← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Predict The Future, Feel Ready for Anything and Prepare for the World Ahead | Jane McGonigal (Replay)
01:05:49
Loading summary
Transcript106 lines
- [00:00]
Commercial Announcer
With Vrbal's last minute deals, you can save over $50 on your spring getaway. So whether it's a mountain escape with friends, a family week at the beach, or sightseeing in a new city, there's still time to get great discounts. Book your next day now. Average savings $72 select homes only.
- [00:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Get that AMEX Gold Card Ready? I'm too tired to cook.
- [00:32]
Jane McGonigal
We feeling Five Guys or the Cheesecake Factory? Both earn up to $120 a year in statement credits of participating partners. Up to $10 each month when you pay with the AMEX Gold Card. Learn more@americanexpress.com Explore Gold enrollment required terms apply. Datter's law says any useful idea about the future should at first seem ridiculous. And. And that's really important to hold in our minds, right? Because on one hand, it's easy to prepare for futures that sound normal, that feel like a kind of continuation of today. But it's the weird stuff that catches us off guard.
- [01:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Is Datter's law trying to shock people or knock people out of the normalcy bias?
- [01:10]
Jane McGonigal
Exactly. So we all have this normalcy bias. Our brain is designed to make sense of the world in a way that doesn't overwhelm us. And so it wants to believe that patterns that have been true in the past or things that are true today will continue to be so. Because if we're constantly waking up every day being like, ah, how do things work now? Like, oh, what's going on? It's too stressful, it's too overwhelming. And so the brain normally assumes things will continue as they are. But what that means is it can be very hard to wake up and realize this thing that used to be true is no longer true, or this assumption I had is no longer helpful.
- [01:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Jane McGonigal, welcome to the show.
- [01:59]
Jane McGonigal
Thank you.
- [01:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Excited to have you here. So, futurist game designer. Two things that I am obsessed with. So when I heard that your new book was coming out about that imaginable, I was immediately hooked and intrigued. I think that we're living through an incredibly disruptive radical transformation moment. You talk about that in the book. This idea of future shock. Walk us through the whole idea of being a futurist. Because you're a futurist. Not like in a, oh, I'm in my garage building technology. But you're a futurist in a way that I think everybody needs to wrap their head around. You distressingly accurately predicted what we just went through in 2020 with COVID So walk us through what it means to be a futurist and how on Earth in 2010 you detailed the things that we just lived through.
- [02:58]
Jane McGonigal
Yes. Okay, so much to chew on. Well, maybe we should start with Future Shock, which you referenced, because people might be wondering, what is futuristic? Where does this come from? So in 1968, Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock. And this is sort of the birth of futurist thinking. And he was looking around society and noticing that people seemed overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change. And you know, in the 1960s, it was a very tumultuous time.
- [03:27]
Tom Bilyeu
There was literally people getting shot like crazy.
- [03:30]
Jane McGonigal
Yes. Social upheaval, new technologies, big economic disruptions. And he was observing the psychological impacts of change happening so fast and people feeling anxiety, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like there was too much uncertainty, they couldn't confidently plan for what was next. And he theorized that this would have a society scale toll on our collective well being. And so he tried to invent ways of imagining what might be next. First of all, so that we could be ready for anything and not be shocked. Right. And secondly, so that maybe we could learn how to be more in control of the change that happens. If we can see change starting, then we could make our own decisions about do I want to accelerate this change, I love where the future is going, let's make it faster, I want to be part of it. Or do I want to try to stop it, slow it down, reverse it, mitigate the harms, control the risks. And from that 1968 book, this whole movement emerged. And I got involved with futures thinking. After I finished my PhD studying the Psychology of games, one thing I learned, I was actually scouted to be a futurist like the Institute for the Future, which is the oldest futurist organization in the world. They look for people who are actually doing things like in their garage, inventing new technologies. You probably know Alan Kay's quote that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. So I was trying to invent new genres of games that would allow gamers to apply their skills to real world problems. And the Institute said, well, you know, sounds like you've got an idea for how the future could be different. Come, come make some games with us and see what happens. Which is how I wound up in 2010 running. I think that was my third big future forecasting game. A simulation where tens of thousands of people, the one we did in 2010, had 20,000 people living their lives, almost like a role playing game, you know, like Dungeons and Dragons are on a table, but instead of being around a table, you're around a social network online and you're imagining how you would react to different future crises. And that game evoke we asked them to imagine a respiratory pandemic that started in China that was complicated by misinformation, conspiracy theories by a group called Citizen X, which of course sounds like QAnon. And there were historic wildfires on the west coast, and there was supply chain collapses. And we just asked people, what would you do? How would you try to help? This was the third big game that I did this. And not only were the forecasts, the scenarios that we asked people to imagine turned out because that game was set 10 years in the future. So we were imagining 2020.
- [06:30]
Tom Bilyeu
So bananas.
- [06:32]
Jane McGonigal
But the things that people said they would do, people really did. And it's what makes me excited about this art form, these social simulations is, you know, people predicted they would go to church even if they were contagious, because it was so important to their identity. And that turned out to be the big super spreading risk. And people said, I'm going to go to work. You can tell me to isolate or stay home, but I need to make money, so if the government doesn't pay me to stay home, I'm going to go to work even if I'm sick. We saw that happening, and people who couldn't afford to work from home were more likely to get sick. Moms said, wait, if schools are shut down because of these issues, how am I going to take care of my kids? Am I going to become the teacher? Am I going to not be able to work? And of course, we saw a mass exodus of women from the workplace. So there were all these social consequences that experts in public health and epidemiology did not predict. But our players, just ordinary people, knew what they would need or knew how a crisis would affect them personally. And when you collect that from a thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand people, you can actually predict pretty accurately things that otherwise would be hard to anticipate.
- [07:45]
Tom Bilyeu
So this is an idea that is hiding in plain sight that is more transformational than I think people realize. So when I started reading your book, my wife and I play a game in business that we call no bullshit, what would it take? Which you call ridiculous at first. And I have the chills, like, hearing you say that. I was like, oh my God, like, that's exactly what Lisa and I are doing. When we have these crazy big ideas that we want to do something insane and you have to get Yourself into a. Well, I look at it as a problem solving mindset. So there are of course a million reasons why we're never gonna, you know, have our kids come home from school. That would be ridiculous. Well, it's ridiculous at first. And then you begin to realize you may be thrust into a position where it's the only sensible solution. And if you stop at it's ridiculous, then you never get to that next thing, which actually allows you to predict the future pretty accurately, as you said, when you start looking at a whole group of people. But as people begin to understand, okay, hold on, if I actually get myself past the fact that this is self evidently ridiculous and now just no bullshit, what would it take? What would it look like? How will this play out? And they run that scenario. You can find, I think of it in terms of solutions. You can find solutions in business that other people, because they stop at the ridiculousness, they never even think through to find that there actually are all these really interesting ways that you could do it. But in your context, if you stop at that's so ridiculous, that will never happen. Then you get blindsided by 2020. So how do we. And I, obviously, I've read the book, so I know the punchline, but how do people get into that state where they actually can essentially sit in the future?
- [09:33]
Jane McGonigal
I mean, there's so many habits that are good for that I want to pick up on. You know, you've introduced this phrase that I love, ridiculous at first. And that comes from something that professional futurists call Datter's Law, after Jim Datter, who's another founder of the field. And Datter's Law says any useful idea about the future should at first seem ridiculous. And that's really important to hold in our minds. Right? Because, you know, on one hand, it's easy to prepare for futures that sound normal, that feel like a kind of continuation of today. But it's the weird stuff that catches us off guard.
- [10:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Dadder's Law. Trying to shock people or knock people out of the normalcy bias.
- [10:15]
Jane McGonigal
Exactly. So we all have this new normalcy bias. Our brain is designed to make sense of the world in a way that doesn't overwhelm us. And so it wants to believe that patterns that have been true in the past or things that are true today will continue to be so. Because if we're constantly waking up every day being like, oh, how do things work now? Like, oh, what's going on? It's too stressful, it's too overwhelming. And so the brain normally Assumes things will continue as they are. But what that means is it can be very hard to, to wake up and realize this thing that used to be true is no longer true, or this assumption I had is no longer helpful. And so we want to have these ridiculous at first ideas. One so that we can shake ourselves from our normalcy bias. And also because the kinds of futures that we might want to make, they might be so transformative that other people say, you know, well, that's unimaginable, or that's unthinkable. You know, a lot of people who got involved, for example, with the universal Basic income movement, this idea that people just get money for nothing is so ridiculous. But we're able to prove with pilot studies and capture people's imagination to actually, you know what, let's actually take this seriously, this ridiculous at first idea. And so we also want to think of ideas that just sound absurd because the kind of change we want is probably going. If we're thinking boldly and we're trying to really make a difference in the world, people will dismiss it. But should we talk about my favorite habit or technique for coming up with ridiculous at first ideas? So I created this brainstorming game called A Hundred Ways Anything Can Be different in the Future. And it's really easy. You just make a list of things that are true today. And then you, without overthinking it, just rewrite every fact so that the opposite is now true. And then you look for clues that might explain why this upside down fact could be true. So I run this game with all kinds of organizations and communities. A few weeks ago, I was doing it with local government leaders in the state of California. So mayors and city managers and state legislators. And so one of the facts about the future, we're thinking about the future of democracy. One of their facts was, well, there's a minimum voting age in California, right? Like you have to be 18 to vote in elections. So we're coming up with facts and then we just, without thinking, just rewrite what's. Okay, what's the upside down version of this? There is no minimum voting age. Okay, so you just make these, make these facts, then you have to go look for clues. Well, one, what does it mean? There's no minimum voting age. So like babies can vote. Okay. What we do as futurists is we come up with these ridiculous at first statements and then we just start typing them into Google, we type them into social media and we look for people who are talking about these ideas or doing them. You can go into Google Scholar. And it turns out people are actually advocating at policy centers, serious intellectuals, that we should lower the minimum voting age to zero because young people have the most on the line and they're going to live their whole lives with the decisions that we make, especially around climate, climate action. And so now we've got all these government leaders thinking like, oh, California, you know, minimum voting age 0, what would that mean? And I always, when we come up with these ideas, I always ask like, well, what's your emotional reaction? Would you be excited to wake up in this future? Would you be worried? I had no idea what they would say. I thought maybe they would really hate this future because it's so weird. And they really liked it. Most of them rated on a scale, we do like a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you? And they were like 7, 8, 9. So I'm like, I'm getting ready. Just even for me, that's a signal of change that, that people working in government were so intrigued by such a strange idea.
- [14:08]
Tom Bilyeu
And how do you, because one thing that I liked in your book is you encourage people to don't just Pollyanna, don't just negative think. How do you get people to balance that? Because like in California, if I run the thought experiment, it's a one party state, I get why they would love it. But if you have a more contentious state, then it becomes who has the most offspring. Because of course, if you have a three year old, they're going to vote the way that you want them to. So how do you help people navigate second and third order consequences as they think through a future that they want to create?
- [14:43]
Jane McGonigal
So that's a great question. First of all, you could definitely crunch some numbers and you could try to figure out what would shift. How would the power of balance shift? Running thought experiments on that already, it seems like younger voters probably would really change just the political landscape. I mean if you're having especially, you know, kids are going to vote the way their parents want, but teenagers, preteens, it does kind of change what might become central election issues, which I think is exciting. But it might not pan out in the ways that we think. But we do, we actually, we have a tool called Draw out Consequences where we do basically chains of causes and effects. Okay, if this happened, then what would happen? And that happened, then what would happen? And you try to create these chains to get to kind of surprising outlier consequences. But the simplest thing you can do whenever I have a scenario is before we start playing with it, everybody has to Think of one thing that they would be excited about or one thing that could go right in this future. Something would be better in this world, and one thing that could go wrong or one thing they would be worried about. So if we have like 500 people coming to play with a scenario, we instantly have a list of like 500 possible, you know, benefits, but also 500 risks. And then that sets the groundwork for, as we try to draw out these consequences, people can say like, oh, okay, let me think about that. Well, what might happen then? And so we do try to have this balance of positive and shadow imagination because really any future is going to have complications but also perhaps unexpected benefits. Or people use it as an opportunity to create positive change. Even with the pandemic, I mean, many people are trying to use this as an opportunity to rethink how we do things. Might wind up having lasting positive impacts on work or learning.
- [16:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Now one thing that I know you've looked at certainly on the game side, is that people don't always make rational decisions. So one thing I found really interesting when I first became aware of economics, there was still sort of the lingering tale of humans make perfectly rational decisions. And my first introduction to the fact that we don't was Dan Ariely and his idea of predictably irrational. That we are far more complex and bizarre creatures than we think we are. That people will lie, but only to the point where it doesn't change their internal sense of, I'm not a liar. Like he, you know, points out all these really interesting facts. Facts. So one, you're, you're crowdsourcing the future predictions, which makes a lot of sense, which will take into account then all of the different biases and the fact that people are different and you know, they aim at different things. But as you think about at an individual level, how do you bake in the predictably irrational parts of the human psyche?
- [17:45]
Jane McGonigal
I actually spend a lot of time asking people how they would feel in different futures. And I have this whole set of emotions. This is not something I write about in the books. It's kind of fun that you're asking. It's like another tool that I didn't have room for. And we have this whole set of emotions and we ask people like, okay, can you imagine, you know, we're playing the idea of the next pandemic, let's say the next pandemic. It's not a contagious virus, it's tick borne. So we would.
- [18:10]
Tom Bilyeu
And you freaked me out with that. In the book, I was like, oh, God.
- [18:13]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah. Get ready. We're all gonna be wearing our socks, like, above our pants, and that's gonna be good fashion. So, like, you're ready to transcend the
- [18:20]
Tom Bilyeu
detailed way that you walk people through this. Alpha gal.
- [18:24]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah.
- [18:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Alpha gal crisis was unnerving given that you did this 10 years ago with the pandemic. So not to derail us from the point you were about to make, but how accurate do you think that prediction is?
- [18:40]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah, that's a good question. Okay, let's. Let's follow the chain. I love you're, like, laying out all these breadcrumbs for me to follow. I feel like Hansel and Gretel. Okay. So I ask people, like, how can you imagine a time where you might feel embarrassed if you were living in this scenario? Or a time you would feel proud or a time that you would feel loved or grateful. And we try to create a landscape of stories. You know, it becomes a story that we're all telling together. And it helps me understand what might drive behavior. If we understand, you know, what are people angry about in this future or what are people grateful for? It really helps you get a much more nuanced sense of, as you said, these irrational decisions we make. When we were playing with pandemics back in 2008 and 2010, we had people wear masks in their everyday lives. The players, we had about 8,000 people, we said, wear these to school, wear these to parties, wear it on public transportation and tell us how it feels. And just based on how it felt emotionally to these individuals and, you know, physically what they were reporting. We Knew early in 2020, it was going to be very hard to convince people to adopt this new behavior, even though it seems so rational. Right. So we ask these questions about feelings. That's how we try to bake it in. The Alpha gal crisis is definitely. So I think it's very realistic. I think we will absolutely be living in a future where more people have been sensitized to the sugar molecule. Right. So there's a. Already there's a disease. It's called Alpha GAL syndrome.
- [20:21]
Tom Bilyeu
It's from being bitten by a tick.
- [20:22]
Jane McGonigal
It's being bitten by a tick.
- [20:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Is it a. A cousin of Lyme disease? Is it related to Lyme disease?
- [20:27]
Jane McGonigal
No.
- [20:28]
Tom Bilyeu
It's the same creature that passes it on.
- [20:30]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah. So the tick has this molecule, the sugar molecule in it, and it comes from how it. You know, from deer and things like that. And it accidentally mixes with your blood. So when it's biting you, it. Some of this sugar molecule from the tick gets injected into your bloodstream and your immune system reacts like it's the bubonic plague. It's really just, it's literally just sugar. It's something that's in animal products like beef or gelatin. But your body, because it came in this weird way into your bloodstream from a bite, your body says, okay, whenever I see this, we're going full, you know, five alarm fire. And people develop severe allergic reactions to any animal product. Not just getting bitten again, but if they, you know, eat a vitamin gummy that has gelatin in it or they, they have. Is it any animal product or mammal, mammalian meat products. Right. And, but which is in more things than you realize. Right. Like toy a lot of toilet paper. That was me when I first talking gelatin to be soft, you know, so you have to like, literally in this future you might have people carrying around, you know, like their own toilet paper. The way we're, I don't know, carrying around sanitizer now and we think about these details just to help people imagine it will. We definitely live in a world where, you know, 10% of Americans have this or more already. In the United States, in the south, the southeastern section, more than a third of people. When you just randomly pick people off the street and test their blood, they've already been bitten and already sensitized. So, you know, one or two more bites or if they continue to eat a diet that's really high in mammalian meat products, every time you get exposed, it increases your allergic risk. So we definitely could see this. It depends on what we do. Like any future scenario, one of the reasons why we want to imagine it before it happens is maybe we could change it. You know, it's not inevitable that we will continue to change our environment so that tick populations grow. It's not inevitable that we'll eat diets that put us at risk. I mean, there are lots of ways. It's not inevitable that scientists won't figure out a treatment. Right. There are so many pathways to affect this future. The reason we imagine it now is one, to just prepare ourselves with knowledge. I mean, I for one definitely am more conscious about being tick safe just because I don't need any more spice in my life right now. And that if it does start to unfold, I won't be shocked. I won't be like frozen in old ways of doing things. I'll be able to adapt faster, but also to lend my support to people who might be trying to prevent this future in any way I can sort of so, yeah, it's not inevitable, but I mean, for sure it's something we should be ready for because it's already happening. These signals of change are already underway.
- [23:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So walk me through why it's beneficial to think through this stuff. So as somebody that has struggled with anxiety, I know that you can get yourself in a twist by rehearsing what I call rehearsing failure. So you're obsessing like I used to think of it as. Well, I'm just planning my escape route. So if I get into a situation, my anxiety goes crazy, like, how am I going to back out of this? And what I found was, oh, this meeting or whatever I'm about to go in. I'm just thinking of the 30 ways that it could go wrong so that I have an escape hatch for each one of them. But once I flipped a switch and said, I'm just gonna let the disastrous scenario catch me off guard so that I'm only rehearsing the success. So I'm looking at the 30 ways that it could go, right, Making sure that I'm ready for those, that I know how to move in that case. And what it was doing was just literally obliterating my sort, what I call background radiation. My anxieties, my fears, they just, they never had a chance to incubate because I wasn't giving them any energy. Now that means that at some point I'm going to get totally caught off guard and be like, whoa, I did not see that coming because I've only thought about the good things. But when I think about the dramatic reduction in anxiety that it brought to focus on, this is going to work. This is going to be amazing. Imagining myself winning, that was really helpful. But in the book, you explain something and I bought into it totally. That there actually is certainly in this sort of anti future shock way, there's a real benefit to thinking through this stuff.
- [25:04]
Commercial Announcer
This is a paid message from GoFundMe. Meet Juan Naula. When his son was hospitalized for a viral infection, Juan started a GoFundMe to pay for medical expenses.
- [25:14]
Juan Naula
It was 5k to pay the bill for my son and I need only 22 hours. It was amazing. People really trust on GoFundMe.
- [25:23]
Commercial Announcer
How did Juan raise $5,000 in less than a day? He posted a short video on GoFundMe telling his story in 30 seconds.
- [25:30]
Juan Naula
30 seconds. Be specific, be quick and tell. What are you going to be using the funds for? I was nervous to do it because it doesn't feel okay to ask money. But you shouldn't be nervous. Sometimes you just have to do it and see the results. We were able to save my son's life thanks to gofundme that we still have my son with us.
- [25:54]
Commercial Announcer
Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com gofundme.com this message reflects one person's experience. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery, so you can keep your facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [26:34]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah, and I will say, you know, when I first started working in this space, I did not expect people to feel less anxiety by imagining these catastrophes. I actually felt bad. I would, you know, I. Because I'd been making, you know, more traditional video games and I was inviting people who liked my work to come play with these scenarios. I'm like, like, I know it sounds scary, but, like, it'll be fun, trust me. And I didn't know if it would work. But over more than a decade of doing this, people come out of imagining these scenarios fired up, super empowered. It's part of why I wanted to write this book, to dig into the psychology and neuroscience, because it doesn't initially seem to make sense. There are a couple key factors to it. And by the way, I say it's not enough just to read about these scenarios or talk about them or listen to a podcast or watch a show. You will feel anxious. What changes people's mindset is playing with the scenarios. It's like if you're hungry and you just look at a plate of food, it doesn't help, you have to eat it. So you have to actually play with these scenarios. If you just read about them or listen, it doesn't have the same transformative effect. But so the first thing, the biggest thing, if you vividly imagine something and you only need to do it for five minutes so you don't have to, you know, every day wake up. What, you know, what am I doing to prayer? Like, literally, you do this one time in your life for five minutes so that your brain is essentially, you overcome the normalcy bias and it becomes something your brain believes is possible. Okay, so, like, one of the scenarios in the book is a government mandated Internet shutdown for cybersecurity reasons. Just turn off the Internet for two weeks or four weeks, and governments around the world are doing this now. So how would you prepare for that? And you imagine it literally for five minutes. Okay? Then just file it away. What happens is if you wake up and the future you imagined is now happening, instead of being shocked or denying it like, this can't be real, that slows people down. They're not able to adapt or act quickly. Your brain actually has a positive emotion, which is pre recognition. Your brain says, yeah, I knew this could happen. Like I was smart enough to take this possibility seriously. And that doesn't mean you were able to prevent it or stop it from happening. But it's a positive emotion. It gives you confidence, it gives you a sense of readiness and clarity. And to start your process of having to adapt or deal with a crisis or disruption from a state of confidence and clarity rather than anxiety, confusion, feeling helpless, it really changes the way that you emotionally experience things that can create a lot of suffering. So that's one thing. The other thing is that when I have people play with scenarios, the big thing we focus on is what would you do to help others? Also, what kind of help would you need? And it becomes like a matchmaking, right? People are saying, like, oh, this would be a problem for me. And I'd be like, oh, I have a solution for that. And this is actually an incredible way to build confidence for any situation. We kind of get out of our own head and think about being of service to other people. And that service mentality, that identifying our skills and our strengths and our values and passions that would, you know, help someone else in a crisis, that allows us to think about these hypothetical possibilities that again, from a position of strength, of confidence, of being ready, and it gives us more insight into our own strengths and skills that we don't have to wait for an actual catastrophe. Right? We might start to get more in touch with the kinds of actions or businesses that would be something we could do today. So people tend to leave these scenarios fired up, which is. Which is good. And I did not expect that. It's something I had to watch happen again and again as players participated and to this day, the Alpha Gal syndrome. I was just saying at a book event last night, people love this scenario. And I was really surprised. I thought it might traumatize people, especially coming out of one pandemic, to think of another pandemic. But what I learned is people want the opportunity to imagine Us doing better. We did kind of not a great job with this pandemic. So they're like, they want to imagine what's the next version where everything goes better. And even the host of this event, she was like, yeah, I love that scenario too. It was my favorite. So it's like you just don't. You just can't imagine until you actually start imagining how something that seems so stressful could actually make you feel good.
- [31:30]
Tom Bilyeu
But talk to me about the degree of specificity. That was one thing that I found really interesting. Like, even with the alpha gal thing in the book, you really go into, like, here's how entrepreneurs will react. I was like, wow, that really is true. And that it was so obviously predictable. Once you start thinking, okay, what would entrepreneurs do? What would moms do? What would businesses do? Like, it was really interesting, but you have this like, hyper degree of specificity that you encourage people to do not. It's heavy, it's 100 pounds, that kind of thing.
- [32:01]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah, well, I mean, so one technique for bringing specificity to these scenarios is we ask you to just live with it. Almost like an augmented reality layer on top of your everyday life, just in your imagination. Yeah, it's like just like kind of background imagination. It's like you. So you might go into a cafe, like a coffee shop, and be like, okay, if we were living in an alpha gal crisis, what would be different here? You know, are you going to like a backyard cookout? One of the things that I learned in researching this scenario is that if you have this syndrome, just smelling airborne meat can send you into anaphylactic shock. It's super crazy. So then I start imagining, well, I have lots of friends who, like, cookout culture is important to them. So what are they doing on weekends? Does this become the new social division between people who have to mask up around meat? Or do we adapt? Do we come up with new new cultures? What's. What's the new pregame or the new backyard ritual? And we can't, I mean, I can't predict on my own what the specificity would be, but when you have lots of people looking at the things they care about. You know, we did a. We did an oil crisis simulation years ago, and one of the most enthusiastic participation groups was NASCAR enthusiasts. And they were like, we have to be able to imagine how the sport could continue even in the absence of traditional fuel. And so if you look at a scenario from what you love, from what you know, what you have your own lived experience or expertise with, then you can get specific. And so for me, you know, I might look at things like running. How does running culture change? Or how does being a mom change? Or how does gaming industry react? And so we just. You bring your expertise and suddenly it's not, you know, if we're. If we're thinking about in the abstract, we just have a really hard time. But then it gets. When we bring our own, you know, our whole selves to it, we realize we have so much information about what could change just based on our own wisdom that we bring to the future.
- [34:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. One thing that as an exercise, I found really interesting in the book, and I could see how it would play out. Well, and in the book, you give three scenarios, if I remember right, and you're like, I want you to spend the next 10 days, two weeks, whatever, actually living it. Like you were just explaining. But like, okay, hey, you're gonna have to wear a mask as you go to the barbecue. What kind of mask do you wear? Oh, you wear your favorite football team. Amazing. What does it feel like? Is it rough? Is it smooth? And like, as you. What? Something interesting happens to the brain when you force yourself to keep answering these layers of questions. Like the. The visual starts to become real and you can really internalize it versus. So here's an interesting idea. I very rarely talk about this out loud. Be curious to hear your thoughts. So in business, there's a concept I'm always trying to get young entrepreneurs to understand, that emotions will make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect because your brain just sort of smooths it in, fills in the gaps you imagine. Like Alpha gal crisis. Yeah, I would be fine. I would just avoid the ticks in the woods. But you're not really getting in to understand. No, no. Now they're migrating to the beaches and they're, you know, whatever, 10 times more present than they were. This is not some minor thing. Like, it's really escalating. And so getting out of emotion and getting into what I tell people to do is journal. Because you need to be able to write it down in a single sentence.
- [35:28]
Jane McGonigal
Yes.
- [35:29]
Tom Bilyeu
So that got a reaction. So.
- [35:30]
Jane McGonigal
Well, yeah, I mean, my favorite technique is journaling from the future. When people ask me, like, what can I do to really benefit from playing with a scenario? I say, well, write a journal entry, because free write for five minutes. But you have a goal. Your goal is to get as many vivid details into this journal entry as possible. And I want you to score yourself. Afterwards, I want you to go back and count out you know, how many, how many visual details, Colors, shapes, how many auditory details were you describing? Something you could hear? Tactile details. If you were talking to someone, did you write down the words that came out of their mouth so you can count up, tally up the number of details. The more detailed your journal entry, the more effective it seems to be for increasing your ability to think strategically and creatively about a future and to overcome the normalcy bias. Right. If you have three details, like, you might need to try again, 30 details, you're done, you're ready. And when we really want to create deep understanding of a scenario, we do have people do it for at least 10 days. So every day for 10 days, take something you're actually doing. Okay, so I'm, you know, getting dressed this morning. Okay. What am I wearing in this future that is different from what I would wear today? And how am I making that decision and how do I feel about it? How do I look? And sometimes people will, you know, it's not just writing. You can take selfies from the future. You can kind of create artifacts.
- [37:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Selfies from the future.
- [37:03]
Jane McGonigal
Well, you know, so one of the scenarios in the book is imagining climate, a mass climate migration, and there's a political movement to be more supportive of people who have to move due to extreme heat or drought. And the party, it's called the welcome party. Right. We should be welcoming. So I just made a T shirt with welcome party on it. And the symbol of this, you know, fictional party is a monarch butterfly. So I'm drawing monarch butterflies on it and.
- [37:36]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, and you made that up, the, the symbol and all that stuff?
- [37:39]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To help people imagine. Right. And we have, we have ideas. Like you could make a. You could take a picture of a monarch butterfly and put it in your window as like a sign to other. It's like, this is a safe house. Like if you are.
- [37:53]
Tom Bilyeu
So tell the game developer.
- [37:55]
Jane McGonigal
This is so cool, building the details. And so, you know, that's one of the skills that I do try to teach in the book is how do you create visual artifacts of the future. Symbols, things you can wear, things you can show others. And then, yeah, take photos, put it on social media, start a conversation. Or have someone ask you, like, what's the welcome party? Oh, let me tell you about this weird scenario I'm trying to figure out when I would move and if I would move, where I would go and if I had to go, what would I need and would it be? Are there laws to support it? Could I find you know, do I, am I ready? Do I have the language skills? And so we create these, you know, things that spark conversation. So yeah, you're writing these journal entries and you're, you're doing it every day for 10 days and you're making your artifacts and taking your selfies. And if you do it for 10 days, around 10 different things that you know, or activities you do or communities that you're a part of, you get this incredibly rich view of a future where you've essentially turned yourself into an expert on this future. And you know, the most, the most people that I've had participate in one of these, you know, long form explorations of a scenario was about 20,000. And I would like to see, you know, 200,000 or 2 million and hoping that we start to build this as a skill set and a practice because we want people to have deep expertise about the future before it happens. Not just, you know, some, you know, futurist nerds who can see it coming.
- [39:35]
Tom Bilyeu
So speaking of things that futurist nerds can see coming, let's talk about cryptocurrency. So the more I look at, so getting into crypto has really reframed my sense of what the future is going to be. Ray Dalio has really formed, like what my sense of the future is going to be. And when I put them together, I do worry that we're coming into some pretty rocky times. And so I know you speak very intelligently around cryptocurrency. So as you one, have you run any scenarios around this? Have you done this kind of gamification around it? What do you see?
- [40:13]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah, I mean, look, the future that I'm encouraging people to be ready for is significant government regulation and governments having their own cryptocurrency alternative. So trying to understand what would a central bank digital currency look like, how would it operate? Why did you get to it?
- [40:38]
Tom Bilyeu
I think, and maybe this is exactly where you're going. So as you try to predict that, what, what are you thinking about in terms of like, what made you think, oh, the governments will run their own.
- [40:48]
Jane McGonigal
Well, so I mean, look, the, the bread and butter of future forecasting is collecting signals of change, right?
- [40:54]
Tom Bilyeu
So it's from what's already happening.
- [40:56]
Jane McGonigal
What's already happening. It's our raw material. You know, we have this huge database at the Institute for the Future. All of our researchers, we are required, ideally, every day, at least one signal of change that you're seeing. And we look for trends and patterns. So, you know, I mean, one important signal Change is that literally every government that has a sovereign currency is experimenting, is planning, they are looking at it. They have teams tasked with designing a cryptocurrency for the federal government. Another signal that I found absolutely fascinating is China's decision to launch its own national cryptocurrency and to give it away for free. So how do we make this currency popular? How do we start to, you know, we don't. We don't want to just have to ban Bitcoin. We want to entice people to say, I would rather get. I would rather be a part of this ecosystem because the government's giving it to me for free. And they get. They were getting different companies to offer incentives to use it.
- [42:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Digital, you want already rolled out?
- [42:07]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah.
- [42:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow. I didn't know that. I knew that it was coming, and I knew that they booted bitcoin, but I didn't know they'd already rolled it
- [42:14]
Jane McGonigal
out now, and it depends on what nations do you think will be essentially cultural thought leaders in the coming decades? A lot of nations look to China now as the ideal, able to respond quickly. That combination of authoritarian power but bold, sweeping future visions, they're not trying to go backwards, they're trying to go forwards. If you ask just ordinary people in many countries around the world, they'll say, well, we'd rather be like China than like the US So when a government does something like that there, you know, that's an important signal to look at. And, you know, we see the signals growing. The current Biden administration just announced, I think, a couple weeks ago, that they are starting their own development of a central bank digital currency. And then the other, you know, why do I think this is plausible? I mean, there's so many cool things, as you know, that you can do with programmable money money. It makes sense that governments would want to have this. It's such a more powerful way to stimulate and impact the economy. So if you want to give out cash stimulus, but you don't want people to just save it because you're trying to provoke spending, you can send out programmable money that expires in 30 days, or you can make it location specific. You can only spend it in this region that was hit by a hurricane or trying to rebuild. There are really cool things you can do with it. You can. You can have money that accrues negative interest if you save it, right? So let's say you don't want a company like Apple sitting on piles of cash, right? They have. They. It gets shrinks instead of Accruing interest. It, it gets, you know, you have less money if you're not spending it. So just the fact that you can do so many powerful things makes it seem pretty obvious that governments are going to want to have that power and use it. And they will probably try to regulate the existing cryptocurrency market industry in order to be able to create demand for that, their own product. And I'm not, I mean, it is. There are definitely reasons to be worried about such a future. I also think, I mean, I think there's some really cool aspects to it. I mean, I could see reasons to be excited for the government having this infrastructure. So we try to keep that balance of positive and shadow imagination because if you're only worried about it, then you won't see the reasons why it would happen. And you have to be aware of other people's positive motivations and why they're excited about it or then you really will be blindsided. This will never happen because it's obviously a terrible idea.
- [45:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that, that brings me back to Ray Dalio. So he catches a lot of flack because he's very, I mean, he might say just sort of objective, but I'll say he's pretty positive about China and what he's watched them do. And he's always like, you can't judge like somebody else's value system. You can say that it's not yours, but you can't judge their value system. And it's interesting to see how this will play out around different value systems, how people think about it. There is certainly a shadow imagination side to the traceability of what will certainly happen with the governments having a digital currency that they can track everything, like somehow because of bitcoins early, like when it was under, under, under the radar, people made the mistake of thinking that that was a wise way to do criminal behavior. That's the worst possible way ever. Literally they can go back and track money. So yeah, that would absurd. And so of course that will be a feature, not a bug of anything that governments do, which does make me worry a little. But in terms of value going digital, it's going to happen.
- [46:16]
Jane McGonigal
And as you said, it's a value system. One of the things I always try to stretch people's imagination around is the competing values of privacy and transparency or accountability. We know in China it's not just from, from the government culture wide, there's more of a value for transparency and accountability. And so when you think, when you look at all the facial recognition technology that's Being rolled out there. To a lot of Americans, this sounds like a dystopian nightmare, but people there will say, well, I feel safer, or there's been positive change. People change their behaviors. People in my community, they're better people. Now, now, that doesn't mean I'm not, not a supporter of any. But the idea that we would never allow that technology to gain a foothold in American society, I think a lot of people believe that. They believe that the value of privacy is so strong that we're not going to see mass adoption of this technology, which is a mistake. And one signal of change that I look at here is when law enforcement started using information, genetic data, information from people uploading their, their DNA to get their ancestors.
- [47:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, didn't know they were doing this.
- [47:33]
Jane McGonigal
Oh, yeah, that's how they, that's how they caught the, the Golden State Killer, you know? Yeah. Oh, I see.
- [47:38]
Tom Bilyeu
You tell me more.
- [47:39]
Jane McGonigal
Well, as somebody who grew up, like, terrified of all these serial killers who were never caught, I mean, I'm actually quite excited that law enforcement now, they can go to like 23andMe and they can search for relatives. If they have DNA from a suspect, they can figure out, okay, well, here's somebody. This is like a second cousin. Let's look for all of their cousins. And they've identified some of the most notorious unsolved.
- [48:07]
Tom Bilyeu
How did I not hear about this?
- [48:08]
Jane McGonigal
I don't know, but for me, it was like I could finally sleep at night. I mean, these people live like, loom large in my, you know, anxiety. Now when, when law enforcement first started doing this, there were all of these thought pieces, opinion pieces about this is this is an invasion of privacy. People don't expect when they upload their data to, you know, to learn, you know, what are my ancestral origins. They don't expect it to turn. Be turned over to law enforcement. So there was this sense that maybe there would be a regulation, we would stop this, it would crack down. What they didn't anticipate is how excited so many people would be, women in particular, that people who for decades were committing these acts of violence are now brought to justice. And now imagine living in a world where that kind of criminal activity is no longer possible to undertake in the same way. Again, I'm not saying the technology is good or bad or this is like totally a utopian situation, but if you are blind to why some people might look, you look at it as innovation of privacy. Other people look at it as a relief, like, thank God, at last people will be held Accountable. We have to hold these competing values in mind, as you said, because the world may decide to go in a different direction. And just because privacy has been one of our highest values in the United States for however many centuries now, doesn't mean it will continue. And we have to be really mindful of what people actually feel and what they actually want. And it might challenge our assumptions.
- [49:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Signals of change, man. You've put words to something that, to your point about future shock and this feeling a bit like the 60s where changes are suddenly happening at such a radical pace. There are so many signals of change happening right now, some good, some bad. And it will be very interesting to see, because if people are dismissing it and they're not looking at it, going, okay, this. This is a signal, man. This is not like, oh, you should or could dismiss this. Like, it really needs to be the thing that informs how you think through what the future is going to look like. So I don't know if you know who Raoul Paul is, but he's very big in the cryptocurrency world. He's a macro investor. And he said something, and when I was reading your book, I was like, oh, my God. Like, this is so you're the missing link between this notion that Raoul Paul has. And so this is what he says is the secret to his success. Says he steps into the future and then he looks back and says what would have to have been true for us to end up here. But the part that's always been missing is how do you step into the future? And so your idea of the journaling and the creating details and the really taking these signals of change and, like, amplifying them and where do they go? So that allows you to get into the future. And then you can look back and say, okay, either what would we have to do to change this so that we don't end up in this imagined future? But at least you have a sense of what that imagined future is so you can be looking backwards. I think you quote in your book that idea of it's a sad memory that can only be used in the future looking backwards.
- [51:25]
Jane McGonigal
It's a poor form of memory that only works backwards. That's Lewis Carroll is from one of his Alice in Wonderland.
- [51:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Such a cool idea.
- [51:34]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah. And, you know, so I think most people are familiar with the term future forecasting. So we also have this term future backcasting. And it's particularly useful when you have a future that you want to wake up in. You know, I want to wake up in a World where three day work week is the new norm, let's say. Or I want to wake up in a world where cars are banned in Los Angeles, whatever. You know, we just like, we have a feeling like I think this would be a great future. Now we probably want to imagine in detail, look for unanticipated consequences to make sure we really want the future. But let's say you've got a future you want, then you do you back cast and you can go back and do we do a lot of news headlines from the future where we try to imagine, tell us each year what was the pivotal news story that reflects this process of change or this escalation of an idea or a movement or behavior. And so yeah, back casting is really great. It's especially great when you have a future that you want. And while I, for whatever reason I have personally more fun imagining the futures we don't want, that's my sort of jam. I think a lot of people will be more inspired and motivated to really articulate those best case scenario futures while I'm over here doing the worst case ones and imagining that vividly and then doing this back casting because it just gives you ideas for what to do. And I would say try to backcast all the way to. As far as what could you do in the next 24 hours to make this future more likely? Just force yourself to roll up your sleeves and do something to start trying to have an impact on this future.
- [53:24]
Tom Bilyeu
And I'd be so curious to know how that breaks along gender lines, the whole idea. So reading about the female brain and what's the difference between the male and female you've got. So men, there's no real investment in having children. It's a very, it's the cost of producing sperm. Whereas for women that's like a real thing. Nine months plus, you know, caretaking beyond that. And I heard it described that females have a detective's brain, which is why they're interested in serial killers. My wife is obsessed. Every time I turn around, someone is shrieking, getting stabbed to death on the tv and I'm like, how do you watch this stuff?
- [53:58]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah.
- [53:58]
Tom Bilyeu
And that has been anecdotally like a thing in my life where, you know, women will get together and talk about, oh yeah, watching the serial killer show or they just have a real deep fascination with that and the thought of you, you know, imagining the ways that things could go wrong so that you can back cast and make sure that we don't end up there. I don't know that you would be alone in that. I think that I will my sort of hypothesis and who knows if I'm right, But my hypothesis would be that there would be a disproportionate number of women who really want to look at that, that their mind just gravitates to how do I avoid this bad thing? Which brings a real genius to the equation because if somebody isn't doing that, then we're really going to be in trouble.
- [54:40]
Jane McGonigal
You know, I mean, it's a good instinct you have, a good intuition you have. When I think about who shows up to participate in these simulations and to play these future forecasting games, there is a slight majority women who show up, which is not true for the field. I mean, the field of future forecasting historically has been predominantly men. But when it comes to actually playing these games, we do see a lot of women do. So maybe it's our detective mind. I like that. It's interesting.
- [55:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Very interesting. All right. I would be super remiss as somebody. So right now at Impact Theory we are developing a. I hesitate to call it a video game, but it's so close to that that we'll just for now we'll round it to that. But I have a very strong thesis that video games in the next three to five years are not going to look like there will still be all the classic games that we have now because they're just amazingly fun. Those will all exist, but there will be this new kind of gaming, a better way to say it, that will come out of web3. And so what makes web3 interesting to me is what I'll call Wallet Aware Encounters. So I need better names for all this stuff because it sounds sort of unsexy and I think it's the coolest thing in the world. But have you read Ready Player One?
- [55:54]
Jane McGonigal
Of course.
- [55:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so huge difference between the movie and the book. But in the book he describes what I think this new wave of web3 gaming is going to be, which I will call game like experiences. So you've got a. Even in the book you've got the sort of battle royale style where we're in a combat zone and we're doing our thing. But then there's, I mean in the book it's probably 95% is a non combat zone and it's all these weird experiences. Somebody builds a replica of their hometown and you can go in and if you go in the arcade and you, you know, beat this game, then it opens this door and you go in and you meet this person. And that to me is where a lot of new style gaming is going to be. Because I can look at your wallet as technology and inside of your wallet will be what I'll call affinity cues. So you'll tell me what you're into just by what you own. And so I can see that and I can customize an experience. And then so that's sort of early phase one. Right. So my wife has a book coming up called Radical Confidence and we're doing an NFT drop around it. She's got this whole thing in real life, she really does this that she calls her Bad Bitch boots. And so she has struggled with insecurity and so she found ways to sort of build herself up through her clothes and self signaling and all this stuff. So we're going to make these 3D boots and then if you have those boots on, then we can create an experience for you. You know, you walk in and let's say that we create an experience where you meet Lisa and some of her other entrepreneurial friends and you're suddenly in this space and it's game like, but it's not like you're collecting coins or shooting people. It's a different kind of game experience. But queued off of this thing that you have in your wallets now. And the reason that I'm bringing this up to you is rule number one of game design, find the fun. Have you thought through like, because you're doing this in real life, like, in fact I would call these things evoke. And the other one that you did as sort of game like experiences.
- [57:53]
Jane McGonigal
Yes.
- [57:53]
Tom Bilyeu
So again, I'm not collecting coins, but there, there is like a, I'm a part of a group, there are more people playing it, we're coming back and we're sharing something. And so there's this sense of, like you said, it's an RPG. Have you thought at all about sort of where Web3 goes from here and what this looks like?
- [58:10]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah, I mean my research on Web3 and gaming has been primarily around getting paid to play and what the new economies might be like. So I will start by saying what you describe sounds really interesting. So I will be paying attention to it as a new signal of change and putting it into our Institute for the Future database. So thank you for putting that on my radar. I mean, my own, I would say it was almost 10 years ago. I was doing a big forecast for a Chinese game company. And the core of my forecast was in the future people will expect to generate income from playing your games. And this idea that gamers pay you for your game is going to be completely flipped upside down. That there are going to be incredible revenue streams around gaming and through gaming and owning our assets and being paid by the game companies for the value that we create. Because most games, the real value is from the community of players, the esteem that you give each other, the ingenuity and creativity that you bring to these worlds. And so yeah, get ready for a totally new financial ecosystem. And they thought it was the most ridiculous idea. Not ridiculous at first, but ridiculous. They're like, we just don't. They're like game companies would never agree to. We're just not. The revenue is just not going to be shared. It's just not going to happen. And year was this, I want to say it was like 2015 maybe.
- [59:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, whoa.
- [59:55]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah.
- [59:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow. I need to. I need to be following everything that you guys are doing way more closely. That's crazy.
- [60:01]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah.
- [60:01]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't know how you came to that that fast, but damn.
- [60:03]
Jane McGonigal
I think I gave a talk at the RSA conference at Moscone about this maybe about five years ago where I was laying out all the signals. But so yeah, for me that's a real interest. And to think about not just how it changes gaming, but how it changes work. And you know, if you can create essentially a basic income for yourself through playing, what kinds of work might you not be willing to do? I mean, it's already hard enough now to get people to do low wage work. If there are alternatives that are more like things that we naturally have a passion for, we're really going to have to rethink who does the rest of the work. And so it's exciting. I think it's exciting. That's where my research around Web3 has been.
- [60:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Have you been paying attention to what I'll call a sort of civil war between traditional gamers and Web three gamers?
- [61:01]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah. Oh yeah.
- [61:02]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you think is driving that? Because there is so much vitriol, it's insane.
- [61:06]
Jane McGonigal
Well, I mean, one of the big problems is that traditional gaming is using this technology to extract more money from players, not to share the revenue with them. And so I think the traditional gaming community sees it as a cash grab. Rather than trying to innovate for the good of the gaming ecosystem or community, they're trying to sell NFTs to get more money. It's not a. They're not making a persuasive case that this is actually going to benefit gamers by participating in this. And I think that's Where a lot of the friction is right now, nobody's presented within traditional gaming a convincing case that, well, if we bring this technology into these communities that it will have benefit. So I think.
- [62:01]
Tom Bilyeu
So they're thinking that the game Companies are using NFTs as a way to be further sort of parasitic, extractive.
- [62:07]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah, like, you know, I mean, gamers and game developers have had a difficult relationship since, in some ways since the shift to freemium models where, oh yeah, it's free to play, but then they keep trying to get you to pay for more moves or more energy and all these upgrades and access. And there's this sort of nostalgia for the day where I could just buy a game and play it and I didn't feel like I was constantly someone trying to pick my pocket all the time and like it created a sort of adversarial relationship. I still, every time I do an interview and somebody's interested, like, we gotta talk about game economics. It's so exploitative. People feel really, there was this feeling of being abused and exploited by the new game economic models. And so I think that, I mean, it's essentially a kind of trauma that the game industry inflicted on its own community. And so I think it's hard to see clearly if there are opportunities with this technology because so many gamers are used to, I would say, more of a bad faith and game companies are moving away from it now. Fortnite was kind of a breakthrough, right. Where yes, you can pay more money, but it doesn't give you an advantage in the game. Right. It's more expressive and status, but you can't pay your way to the top. And that felt more fair. It felt like, like a more just economic model. And so I think we just need to kind of live through fair economies in gaming for this to make sense and build any real interest or enthusiasm.
- [63:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's interesting being on the Web three side of this and being like, oh man, gamers are going to love this because I'm an avid gamer, old school gam. Been gaming since Atari even still to this day. I game and I was so smitten with web3. As soon as I got what it was going to be, I was like, oh my God, this is so amazing. And so then really expected, oh, games will be like one of the first places that this is adopted. You now own your skin and it's not just, you know, something that you have, but you can't really sell it. And then, you know, you watch enough YouTube videos and you realize, whoa, like there's this real pushback. But from the web3side it's like, I, I get it. Because if you're thinking that this is just going to be a siphoning tool that the game developers are going to use, and maybe it is, maybe that's what traditional games will do with it, but they will ultimately be supplanted by games on the web 3 side. My only beef is that the web 3 side is approaching it from play to earn instead of play and earn.
- [64:50]
Jane McGonigal
Yeah.
- [64:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Which I think is, is also going to have its moment of like where we watch game economies collapse in on
- [64:55]
Jane McGonigal
itself and there has to be an intrinsic value to the game. Right. To be sustainable. I want to make money playing my favorite games, not some weird new stuff. You know what I want to say? I think one of the biggest problems where this movement is shooting itself in the foot accidentally with gamers is, is how the idea of a metaverse, a singular metaverse where you can have interoperability really sounds naive to game developers. Because it is naive. We don't want, Yeah, I don't want you bringing your Fortnite weapons onto my animal crossing island. What am I supposed to do? Do you know what I'm like? Okay, you got it. I think that's another. It's like from a, it's not just from a technological standpoint, it's from a, a cultural, social standpoint. We don't actually want interoperability of all of these Web3 assets in the sense that we don't like, you may design things that I don't want to exist in my experience. So getting back to what you're creating, you know, this idea that in my wallet you'll have my affinities and you'll know me so you know not to bring any weapons onto my island. I mean that makes a lot of sense and it sounds like a much more plausible way to get to a future where we do see that integration of, of the gainful experience with this tech.
- [66:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So I think one thing that's going to happen is so it's what I call the metaverse archipelago. So right now, and the bet that we're making is that it's going to be Unreal Engine and you've got a bunch of people in the web 3Space Developing games inside of Unreal Engine and that if they do what I'm talking about, these game like experiences, then you've really got a shot because there's parts of the game that don't require weapons. So we don't have to worry about balancing and things like that. But if you're just walking around the experiential side of the game, then you've got your consistent identity, which I think will be a big thing. Jen, I could talk to you about this stuff forever.
- [67:02]
Jane McGonigal
We will talk about it again, I think. Let's stay in conversation because I'm excited about what you're doing.
- [67:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Absolutely. So I'm going to now be obsessively following every word out of your mouth. Given your ability to predict the future. Fair, where can other people do the same?
- [67:17]
Jane McGonigal
So besides the book, which is called Imaginable, we also just opened at the Institute for the Future, our first public center for social simulation and imagination training. It's called Urgent Optimists, plural, because there's a bunch of us.org and you can come and get a new scenario every month and play these games with me and find other people reading imaginable and work through the games and scenarios together.
- [67:43]
Tom Bilyeu
I love it guys. She's helping us all predict the future. I can't say anything more powerful than that in terms of reasons to go read the book following her, you will be richly rewarded. And speaking of things that will reward you, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
- [68:05]
Grainger Announcer
If you work in university maintenance, Granger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.