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

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Jane McGonagall. You can find her on Twitter at Avant Game, A V A N T Game. Jane is a future forecaster and a world renowned designer of alternate reality games that improve real lives and solve real problems. She's the director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future and the lead instructor for their series on the Coursera platform. She also teaches the course How to Think Like a Futurist. We're gonna dig into Some of the frameworks, I imagine, at Stanford University. Jane is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken and Super Better. And her newest book is Imaginable, subtitle How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything, Even Things That Seem Impossible Today. And we'll get into some of her exercises.

and also simulations and it might be pretty eerie and amazing. So we will get to that. Her TED talks on how games can make a better world and the game that can give you ten extra years of life have more than fifteen million views. So jelly, so jelly, Jane. That's a lot of views. Her innovative games and ideas have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, O magazine, and the New York Times, among many others. You can find all things Jane on her website, Chain. Megonical M C G O N I G A L dot com. Jane, welcome back to the show. It's nice to see you.

Thank you, Tim. It's really nice to see you. Now I thought I would just immediately make this super self indulgent and Use this opportunity to ask you about sleep. Because I know that we have spoken about sleep before, but for me and I'm sure a lot of people Recently my insomnia has just been going for extra credit.

And Typically there are two causes I would say. One is just too much caffeine. Not much I'm gonna ask you about that. that is something I should just self regulate. The other one is A

hyperactive high RPM just mental processing that happens. And it sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't, but the feeling that I'm laying down and my brain just will not turn off. And I know that you have experimented with Yeah. Have you any recommendations for me or anyone else listening?

I have two recommendations. One uses video games and one uses the future. So the video game one, pretty. Easy. Video games allow us to control our thoughts and imagination. They focus our attention on A problem that isn't real. It's a game, and we can be swapping candy tiles or catching Pokemon or whatever we're doing in the game, and it allows us to shut down. the busy thoughts, the hypermental stimulation. And it does seem to be pretty effective as a bedtime

routine. The only side effect is that you might dream or hallucinate about the game when you fall asleep. So you might see those Tetris. blocks falling when you close your eyes, but that's not too bad a side effect. It is, you know, better than ambient, I think. Yeah, I imagine so. I just wanted to to layer onto that really quickly because you also mentioned in our last conversation.

How Tetris. Can be used. to mitigate post traumatic stress disorder and in a sense kind of visually overwriting what could become a sort of compulsive repetitive

cycle of imagery caused by the trauma. itself and that really struck me. Do you any games that you favor for this if you were Going to be using

A game before bed and for how long would you suggest? First, some good news. The researchers at Oxford University who first did that study about using Tetris to prevent unwanted flashbacks from traumatic events. They had previously done the studies in the lab. They actually started testing it in the field for people who had experienced violence. uh or accidents that sent them to the emergency room and they were able to replicate the findings in the field since we last talked. So there's even more evidence that it works. For Preventing PTSD or just for bedtime, 10 minutes is the dose that's been tested. I mean, it's pretty easy just to pull out your phone. I've been using lately Quartal.

So I don't know if you have found. Cordle is the super masochistic version of Wirtle, which everybody's been playing. How do you spell what is it? Quartal? Quartal. Q R D L E. So it's just like Wordle, where you have five guesses to get a five letter word, except you're doing four words at the same time with the same guesses. So you have to allocate your guesses to try to maximize information about all four words. And you're looking at all four words. And I do it every night before I go to bed now. And it's great. I mean you literally can't think about anything else.

While you're trying to solve. four five letter words at the same time. Wow. So I interrupted because I'm uh I have no tact and just wanted to talk about the PTSD from the last conversation and segue.

From that. into your recommendation related to games. You said you had another recommendation related to the future. You and I have talked before about this mantra that a lot of futurists have. I think it's in one of your books that in order to look forward, we try to look back at least twice as far and look for patterns in the past and human culture and history. And There have been a lot of people talking lately about a past pattern of sleep. I don't know if you have come across this. So before we invented electricity. The normal human sleeping pattern was to be awake in the middle of the night for two to three hours, and people used to sleep in what they called first sleep.

And then they would be awake and they would do stuff. They would often do chores or have intimate conversations with whoever was sharing the bed with them, which wasn't always a partner because people used to share beds with You know. More people. Family members. Yeah. And then they would after a few hours they would go back to sleep for a second sleep. And it seems like a lot of people if your insomnia is when you're falling asleep, you know, do the game thing. But

If your insomnia is in the middle of the night You may actually just be more in tune. with natural human sleeping patterns and the rest of us because of the type of Simulation our brain gets from electric light or artificial light.

We have a weird modern sleeping pattern. But I find that a lot of people Can relax. in that middle of the night awakeness. And I've definitely gone through periods of my life where I've fallen back into that two sleep cycle. And if you know that it's natural and actually kind of the original human sleeping pattern, it can take away some of the anxiety and you just if you can get Amazing stuff done in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep. And if we can kind of let go of the

worry, this is weird, something's wrong with me, I have to fix it and think about, you know, maybe in the future we'll go back to the way we used to sleep in the past and or not try to force people out of it. Maybe it will just be like two ways of sleeping. I've always done my best writing. In the middle of the night. Two three in the morning and Fortunately, in my case, or unfortunately, it's it's onset song. Yeah, so it sounds like I should I should try the game. Do you know why the Oxford researchers chose

Tetris, did they test other games and then choose Tetris? Was it just the ubiquity and kind of simplicity awareness of the game? What was the reason? The main reason is that Tetris is widely known to be the most visually stimulating video game that has ever been designed. And what the researchers were trying to do was essentially to take over the visual processing center of the brain because

Unwanted flashbacks. The reason we experience them is that in the heightened emotional period after a trauma, our brain keeps replaying it over and over again, especially in a this incredibly intense visual form of imagination. And If it gets

really locked in. During those first 24 hours, it essentially becomes a pattern for the brain that is very hard to disrupt. And there are therapies, but people will go to therapies for years to try to break that pattern. And if you can stop it first, it helps. So And everybody, you know, you've had this experience, you close your eyes, you see the falling breaks. There are other games that work. Candy Crus is great. Any visual pattern matching game where your brain is looking at colors, looking at shapes, looking at how things are arranged in space. Will be really good. Cordal works for me because I'm not, I mean, I wouldn't use Cordal for a trauma, but it works for me for insomnia.

But depending on how much If you're trying to stop visual thoughts. If you've a really vivid imagination. the visual games will work better. And if it's just sort of abstract thoughts. You can really play any game that you like.

So let's segue to The foreshadowing. To Nostradamus. McGonigal to Mick McNostradamas. Oh my god, I love it. I'm getting a t shirt that's that.

Oh man. What happened? When you led more than twenty thousand gamers in a simulation in two thousand ten. Because it is It is pretty spooky. I should just very quickly explain that one of the kinds of games that I specialize in creating

Is something called a social simulation, which is where you get thousands of people to spend several days or weeks. I don't know. Fictional social networks. We basically build Facebook from the future or Twitter from the future. And people come and they share. messages and photos and videos and stories about what's happening. But it's all imagined ten years in the future and

To get people all imagining the same future, we give them Scenarios. So we say, okay. It's ten years in the future. And One of the most popular

simulations I created. We ran it in 2010 with the World Bank. And it was set ten years in the future. So the year twenty twenty. And we asked them to imagine a series of cascading global crises.

And how would they feel? What would they do? How would they adapt? How would they try to help others? And it started with a respiratory pandemic that. Started in China. Yeah. And then there was a misinformation and conspiracy theory group called Citizen X that started to spread all kinds of crazy information and people couldn't figure out what was really going on and they weren't trusting the government. And then they started experiencing historic wildfires on the West Coast due to climate change. I mean

It was essentially everything that we actually live through. In twenty twenty. But back then it was fictional it was hypothetical and We ask people.

First of all, we want to just get some collective intelligence, like Let's say you've been told to isolate. For two weeks. Can't go to work, can't go to school, can't go out. Under what circumstances would you break this order? Right? Is there something that would make you feel compelled to go out, even if you've been told not to?

You're contagious, you're at risk. And the number one thing people said was for religious services because it's so deeply ingrained in their values and the community is so important to them. We also heard weddings, funerals. And Of course, these turned out to be The super spreading events the hardest to shut down.

when the real pandemic happened. People said, you know, I'm I'm worried about. Schools being closed. and how I'm going to work and take care of my kids at the same time, if suddenly we can't send them to school anymore. A lot of women expressed concern that they would be the ones who'd have to stop working. Of course, in twenty twenty, there was a historic exodus of women from the workforce to take care of kids home from school. I mean, what was really interesting is the players back then

We're able to Two. effectively imagine what they would feel and need and do and predict A lot of things that During the actual pandemic.

People said were surprising. You know, we ask people. We we ran another simulation called quarantine. Back in two thousand eight, looking at the year two thousand nineteen. And we asked people during that simulation to wear masks. We gave them masks, we sent out masks, and we said, just try and wear these in your everyday life. And like, what is it like? And how comfortable is it? How socially awkward is it? When do you really need to take the mask off? And would you be able to adapt to it? And what we heard, you know, was it was gonna be very hard to adapt. And there were so many social norms in the way and the physicality of it and the The difficulty of expressing our emotions and feelings and connecting to others.

So we're like, great, even though it sounds like a really rational intervention during a pandemic. when the real pandemic rolled around, we're like, this is gonna be really tricky and people aren't gonna wanna do it. It's just amazing. How much we could learn.

That when the real pandemic happened And all the other. intersecting crises. People said, Well, that was unimaginable or that was unthinkable. But no, people Our experts

On their own futures, and if you ask them Before the crisis happens, before the disruption happens. You can get really actionable evidence, but Tim, can I tell you? What for me is the most important thing that happened as a result of all these people. Tell me all the things and then I have many then I have many follow up questions on this and this story. Please continue.

I started hearing from people At the start of twenty twenty. I mean people at the World Bank who had worked on the simulation and they were like, Oh, are we reporting out? Are we like following up because this of the world it looks exactly like we imagined. But also from participants, from players. And they were writing me very early on, before most people were even paying attention to what was going on. They told me, like, you know, ever since that. Game.

Pandemics have just been on my radar. It's like I pick up the information faster than other people. I notice the change faster. They were they were writing me in early January when most people were not really thinking this was going to affect them outside of China. People were writing me throughout twenty twenty saying This has been terrible, but I feel like I experienced

Less anxiety and depression. than my friends and family. I felt less shocked. It didn't take me as long to accept reality. Tim, I don't know if you remember.

We were fighting reality early in this process. People did not want to change. Businesses did not want to send their workers home. I think a lot of people are still fighting reality, but yes. Yeah. I spent like the last Two years studying. all of these people who participated, how they suffered less during the real crisis. And it wasn't even necessarily like, well, some people avoided getting sick better than others, but it was that

The first feeling they had, the first emotion they had when this all happened. was pre recognition Which is an incredibly positive emotion. It's like you said no srodamas. That feeling of having been right. I knew this could happen. I saw this coming. That makes us feel smart.

It makes us feel capable. Confident, powerful, even when we're in All this uncertainty and disruption. And Having that be your brain's first reaction

To a new adverse situation, it turned out was really powerful. It allowed people to feel less shock, not get frozen, not be in denial, overcome normalcy bias faster, and get on with adapting. And helping themselves and others. We're gonna of course get into Many facets of

Seeing the future coming, we're seeing envisioning the future coming, different tools, different games. But let me double click for a second on this two thousand ten Simulation. So there are two questions that I have. The first is How did you

Or how did the team or how did someone else arrive on these particular scenarios? And then The second question is what other scenarios were there, if any, that did not come true or that have not yet come true? So there were really two big simulations we were running at the time. One was Superstruct, which I was running with researchers at the Institute for the Future, and the other was Evoke, which I was running with the World Bank.

And I would say that One of the biggest inputs into deciding what scenario to simulate. Was a new resource that

That had just been published for the first time. The World Economic Forum published its first annual report on global. Threats, which they now do every year. But this was the first time they published it, and they were asking business leaders, government leaders, creative people, the smartest people they could find, the most powerful people they can find, and ask them, what's keeping you up at night? How Likely, do you think The things that are keeping you up at night are to happen. They ask really smart questions like, What do you think is the most

Under Rated or underappreciated risk or threat where it's more likely than people think. It's gonna have a bigger impact than people think. And by the way, I want to share with you what was recently reported as the most underrated risk'cause I am Totally.

I feel it, I believe it, I think we need to prepare for it. So we were using that, and you know, I always say like It looks in retrospect like really amazing. We totally predicted the future. We had A whole scenario on supply chain disruptions. That was a big part of it. And that definitely happened. We had one of the scenarios called power struggle was about geopolitical disruption. Surrounding oil and gas and fuel, which I mean has sort of happened on and off. One of the things we were looking at in that scenario was what would happen to countries that rely on

fossil fuels for their economy, and would they successfully transition their economy? Out. like some countries in the Middle East are trying to prepare for a future now where the world doesn't need all this oil. But then you have countries like Russia right now, which is trying Use gas and oil as leverage against the rest of the world, you can't sanction us, you need our fossil fuels.

And think about what might happen if we do make that sacrifice and say, you know, we're gonna accept higher prices, we're gonna accept radical Temporary reduction in our carbon emissions to not be held hostage by this government. So that was the scenario we were looking at. It didn't all happen at the same time. I'm not sure if there's anything we s we said that was like super

Super crazy. I'm gonna come back to that because I'm we had 10 predictions in Evoke and we had five in Superstruck. But you know, you just you don't have to be like a genius. You just have to pay attention and not deny reality. If you're willing to have some trust in science, some trust in expertise. People know what's coming.

Uh Public health people know pandemics are coming before they hit us. The next one they're worried about is a tick borne pandemic. Maybe it would be fun for us to talk about it because it's gonna make us all allergic to meat and think about living in a world where we have meat allergies. Let me interject for a second. So my mom actually has Allergies to mammalion proteins due to the lone star tick in this particular case. So we have first hand experience and I've had Lyme disease twice, so I

We both have firsthand experience. So could you elaborate on that and then we'll we'll move on from the doom and gloom. But but I do think this like premeditatio malorum as like say Seneca or the Stoics might word it, this envisioning worst case scenarios is a valuable skill or just It's not even necessarily. Obsessing on worst case. It's Envisioning

what underestimated threats could be or inevitable. threats if you just look at like the secondary, tertiary effects of of trend lines that are already converging. So could you say more about this tick borne disease? Yes, and I will say you are absolutely right. You do not have to dwell on apocalypse. So as I write about a study in Imaginable that showed that five minutes of vivid imagination Was enough. to overcome normalcy bias. So normalcy bias is when we believe that the future will be like the present or the past and we really underestimate

the actual risk or likelihood of novel changes or disruptions, but five minutes of vivid imagination. And vivid imagination means not just thinking abstractly about it, but like trying to go to the future in your mind, like it were a virtual reality world where you can like look around. What's the weather like? Who's with me? What is my body like in this future? You're really trying to Get in it. So one of the futures I think people should spend five minutes vividly imagining Is a future in which this Alpha Gall syndrome, which I'm very sorry to hear that your mom has it.

It affects more people. So the numbers are really rising. We're actually doing a simulation about this scenario starting at the Institute for the Future tomorrow. I'm like super busy planning to kick this off right now. And I mean the signals look pretty significant in the United States there are regions of the country, particularly in the south east, where thirty three percent of people have already received At least one of these tick bites and already have sensitivity to this sugar molecule that shows up in animal products. So it's meat, but it's also.

Gelatin, so if you're like eating gummy vitamins, you know, you can't do that anymore. There's gelatin and toilet paper. In uh encapsulation. Also, if you take capsules, most capsules contain gelatin. And I was in I took my family to Japan where I've spent a lot of time as an exchange student and just love the place. So I finally took my family there and we had to take my mom to the emergency room because she had

Dessert. That had gelatin in it. Oh my goodness. Often used for binding purposes. And it is surprisingly ubiquitous. Yeah. Yeah. So you know, in the scenario that I've developed around it, there's a meet is everywhere campaign public service announcements to let people know That sort of hidden Animal products, but also what they're starting to see is if you have a lot of exposures to these molecules, even airborne meat.

can trigger a really dangerous allergic reaction. So if somebody's doing like a cookout, a backyard grill, even just smelling The smell of meat cooking. And so I'm just trying to imagine, you know, what Happens. To our eating lives to our rituals and traditions, to the restaurant industry, to groceries, to the world if

one in ten people on the planet are living with this. And it is when we come up with scenarios, we're looking for signals of change, evidence that certain futures are becoming more realistic or more probable. Ticks are now moving into areas they haven't lived Before in in New York City, it used to be urban parks were safe. Well, researchers just found disease bearing ticks in all of the public parks in New York City. Here in California, we have them on our beaches now, which they didn't used to be hanging out on the beach.

Beach with the safe place. Now there are So it's like This sounds terrible. probably we don't want to think about it. We don't want to spend too much time thinking about a future where we're all living with this. But I promise if we spend five minutes imagining it now.

We will notice. Change faster over the next decade. If we need to prepare for it, we'll be ready. We won't be shocked. We're not gonna be in denial. We're gonna be ready to help ourselves and others. So give it five minutes. Just imagine waking up. And

Some of your family members have this Alpha Gell syndrome. Or your employees do, or students at your school do. It's just what's different now. Look around. What are people doing differently? What are some of the assumptions underlying the expectation that this will continue to spread at a high rate? I mean, one of the theories that I've come across just because growing up on Long Island, you were in the middle of the red on the CDC map for tick borne illness, and certainly most people have associated it with the

Northeast, right? Lyme, Connecticut. Mm-hmm. Than lending its name to Lyme disease, et cetera. But what are some of the assumptions? that underlie the expectation of growth. One that I'll throw out there is

climate change leading to two issues, in some cases overlapping breeding cycles, but also Not killing. Ticks. And therefore you just have this accumulation and multiplication. But are there other things you'd like to highlight?

Climate change is the big driver right now of increased tick populations. Also Changing How close humans live. to the wildlife interface. So as we're developing into areas where we're up against forests and mountains and other natural areas, we become

More in contact. With animals that carry ticks. Another reason that it might increase is If you have a lot of exposure Two

Meat and animal products. After you get bitten by one of these ticks. So the first time it bites you, you may not notice anything, which is why I say, you know, 33% of people in the south east have already developed the beginning of this sensitivity. If you get Another bite it increases, but also if you just continue eating a lot of meat. you develop more and more sensitivity. So it's just like one of those allergies where the more you expose

Yourself to it, your body gets angrier every time. Heightened immune response. So, not just in the United States, but in other parts of the world. Meat eating is on the rise as people come out of poverty. And they want to eat more of a Western diet and more protein. So it's not just happening in the US, but we're seeing in other countries. People are essentially setting up their bodies to be more reactive. to this molecule. One of the things I talk about in the book is there is a preventive strategy.

If you were to start eating less meat or exposing yourself less frequently to this molecule. If you did become impacted, you're less likely to experience such a severe reaction that you would need to go to the hospital. Now, not everybody would want to do that, but It's something you can do, it's in your power. I'm always looking for things you can do.

to feel ready, be ready. Set yourself up to Survive or thrive in no matter what happens in the future. Now just to play stand in for some people in the audience they might say, Well wait a second. I think Jane

is probably a vegan or has some Secret mission. to reduce meat consumption and therefore biased. But let me let me so you can speak to that if you'd like, but let me just mention you could go the other way. The exercise doesn't have to lead that direction. You could also say, Well And I'm not suggesting that people do this, but it's not found in fish, reptiles, birds, or people. So alligator farms, ostrich farms. I mean you could go In a different direction.

Cricket protein. You can you can eat crickets. You can eat poultry. I think it's still fine. I think shellfish is still fine, but it's funny, in this scenario, I actually have One of the things that we anticipate happening is people who are convinced that Alpha Gall syndrome is a hoax. So they think it's a lie perpetrated by the plant based industry to increase profits. Or It's the work of a feminist militant vegan global secret society called the Alpha Gals, designed to scare people into adopting a vegan lifestyle and possibly lowering their testosterone by eating less red meat. So we're already anticipating The misinformation and conspiracy theories. You know what? I was vegan for a while. I'm not a vegan anymore. So you cannot pin that on me. I'm not currently. Um although I do, I mean, I don't eat red meats for whatever that's worth, but You know, I'm ready for this future.

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

In my case, again, I'm not recommending anyone do this, talk to your doctors, but I always carry a supply of doxycycline, which is a common antibiotic. And in the case of any embedded tick, so not a tick walking on the surface of my skin, but any tick that is embedded. And just to paint a picture for folks getting immersed, like you said, if you go walking Let's just say. in Montauk on eastern Long Island. And

You take a hike on public land. There's a very good chance at certain times of the year that if you pull your socks up over your pants, do everything right, put on some type of spray. you'll come back with ten to twenty ticks on you. And that is avoiding tall grass. It is incredible. How much that density has increased.

And you see. different seasons where it's it's just absurdly, absurdly dense. However, where I was going with that is right, if we're looking at some of the The ripple effects of this type of phenomenon or just this type of

story, right? The meme of This prediction. Spreading if it were to spread. Does Doxy or do other medications have any prophylactic or kind of the morning after pill like effects? On

being bitten by a lone star tech. I don't know. But if that were the case, you could envision a world in which All of a sudden you have Ten, twenty different ripple effects just caused by, say, stockpiling. Mm-hmm. Antibiotics or other drugs. Absolutely. So antibiotics don't work to prevent the sensitivity from developing, but one of the ripple effects that we forecast in this scenario is a run on It depends.

Because you might suddenly have Going from hundreds of thousands of ER visits in the country for anaphylactic shock. in a year to Tens of millions of

ER visits for this. And you know, one of the things we talk about, well, entrepreneurs will start selling epi pen holders and you can like wear it strap it to your thigh or strap it to your arm. There's like a fashion that develops around the socks that we wear over our pants, like in the future. That's The Instagram influencers are gonna be selling the socks that go all the way up over your pants. I mean, you can imagine All kinds of things happening, but I say like okay, well what if you wanted to spend five minutes a day feeling More

ready for the future. I mean learn how to use an epi pen. If you don't know how to use one yet, that's a good one. Learn how to do a tick check. You can actually go to your doctor today and request A test. I think Lab Core will also do it. So it doesn't really matter, you know, if your doctor's into it or not. You can go to Lab Core and request A blood test to see if you have Sensitivity to the alpha. scalp molecule yet. So you can know if you're at risk. And if you're not at risk, like great. Because again, the first bite usually is not a problem. But maybe you want to know that you actually have sensitivity to this and that might make you

Try a little bit harder to avoid. The tick bites. In the future. Now is this the threat that you were alluding to earlier? that the World Economic Forum And uh

put into the the more current editions or is it something else? No. Well okay. So And I promise we're not gonna spend the entire time talking about threats as much as uh people follow Enneagram. I'm a self preservation six, so sorry. But What was that threat? Well, and this one, I think there's like a silver lining to this threat. I'm actually kind of excited about this threat, if that sounds a little bit weird and um twisted. So the number one most underrated threat was global youth disillusionment. So basically young people Saying

F it. I don't buy How we've organized society and I'm out. I'm not doing toxic productivity. I'm not doing the capitalist grind. I'm not gonna live my life the way that

global capitalist forces want me to. And if you want to look for evidence, where do we see evidence of global youth disillusionment? I don't know if you saw there was a landmark study published in February of this year in the Lancet Planetary Health Journal. And it's the biggest study of its kind ever. They interviewed over 10,000 young people aged sixteen to twenty five in ten countries, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North America, Latin America, and they found that fifty-six percent Of young people.

feel that humanity is doomed and they personally have no future. Two thirds that they primarily feel anxious. hopeless or afraid of the future. And the number one reason that they gave for these feelings Was confusion about government failure to act on climate change. Like they literally

Think The world is going to burn. And They're not here for anything except radical dramatic action. And you can kind of see Also, little bits of this in like the great resignation in the lying flat movement in China. Do you know about the lying flat movement?

I don't, but tell me more. What is lying flat movement? It's just young people saying, sorry, not gonna get a full time job. I don't need to spend all this money. You don't have to pay me so much because I'm just gonna buy less or live at home with my parents, that would make me happier. So it's like lying flat, like I'm just gonna lie. down. And literally they lie down a lot. But

It's more of a meme. The idea is that I just don't believe that this is necessary. This hussle, this grind, global grind. It's not good for the planet. It's not good for my mental health.

And I don't like it and I'm out. And so the idea that I mean, on one hand, this is posed by the world economic forum as a global risk or threat. Because what if young people just don't want to do the work anymore? Right. What if they don't want to buy the stuff anymore?

What's that gonna do for the economy? But on the other hand I'm kind of excited for Well, it's also a a risk because people who are disillusioned I shouldn't make light of this. People who are disillusioned are more likely to be drawn to extremism and terrorism. So

That is also That is a major risk. And I also find it exciting. That

We might be, you know, kind of like the sixties was a big decade for social change and just radically changing our norms about gender and race so fast. Maybe we are going to be able to ride the wave of global youth disillusionment to Something that I think could be better. I've been radicalized a bit by, you know, the seven years since we last

Spoke. I definitely uh Want to see. Big. Radical crazy change.

Let's if you're open to it, just chat for a second about the sort of unspoken subtext of that statement. This is kind of a lazy question, but with respect to what you just said, what has happened for you or what have you felt or what have you come to realize in the last seven years. I mean I've learned about

Modern monetary theory, which I think is super interesting. Have you ever had an expert on modern monetary theory on your show? I don't know if I have. I definitely encourage you to get someone on to talk about How countries with sovereign Monetary systems. Can afford

to do more than we are. I won't try to be an economist on this. But There's a new understanding of money. that makes it possible for us to really seriously imagine universal basic income, which I've gotten more informed about universal basic income and how it changes people's physical health or mental health. There's less crime. I mean, it's just it's a good thing for society. So I've been kind of

I don't want to say radicalized because I don't think UBI is a radical idea, but I'm I'm on that train. I want people to work less and care more. Right, care for their kids, care for themselves, care for their communities. I've seen the numbers on the four day work week. Which I think isn't going far enough. I'm already imagining a three day work week as a global norm.

Because We Honestly, there's no reason with automation With AI

There's no reason we need to work this much. I mean, every time we've invented new technologies of productivity, economists have predicted that we're going to use that. To create more free time for leisure and cooking and hasn't happened. It only happens when companies experiment with shorter work weeks. The only thing that actually leads to People spending time on themselves and each other in ways that benefit them physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally is when the boss says, Well, I'm gonna pay you the same amount of money, but for a shorter work week. And it's been tested

On as much as 20 hour work weeks. I mean, I know you you know all about working less, but you know, they've been able to pilot 20 hour work weeks, which I actually think is. the ideal in terms of, you know, like how much productivity do we actually have in a day. Especially for people who are creative or they're thinking, they're producing Four. To five hours a day is its absolute max. Yeah, the the consensus pretty much for almost every

Writer. I've spoken to and I like the writing example because it's quantifiable. It both in terms of time and in terms of output, say just words per day is Around four hours is where a lot of I would

consider very productive, many would consider prolific. writers max out per day. So we're looking at let's just call it twenty five to thirty hours of concentrated work. In that case per week. Let's see, what else can I tell you about that part of being a futurist is you get exposed to new ideas and new evidence.

A little bit faster so you can you can kind of get excited before other people. So one of the areas of evidence, new evidence that I'm excited about is looking at Programs that give Free

Basically unlimited. Fruits, vegetables, fresh produce. Two people. Who want it. Not means testing, so not not just like poor people, not just people who are on food stamp programs, but just take a community.

Give them a bag. Say you can fill this up. You can take this to any farmer's market or grocery, fill it up with whatever you like to eat. Any fresh fruit or vegetable, it's totally free. Program set give away this kind of food for free to people.

See such a radical improvement. And health. Such a dramatic decrease in healthcare costs. And these programs are being piloted all over the country. People who are interested can look for the food is medicine movement. It's a coalition of Food producers.

Who pays for this? So the government is actually the US federal government has given money to these programs to test it. You would never know about it. I don't know why this is not more common knowledge. It's like hidden away in some farm bill. I mean it's There should be more awareness of this. And then there are also philanthropists who are funding it. There's health insurance companies doing pilots because they think they can spend less money on healthcare of people. If it's just easy. And you know what I love about it? It creates this feeling of abundance. So inimaginable, I ask people just to imagine.

You have this like Tote bag with a QR code on it that's attached to your profile. So you can take this bag wherever you want once a week and just get whatever you want for free. And just how good that feels. And we can imagine that when we go to a market, we can look around and just imagine What would I? And the feeling of abundance instead of scarcity and Of

Having what we need. The emotional quality like is this is not just a physical health intervention. This is a mental Health boost to feel like we have what we need. And if we can create more abundance in the future.

Any way we can do that, we fight less. There's less. Sense of Other people as being Competition.

If we all have what we need, that's a world where we I think we can be a little bit happier and nicer to each other, and I would like to live in that world. So I'm gonna ask you about urgent optimism in a moment. In a moment. First I wanna just bounce some non professional

Mm-hmm. Thoughts slash I wouldn't say in some cases predictions. off of you and just just get your get your thoughts. So the first one is You mentioned universal basic income.

And What we're already seeing in places like, say, the Philippines with Axi Infinity is People Playing to earn. So playing a game. Earning income to the extent that there are so many players

On some level they represent such a significant percentage of a politician's constituents that they can now impact elections. And this trend I think is only going to explode. I I don't see any countervailing force. Maybe there's some regulatory action, but regulatory action

is often determined by political action. Politicians like to be reelected. So It really depends, which is the same way that say Uber took a lot of cities, right? They could harness the power of their In this case, users and drivers, but mostly users, not even people making Their livelihood. Automatically.

to kind of overthrow policy in a sense. There's so many things about what you said. I'll I'll throw two things out at you, okay? So One aspect of it is cryptocurrency, right? In in Axis Infinity, they're earning money by essentially mining cryptocurrency as they play. There is definitely gonna be regulation. You know, Biden's talking about setting up regulation of cryptocurrencies. The scenario that I think is most likely in the space because of all this unregulated

exchange of income and wealth. is that governments will absolutely create their own cryptocurrency, central bank cryptocurrencies and there will be incentives to not use What are now what we call like traditional cryptocurrencies that are

unregulated or unattached to a national bank. There will be financial incentives. So in China right now, they hate Bitcoin. They're banning it. They want people on a government cryptocurrency so they can track. Every transaction. They want to know where your money's going. China's a surveillance state, right? They're giving it away for free. Hey, try this new cryptocurrency. Here's a bunch of money. And they want to get more of this currency into circulation. So that it replaces traditional cryptocurrency and then they get the data.

And people have sort of been I don't wanna say lured into it. Hundred percent lured into it. If they're being bribed with money on a hook. Yeah. So one of the dilemmas that I pose in Imaginable is would you take that offer? Let's say you can trade in your traditional crypto or traditional cash. For

Twenty percent interest. A hundred percent interest, one time offer. I want people to imagine being ready for this wave of regulation, but also for this wave of potential financial opportunity. If you're willing to use A government's cryptocurrency. That too could be a big wealth generator, but I think people will be paid to play games through a completely different economic system, which is the Game companies themselves

getting into a revenue sharing system with players because we know you look at Roblox People already getting paid for creating games within this gaming world or ecosystem. The companies are Trying to figure out how to make gaming sustainable and healthy and

And viable for the long run. And so we are gonna see Definitely. Ways to earn a living playing games, but it might not be

in a crypto sense, it might be in a more traditional sharing revenue sense and I'm very excited about that. Just to and not I don't want to take us too far down like crypto metaverse lane, but another question that I have as I think about this. And there are many experiments being run right now.

in the sense that you have Axi Infinity as one very large scale example, although in the grand scheme of things I think Still in the first inning, you have Companies like So Rare which tether real world performance and sports to not just virtual gaming, but then betting on top of that. It's fascinating. And

one question that has come to mind for me is I'm thinking about the secondary, tertiary And so on effects is Which occupations will first or most likely experience mass defection.

Brain drain. So who are we gonna lose? Which services are going to experience a gap that may not be automatically filled by automation if the automation is slower in terms of mass adoption than the player earn, which I think will take off. But those are some of the questions I'm asking. Let me let me throw out a couple of other ones. So another is A I created or curated. Whether with attribution to some team or

Anonymously In effect cult leaders or religious figures. Because you can Presumably ingest vast amounts of data. About

a potential target population or craft a particular figure who is nearly indistinguishable from a photorealistic human. And China has already, of course, China's is far ahead on a lot of this, and they've they've had even as recently as I want to say Maybe two years ago, so I'm sure the technology has improved dramatically, but they had Real newscaster AI.

Newscaster. Same person side by side and the test was to see if you could tell the difference. And it was hard. It was really hard. I'm you are hitting on something very important. I mean, we are definitely entering into decades of essentially cognitive warfare and we are definitely going to have to protect ourselves. One thing that I've seen That

Makes me You know, uh pay attention. I wanna be alert to this future is the blending Of People in your social network. Вис.

Of this like Artificial Persona that they've So let's say there's a cult leader that they want to establish. a following around. You can blend that person's face.

With the face of a person's mother. Father. Romantic partner. And create It's just the slightest tweak. You and I would think we were looking at the same

cult leader phase, but the algorithms can go to your social network. Pick your closest relatives or people you interact with most often on the network. Use their faces to slightly transform the face of the cult leader. So every single one of us. It's seeing now. I haven't seen examples of cult. They're just doing this in studies, just to be clear.

And then people trust, they say how trustworthy does this person look to you? Well, the trust goes up when their faces are blended. I guess it depends on the relationship with the family member. But yes, I I uh I get the basic idea. But I mean so it's it's not hard to imagine. It's like trust warfare. It's taking People that you have trust in. And hijacking it to build your trust. They can do it. I mean, right now it's being positioned.

Primarily for Politicians as a way to make yourself look like somebody a person would want to vote for, you just slightly morph your face to look like someone's mom, or for marketing to make spokespeople more Relatable. One hundred percent we're gonna see that happen. I mean, like ten years from now, you and I are gonna be like

Ugh, can you believe that So the the game becomes What do we do about it? A lot of people are interested in moving to A more of an audio.

culture and audio information culture because there's so much Deep fake video and so much deep fake Imagery being generated by AI. That we might have a longer timeline where The audio landscape is more

factual or trustworthy. I'm gonna push back and say there's deep fake audio already. It is horrifying. Horrifying. This is great. I love how you're pushing back. The technology exists, but what does not exist yet is the data sets. Whereas we have facial information about virtually everyone on the planet. Unless you're me and you've recorded six hundred episodes on a podcast. I'm fucked. Podcasters are the first people at risk here. But I think about that future. Because I'm often asked by technology companies to think about unanticipated harms of their products and services. They don't want to wake up in ten years and realize they just

destabilized democracy again or what have you. So all of these smart speakers That we talk to, right? And so we're talking to Siri or Alexa were the Google Assistant Well that's learning a lot about

our voice. And it may be that early adopters of those devices, if those systems get hacked, Are at a new kind of privacy or security risk. The way we used to worry about our social security number being hacked, maybe our audio signature being hacked might become. But you know, this is still in the realm of play. Like I still think this is fun to imagine. It's not a serious enough, it's not like, you know, the Alpha Gow syndrome where like, oh, we should really do something. Right now we're just playing with ideas and we're thinking about how our actions today could lead to

A better or a a weirder. Or a scarlet. Well, let's get weird. So I I encourage people to listen also to my last conversation with Eric Schmidt around AI. It may make you want to curl up into the field position and just weep, but I think a lot of these things are closer than we expect. And so that leads to my next question, which is one I probably wouldn't ask Eric, but I will ask you'cause we've we've spent some time together and I feel comfortable asking you because you're breadth of exposure and thinking is is very wide.

in this world of looking into the future. So let's talk about Two things, I guess. Sort of physical augmentation and manipulation. So let me say one thing about what you just said also earlier. If Someone has data on your likes and interests, presumably one could. You like Rihanna? Great, when we show you an ad for a fill in the blank.

And we know you're a female, we're going to like take ten percent of her attributes and blend them into whatever AI face is talking to you. But if we look at For instance, some of the trends that I'm already seeing. I mean, my my girlfriend showed me a number of filters on Instagram that I could not believe. I mean, people are using these filters and it turns them into, you know, nine or ten out of ten. Attractiveness.

models. It's pretty mind boggling to see the side by sides. So my next question is gonna be related to sort of porn and virtual sex. Because younger as I understand it, and I don't have the direct source or citation for this, but it seems to be that

younger generations are actually having less and less sex. And there there could be many different causes. There probably are many different causes. But It would seem to me that in a world of kind of ubiquitous beauty, if people are able to modify that, and ubiquitous kind of extreme sex, that a certain insensitivity develops, right? Where the real world pales in comparison. And I follow V R Less so AR, but VR reasonably closely, and I do think, you know, ready player one is probably closer than we would like to think.

But I imagine when you have technologies like Neuralink and direct, you know, computer brain interfaces, which could be good for a lot of things, but My feeling is that Virtual sex

And kind of immersive porn. is probably not going to use haptic suits. So these suits that just have like a vibration in your chest or something is very dissatisfying uh ultimately when it gets to certain types of things. Like if you're getting shot by a ghost in a video game, fine. But if you are having sex with someone probably not the sensation you're looking for. But It seems to me that As with many technologies, horn

is going to probably drive a lot of the pushing the envelope. Yeah. So this is a this is a very 'Cause like no one will ever admit to going to Pornhub and yet it's like the fourth most visited website in the world or something. How far away do you think we are from that or how do you think about this? Because I I think the destabilization that it will exert Not just a pawn.

People productivity is the disruption of relationships, possibly Procreation, putting aside the kind of children of men movie type scenarios, which is a whole separate thing. This could even be I could see it being weaponized, where like there are I mean politicians get involved because of the sort of macro effects that these things have. Maybe I'm just spinning a science fiction yarn. But what are your thoughts? Okay. I'm like taking so many mental notes as you talk. By the way, Tim, you are

an excellent futurist. Uh I I wanna invite you. I you have visited me once at the Institute for the Future. I would like to invite you back sometime. I wanna pick your brain for some of your Wild scenarios because they're They're informed, right? You talk to so many interesting people that you You hear these signals coming. So Let's see. Okay.

So first of all, yes, definitely. Porn is almost always at the vanguard of new technologies. It's one of the biggest drivers of adopt like sex and porn will drive adoption of new technologies. There's a huge interest in neural implants, as you suggest. I do think There is considerable interest in developing neural implants. First wave will be for mental health for treating intractable depression and suicidal ideation. That will be the first wave. Second wave Maybe sex.

And fun. And you could Definitely imagine. A society In which Our

Orgasm needs are met. By a neural implant rather than through physical sex. And what I Find fascinating to think about is, you know, could we map out

all of the possible consequences, maybe some positive, maybe some negative. But what happens when we Don't have to have physical encounters, essentially.

And we're already we're seeing that through porn. But The difference between normal simulation is it wouldn't need to use imagery. So I actually think it would be better. In some cases.

to get an orgasm through neural simulation rather than through porn, because a lot of the porn that's being created today. Is I think Really What's the word I want to use? There's a lot of violence.

In it that If you look at the research for why younger people are having so much less sex. The biggest reason that's coming up in the research right now is that women see The choking, the slapping, the hitting in the porn, it's become Normalized

And they don't What To be choked and slap and hit they see sex as more violent than it traditionally has been. And so we've got this whole generation of young women. So look at the imagery that's being consumed and produced and think like, I don't know, that doesn't

seem like something I actually want to be experiencing. If we didn't have to be creating these visual Representations. People might actually come back to sex. If

they weren't being shown versions of sex that they personally did not want to participate in. May I add something to that? Yes. Because it's all crazy and hypothetical. Yeah, no, I think a huge part of it. Is That males become desensitized.

Two. the appeal of let's just call it everyday or normal sex, because if you can have a threesome or foursome with like, you know, nubile young women who will enthusiastically do anything, even if it doesn't include violence and uh these other sort of acts of aggression. Let's say it's not that. Let's say it's just all fun and games. But if you have kind of access on demand to the most Outrageous fantasies that you could possibly have. Instantaneously with broadband.

I think there is a desensitization also I think sex drive from males who are I think if we want to call spade a spade, typically sort of initiating Interest or sexual advances. If they are constantly depleting themselves.

Physically there are kind of physical self-regulatory mechanisms that will lower sex drive. So so I do think that's a huge part of it. Right, and it could change culture. I mean, if men are just acting differently, if women are acting differently, so much of society is right now oriented around finding sexual partners. Our grooming, our physical routines, our social encounters, like our dreams, our hopes that we imagine for ourselves. If we were to put that

Time or energy. I'm positing that we're not getting addicted to this simulation. It's highly regulated in the way that like you can't I don't know, buy more than X amount of stimulant medication, you know, it's controlled. I'm assuming it's gonna be controlled. If it's not, we're in a lot of trouble. But yeah, people like just pouring their energy.

They male energy, they're female energy, they're their gender career energy into whatever else they might want to do other than just trying to find a mate is going to be really interesting. In a way, it's as radical as not having to work forty hour work weeks and the time and energy that frees up for other things. I think it is so fundamental that I think it's going to rock.

Everything because I was looking up the source, you know, Oscar Wilde said everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. Now put it putting aside the meaning or the interpretations of the last line for a second, which I think is interesting, but it's a whole separate podcast. But it's it's like if you look at I'll just speak from the male perspective'cause I I mean the vast majority of what men do in this world, certainly up in sometimes exceeding the point at which they have kids.

Revolves around Preferred. Mating abilities. That's it. Yeah. It's like all of it. The fucking cars, the fucking money, the power, the this it's all Yeah. Going straight to sex. Yes.

When you start to remove Yeah. That incentive in the real world. Holy shit. Oh my God. I love it. Okay, Tim. One hundred percent. I'm committed. I want to simulate this future. So so we have a scenario club, a new scenario club at the Institute for the Future. It's like a book club, but you just come and talk about different future scenarios each month.

And we imagine ourselves and what might happen in the ripple effects. And I'm gonna do this year. A future of sex. scenario for our scenario club, which by the way is open to the public. So I hope people listening who are like incredibly have their brain on fire thinking about this possibility that you have put in front of us, they should come to Urgent Optimists, which is our Future Imagination Club and they should join Scenario Club and come imagine the future of sex with us this year.

You have planted that seed, I'm gonna water it. We're gonna we're gonna see what it grows into. On which Website can people Find that. That is urgent optimists, like plural because there's a bunch of us. Dot Org.

Okay, urgentoptimist.org. We'll also put it in the show notes. So let's lest we Allow the apathetic Youth amongst us. just turn into, you know, uh some version of twelve monkeys or worse. Encourage everybody to re watch that movie, by the way. Should also rewatch Ready Player One and Children of Men.

And possibly reread Snow Crash, but that's a s whole separate thing. We need more movies about futures we want based on that list. I know I know. Although you know, you we were chatting before recording about my my conversation with Margaret Atwood and she writes a lot about near term kind of dystopian. people would consider dystopian futures, but she's very optimistic, which is interesting. So let's talk about cultivating optimism or definitions of optimism. What is Urgent optimism. Urgent optimism, that's actually a phenomenon I first identified when I was studying the psychology of gaming. So something interesting happens.

with people who play video games often is there's a certain Neurocircuitry pattern that gets really strengthened and easy to activate. that involves the reward system and the learning centers That makes us feel Like

I got this. It's like the neuroscience of I can do this. And we feel more physical energy, more mental focus. More hope that something good could happen, more expectation that we can make something good happen through our own efforts and actions and abilities and

What my research eventually showed was that essentially Every video game is like a psychological experiment. It's like a training ground to convince people. That They have power, right? You go into the game, you make choices, you take actions, the virtual world changes, you get better, you're improving your skills you're achieving goals.

This whole experience and journey of essentially building the sense of power that we have to impact the world and how the future of the game turns out. What I've tried to do in my work is figure out how do we develop that Sense of power and The real

ability to Get new skills and achieve more ambitious goals in relation to reality and in relation to the future. So that we're not just feeling this when we play a game, but when we think about the future of sex or the future of food or the future of religion or the future of democracy, whatever we wanna think about. That we feel that same sense of Urgent optimism that I know for sure there are things I can do today.

That will Impact how the future turns out. For the better, through my own power. And there are three habits. That you can practice. That builds urgent optimism.

By the way, the the best way to do it is just to play these future simulations. I mean that's like the fast track. That's the cheat. I I tend to um as you've probably noticed, when I play out the future scenarios, I almost always go negative. That that I think is Part of My superpower, so it's like I've you know saw COVID coming from a mile away. I was able to prep prepare, make a lot of decisions that were great decisions early. But I'm sort of constantly future pacing to the next disaster, right? That's it and people like what they're good at. It's like

stretchy, fle people like yoga, even if yoga didn't make them stretchy,'cause they get to be like the Michael Jordan of the You know, hot a flow or whatever the hell. Good. I'm glad you said that. So urgent optimism does not mean thinking that everything is going to be good, it does not even mean imagining Better futures. In fact, urgent optimism

is often something we develop by thinking about. as you said, the next risk or threat or a disaster. But the key is We have to Practice these three habits and like we have to take it to a full cycle. You might be stopping Some place where we don't get

We actually it doesn't actually feel good yet. So we gotta do these three things to feel good. The first step is mental flexibility. So mental flexibility, it's the opposite of having a fixed mindset or being stuck in assumptions that the future will be like the past. So To get mental flexibility. You're always looking for these signals of change. You're paying attention to weird stuff that's happening that maybe has never happened before. You're putting kind of like your ear to the ground so that you can

notice change faster. One way you can increase mental flexibility besides just Trying to pick up on these signals of change is just to vividly imagine. scenarios that other people would describe as unimaginable or unthinkable. So like we are just trying to go to this future of sex with the neural implants, or we're going to the future of where we can't trust video or faces anymore. When you put yourself into this future and you just What would it feel like when I Look at my computer screen, what emotions am I feeling? What am I seeing that I've never seen before?

That overcomes the normalcy bias. So the first thing you're trying to do with urgent optimism is just to Not be the person who gets stuck saying That could never happen. Or like, Ugh, I don't know. I can't even imagine it. So I probably don't have to worry about it. We're trying to improve our ability.

to imagine things have never happened. So that's mental flexibility. The second practice is realistic hope. So realistic hope, and I'll give a really good trick for this, but realistic hope is having a balanced mindset. where you are both aware of the risks and threats it makes sense to worry about and prepare for and ready ourselves for.

But also all of the new technologies, the new policy ideas, the new solutions, social movements, all the positive stuff that could make a better future or help us avoid these risks or transform it into something. that is a world we actually want to live in. And one of the simple habits that I teach people to do is just Go to Google. And type solution. For whatever problem you're worried about.

You know? Solution to climate change. Instead of just worrying about climate change, type it into the Google News and see what weird solutions like learn more about carbon capture, learn more about geoengineering and solar radiation management. We have to fill our brain. With The pathways forward. As we're also holding

in mind the risk and threats. And this is just like a most people tend to have more of one than the other. So we're trying to balance it out. I just want to add one quick thing because this is a good place to put it, just in the process of doing research for this conversation. I found another example of using Google that might be this is from you. That might be helpful also for that improvement of kind of Future focused imagination of the so called

Impossible or unimaginable and that is Making a List of things you're interested in. Like food, travel, cars, city you live in, shoes, dogs, music, real estate. This is from Slate dot com.

And I think it's from one of your courses at Stanford. Just how to think like a futurist and it is Once a week, just do a Google search for the future of dot dot dot. Yes, once a week. So I say make it Fridays, future Fridays, easy to remember. Like that. And you just type into Google and I I suggest Google News because what you're looking for is

new stuff that you don't already know about. So you want the latest. And yeah, you type in Future of food and you can learn about Let's say Lab cultured meat. Maybe that's something that you would be interested in knowing that maybe you're a vegan today for animal cruelty reasons.

But in the future there will be actual meat tissue grown in a laboratory condition without an animal having to be killed. Like that might give you hope for the future if you're like kind of a you would rather not be vegan, but you know, you have your ethical concerns. So yeah, you just type it in, future of whatever, and collect that's the signals of change, and it helps you build your mental flexibility. I don't have to be this way my whole life because the future might give me a different opportunity, things don't have to continue the same way. We can do it differently.

So we got to I think we got through two, right? We got to realistic hope. What w what else do we have? You're mentally flexible, you're practicing realistic hope. The last thing is future power. Future power means you can make a list of things you can do today. that help you either be more prepared for the risks inside you're worried about

Or prepare for an opportunity in these future worlds. or that will change the world in the way that you want it to change. So you're like collecting These just little actions. So I'll give shall I give you a few examples of like things that have been good for me. Okay. Learning how to operate A drone for me very empowering.

Drones are clearly gonna be a huge part of our culture and infrastructure in the future. I want to know how to operate one. Particularly the ones with Cameras. Because that is really interesting to me. It's interesting me for art.

For storytelling, for journalism, for documenting human rights violations are being a witness to things that the world needs to know about for all of these reasons. I just ordered not an expensive drone, a cheap drone on Amazon, and learned how to fly it. And I taught my kids We're seven years old now. I taught my daughters how to use it too because It's just something fun and easy we could do.

To be ready. For Future in which It will would be good to know how to use a drone. Another one. Have you heard of adversarial makeup? No, I have not.

All right, you got five minutes. Go find a YouTube video for How to apply makeup. that interrupts the algorithms used in facial recognition. So that's cool. During the pandemic

People were like, Well we're just wear masks and well if we don't wanna be surveilled By our faces will wear masks. Well, during the pandemic, there were so many people masking that all of the big facial recognition companies. had to learn how to recognize people just by this little band of our eyes. And it actually the pandemic actually inadvertently Made. This huge

advances in facial recognition because Companies now they only need to see This little bit. You can apply eye makeup. Two

Throw these algorithms. Off their game. And It's better than wearing a mask, I think. You know, it's more comfortable, it's more social, and it's fun and it's expressive. So yeah, you know, we might wake up in a world not too far from now where people on their phones have facial recognition apps. I mean, we're not just talking about the government or police having this technology. We're talking about it being in every dating app in every social network. I wanna who's that person?

learn all their stuff about them. So You know, you want to be ready for this future, take five minutes. Learn how to apply makeup. to interrupt it. I'll give you one can I give you one more? You can give me five more if you'd like. I'm not an A Rus.

So one thing that I really want to recommend people do in five minutes if they haven't done it yet. is to install An app on their phone. that can be used to create a mesh network. Do you have any mesh network capabilities on your phone? On my phone no. I don't think I do on my phone. I have used mesh networks and I've used them at home, but please explain.

You can get an app like Bridgefi and what they do is if the internet goes out during extreme weather. during a government mandated internet shutdown, which happens in dozens of countries right now. India's a big internet shutdowner to kind of control information and prevent people from organizing. So You can essentially make your own internet. So if you have enough people with this mesh network on your phone.

you can communicate to somebody's phone within a football field's distance and they can communicate to someone at football field's distance. So if you get a community, Or you get a an in an urban center, a bunch of people, you can essentially recreate the internet using just the Bluetooth capacities of your devices. Now Amazon is actually Trying to do this as well kind of secretly, like if you have um

Smart speaker from Amazon. They want to essentially have it be ready to act as a mesh network, which on one hand people are like, Oh, I don't want information being connected with other people's devices. But to me, my mind goes to the future where The government's shutting down the internet for cybersecurity or to stop misinformation or

because it's an authoritarian government and they're shutting it down. And you know, we have s a company like Amazon being like, not so fast, here comes our mesh network. And they bring up this like So the can't be stopped by the government, which by the way, in the United States it's written to the Constitution, the president can shut down the internet. legal scholars have recently looked at this and basically the same communications act that allows the president to shut down

Mail and phone. You can shut down the internet too. She Could shut down the internet. Get your phone ready to make your own internet. Put an app on, five minutes.

So I have not used that. Yeah, I will. I'll try it out. Although I guess there might be a chicken the egg kinda situation. Do you need to convince other people to do it or is it just kinda like Or is it like Google Maps where it's gathering data because so many people already have it installed? There has not been a tipping point yet, I would say. So I mean

You're getting there early, as we like to say at the Institute for the Future. You you'll be one of the people who lets others know, hey. Get your phone ready. to be in a mesh network in case we need it. So right now Yeah, spend the first five minutes putting it on your phone and test it with like someone you live with, a friend, a partner, whatever. Test it so you know how to use it.

And then if you have to converge, you know, in an urban center at some point in the future to like recreate the internet, you'll be ready, but it'll help if more people have it. So you might spend five minutes also telling someone else to put it on their phone. So another uh technology that I don't understand well. So the engineers and computer scientists out there may have criticisms, but Is helium. Which is

In effect. to create decentralized wireless infrastructure. And is is very much web three based. I didn't realize that helium.com. That must have cost a nice pretty penny. I hope they had a good broker for that. But What you're describing and

than thinking of helium and other sort of alternate communications means. Have you done s I imagine you probably have Scenario planning. And we are gonna come back to these three steps. I'm gonna ask you about specificity training also. But before we do

Let's talk about Black out scenarios. So whether that is through Cyber attacks. This is very current news, right? I mean the possibility of cyber attacks on the grid.

the possibility, although I think it's less likely, but a brute force attack with, say, uh electromagnetic pulse bomb over the Great Lakes or something like that. There have been books written by People I would consider informed and credible about This type of threat. Have you done any scenario

Simulations around that. I did do a simulation called Dark After Dark. Where we asked people to practice Not using

Anything with artificial light source after sunset. This is for a slightly different scenario than the blackout scenarios, but it was an interesting way to develop Essentially calluses for a world in which you might not be able to open up your laptop or turn on your phone. Like the we would have

Darkness, true darkness again. That was an experiment in just how people's behaviors would change and how much they were willing to change. So it's More of like an experiment than a future forecasting effort. But I absolutely think it's worth preparing for. I mean, just even in general, the reliability of our

Power grid. is very much Weaker. than it used to be. We saw what happened in Texas. Suddenly there was extreme old You were there for that, Tim. Oh my gosh. I was very involved in trying to Yeah.

You know, water and so on. Two people who if that had gone on three more days, I mean there would have been thousands of casualties. Yes, yes. We we just got lucky. It was pure Just meteorological luck. Yeah, so two things around so one is you be aware, right? So now we have mental flexibility. That maybe we can't expect

the power good to be as reliable in the future. That's the first step, right? We acknowledge the possibility, right? And then we look to Places where we might have more power to avoid or survive or change it, right? So A lot of people that I know are thinking about climate migration right now. They're starting to think about it. I'd love to hear more about that. Oh, that's my obsession. Climate migration is my number one

Personal mission I'm on to prepare people. For up to a billion people to move. And possibly to have a incredibly more open and transparent immigration system than we have today so that people aren't trapped.

Behind. borders and climate hell, but also in our own lives. even moving internally within our country in California. So many people I know are like Mm.

I don't know if I wanna live under extreme wildfire threats for three or four months a year. I don't wanna live with this Air pollution from the wildfire smokes. I don't wanna live with power being preventively cut off. I don't know if you've had this experience where I live. I was in Cali and yeah, PGE rolling blackouts and all that stuff. Yeah. And they just shut it off because they they haven't put the wires underground. So when there's winds, they just turn off your power for up to a week. And you just have to you're expected to work. And

learn and live And cook. Even though literally they're just like no power today. Yeah. So we have to make we have to think now about where we're willing to live or what we're gonna raise hell about, like getting power lines underground. I don't think a lot of people have that as their number one thing to protest and raise hell about, but

we might want to think about securing our power grid as Something as worthy of radical activism as what we've seen social movements in the past around. And is the getting lines underground, aside from being more aesthetically pleasing, is that too

Prevent easy sabotage, or are there other reasons in your mind? It's just more secure underground in every way. In California We're having more wind high wind events. Right. And so they just snap and then they spark a fire and then It's three months of hell.

So That's the main reason. But yeah, it increases security. Overall, one of the games at the back of Imaginable, it's called Welcome Party. And it's an invitation to explore your own tolerance. For climate risk? So there's a set of questions to ask yourself.

At what point is it a tipping point for you to leave? How many days without power a year? How many days of extreme Air pollution. It's just Asking these questions now so that you don't wind up like the frog in boiling water who never hops out.

Yeah. Totally. And just to recommendation if I could throw something out there because I Live in Texas. Clearly a broad spectrum. Uh

Political. allegiances and uh broad spectrum of beliefs that go along with that if you sort of accept whatever the party has as its ten commandments and so on. I think that climate change can provoke a really strong negative response in a lot of people. But

If I simply word it as Increased extreme weather events. Yes. You sidestep the whole thing. Mm-hmm.

human caused. largely or in part skip that part of the I know this is gonna be controversial, but I'm saying just to get the foot in the door if you're talking to someone who may be resistant to that, because that will be one of the first fights that many people want to pick. You just say Forget about that. Let's say this is a natural event. None the less, if we want to

actually maintain our infrastructure. and do A, B, and C. We have to contend with extreme weather events. So let's just assume it's all natural. Doesn't really Absolve. Us of the necessity and advantage of

thinking about how to cope with these. Specificity training. What is specificity training? I know these two words separately, but in the context of what we're talking about. What is this? Can I put a pin in that really quickly?'Cause I just thought of one

practical thing. Make it a pin cushion. Go crazy. I was just thinking of one practical thing we could do. that your listeners might like, which is Can I just tell you the three questions that you can ask to measure your urgent optimism and give you a sense of which of those three habits or skills you might want to practice more. So it's really simple.

And I like to say you can pick this for any topic. So it might be the future of psychedelics for mental health treatment might be something you're interested in, or could be the future of college education to pick a specific topic. And then you ask three questions. When you think about the next ten years. How much do you think

This Topic will change. On a scale of one to ten. So one is almost no change, everything stays the same. Ten is Extreme change. Almost everything is dramatically rethought or reinvented.

So on a scale of one to ten, how much change? Do you expect one to ten? On a scale of one to ten. When you think about the changes that are likely to happen in the next ten years. Are you mostly worried? Or mostly excited.

About them? So one is extremely worried, ten is extremely excited. And then one to ten How much Influence or control do you have personally?

In how this Change happens. So one is Almost no controller influence and ten is almost complete controller influence. And not only is it helpful for us to think like, oh, I need to practice some more realistic hope, find some reasons to hope, if I have a low number, or I need to pay more attention to the World Economic Forum's Global Risk Report, if I'm like at a 10, maybe I should try to learn more about the risks. It's so cool to share numbers with people.

And Mando, I love talking to people who are at Sevens, eights on nines on topic that I'm at a one, two, or three about is super fun. So I just wanted to put that it's like a practical fun for you, talk to people about it, share your numbers, and think about how you might practically increase your urgent optimism on on the ones that you have lower numbers for. Could you give A personal example for yourself.

On A Topic industry.

Discussed yet. It could be one that we've talked about, if that lends itself. But that would be super helpful for me because when I hear these questions I can see the value in answering them. And

I find that my default so I'm not asking for a solution to my particular mal malfunction here, but I think it correlates very highly to the kind of existential malaise and apathy. Of a lot of young people, although I'm definitely too bearded and too bald to be considering myself young at this point. Nonetheless, though. I can answer question one pretty easily for most things, and then I think generally I skew very pessimistic. Yeah. I have a very Hobbsian view of of humans in general, which is maybe another

Issue. And then three with respect to like the agency. Mm-hmm. Sometimes I feel very little agency or I feel a lot of agency, but I don't know if I wanna be Just like Going through.

Just a forest of headaches and Difficult humans with a machete for most of my time. Yes, the upside isn't certain. So could you give an example of Something.

that you've sort of applied these questions to. Let's go back to drones. So Drones. Create a lot of anxiety in people. For good reason. They create

Noise pollution. They create visual pollution. They can be used for surveillance, remote policing, privacy intrusions. Warfare. Warfare, right. And I started seeing drones just out in the world, seeing signs like no drone zone. I didn't know Is that a law? Is that a recommendation? I realized I didn't know what the rules or policies were around drones. I didn't know why.

Why are we spending so much time and money Developing this technology, all I ever hear about are a lot of the risks. So for me, Jerome was the space that I wanted to Explore and maybe build some urgent optimism and not Optimism in the sense of

I'm gonna become an evangelist for drones and I'm gonna Be like Yeah. Future's great, I don't have to worry about it anymore, but to increase my confidence that I can imagine a future with more drones, I understand what it might mean, the risks, the opportunities, and that there are things I can do to be ready for it or help shape it. So I started talking to people.

Looking on Google Scholar, finding drone hobbyist communities. What are people using them for that is not terrible? So I learned about witness.org actually has a drone training program for people to document war crimes, human rights violations, authoritarian governments doing terrible things, to create Irrefutable evidence. So to be a witness for this, drones is a form of activist

journalism and documenting reality. I learned about The emotions that we feel. When we look at aerial footage, so drones, it turns out, can create a kind of visceral. feeling that I don't even know if we have a word for it yet. It's a

Strange new positive emotion. Where we have an almost this kind of godlike omniscience because we're we're seeing everything from above, but we're moving, we're like swooping through the air like an eagle. There's an incredible new positive emotion that we don't even have a word for yet. that artists can use, storytellers can use Therapists can use by Using drones to

To give us a viewpoint we've never seen. I was just gonna say my my ask of my audience is somebody come up with a clever German word for whatever that feeling is and uh put put it online'cause there's there's gotta be uh some way to slap a bunch of adjectives and nouns together into a word that'll get back to the Thank you, Tim. That is that is an amazing suggestion. What else did I learn? I I went to Google News and was like Just show me what people are doing with drones right now. And I learned that just a couple of months ago the first Oregon.

was delivered for a transplant that they couldn't get this organ. I I think it was a heart. They couldn't get it there fast enough. Except for delivering it by drone. So the first emergency medical delivery. So learning about the positive uses, while also learning about What are the rules and policies? Who decides? To me, this it became fascinating rather than anxiety producing to expose myself to. Who is in charge of drones? Is it the FAA? Yes, in part.

Is it local? Parks and recreation. Yes, in part. Because in order to have future power, we have to know. who's making the rules because I need to know what the rules are, who's shaping them. Who's advocating for what? It's like

Building urgent optimism, it's like Following a string out of a labyrinth. It's like you're taking all these twists and turns. You've got your radar up. So you're gonna hear about weird new risks, you're gonna hear about cool new uses. And I like to think it's just like It's essentially a process of opening your mind, and if there's something you care about.

These habits of looking for the clues and If you're negative looking for Well, who's excited and what are they excited about to kind of create the balance, who's in charge, who has power now. So you can even understand where power is being concentrated. What are the companies that are most advanced in this technology? It's literally just. It's a practice. It's a practice like meditation.

Where We just have to kind of show up with this curiosity. Actively Collecting these clues. Every day.

So I can see how The Pursuit. of the sort of metaphorical drone as you follow the strength through the labyrinth with doing this type of data collection would help a lot with answering question number one. When you think about the next ten years.

Do you think things will mostly stay the same or will they change tremendously kind of one to ten? Number three, I can see how you'd figure out what you may be able to do, whether that's learning the technology, whether that's buying a predator drone to take out other drones, which which are being used at in many contexts, including sporting events. you could figure out sort of from an agency perspective what you can do to

Increased the good, decrease the bad. I'd love to talk about mostly worried to mostly optimistic one to ten. Mm-hmm. I got you. And this is a very personal question because I tend to focus on the negative because I'm like, hey We didn't last this long by underreacting to threats, right? Humans are programmed to kind of overreact.

for survival purposes. And Not saying that should be the case, but it's like even if we're all screwed and going to just die in a a fireball of self imposed Disaster. There are times when I would like to not think about that and be more optimistic. Even if it's a s a suspension. I got you. I mean, that is literally why. I run social simulations because I don't want you going into this mental spiral of

Doom and gloom. First of all, people are at different places. naturally in terms of Pessimism or optimism, anxiety or hope. Just were born that way. There's a hardwired nature.

It's a biological component. When we do these social simulations, when we You're going to be exposed to all of these different points of view. And it's why It works for me.

Jane McGonagall, the game designer. To have become a futurist because What are the most fun games to play? It's really not the game you play by yourself. It's the game that you're playing in big groups. Unless it's VR. Neuralink porn, then maybe, but Yeah. A good callback. Right. But I mean, you know, we really like these big game worlds we're all playing together. It's World of Warcraft. It's League of Legends, it's Pokemon Go. We wanna be in community. We wanna be a part of a bigger game. So Tim, you gotta get Out of

Your own head. Oh Jeez. Do I ever It's easier than I mean, you can do this yourself. You can go look for sources of hope yourself. But like so, for example, in Urgent Optimus, we have a week long signals of hope scavenger hunt. Every month. It's a group chat. You just sign up for the group chat and everybody sends each other. the signal of change that makes them feel most hopeful for the future. And we have different categories that you can go look for, like show me a signal of hope around the future of food. Show me a signal of hope for the future of climate adaptation. And

I mean, you're basically flooding your brain. It's an active habit. You have to intentionally expose yourself. Go look for these positive clues. But if you're not good at it.

Then get yourself in a community. The same way when I learned to meditate, I didn't do it. by myself, I went to a sangha and I went to sit in a room full of people who already knew how to meditate so that I could develop that skill and be held accountable. I like to do this features work. With a community to hold each other accountable to see the risks and to see

The reasons to be optimistic. Teamwork makes the dream work. Yeah, I do need too. Get out of my uh sort of Hamster and a wheel in my own head. I'm gonna mention a few things and then I'm just gonna pass the baton and you can pick up whichever one.

You want. I know I'm I'm Mixing up my singular. And plural here, but Okay. Choose your own future forces. Journal from

Future or journal from the future. The first five minutes of the future. Which of those would you like to snack on right now? Great. Well we did put a pin in specificity training. So We did. Absolutely perfect. So journaling from the future, it's a form of specificity training. So what is specificity training?

Most people when they try to imagine the future There's just too many blanks. If I were like, imagine yourself waking up ten years from today. Your brain is like uh You could imagine yourself waking up tomorrow, you know what room you'll be in, what bed you'll be in, maybe what you're sleeping in, what your body will feel like. You have your particular moment in time. If I say 10 years from now, are you gonna feel better or worse? Are you gonna be with a different partner or not? We don't know. Is there gonna be extreme climate change and you're going through some extreme weather?

It's harder to fill in the blanks. So one way that we train our brain to be able to think more effectively and creatively about the future. Is through practices that Increase the specificity of our imagination, the number of vivid details. And you can actually measure if somebody's like, Okay, I imagine waking up and it's uh it's really hot because there's extreme

Heat in San Francisco now, which is really weird. We didn't used to have temperatures over a hundred, but now it's like a hundred and ten every day. You could go back and count the number of details. 110. That's specific. That's more specific than just saying it's hot. And you can count. Every color, every sound, every emotion. I'm feeling dread because I don't want to run my air conditioner or whatever. I'm feeling excited because I've access to this new thing. Every detail counts. And you can score yourself on the specificity of your imagination. And one technique to improve the specificity of your imagination. Which is linked to

Again, more creative thinking, more effective thinking, better strategies, more motivation to do something. Specificity is good. You keep a journal. From the future, where you write detailed entries. Of What you might experience.

As if they had already happened, so you have to treat the future like a memory and you're trying to capture it. Or you can think of it as like journalism, but most of us are better at just writing a personal diary than Some kind of journalistic account. And when I run these social simulations of the future, the main thing people are doing. is just keeping a journal.

So okay, I woke up today and I got the lab results that I do have Alpha Gal syndrome, I've initial sensitivity. This is how I felt. This is the time the phone rang. This is who I told I told my husband first. Like you start to tell the story, you imagine it in vivid detail. The number one thing this accomplishes is that it obliterates normalcy bias. Once you have vividly imagined a future. It is literally imaginable, and you will no longer deny the possibility. You will not

Underestimate the risk, you will spot. evidence of change faster. This is why my book is called Imaginable, because we want to be able to imagine the world either that we might wake up in or that we Create through our own actions that is better. Than a world today. So, you know, any of the scenarios that listeners have heard in this episode. They can just go do this now. Literally pull out a notepad. I find it works better when you write by hand.

Because You don't wanna edit or censor yourself. So we recommend free writing. You set a timer for five minutes and just write for five minutes, whatever comes to mind with as many details as you can. Pick one of these scenarios, future of sex, future of deep fakes, future of Whatever we were talking about, drone, you know. Art.

And storytelling, whatever you want, and just write a journal entry from this future. It will literally change your brain forever. The future is now forever imaginable to you. And it only took five minutes. Who is Alvin Toffler? Ooh, Alvin Taffler. Wait, before I say who's Alvin Taffler, the other thing is when we write these five minute journal entries, we can share them with each other. Which is how we get out of our own head. So that's another reason why you write it down. You don't just want to imagine in your head, because I want

Tim, I want to read your journal entry. I've done enough of that. So Alvin Toffler, he essentially Created popular Future is thinking as we have it today. So in nineteen sixty eight, he wrote a book called Future Shock. And it was coming at the end of this incredibly turbulent time in the United States where

Uh Gender norms were changing, there was a civil rights act finally passed. The economy was changing. People were feeling like they were unmoored new technologies and he had the theory that if too much changes too quickly

That it is like a trauma. We get shocked. We feel overwhelmed, we feel paralyzed, we feel hopeless, unable to cope. And he was observing That there was almost like this mass trauma.

Too much future too fast in the sixties. And so he had this idea that we could essentially Prevent. Future shock from happening. Again, if we were better able to imagine the future before it happened and to prepare people, to actually train people. He had this crazy idea that didn't really come to pass. Where

whole cohorts, whole generations, you would form like clubs almost like almost like we have a book club today or like bowling clubs, but you would come together to practice new future skills and it would become this like right of passage instead of getting a driver's license. You come and you learn these like 10 new future technologies to prepare you so that you don't feel shocked. And that does actually sound kind of fun to me. So yeah, he was trying to get us ready and he kicked off the field. And uh all of us who do futures work today.

We kind of owe him A debt of gratitude for recognizing that how we feel about change. Is a huge driver of society's health and our own psychological well being. I believe this is from The new book, Imaginable.

As it relates to Alvin Toffler. that he had a maxim which is it's just truncated in front of me, but I'd love to just hear you Explain or expand on this a little bit. It is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be one hundred percent right in quotation marks. Could you speak to that and any other sort of maxims of his that uh

That you like. Well Here's the problem with trying to be right about the future. And there are definitely people who Are interested in this, there's like a whole other school of futurism called super forecasting, where you're just trying to be as specifically correct as possible. What will the price of oil be on this date a year from now? What is the exact number of troops that will be sent into this conflict? You're trying to be very

And people try to be as accurate as they can. Which Hoffler was saying. And what I believe to be true. Is What's the point of being right?

Other than You can feel smart, you can say aha, I told you so. Maybe you can like protect or prepare yourself. But what if the future that you think is most possible, the future you think is most likely to happen It's not a good future. I mean, do you wanna be right or do you wanna actually

Prove yourself wrong. And Help. Us all wake up. In a better.

reality. So this obsession with being correct about the future Even though I'm proud of having accurately foreseen certain changes or certain Disruptions. I would be

Much happier. If We never wake up in a world, you know, where alpha gal syndrome is so common because We all got more sort of interested in tick health and like nobody gets tick bites anymore. Cool, problem solved. That was a stupid scenario. That never happened. I'd rather be wrong. And so Alvin Toffler's

Trying to encourage us. And I encourage everyone. Is we stretch the imagination to consider what's possible. And we look for clues. As to which possibilities are plausible.

And what might make an outcome more or less plausible, and then we decide. We take action. To make the future we want more plausible. Or take action to make features we don't want. Less likely.

And that's the power, not accuracy. It's the ability to imagine And take action. That We're really trying to get better at.

I'm gonna ask you about Technologies or approaches are plausible. Technologies approaches that you're excited. About or have spent time on related to

Extreme weather events, AKA, climate change, or carbon removal, et cetera. But before I get to that I'll just say I think one of my challenges in finding optimistic people to Act is a counter veiling influence to my inherent

Innate pessimism. is I'm so fucking tired of techno optimists who are like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can do whatever we want, like we'll figure it out later. That stuff drives me crazy. But To be fair. You know, humans are really good at kind of spotting

obvious trends and I can't remember the exact timing, but at some point Yeah, the price of oil was going up, going up, going up, going up and Someone projected, Well, by this point in time, you know, this day of the year, ten years from now, five years from now, like It'll be a bazillion dollars per barrel and like China will overtake us in this, this, and this. Underestimating

Or missing completely. The fact that when the price of oil gets to a certain point technologies that are currently economically infeasible or that yet haven't not been created because the cost is too prohibitive, suddenly become very profitable like fracking and so on. And so

So there is something to be said for people underestimating the rate of innovation, but the the kind of yeah, yeah, it's all gonna be fine. Mm techno optimist stance that you find at the extreme really drives me nuts. So I would Love to know because it's of personal interest. With uh

Climate solutions or regenerative agriculture, carbon removal. What do you think are some of the most interesting things that you're seeing or expect to see. I don't see these technological solutions as requiring techno optimism so much as they require Socio optimism, meaning that we would somehow find a way as a society to

Enact these potential technological solutions. So the very last scenario in Imaginable, and it seems to be everyone's favorite. People just love it. is called the ten year winter. And it tries to imagine how we as a society might decide to go all in on solar radiation management, which is a real Geoengineering technology that has been

In many people's opinion and my own Grossly. under investigated and experimented with because people are Rightfully worried about Unintended consequences.

But many people also believe that there is absolutely no way to keep this planet. Inhabitable. In as much, you know, space as we inhabit today, if we don't want to run out of two continents worth of livable space, we probably are gonna have to do something. to control temperature while we get to clean energy, while we stop carbon emissions. So that's gonna take a while. We may need to explore things like solar radiation management where we just

partially block. Some of The radiation. And so we're trying to cool the earth by injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere. There are scientists ready to test this. There are Delivery devices that have been created. They want to send them up into the atmosphere. They want to test, can we send this stuff up there?

We want to run simulations and models of It might create Maybe inadvertent flooding or flood risk. I mean, there are things that will have to be grappled with, but if we don't start talking about and imagining it now. We're not gonna have time to actually develop the technology in the process.

Who decides to do geoengineering? Are we gonna let one company or one country unilaterally act? What if China just says Whatever, we're done with climate risk.

We're gonna solve this problem. we're just dimming the sun for the whole planet. Like you can thank us later. Is that gonna be possible. Right now the UN has a moratorium On all

Geoengineering experiments and efforts, it's like Treated the same as Setting off a nuclear weapon. They want to stop people from doing it. We need mechanisms.

To debate. Discuss, educate. And innovate. So that if we have to do this. We're not doing it stupidly and we're not doing it in crisis mode. So Man, do I want people to start thinking about

What would it be like? To possibly have to make this call. Who do we trust to make it? How will we Get informed consent. From humanity to do geoengineering.

That's gonna take a while to figure out. We need to start now. Today. Talking about how we will accept this risk. If we need to take it and how we will

try to mitigate the harms for people who might be harmed by unintended consequences. Yeah, it sounds like a great scenario to role play also because I can imagine, I mean, if you look at property rights in the United States, for instance, I believe That

There is ownership of some degree of airspace. I don't know what the limitations are, but above one's land property, let's say. So I could envision especially countries that are being hard hit, harder hit perhaps than other places in the first world who Or they may be first world themselves. Deciding.

If it hasn't been sort of spec'd out. Already from a legal and political perspective, that they own the airspace extending all the way up to the End of the atmosphere. And God, it seems

If we can't coordinate around COVID on a global level, it seems unlikely that we're gonna get a calm Conclusion slash consensus and Peace building effort on this. from politicians who are incentivized by short term rewards largely. And I should say just because I I want people to know this about you that You also study

incentives and we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but I do recommend that people read Believe this is a piece you wrote for Wired. Tell me if I'm getting this right. So on wire.co.uk, but related to lotteries. And social problems and

using prize wheels, say for in patients who test negative for opiates and things like this. So I want people to appreciate that you're not just waving your hands and saying, Hope people figure it out. You're also studying the mechanisms by which

The positive rewards or negative rewards, right? If there's a in a sense, I mean it's kinda hard to categorize this, but like regret lotteries for weight loss studies, which you have to forfeit your winnings if you haven't met your weight loss goals. Yeah which is actually super effective. Had an economist on the podcast recently talked about the effectiveness of a clawback incentive, which was what that would be. Do you have any recommendations for people who would like to Study. incentives and how they might apply because we're all self interested creatures and I guess the trick is to make us whether we like it or not

beings who act in enlightened self interest. Even if it's just to better ourselves, we end up bettering others. Mm-hmm. Any resources, they could be in any of your books. They could be in articles. If people want to learn more about incentives. Do you have any thoughts? You should look for the new game theory. So Old game theory which comes out of economics and to some degree political science.

assumes that we're all rational actors and we're gonna do what is almost mathematically the most Optimized. choice, we're gonna make it, we're gonna take it. And people were winning Nobel Prizes for it for decades. And people today, I think, are waking up to the fact that we make choices for all kinds of irrational reasons. And a proper game theory, a new game theory, should take into account things like We're more motivated by regret.

the fear of regret than other forms of psychological incentive that take into account That we actually like to inflict Suffering on people that we We have a frustration or we have perceived slight in the past that we can be motivated intensely by

humiliation. I mean like there's so many incredibly powerful emotions that Drive our behavior is And trying to essentially invent a new game theory that does not treat people as rational actors because if if anything we've learned over the last couple of years is that

People will make very irrational decisions based on emotional And psychological. Are there any names, any writers or places you would suggest people go if they want to dig into that? Mm.

Let me come back to you for the show notes. How about I send you send your let's send your fans to the show notes for follow ups on that. Because I I want to get something good for them. Okay. We will add those to the show notes, everybody. Tim.blog slash podcast and just look for Jane. You can search Jane. You'll be in good company. You'll be right next to Jane Goodall. So People have all the the superstar Jains in one place and you can find this. I would also recommend people read There's a book called Chimpanzee Politics, which is fascinating. It's written by a field biologist, but I believe this was used by Newt Gingrich at one point or so he claimed to help sort of seize control. And

Fascinating. There's a lot of overlap. between us and our our dear cousins. So Jane. People can find you on Twitter at Avant Game. They can find you on the website, Jane McGonagall, M C G O N I G A L dot com.

The new book is imaginable. Subtitle How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything. Even things that seem impossible today, perhaps especially Things. that seem impossible today. And we'll include a link to Imaginable in the show notes as well, and you can find it everywhere books are sold.

Is there anything else that you would like to Add to it. Anything else you'd like to discuss or uh request and ask of the audience? Anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up? Thank you, Tim. I mean my big ask Is that we do not waste this historic opportunity that we have to

create the change we want to see in the world. So w you and I we've talked a lot about The future is we don't want, but we might wake up in any way, how to be ready. But There has been so much change so fast over the past two years that I think we all realize

that the kinds of ideas we would previously have dismissed as unthinkable or unimaginable. We can change, right? We had a failure of imagination. We were stuck. We just saw humanity do things that would have seemed completely ridiculous and impossible, changing how we live, how we work, how we learn, what we value. So I wrote this book not just so we could be ready for

The hard stuff. But so that we can all see ourselves as being gifted with An unprecedented opportunity to create positive transformation. People are ready for change. Our minds have been broken open by the pandemic and all the other crazy stuff we've lived through the past couple of years. And so Let's see ourselves as living through I truly

Historic And special valuable moment, we may never again have this opportunity to create. quite so much transformative change so fast. And I wanna just ask everybody Don't waste it.

Let's not waste this moment. Let's truly change things that need to be changed. Here here. And You know, it can be as simple as doing a few exercises

to envision the future so that you feel a greater sense of urgency, which would give you an indication of the steps you can take. Now. Right, the small steps that you can take. Even if that's just finding Drone hobbyists so that you can have some selection of positive implications of the technology and to see how you can steer away fr towards that or away from the negative. And

Jane, I just love Our conversations. This is so fun for me. I've taken a million notes here. I didn't get to ask you about cookie rolling. Which that's gonna have to wait for another time. But I really recommend everybody check out the book. I think these are

To my mind, like first and foremost, like psycho emotional tools. for developing not just resilience, but like anti fragility, which is different. Right. It's where you can thrive and train and help others to thrive. Certain to be. Uncertain times.

And times of great flux, I don't think that is going to slow by any stretch of the imagination. So I do think overwhelming change or potentially overwhelming change is the new normal. And so I'm so happy. that you've written this book. People should check it out again, folks. It's Imaginable subtitle How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything. Jane has a good track record. Very good track record and has thought very deeply about this. So she has not just the theory, but also the street cred. And I recommend people

Check it out and uh You know, I say that too,'cause I just love hanging out. And what a what a fun conversation. So thank you for making so much time. Yes, absolutely my pleasure. And I hope, you know, I hope we get to revisit this conversation and see how our imagination lines up and and we can talk about the actions we took. And what we actually accomplished.

So I will look forward to that. Ten ten years from now, Tim, you're from now. Maybe sooner. And and for God's sake, people, go buy just a few hundred dollars worth of backup water. Like for fuck's sake. I don't know why. I've seen this everywhere over and over again. Hurricane Sandy, the Austin Freeze, and they're like that was a hundred one in a hundred years storm, it'll never happen again. And then there's like a year or two later it happens. Just like If you have a fire extinguisher in your house or you wear your seatbelt when you're driving down the highway Buy some extra water. You can go a long time without food. Anyway, think about backup power too. So I'll leave that for my uh prepper send off. And Jane, I'm so excited about the new book. I'm so happy to reconnect.

And for everybody listening, we will have links to everything we discussed. Jane will also send some resources to my team. to put in the show notes about new versions or new iterations of game theory such that we don't model the world after the assumption that humans are rational robots because clearly we are not. And I think the resources section will be really powerful. So that'll be at Tim.blog slash podcast. Just search Jane and it'll pop right up.

And until next time, everyone. Be safe out there, be just a little kinder than necessary. Train yourself to be optimistic. Don't just sit in your house. doing laps around the couch or chasing your tail in your own head.

And Thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out. every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading.

albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep.

Sleep is super important to me in the last few years. I've come to conclude it is the end all be all that all good things good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep, so I've tried a lot to optimize and I've tried. pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Lux mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side in like a super soft bed. No problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine Wire, Partner Therapy, and many others. Just go to HelixSleep.com slash Tim, take their two minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that

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