what you would do, what you would feel, what you would need, how you would try to help others, and if we can ask you questions, just give us your intuitive response based on what you know about yourself, what are you likely to do? So you've been told to isolate for two weeks, under what circumstances do you violate this order, disobey these instructions?

0:24:52.3 JM: The number one thing people said back in 2008 when we first started simulating pandemics was for religious worship, that it was so fundamental to the their values, their sense of purpose and meaning, that they are gonna go to church even if it's dangerous, or even if they're not supposed to, and of course, that turned out to be the number one super spreading risk all over the world, Italy, Korea, the US, this is where all the initial outbreaks were happening and people were disobeying, and it's where a lot of the early tension in the United States came from, the biggest resistance to shut downs were from religious communities who saw it as a First Amendment issue, and so it's like a lot of the social divisiveness was coming from experts, failure to anticipate how important this would be and how divisive it would be, and we asked people to practice wearing masks, right.

0:25:42.8 JM: So had a six-week game. Try taking a real mask out. We gave people masks. We said wear it to work, wear to a party, wear it on public transportation, like what do you think? Could you do this in a real pandemic, what would be... What would be weird about it? How comfortable is it? And of course, we saw people... It wasn't just like people wanted to or didn't want to, we saw that there was a physical endurance aspect to learning to be comfortable wearing a mask that was not easy for people who had never done it before to pick up, we saw that people really were frustrated by not being able to see each other's faces and the sort of social disconnection of it, so we anticipated that it would... Even though it seems rational, and it seems easy to just adopt this behavior, that it was gonna be much more difficult in communities that didn't have a practice or culture of it, if you hadn't grown up used to this. So for me, this is my passion, it's not... We don't wanna leave it to a few computer algorithms 'cause who knows if our algorithms are right. People are the algorithms in these social simulations, and we let them surprise us, we look for patterns in what they're saying are or predicting. And it's based on this idea, like people can be experts on their own future, and if we have this kind of bottom-up intelligence, we'll be more prepared for surprising social consequences, that really aren't so surprising.

0:27:14.1 JM: One of the things I'll never forget, pretty much in every scenario we've run, the mom show up and they say, "Well, who's gonna take care of the kids in this scenario?" It could be a pandemic and schools closing, it could be an oil crisis, so the buses stop running, so no one goes to school, moms are always showing up being like, Oh, what's gonna happen? Am I gonna have to stop working to take care of the kids? And again, we saw this mass exodus of women from the workplace to do caretaking when schools shut down. When you run these scenarios, you do get a sense for the types of social consequences that should be more front of mind, should be even... We had somebody from who was living in Upstate New York, who was experienced with long-term... The long form of Lyme disease and how doctors dismissed this for, I don't know, decades, people... They're saying it's all in your mind, it's a psychological... You're depressed, you're stressed, you're anxious, and predicting, well, there are probably gonna be long forms of... For this imaginary pandemic, and of course, they were right. But the... Sometimes it gets dismissed by experts at the outset of real crises. So yeah, if that was a lot, but you could say I'm very passionate about letting ordinary people into this process and the power of collective imagination.

0:28:36.8 SC: Well, I'm actually, as we're having this conversation, sitting in my guest office at the Santa Fe Institute, where they love complexity and emergent collective computation, and emergent is our favorite word here at Mindscape Podcast, this is all just candy to us. But in fact, let me ask more about the nitty-gritty of this kind of simulation that you do. I presume you're using computers here, is it, what, asking a whole bunch of people to donate an hour a day, or is it in a virtual world, or it is answering questionnaires?

0:29:10.8 JM: Great, okay, so we set up social networks for these games, so the actual game interface looks, depending on the game, and we try different versions of it, it might look like you're on Twitter, it might look like you're on Facebook, or look like you're on Discord, and the core mechanic is just participating in normal social media activity. There might be polls to take, surveys to take, so we can get data in a way that is easy to analyze statistically, but the main thing that you're doing is you are posting little updates, little text updates, or photos, or videos of what you imagine yourself doing in this future, and it's very social, people start having conversations. If you're imagining what moms are doing and you might find the other moms, and you imagine together. And depending on how long the format is, you might spend just two whole days basically doing nothing but being immersed in this. So a lot of the ones that we run, it's like a 48-hour thought experiment, everybody's online, you might have 1000, 2000, 3000 people, just basically sunrise to sunset, we're in it.

0:30:27.0 JM: We're imagining it, and that it's done. For the longer form ones, I said six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks, maybe you drop in once a day for 15 minutes, so you come once a week for a few hours to really deeply immerse yourself, but the end result is usually thousands of player-generated stories that we can then analyze for key themes, we can do sentiment analysis, we can follow up with essentially a deep ethnographic interviews if we saw people doing weird stuff that we wanna understand better.

0:31:03.0 JM: My PhD was in Performance Studies, which is a field that has an ethnographic, a deep tradition of ethnographic research, where you're studying human behavior by just getting in there, long conversations, looking for the rich details of what people want, and feel, and need, and so it's a combination of polls, surveys, sentiment analysis, looking for key themes, trying to cluster the stories, and then following up with deep ethnographic research, and it's... I wrote this book, Imaginable, because we've been practicing it at the Institute for the Future now for a little over... I guess about 15 years now.

0:31:55.1 JM: But it's kind of like a rare art forms, like a rare skill set. And I'm hoping that other people will read the book, learn how to design these social simulation, so there's a step by step, I break down the creative process, the tools, how you might wanna build it, how you might wanna analyze it, and I'm hoping that in the future, we have, in the same way that when video... Home video cameras became available and suddenly everybody could be a film maker, right? And then blogs existed, so now everybody can be a journalist, right? So I'm hoping we can all be simulation designers in this future, democratize the skill set, and instead of just playing with the scenarios that I come up with or my fellow researchers at the Institute for the Future come up with, every organization can be running their own scenarios, and every foundation and social movement is something we can all... We can all do together.

0:32:51.5 SC: And in the real example, or in the real world of the pandemic or some future shock event, there's both what the individuals are doing and then there's the external forces that are pushing them, right? The government gives the money or doesn't give them money, he shuts down air travel, so how much structure do you, as the simulation runner, have to impose on what's happening over time in this kind of... Is it simulations, is that the right thing to call it?

0:33:17.3 JM: I call them social simulation.

0:33:18.9 SC: Social simulation, yeah.

0:33:19.8 JM: Sometimes we call them future forecasting games or immersive scenarios. This is one of the cool things about working on the bleeding edge of a new genre.

0:33:29.4 SC: You got the words.

0:33:30.5 JM: Nobody calls it the same thing yet, but... So I'm trying social simulation now. For me, that best sort of summarizes what we're doing. Rather than a computer simulation, it's a social simulation playing out on these social networks from the future, right? So we will usually plot out a series of updates to the scenario that allow players to examine different dimensions, and these sort of external forces. So, it's exactly right. We might say, Okay, here's... In Superstruct, which was the first one in 2008, we were looking at the Respiratory Distress Syndrome that we imagine. We did... We would say, okay, the government has decided not to provide economic support for individuals who are asked to isolate or who have gotten sick, and then we saw the players reacted to that by creating essentially an activist movement to demand for this disability to be recognized and people to be paid to be caretakers for their loved ones who had... Some of that actually did happen during our real COVID-19 experience, and I think it was...

0:34:52.7 JM: I think if we have more people playing these games, it will be... That, in itself, will be an important skill that we develop, like what do we ask for during a crisis? Let's practice demanding what we would need or calling for change, or really understanding what kind of help or mutual aid needs to emerge and not just sort of wait until the real crisis hits, and everyone's like, Oh, but what do we do? Yeah, but so we do provide these narrative updates, and in the case of, let's say, EVOKE was a big one I did with the World Bank in 2010, we had a weekly update. And in Superstruct, I think we were dropping it like twice a week. In World Without Oil, which was one of the first big future forecasting games that had about 1200 players, there were daily updates for 30 days, so you can sort of experiment with different... Yeah, and the fast ones, the 48-hour ones, we do it every hour and do theme or update, so I don't know.

0:35:57.3 JM: We're still... I'm still trying to figure out what is the best timeline. What I've sort of come to is, it's ideal if people can spend at least 10 days in a scenario because it allows it to percolate and really simmer in your mind and you can get past your obvious ideas into more complex and nuanced and surprising ones, and it also gives you time to see what other people are saying and imagining, so that it's more of a collective activity. Right now, I'm trying the 10-day, and you spend an hour a day in this future for 10 days, which I think is... People can commit to 10 days, six to eight to 10 weeks, is a harder commitment to me.

0:36:37.4 SC: Yeah, that's a lot of life. It's hard to predict the future, that far in advance. And there's always the question whenever you have human beings involved, bless their hearts, but they're not always reliable or honest. Have you found that the ways that the people in your social simulations responded are more or less accurate, or have they been nicer in the simulations than they are in the real world, etcetera?

0:37:03.1 JM: Well, that's a good question. No, I mean, I don't think people are... I don't think people are very nice. I try to focus people's... People on, I guess, their values, their needs, things that is relatively easy to make accurate predictions about. So one of the examples that I use is if I were to ask you to imagine that for whatever reason you're on an airplane and they will allow you to parachute out if you would like for fun, it's a safe, could you predict, do you think, a year from now, if you are likely to say, no, thank you, I'll wait till the plane lands or you personally would jump out, like what do you think? Could you predict that? And if so, what would you... Are you jumping, or are you staying till you land?

0:37:53.0 SC: I guess that would depend on why I got in the plane in the first place. If I'm trying to get somewhere, I'm just gonna let the plane land. If I'm just thrill-seeking, then I might jump out.

0:38:01.9 JM: Okay. But you have a pretty good sense.

0:38:03.5 SC: Yeah.

0:38:03.6 JM: I could tell you, for sure, I don't care what the scenario is, unless it comes with a $100 million check, I'm gonna stay on the plane till it lands. I do not want to... I feel like that would traumatize me for the rest of my life. I'd have flashback, I don't wanna do it.

0:38:16.3 SC: Some people actually pay money for the privilege of jumping out of planes.

0:38:19.5 JM: Right, right, right. So it's like... I guess I wanna say... What we have seen, now that we've actually had the chance to live through crises that are similar to the ones we were asking people about, in general, people in general, did what our players said they would do. I've tried to do research. I've interviewed, in-depth interviews, 150 players in 2021 to find out, did you do in 2020 what you imagined doing? And I would say that, in general, while people may change their behavior, and especially for having imagined it, what we saw with the World Without Oil is that, just having imagined adapting to an oil crisis, and people imagine themselves doing all these cool sustainable creative things. I think that did prime them to actually do it...

0:39:13.8 SC: Okay, yeah.

0:39:14.0 JM: When we, a year later, the gas... This was in 2007. In 2008, you may recall, we did have a bit of an oil crisis and people, players reported doing things that they had imagined doing. Now, I think it may have been at just a priming effect.

0:39:31.0 SC: Yeah.

0:39:31.2 JM: Once you vividly imagined it and you see yourself as someone likely to take an action, it increases the likelihood, so it's not that they were necessarily correct in predicting what they would do, but having predicted it made them more likely to do it. On that hand, I think it is... There's an interesting connection. But moreover, just general predictions seem to map onto society. If you have enough people participating, I wouldn't try this with 10 or 20 people, but when you have 1000 or 10,000 or 20,000, you start to, I think, have a diversity of participants where you'll get a more statistically significant correlation to what might play out in real society.

0:40:17.4 SC: Well, I definitely wanna ask more about the priming thing, but first, since even mentioning the simulation or simulations that you did about a global pandemic, I'm not saying it's your fault that we actually got a global pandemic, but you were thinking about it 10 years earlier.

0:40:31.0 JM: Yeah. Yeah.

0:40:32.1 SC: And you said that in large measure, what you saw in the simulation played out in reality. I mean, let's dig in a little bit more to what extent that was true. Are there things that truly surprised you when the actual pandemic hit?

0:40:46.2 JM: Oh yeah.

0:40:46.3 SC: Whether it's sort of misinformation or political polarization, or vaccine denial, did you anticipate all of these things or were there some things that we've learned a lesson 'cause you just missed those important aspects?

0:41:00.2 JM: Yeah, two of the things that we very accurately anticipated was the threat of misinformation. We've spent a lot of time talking about the infodemiology crisis that we might be anticipating, asking participants, what would do to try to get accurate information? How would you tell what was real and what was misinformation or just a conspiracy theory? How would you try to help friends and family who are getting bad information? So we did spend a lot of time talking about that, and I think we're correct in seeing how problematic and difficult that would be for people to navigate. What we did not anticipate was essentially, I guess, governments giving up or people in power acting in a kind of bad faith way to downplay the severity or... I definitely think that was...

0:42:00.0 JM: I can't recall that coming up at all. Just the sort of the idea that some people would just say whatever, that was not something we predicted. And it wasn't really anything that our players predicted. We didn't see a big... I don't recall that coming up at all, that like, well, some people are just gonna go about their everyday lives. People accepted the crisis aspect and went with that, so it definitely gave me some food for thought for future scenarios, so I was really lucky I finally got to attend a conference that I've always been wanting to attend this past year called the Planetary Defense Conference, so I don't know if you know about this.

0:42:46.4 SC: I've heard of it, yeah.

0:42:47.0 JM: It's space scientists and political leaders come together to talk about and share science and actually run simulations of what might happen if an asteroid were heading towards the Earth, near Earth objects that pose a threat to human life, and what's really great is seeing them start to factor even just from having lived through this pandemic, things like, what if we forecast an asteroid is coming, but people downplay? Nobody wants to evacuate because the government is saying... Could a government leader say, "This is stupid. Don't worry about it." Would there be conspiracy theories if people learn about this area of science and you can actually go online and see current forecast now, all the objects are tracking, what the percentage it might hit, what the severity of it might be.

0:43:44.2 JM: What if people to misuse this to sow panic or to create social division? They're starting to look at what we lived through, these things that I didn't predict, and I don't know anybody predicted this sort of global shrug that happened in so many places. They're starting to factor that in and had sessions on how they would deal with misinformation and public trust in this area of science, and so yeah, we do... No matter how creative, imaginative, amazing our simulations and thought experiments are, let's assume we'll still be surprised by things, but then we can factor that into our next efforts, our next scenarios.

0:44:34.2 SC: Well, and having done that and how having been in a pandemic for a while, do you have insight, you think, about what our actual future post-pandemic is going to be like? Are we returning to normal? Will we always be wearing masks? Is it a different world, do you think?

0:44:53.6 JM: Well, one of our research methods is we look for signals of change, so evidence that change is happening, some shift has occurred, or it's just some new behaviors that are taking place, and they might become more common over time. One of the big signals of change that I'm really latching on to, from this sort of heading into a... It's not post-pandemic yet, but I don't know what it is. It's like, it's the normal pandemic moment or if the pandemic has been normalized, what's coming out of it?

0:45:25.7 JM: There were two major studies that found that despite all of the misinformation, conspiracy theories, resistance to mask wearing, at the global scale, public trust in science and scientists has increased as a direct result of seeing the vaccines developed, their efficacy, the efficacy of certain recommended interventions, like mask wearing. Despite all the divisiveness and the emergence of people really resistant, more people trust science more now than before, and public understanding of the scientific method and how science works to produce insight and recommend actions and interventions has increased globally, so people trust science more and understand science more, even if it doesn't feel like it.

0:46:22.5 SC: It doesn't.

0:46:23.0 JM: Because of all the fighting going on on social media. And to me, I like to think one of the long-term, I think, I think, I think, I think, is, at some level, many people will trust science more, and the scientific community is really on top of this issue now, like realizing how do we build trust in science? How do we communicate more effectively? How do we make science not a politically divisive issue, because as we face climate change and all the things we're gonna have to be dealing with in the future, we do need to build and repair trust in science. I think that, to me, that's like... When I'm looking ahead, I'm really looking at that and how we're gonna pour energy into that and creativity into that. And hopefully, we're off to a good start because most people who live through this are like, "Wow, that worked. Awesome. Let's do more... Let's do more science."

0:47:25.7 SC: Yes, science is helpful. It's on our side here. And good, because this is... It's moving us... I don't wanna let go of that priming issue that you mentioned. In other words, the idea that once someone has gone through the simulation and imagined what it would be like, they are better prepared for what actually happens. And so, this gets us into a lot of the emphasis of your book, which is, even if I'm not involved in the simulation, how do I prep my brain for things that are gonna happen in the future? Because it's very hard to do. We're in ruts. We have a view of the world today, and absent anything else, it's probably gonna be like that tomorrow, but of course, it won't. Predicting how it won't is the hard part.

0:48:10.8 JM: Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say that, if I don't participate in these simulations, because I do think... I mean, so one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is build this general skill, so people can find their own signals of change, and create their own scenarios, and run their own mental simulations, or they just imagine in their own mind, or they can do social simulations with other people. I do think at some point you have to pick up these habits and practice them for it to work, and the smallest habit, like the easiest habit is, is collecting signals of change.

0:48:41.3 JM: So making it a habit, I say like pick Fridays, so future Fridays, once a week, just do a Google news search for something that you're interested in, like future of food or a future of democracy. See if you can find a news story about a new policy idea, a new scientific breakthrough, a new technology that's being developed, a business model, a social movement, try to find evidence of some form of change that it's now starting to happen, and then you're... So planning that in your mind, because our failure of imagination, the reason why we can't anticipate these surprising futures is that If we don't plant vivid details of what the future might be like into our minds, then there's nothing to draw on. Imagination, it needs to reach into that hippocampus for some facts, like some evidence, some clues. We can't just conjure up realistic possibilities unless we are looking around the world and collecting the signals so that's like...

0:49:44.7 JM: The most rudimentary imagination habit I want people to develop is... And it works better when you do it with other people, so you can make a commitment to text a friend once a week. You're gonna have... You know that I'm sending you a signal, and you're gonna have to send me a signal, or you do coffee meetups, brown bag lunches at work, you try to make it social, because I think all of this works better as a community practice, just like games. You're more likely to play a game if somebody else is playing it and waiting for you to show up. So yeah, collect these and just plant them in your mind, because then what your brain will do is, when it goes into default mode, and it's just like you're not paying attention to what's around you, you're just imagining, you're like... So daydreaming, it will draw on these signals of change that you've planted there, that's waiting in your hippocampus to be recombined in novel ways so that you're now thinking about, well, this is like... This is the first time I've seen so many people with drones. I went to this protest and everybody had drones, and they were using the drones to document.

0:50:49.0 JM: So now when I'm just daydreaming, I'm gonna put drones in my daydream and try to imagine like what are people using them for, for activism, or art, or storytelling, or journalism, or stalking, or spreading, good news, or whatever we think like... We need to collect these details so that our imagination is not fantasy, it's grounded in real changes that are already happening.

0:51:15.5 SC: I was definitely struck in the book by your emphasis on the idea of mental time travel, because that's something we talked about in the podcast, but usually in the context of consciousness, cognition, self-awareness, the difference between human thinking and other species thinking is the ability to imagine different hypothetical futures, and you're sort of... There is, even though we can all do it, imagine different hypothetical futures, we still tend to react a little bit to the moment, like when the pandemic hits were not instantly thinking, Oh, I will use the next six months to do my pet project, right? We're thinking like, I gotta go buy toilet paper, and this is kind of what you're suggesting, is that it's not just a phenomenon, but a habit of mind that you should cultivate.

0:52:02.9 JM: Well, first of all, the future can be a wonderful place. We've talked a lot about risks and threats, but going on these mental time trips far into the future, one of the interesting things it does is if you're just trying to imagine what you might be doing 10 years in the future... So I give people this very practical exercise. I say, I want you to open your digital calendar, so if you use Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or whatever, tab forward to 10 years in the future, which if you didn't know, you can schedule events 10 years from now, you cam actually go 100 years from now. These calendars are very future-ready, so go 10 years into the future and put something on your calendar for 10 years from today that you would be excited about, and ideally something you can't do today, and if you're feeling really gainful, invite someone else, like send the calendar invite to your best friend, or to your partner, or to... To bring someone into your imagination, and what we see is that when people imagine what they could do 10 years from now, they tend to imagine things that are different in a couple of key ways. One is we tend to...

0:53:10.2 JM: We tend to think about maximal situations, so best possible things, biggest goals, most exciting, most meaningful. When we imagine what we might do today, or tomorrow, or next week, or even next year, we tend to think more minimally, we're more focused on what is realistic, what is feasible, what can I definitely accomplish? When we tend to think on further timelines, our brain just sort of experiences this creative freedom and this sense of hope. Yeah, 10 years, that's a lot of time to get ready or things to change, and there's nothing... I mean, go to your calendar, do you have anything on your calendar for 10 years from today? No, it's a blank slate, right? You have no to-do list for March 31st, 2032, you can do whatever you want, so there's this freedom of imagination, and so this practice of mental time travel, it's definitely not just about preparing for risk or getting ready for disruption, it can also be about getting in touch with our sense of hope and purpose, and then we can allow ourselves to imagine what would it take for this calendar event 10 years here now to actually happen, but we've got a lot of time, there's no rush.

0:54:26.2 JM: I would say, instead of making a New Year's resolution, we could make a 10-year resolution so that we haven't failed by the first week or the end of the first month, we're giving ourselves the luxury of a decade to change or to achieve... So that's one thing. And then another thing that we see is that when we imagine 10 years out, we tend to give more emphasis to our deepest values or priorities, so the things that drive us, the things that make us feel like this is my purpose in life, whether it's being a good parent, or learning something new every day, or creating art that inspires others, or whatever we feel is true to our sense of purpose, that stuff comes up, right at the fore when we're imagining, whether it is a crisis scenario, what do you do in this pandemic? Like musicians talk about writing protest songs against the government for not funding the long care treatment for this disease or whatever.

0:55:33.7 JM: People put their deepest values and strengths and service of the future in a way that we don't always make time for or prioritize in the rush of the present, especially if we feel over-scheduled or we feel time-poor, we're not in control of our schedule, we're not in control of our time, we don't have enough time to do what matters. So yeah, there's this mental health aspect, self-care aspect, that is also a part of mental time travel, and so it makes it kind of like the future is an inspiring place. It doesn't have to just be a scary place. We can inspire ourselves too.

0:56:10.6 SC: I guess the closest thing has ever done to that is several years ago, I got a payment for a book royalty check, and my wife, Jennifer, and I invested it in very, very nice bottles of wine that we would save for our 10th, 15th, and 20th wedding anniversaries.

0:56:28.4 JM: Oh, amazing.

0:56:29.8 SC: And it totally works. You're literally waiting for that year to come up, so to say, you can go out and go to a nice restaurant and drink your wine.

0:56:37.0 JM: What a beautiful and poetic, active commitment to each other, and it's saying, of course, I imagine being with you in 20 years. Do you wanna hear a funny story that was in a version of the book that I wound up cutting 'cause I get excited I write...

0:56:53.7 SC: Sometimes... Of course.

0:56:54.7 JM: I write twice as much as need [0:56:54.8] ____ Okay, so I was interviewing people who had played these games to find out, did it impact your real world behavior this year during the pandemic, and somebody said, Oh my God, I've the best story for you, it's like playing these games, it totally changed my life, real world action, here it is. So she had played a series of forecasting games called First Five Minutes of the Future, where you get these really lightning round scenarios and then you journal for five minutes as if you were in this future, just what you're doing in the first five minutes. So the scenario might be, you get a text message, it's like the emergency alert system saying that there's a government-mandated internet shut down, the whole internet shutting down for two weeks for cybersecurity threat. What do you do in the first five minutes? And it's going out in an hour, so see you later in the next in two weeks.

0:57:46.3 JM: What do you do in the first five minutes of getting this text? And so you just journal, how do you feel, who are you gonna talk to, what are you worried about? So she did like five of these over the course of a week, and then she said at the end of it, the action she decided to take was she filed for a divorce, and I was like, What? Wait. Why? How did that happen? And she said... And I was like, Oh, my God, this is so profound. She said, every journal entry, when I was writing what I was gonna do, who I wanted to talk to, what I was planning, how I'd react, she said, my husband wasn't in a single one of these... These moments that I was imagining. I wasn't talking to him about it, I wasn't asking him... He just wasn't there. And it sort of drove home for her that they've been growing apart, that they've been refusing to deal with it. Anyway, fast forward, she played this game, she filed for divorce, they're separated, she's really happy, she's living what she feels is a better life, but she wasn't able to acknowledge what needed to be done until she really sat with those futures and realized that when she really has permission to think about her future, she didn't put him in it. And so it kinda gets back to that idea of when we go 10 years out, either like you...

0:59:04.0 JM: You're seeing the people you care about, who you wanna... That you prioritize, and you have this place for them or maybe we see... We imagine things that if we don't change, do we wanna be stuck 10 years from now in the position that we're in now? So I just like... The future of is a gift to allow us to really challenge our assumptions about what should we be spending our time on now, or who is important to us, what can we do today? Just by imagining the future, we might change our perspective on that.

0:59:37.6 SC: Well, life is hard enough for moment to moment that people can... I know, I am certainly... In my science career, I know for a fact that I've spent way too much time thinking about what I gotta do in the next few months or couple of years, and not enough time about what I need to do 20 years down the line, so it's a very interesting exercise to do. And one of the things that came clear from the book is the usefulness of the specificity of imagining the future. It's not just like, Oh, I imagine that I'll be happy, it's I imagine I'm driving a blue car. It's something that really anchors you in that particular specificity of that future scenario.

1:00:16.0 JM: Yeah, so I always teach people these specificity induction techniques, so I find that writing journal entries is a really good way to make sure that you're vividly imagining the future, almost as if it were a memory that had already happened that you could recall and write in a journal, and there's actually a scoring method where after you write for five minutes, you count out... You count up the number of details, so visual details, did you mention a color, a blue truck? Okay, plus one. That's one detail. Were you describing what you were wearing or a pain that was in your body, or what the weather was like, or what song is playing on the radio? Who's with you? What words are coming out of their mouth? The more vivid, specific detail that you bring to imagination, the more that this imagination or memory of the future can change how you feel and act today. So for example, if you're trying to overcome normalcy bias, so that if the next pandemic, maybe it's a tick-borne pandemic, instead of a viral contagious disease, it's spread from ticks, if you have vividly imagined yourself pulling your socks up over your jeans because that's the new fashion, because everybody is afraid of getting these tick bites and you're...

1:01:31.9 JM: So as you're getting dressed in the morning, you're imagining, well, what if I wear this earring, you're... And you can... The more of these details you have, the more your brain treats these hypothetical possibilities as worth taking seriously, and you pre-feel them with a stronger emotional intensity, which can... Essentially, it makes all of these topics more salient to you in the future. So let's say, the next time there's a weird news story, or people are talking on social media, you're gonna pick up those clues faster because your brain says This is a topic that matters to me, you've locked it in, you're gonna get the dopamine hit from the next headline that you see. Whereas, people who haven't vividly imagined it, their brain doesn't have a connection to this topic, they don't... So anyway, yes, for all kinds of reasons, more specificity is better, and you can count up the number of details, and you can try to work on being somebody who has more details or you can re-write your journal entry if you only have five details, okay, I'll say, you've got another five minutes, now I wanna see 15 details in there.

1:02:37.9 JM: And it doesn't really matter what the details are, right? If you're imagining a blue truck or a red truck, it doesn't matter, but it matters to your brain, in that it makes this future more imaginable, literally more imaginable. When you try to think about it, it's gonna bring this movie into your mind or this 3D environment into your mind, so you can really revisit it and think about it and allow it to motivate you or inform your actions.

1:03:04.6 SC: So you've mentioned the importance of realizing that we can imagine futures that are not just disaster scenarios and terrible things happening, but also good things happening. And there's a balance to be struck there. For anyone who's listening to The Mindscape Podcast 200 years in the future, not only are we right now in the recovery period of a pandemic, but we're in month two of the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, which has the potential, in some hypothetical future scenarios, to grow into a superpower clash and a nuclear war. I mentioned this on Twitter recently, I was accused of peddling disaster porn rather than being realistic, but rather than saying my own opinion, let me ask you, how do you balance the worst possible things happening from the best? Is it sort of cheap and easy to err too much on one side or the other, or is there a happy middle?

1:04:00.7 JM: I love this question. I'm gonna try to answer it very slowly and methodically, because it's very important. Okay, so what I encourage people to do and what we practice at the Institute for the Future is to have an active balance of what we call positive imagination and shadow imagination, so positive imagination, that's made up of the futures that we want. The world you wanna wake up in, where economic inequality has been solved, racial and justice has been solved, cars are banned from cities, whatever futures excite you that you would like to wake up in, that's your positive imagination, then you got your shadow imagination, where you are willing to acknowledge real risks and threats like nuclear war, still a threat, even though we stopped talking about it as much for a couple of decades.

1:04:51.9 JM: Let's actually bring that back up into our consciousness, and so the need for new approaches to nuclear disarmament. We need to get out this weird stalemate and figure out. People in nuclear security would argue there gotta be new methods for disarming, because this is taking too long, and it's not having any lasting or transformative impact. So you've got the shadow imagination, you've got the positive imagination, and what becomes important is that you can assess new situations, developing situations, using what's in your positive imagination and in your shadow imagination, so let's say there's some new technology you're excited about, the new unfolding situation is a neuro-simulation technology. This is something I'm actually very interested and excited about, that there is the possibility for neural implants to essentially cure intractable depression.

1:05:49.4 JM: And this is exciting. Okay, I can use it to fuel my hope for the future of mental health care, but maybe I can also think about these other things in my shadow imagination, like economic inequality who will have access to it, think about the rise of authoritarian politics. Will somebody come up with a misuse for this technology, how we're gonna regulate it? So if you're excited about a future, let your shadow imagination inform it, likewise with the war that we're living through now, we wanna balance the justified dread, and anxiety, and despair, we have over the suffering. Can we look for ways that the positive futures we've imagined... Can we pull those positive imagination, those positive futures into the present somehow and create a connection? So one thing that is always on my mind, is one of my top futures, is the future of migration and particularly around climate change, and I'm worried that we might force people to stay trapped behind geopolitical boundaries and live in parts of the world that are no longer conducive to human life because of extreme heat or extreme drought, I'm worried that we're not going to transform our border policies, our migration policies, fast enough to prevent mass suffering. I'm very interested in climate migration and new approaches to that.

1:07:15.2 JM: So I've been trying to encourage people to imagine what change we might experience, how we might become more welcoming to refugees, how we might change the conversation so migrants aren't a threat, but that it's something that we can have a more positive narrative around? So at... One spark of hope for what I'm seeing is the unprecedented response to refugees leaving Ukraine and how they're being welcomed and the details, the specificity of it. People are meeting them at the border, they are bringing things, they are opening their homes, they're trying to show up for this crisis. Now, there is a level of racism involved, Poland wants to accept these refugees because they're white, and they're Christian, but so at the same time, they're gonna have a lived experience of being heroic in this way, The world is gonna witness this, people like my kids might grow up, having this narrative in their mind, this is what we do, we welcome people in crisis, we open our homes, we open our communities. This is great, this is what we do now.

1:08:29.4 JM: So I try... Now, I'm trying to bring that future I want, a future where we can welcome each other when we're in crisis across borders, I'm trying to bring that and connect it with what's happening now, and is there anything I can do to help this be a tipping point for the culture of migration, so that coming out of this, again, going 10 years in the future where hopefully the war is over and we have not sustained any nuclear damage, hopefully we're gonna go ten years out, how are we using this experience 10 years from now to develop a more humane approach to human movement or whatever it might be? So it's this dance that we do when we think about things that seem positive, let's make sure we're bringing in the awareness of risk or injustice or inequality, whatever, and then if we're thinking about, if we're living through a crisis and disruption and suffering, how do we find a place for the futures we want still and try to... Try to create those connections.

1:09:32.9 SC: I don't know if you saw it, just the other day, a new poll came out. It seemed to indicate that for the first time in decades, a majority of Americans would like to see more immigration than we currently have, rather than less immigration than we currently have.

1:09:46.9 JM: Great, I love it. Also, I saw a headline that for the first time, we had more deaths than human... Than births in the United States, which is another reason to consider more migration, like aging populations. We're not gonna be able to sustain life as we know it, without young people, and that's the thing, when you start to pay attention to signals of change, you start to see, well, there are lots of drivers of change that might be pushing in the same direction, and it helps you think like, Yeah, we're really on the precipice of a new way of thinking about migration, like I'm gonna get ready for that. Yeah.

1:10:29.4 SC: Well, and it's very related to another thing that you mentioned in the book. I interviewed Paul Bloom on the podcast, he had this wonderful book Against Empathy, and I was completely against empathy, and so we had a fun disagreement, 'cause his argument is, we should be rational rather than empathetic. Empathy is something that we are more likely to have for people who are like ourselves, and that biases us. And in your book, you very nicely contrast that kind of an empathy, which is easy empathy with hard empathy, the empathy that we have to work to get for people who are unlike ourselves, and that plays a role in maybe being a good person, but also just in accurately thinking about the future.

1:11:13.8 JM: Yeah, exactly. And it's one of the reasons why I like running social simulations rather than just giving people future scenarios to sort of sit in their own mind, try to bring communities and groups together so that we can see how other people react to a scenario. And I was doing this for a while around Universal Basic Income, which people have these abstract opinions, well, it's not right, to pay people for nothing, or if we give people UBI, they'll just stay home and play video games, or it'll create this sort of lazy... And people have these...

1:11:52.2 SC: I know.

1:11:52.3 JM: I'm in favor of universal basic income, so I'm saying those arguments in a tone of voice that probably conveys that I don't find them to be persuasive but... So let's develop some hard empathy for people whose lives might be transformed by universal basic income. I can hear it. So I might say to someone, I hear you say you don't need a universal basic income, you prefer to earn your income through work, that that is meaningful to you and purposeful to you, and you have a job that allows you to do that. Great. Now, let's talk about... Let's have some other people share what they would do if they had this money. Oh, this person says that I would quit my second job so that I could spend more time with my kids if I had this income, or I would like to be more involved in volunteering in my community, and maybe I could work less and volunteer more, I could...

1:12:47.0 JM: Instead of hiring somebody to take care of my parents, maybe I could be more involved in that, and what people say... When you can actually hear real people respond to hypothetical future scenarios, it takes us out of this, I don't know, this sort of abstract opinions or politically divisive feelings, and we can just understand that there are reasons why some people might want a particular future or likewise... Why people might not want a particular future. You might have all these people excited about a new technology or a new policy that they think is gonna lift humanity, and then you might talk to people who historically have been marginalized or harmed by new technologies, and they would say, Well, here's... Let's think about this a little bit more, 'cause I would be worried about this. It doesn't mean that their fears are founded necessarily, but it's good to know that there's gonna be resistance or that we need to heal this pre-existing trauma in order to get people to accept this new possibility.

1:13:58.0 JM: So hard empathy, we can develop it by just actually seeing the future from other people's points of view. And to do that, we can play these games together, we can have... We started a Scenario Club at the Institute for the Future. We have 850 members now who come together once a month to just... It's like a book club meetup, except instead of talking about a book, we talk about a future scenario and what we would feel, and we vote on whether we're excited about it or we're worried about it, and it's just... This is a good skill also to develop, this ability to get outside our own reactions and intuitions and actually hear from other people, this is how it would impact me, or this is how I would feel about it.

1:14:42.5 SC: Well, it also sounds like it's crucially important for the idea of democracy, which is under threat in various different ways, but everyone thinks that the people who disagree with them are the real threat to democracy, and I increasingly worry that no one is willing to accept or, anyway, it's becoming less common to accept that democracy is about living with people who disagree with you. That's not gonna go away, that that's what we have to learn to do if the system is gonna work.

1:15:12.1 JM: I love that. What an interesting rebrand for democracy. We do, at the Institute for the Future, spend a lot of time thinking about the future of democracy and how to preserve it and revitalize it, and that's a very interesting idea that we lean into that instead of... 'cause I do think you're right, a lot of people approach democracy as a struggle to convince other people, essentially, that you are right and they're wrong. So how do we re-brand it and think about co-existing and maximizing the non-zero outcomes and... I like it, I like it. You're right, that we don't think about it that way. It could be really helpful. I'll try to come up with a scenario for Scenario Club that thinks about democracy, the new... The new way that we talk about it, What will it be? Okay, I'm on it.

1:16:11.8 SC: Good, good. Glad to do that. And maybe it's useful to wind up here with just some big picture speculation, 'cause you've given us a lot to think about in terms of how to visualize the future and how to get our own brains out of the ruts that we're in. So let me just ask, and we always let our hair down near the end of the podcast, what have we learned, what have you, what do you think are the things that the person on the street should expect about the future from these simulations that you've done, positively or negatively, what are you optimistic about, what are the big worries that you have that people aren't worried enough about.

1:16:49.1 JM: I think, big picture, what I'm telling everyone is we need to be more flexible, we need to be more willing to change plans or change practices, whether it's... I live in California, where now we have a wild fire season and certain things aren't safe now during certain times of the year, being outside, we're gonna have to get flexible about, for example, the school year calendar. People don't wanna be in California during wild fire season, but it starts at the same time that the school year starts, are we gonna start to have more flexibility around this practically ancient tradition? It's not ancient, it goes back to when industrial schooling began, but this is some flexibility in our calendars, in our practices, until we rebuild our electrical grid, there may be less stability and power supply.

1:17:50.5 JM: Are you more flexible and ready to like just go with this, go with the flow? If you don't have energy, do you have what you need? I don't mean this in a scary, apocalyptic way. I think it's just gonna be how we maintain our well-being, is just to accept that things can change on short notice or permanently, and heading into the future with that, that we don't wanna grasp to expectations. Just be ready. Things... You may need to be behave differently or schedule differently, or let go of a plan that you made and make a new plan, and then I said it before, but I think movement around the planet is going to... And it excites me because if people can move a little more freely on the planet, they can go some place where they can contribute to society more, they can work, they can create, they can care for people.

1:19:00.7 JM: I think if we're willing to rethink our assumptions about human rights to move freely and to seek out opportunity or safety, I think if we lean into that, we could design a higher density cities than we've ever lived in before, and that could be amazing for a new renaissance of what is it like to live with so many people bouncing ideas and culture and the social experience of that. So I'm saying pay attention to what's going on around that and lean into that and be ready for that. Not in a scary way, but I... Could we establish a new human right to move freely, could we live in higher density in a way that is incredibly green and art flourishes and ideas flourish? Let's be ready for a decade or two of transformation there.

1:19:53.8 SC: So this is a perfect place to end the podcast, 'cause I always like to end on an optimistic note, but nevertheless, I still have one more question, which is, as a fellow Californian, what does your earthquake kit look like?

1:20:07.1 JM: I mean, we've got lots of water. Our main thing we've got flashlights and water, that's our main and... Yeah, the earthquake, the earthquake one is... Yeah.

1:20:21.6 SC: It's a tough one.

1:20:22.7 JM: It's interesting. Water is the big one.

1:20:27.7 SC: Water is the big one, and it's hard.

1:20:28.6 JM: Because you can survive without food for a while, but if you need to get your own water, that's gonna be... So we have a lot of water since you said, ending on an optimistic note, can I also suggest if folks want to join our Scenario Club or actually, we're gonna be running two social simulations at the Institute for the Future this year, one on climate migration and one on geo-engineering decision-making and unanticipated consequences, they can join us at Urgent Optimists, plural, 'cause it's a bunch of us.org, they can join the Scenario Club, 'cause I want people to like... I don't want people to just... I want people to read the book, Imaginable, and I also want them to join the community of practice so that... This is a collective imagination we're talking about, so I don't want people to just read the book on their own. I want them to come and now play together with others at Urgent Optimists.

1:21:23.6 SC: That is very good. Good, that is an excellent, optimistic place to end. I will put a link to it in the show notes.

1:21:28.8 JM: Awesome.

1:21:29.6 SC: And everyone can visit. So Jane McGonigal, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:21:32.0 JM: Thank you.