Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #12 Gaming Will Save The World w/ Jane McGonigal

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

In this episode, Jane and Peter discuss the power of gaming, Jane’s journey to becoming an alternative reality video game designer, and the gamification of the education system.  You will learn about: 49:35 | Jane McGonigal's challenge for the Web3 community. 53:32 | Why the gaming system is better than the education system. 59:22 | Can game developers be nominated for a Nobel Prize? 1:04:01 |Taking the gaming mentality & using it to fix the world. Jane McGonigal is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality video games crafted to improve real-world problems. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future and is best known for Inventing and Co-Founding SuperBetter. This game has helped more than 1 million players tackle health challenges such as anxiety, depression, and traumatic brain injury. Her TED Talks about gaming and longevity have over 15 million views, and she’s been named by Fast Company as one of the “Top 100 Creative People in Business.” _____________ Resources Urgent Optimists - an Institute for the Future community, urgentoptimists.org Buy her book, Imaginable - https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/imaginable Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about Abundance360. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Listen closely. That's not just paint rolling on a wall. It's artistry. A master painter carefully applying Benjamin Moore Regal Select eggshell with deftly executed strokes. The roller, lightly cradled in his hands, applying just the right amount of paint. It's like hearing poetry in motion.

Benjamin Moore, see the love. I always say the reasons we look ahead to the future are so that we can be ready for anything. That's the risks, the disruptions, the crises, but also so that we can imagine what could be possible tomorrow that isn't possible today. So that we can, I guess, motivate ourselves to stay with the hard work of making a better world by really imagining that exponential benefit. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Welcome to Mindsets and Moonshots. I'm super excited to be speaking today with a friend and extraordinary author, Jane McGonigal, a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games, games that are designed

to improve real life, solve real problems such as hunger, climate change, and poverty. I love that one of Jane's goals is to see a game developer win the Nobel Peace Prize. Jane's goals is to see a game developer win the Nobel Peace Prize. She's a game designer, New York Times bestselling author, future forecaster. Her TED Talk on how games can improve the world and that games can give you 10 extra years of life have more than 15 million views and are among the most popular TED Talks of all time. She is best known as the inventor and co-founder of Superbetter, a game that has helped more than 1 million players tackle health challenges such as anxiety, depression, and traumatic brain injury. She's been named as one of the top 100 creative people in business by Fast Company. Oprah Winfrey called her one of the 20 most inspiring women of all time. MIT Tech Review has hailed her as one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology. Her most recent book, one of many, is called

Imaginable. It is more than a book. It's a mindset upgrade. It teaches you to think more creatively and optimistically about what's next. You'll be excited about the future rather than fearful of it, which is everything I love and stand for and what this podcast is all about. Dr. McGonigal received her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in performance studies. Jane, it's a pleasure to have you here. Peter, thank you and congratulations on this new podcast. What an important topic. I'm really excited to be a part of it. Thank you. And it's a topic that we both share a passion around. I love the new book, and I was honored to have a chance to blurb it. I think what I'd like to do is start in the area of passion and purpose and get your thoughts about why a purpose-driven mindset is so important for

people. What is it that you get out of that? Why should people strive to be clear about their purpose in life and how do people find it? Let's start with that small subject. I love that question. I've had a very strange career path that I have followed, starting out as a game developer and trying to figure out if we could invent games that might have a more intentional impact on people's real lives or on the problems that we all live with. And I think as part of that journey, I have observed that when we have a purpose that is bigger than ourselves, we think more creatively, we're less likely to give up in the face of setbacks and obstacles. And we can push aside feelings of anxiety and replace them with feelings of hope because we're being driven forward by our goals, by our ambitions, by the biggest positive transformations that we can imagine. And in my work now as a designer of games that help people simulate really hard to think about futures, thinking about big future challenges, things that might be hard to live through, and how we would help others and help ourselves during those types of crises and disruptions.

ask people to imagine how they would help others, how they would serve a bigger purpose in these crises, whether it's a new kind of pandemic or unintended consequences of geoengineering or whatever else we might be imagining, mass climate migrations, that if you ask people to imagine how they would help others, then they tend to approach these possible futures with less anxiety, less dread, less hopelessness, and a feeling of power and purpose. I love that. So reframing it rather than, oh my God, how is this going to impact me? It's like putting yourself on top of it from a, how can I help others? It brings a whole new set of cognitive capabilities to the table. Yes. And so before I have people imagine specific future scenarios, I always have them play a quick little game called Pack Your Bags for the Future, where you answer a few questions

about what are you good at? What do you know more about than most people? What do you care about more than most people? What are the communities that you're a member of, that you're connected to? And you make this list of essentially all of these assets that you bring to any future, no matter what challenge or disruption, you will have this knowledge and skills and these relationships. And then we throw the scenario at you. And for me, this methodology really clicked into place when I started simulating pandemics back in 2008. We were imagining the year 2019, because you know,

futurists, we love to look a decade ahead, so we have enough time to get ready for whatever we imagine. And this was the first time I really tested this methodology. And I played the game myself because I always want to get the experience and the benefits. And I said, well, I bring game design to this crisis. So I had to imagine what a game designer would do during a pandemic. And, you know, it occurred to me that there's a stereotype of gamers. They like to stay at home. They're antisocial. They play in their basement instead of going out into the real world, which is a bit of a stereotype and unfair. But in reality, during a pandemic, what does the CDC want you to do? What during surges and, you know, incentivize people essentially to stay home, play more, stay connected. that. You might recall early in March and April 2020, there was a huge push from the game community to say, look, you can stay connected. You can do this. We've got this. Play the games. If you've

never played these games before, come into our community. And more people started gaming than at any other time in human history as a result. I love this idea, pack your bags for the future. And it's interesting, right? Because when you take a self-inventory of what you have, what your superpowers are, no matter what they are, your relationships, your capital, your technology, your degrees, and so forth, and then you map that against significant objectives in life, like whatever grand challenge you want, whatever business you want. I think if you're self-reflective and you say, wow, my assets are really good in this area and I'm excited about applying them, that passion starts to evolve into a purpose.

Absolutely. And in my line of work, we're having people imagine what they might do. They're not necessarily founding a new company or rolling out a major program when they're imagining the future scenario. But oftentimes, I do find that these ideas that people come up with in the games, they keep rattling around. They keep kind of fueling our subconscious thoughts and motivations. And then people do start to prototype and build, and you don't actually have to wait a decade for the future to happen. Once you've realized that there's, as you said, a connection between

your skills and your passions and this new purpose that maybe you've learned more about because you've been simulating this future and you've been exposed to new opportunities to help. You can take action now. It's interesting, right? Like the definition of luck is actually, you know, being prepared to embrace the things that are coming at you. In other words, if you've thought about this future and you meet a person, have a conversation that is useful towards that future, perhaps you would not have had that conversation if you hadn't been thinking about that. So that's fascinating.

Let me take you to your purpose in life. Do you have a defined purpose that you want to share? I mean, my overarching purpose is to try to help alleviate suffering using my skills as best I can. And my career has been dedicated to figuring out how can gaming and forms of organized, structured, goal-oriented play help people alleviate things like anxiety, help people alleviate things like anxiety, depression, social isolation, feeling a lack of purpose or a lack of hope for their own future. And that's what I do. And I love you for it. Let's take you back to those earliest days.

Can you talk about when you started discovering this passion and purpose and how it evolved. Have you had it since childhood? I mean, talk about, well, yeah, I mean, I was lucky my parents bought us a Commodore 64, a used computer. My parents were both school teachers, public school teachers, so we didn't have a lot of money, but they were always trying to expose us to new technologies, which is great. You know, build our confidence that we can learn new tech. So we had a Commodore 64 used, that came into my house when I was about nine

years old, started learning basic programming, started playing the games that had modes where you could actually design your own levels. And I definitely felt that passion early on, like I can build things that I can make predictions about what people will do when they play my games, but then you sit and watch and you're surprised by what people think of that you didn't think of. And they have different strategies and different reactions and just that whole mode of, you know, predicting how people will feel and react, trying to design something that elicits those behaviors or those emotions and then studying it and watching it you know that the kind of iterative scientific process of experience

design i mean i was doing that from a very so you started playing which is great and i remember the commodore 64 um which dates us both but uh what happened next when did that go from potentially a passion to a career and a purpose? Yeah. I mean, in 2001, I rolled up to Berkeley to start my PhD program intending to study how scientists communicate their research to the public. I had this idea that we might have forms of play that could help people learn difficult but interesting scientific concepts. That was my intention. And then in my first year of grad school, I was kind of weirdly became enmeshed in a new community that was just bubbling up in San Francisco. the earliest experiments in using mobile phones to create location-specific gaming. So there was a startup that advertised on Craigslist that they needed people to work on a

new game that was going to send you out to the city and pay phones would ring and you'd get secret codes and you'd dig up boxes that would have inflatable rafts and you'd take it to the lake and you'd roll it to the lake. Yeah sounds like fun like yeah super fun and i had a background in theater um working off broadway in york city as a stage manager um and i was like hey i'll stage manage your games like you know you'll have props you'll have actors you'll players and what happened was as i was starting to write design these games write them, help stage them, the players would come back to the next version of the game, the next round of the game, and they would say the most interesting things to me. They would say, you know, I hadn't really

hung out in the mission district before, but now I'm going back there because I feel, I just, I have like this positive association and they would say they, they were more curious. They were more likely to talk to strangers. They would go into, you know, restaurants they hadn't seen before. They'd read the graffiti in the alley. It was like just having this day of play in an unfamiliar location, it permanently changed their mindset when they were in that space. felt confident comfortable curious and and i thought you know this weird slippage between the game yes and then their real life behavior and mindsets to me became very interesting and so i started looking for other examples you know

are people playing world of warcraft trying to you, organize the equivalent of a raid in real life to solve real problems. Like what could I find that would maybe provide evidence that, yeah, people who play games are approaching their real lives and real world problems with this gameful mindset. And when I started writing about that and giving talks in grad school about that, suddenly everybody was very interested in my research. And that was actually one of the most important things I learned in grad school was if professors are like, come to my office, you need to tell me more about this. Or people like, I have to play this game. If people are interested, then that's a sign that you're onto something that you

should, you know, continue building and following up. And if you're just constantly pushing the boulder up the hill and nobody wants to help you, I mean, maybe that's not going to be the most impactful purpose. And so I left the science communication behind, which was fun, but it didn't create the same sense of, for me, wow, this is a purpose I could have, but other people want to take this on with me. And it could be a really big deal if we all pursue this possibility together. I love that. And it's so true.

When you come to a situation with a different perspective, it gives you the freedom to engage in a very different way. And also the idea of that game in particular, getting people curious and getting them out of their comfort zones to explore new geographies and new conversations they wouldn't normally have. By the way, that game company still exists. I should give them a shout out. I never actually mentioned, it's called The Go Game and they're still running games all over the world. So yeah, I love it. Hey, thanks for listening to Moonshots and Mindsets. I want to take a second to tell you about a company that I love. It's called Levels and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat, what I bring into my body. See, we were never designed

as humans to eat as much sugar as we do, and sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general. Levels helps me monitor the impact of the foods that I eat by monitoring my blood sugar. For example, I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil, it blunts my glycemic response, which is good for my health. If you're interested, learn more by going to levels.link backslash Peter. Levels will give you an extra two months of membership. It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity. All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode.

Let's go into the curiosity mindset because I think i think uh curiosity is an underrated uh mindset but it's so critically important um what are your thoughts about a curiosity mindset what's it valuable for and can people increase their level of curiosity i think that one of the most important habits that we all need to cultivate and practice heading into the next decade is finding ways to essentially unstick our mind about what we believe can and cannot change. You know, what is true today? What has historically been true? We tend to get stuck in old ways of thinking or drawing too heavily on patterns of the past. You know this as well as anyone. When we get trapped in this kind of normalcy bias,

we stop being curious about, well, could we do this differently? Could work change? Could society change? Could learning change? When we assume that things more or less have to continue as they are or as they have been, then we innovate less, we have less hope for the future, we have less ambitious goals. And so I personally have a habit that I teach when I teach future thinking and that I practice in my own life that helps me develop my curiosity. It's very practical. Can I just tell you how it works? Yeah, I would love that. Okay. So I call it flipping the world upside down and you just make a list of things that you believe are true today and are likely to be true in the future. So basically you're trying to

stump yourself or like, so people will often say, well, humans need oxygen to breathe, or you need a man, you need genetic material, let's say from a man and a woman to make a baby. You can't just have, you know, a woman can't have a baby on her own. And you make a list of all these things and then you rewrite them so that the opposite is true. And then you go look for evidence that these seemingly impossible, ridiculous facts could actually become possible in the future. So I will literally just, I have a sort of running list of these facts, and then I'll just go to Google and I'll do a new search. Okay, humans don't need oxygen to breathe. What comes up? Well, it turns out German researchers are working on

essentially a kind of photosynthesis for animals, including humans, so that we could breathe carbon dioxide instead of oxygen in environments where there's not a lot of oxygen. Could be useful for space travel, right? Now, I don't know if I'll ever be on a spaceship needing to breathe carbon dioxide. Like, it might not affect me personally, but the benefit of this is you start to get better at believing confidently that transformative change is possible so that you're not getting stuck. You're not slow to notice change. You're not setting these like sad little tiny incremental goals for yourself. You're really thinking about exponential improvement and you're thinking about the moon shots. And so, you know, even with the genetic material for babies, now I'm like obsessed with this topic, even though I've had my babies and I don't intend to necessarily

have more, but knowing now that the researchers are working on ways that two same-sex parents can create an embryo, a human embryo, so that you could have two men be genetic parents for a baby, no women involved, or two women and no men involved. And they're already doing this with mice. They've already figured out how to create living mice with genetic material from two same-sex mice parents, like for me, again, even though it might not impact me personally, it just opens up my mindset so that now I'm feeling ready for anything, totally unstuck and able to imagine that the future really could be different, right? I love this, flipping the world upside down.

I love that practice. And so you're clear, you're not necessarily born with a curiosity mindset. You can develop one over time, yes? Absolutely. It's just a matter of finding what makes you curious. With flipping the world upside down, I'll do this in large groups and we'll flip a hundred facts. And then I say, well, which are the ones that really jump out at you and make you wonder, you know, what would it be like if, you know, if, um, what's, what's a good, you know, uh, well, the three-day work week, for example, let's say that sparks

your curiosity or imagination. What are we doing with the other four days of our week? You just, uh, have to find, I guess, the questions that connect with your passion. Yeah. Here's one for you. What if kids didn't go to school and they just played games every day? Well, I mean, I'm quite sure we could produce probably a better education. A better educational system. Absolutely. But schooling is a great one. One of the most exciting future scenarios that I know for sure people are working on now that came out of flipping facts upside down. A number of years ago, I was working with an education, future of education group, and they flipped the fact about majors, right? Like, what would you do in college if we got rid of majors? Like just

throw it away. This idea of concentrating in these sort of archaicly defined subjects, you know? And one of the upside down possibilities was that would be that people would major, major in challenges. And instead of studying English or history or economics, you would study climate mitigation or adaptation. You would study economic equality or economic security and food innovation. And whatever fueled you, this is the world I want to make better. This is the problem I want to help solve. And all of your coursework would be geared toward experiences, knowledge, then wisdom that would allow you to

be of service when you graduate to that problem. By the way, parents often ask me when I'm on stage, what should my kids major in? What should they study? And my response is, study the challenges and the problems. Become an expert in what the issues are because the technology is constantly changing. And if you understand fundamentally what the issues are, how people are suffering, why things aren't working, you're going to have valuable contribution to society forever. Yes, I love that. And I think it's a good possible intervention at the high school level as well. And, you know, if there's any area of learning that really needs

to change because of the amount of suffering that exists in the current model, it's definitely high school. You know, people feel like they're forced to spend, I mean, some of the most curious, energetic, creative years of their lives studying things that they don't have a natural passion for. And what a waste of young minds. If I could liberate my own children when they get to high school from having to just study things that they would rather, I mean. I totally agree. How old are your kids? They're seven. So there's time. We have a little bit of time to reinvent high school. I have fraternal twin boys that are 11. They're going into fifth grade. So a little bit more

urgent, but I agree. It's like, I do not think the current educational system is, is even 10% in the right direction. You know, I often tell my kids, I have three wishes for my, for my, uh, my kids. I want them to find their passion and purpose first and foremost. Um, I want them to have grit, learn not to give up. And then the thing I tell them is ask great questions that, um, and, uh, let's, let's talk about about that because in a world of Google where you can know anything you want, I think the questions you ask are far more important than the knowledge that you have. What are your thoughts about that? We have a whole wall at our house you would be excited to know that we call the question wall and it's by the dining room table. And we have all of these rainbow colored index cards.

And whenever a question comes up, if we're on a family walk or we're over dinner or we're watching a show, we say, okay, put it on the question wall and then we'll write down a question. So one of my seven-year-old daughters who got really into Encanto this year, the Disney movie, she just sort of randomly, out of nowhere, one day, we were in the car, she said, why do people sometimes break out into song when they're in a movie to express their feelings? I'm like, that's such a great question. Like, where does this come from, this idea of we'll just break out into song as a form of storytelling. So we're like, put it on the question wall.

And there's all sorts of weird questions like, what was that dead animal I saw on the road? We're like, put it on the question wall. We'll try to figure it out when we get home. And then once a week, everybody pulls a card off the wall. And we all spend, you know, 15 minutes trying to figure out the answer using Google, using YouTube, whatever we can. And then we report back to each other what we learned. I love it.

What a great way to spark curiosity and creativity in your home world. I think I'm going to add a question wall to my kitchen someplace. That's awesome. I keep on saying this is the most exciting time ever in human history. And the only time more exciting than today is probably tomorrow. And I would imagine that you believe a curiosity and creative mindset is going to be one of the most important mindsets for the world that we're heading in. Can you share some thoughts on that?

Yeah. that we're heading in. Can you share some thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, look, we all just lived through proof, 100% evidence that the world and we ourselves can change in radical transformative ways at local scale, individual scale, organizational scale, global scale. We just saw how much we can change through our own decisions and intentions. Now, these changes were not ones we wanted to make. The shutdowns, the border lockdowns, everybody learns and works from home, like we're going to cook our own meals, whatever it is. We didn't want to make them, but at least we have just witnessed, every human being on this planet has seen, we can change more faster than we thought possible. There is no excuse now for continuing

with systems and patterns and habits that don't work, right? We can change. So that element of curiosity and creativity, it's really necessary now to turn this, you know, arguably the most collective suffering the planet has ever been through. I mean, has there ever been an event in human history where so many shared this experience of pain and disruption and grief? Can we use this moment as a springboard for something better to make it meaningful what we've had to endure these past two years? And I think if we have a flexible enough mindset, if we're curious, if we're flipping the facts of today upside down, if we're thinking creatively about how we connect our skills and talents with the challenges that we face, we really can take advantage of the next decade to change society faster than we thought possible, to ask for a higher level of transformation,

you know, forget incremental stuff. Let's just go for the big, the big change. And, and I'm excited about that. And we just have to be careful that we don't squander this opportunity. Keep reminding ourselves, we did it. We changed everything. We can do it again. But from a, now from a standpoint of what do we want to change? Not, you know, what do we have to change. Yes. Let's not forget. And just that connection again about creativity to challenge what we believe to be true, flipping the world upside down. I love that lesson. Jane, let's talk about an abundance mindset, a term that you used in your latest book, urgent optimism. How do you define that?

So, okay. Urgent optimism is a term that I coined after seeing a lot of weird stuff happening in the gaming community. So first, just at a neurological level, what game researchers started to observe in people who play games is that they were developing more essentially grit and resilience in the face of setbacks. They were learning faster from mistakes or negative feedback, failures. They were energized by failure. In fact, when they were, they were wiring gamers up and seeing that they were actually experiencing positive emotions after failure, if they had an opportunity to try again. And so there was this- To apply what they just learned. To apply what they just learned. And there was just this incredible feeling of, I can get better

and improve and change my strategy to be more successful through my own efforts, attention, learning from others, asking others for help. And so we would see just people would work longer and harder on tougher challenges and be energized by it instead of feeling anxious or, you know, self-doubt, lack of confidence, or giving up. And when I started working in the future space, I was hoping that the same mindset would be developed in people who were playing future forecasting games, who were participating in these social simulations where we just imagine, what would I do?

What would I feel? Kind of like a tabletop role-playing game, except instead of like Dungeons and Dragons. And we're imagining these fantastic adventures. We're sitting around the internet with 10,000 people imagining how we would adapt to a mass climate migration event or whatever we're simulating. And I was hopeful we could develop that. And in fact, what I started to see is we would invite people to spend six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks, imagining terrible futures, total crises, things that you would have nightmares about.

And they were coming out on the other side of these games fired up. Like, wow, I feel so optimistic now. I feel hopeful. I have purpose. I have clarity. And it was totally bizarre, totally unexpected by others in the field who had this sense like, well, if we ask people to imagine the worst that could happen, it's going to increase their anxiety for the future. It's going to create dread or hopelessness or powerlessness. But if you bring that same kind of gaming experience where you're asking people to use their own skills and their knowledge and their communities

in service of a bigger goal, helping others, then people come out of it feeling what I started calling urgent optimism, which is essentially this balanced mindset of being clear-eyed about risks and possible threats that we face, while also filling your brain with positive ideas, new possible policy solutions, social movements, technology, scientific breakthroughs, wild ideas that could really help us not only address these threats or mitigate the risk, but actually create a lot of positive change along the way. So this balanced mindset, it is amazing how good we can feel by being willing to think about events that should be unpleasant to think about. Is it because it gives us agency in the sense that this future disaster is one that we can bring resources to solve, that we're not powerless

in this regard? Exactly. One of my favorite things I ask people to do when we're running these games is to imagine a happy moment. You know, let's say there's this, you know, extreme heat wave or there's been, the internet's been shut down for a month by the government for cybersecurity. You've been, whatever we're living through, write a story. Like essentially there's a lot of journaling from the future in these games and you write about it as if you've already lived through it. So you can create really vivid memories of these futures. And so I was like, write about something good that happened. Like, was there a holiday you were able to celebrate, or a new family ritual or tradition, or a gift you were able to give someone? And tell a story

about different positive emotions, like happiness or pride or love. How did you feel love in this future? And what people realize is that as human beings, whatever world we wake up in, we will find a way to make art, to love each other, to help each other, to be creative. There is just, that's the human spirit. And when you actually practice it in a context that's safe, it's a game, it's a game.

It's not real. So you take away all of the things that stop us maybe from doing it in real life because we have real anxiety. We have real things to worry about. When it's in the context of the game, then you can just explore all those positive responses and strengths. And it really works. You're finding your agency to tap into that indomitable human spirit, even in the worst. So this sort of taps in as well to the gratitude mindset that even in the worst circumstances, we can find things to be grateful for. And that sort of, I guess, flips the mindset from one of helplessness to one of empowerment.

Yeah. And I learned more than a decade ago, one of the big findings out of positive psychology when they would run meta-analyses of what habits or interventions really increase well-being in the long run, there was this habit of not, it's not a gratitude journal. That was, people thought early that that was like kind of the big habit to cultivate. What they found was something almost like a gratitude journal, but it's called Three Great Things. And I started practicing it more than a decade ago. And my husband and I practice it every single night. Even if we're apart, if we're traveling, we call each other or we email each other.

And the way Three Great Things works is you reflect on three great, three things that went great today, three things that went well, and why they went well. So, you know, yesterday was a summer solstice. So, we had our little family summer solstice traditions and our kids wrote poems and it was great. And we're like, wow, okay, we had the summer solstice tradition that went well. And why did that go well? Well, we made time for our family. We made that a priority. And, you know, it's a good day when we live with our values, right? What you're doing is you're not just being grateful for random things, you're focusing on the agency of yourself or others, you know, where it's not just that good things exist or happen, but that you're making them happen or others are making them happen. And that aspect of agency combined with being grateful for what's working or going well, that's like the sort of magic boost that really makes that a powerful practice. I love that. You know, I practice a very similar thing when I go to sleep at night.

It's what are the three things today that gave me the greatest joy, right? And it's usually around the kids. right? And it's usually around the kids. But adding the element of why, I think, adds a real great value to that. The flip of that, I'm curious, is in the morning sometimes I set out, what are the three most important things that if I do today, today will be a great day? I like that. I'm sort of like an epic to-do lister. I have like insanely ambitious. I'm sort of the opposite of that. I find that the more things I set out for myself to conquer, the more that I do, it's like this positive upward spiral. Like every time I get something done, I'm like, yeah, I'm getting stuff done. What else can I do? Um, but so for me personally, it's like having this huge, you know, I mean, I literally keep

a word doc where I was like a page a day of like one every, you know, um and then i uh i i feel like i mean to me that feels more like that feeling in a good rpg you know where like wherever you turn there's another class there's another challenge yeah yeah and crossing that thing off the list right that checking that box yeah it's you know it's uh well you know that mindset, actually. So here, can I tell you a funny story? Please, yeah, happy. Sort of funny. I mean, it's interesting how all this ties together. So I think some people know I had a severe concussion back in 2009 when I had an accident.

And part of my recovery process was trying to bring a gainful mindset to that recovery. And I was super depressed. I had suicidal thoughts. I didn't know why I was thinking this way or feeling this way. I later found out that during recovery from a concussion, and it seems for many people, long COVID, the same kind of neuroinflammation, while your brain is trying to heal, it doesn't want you going out into the world doing stuff. It wants you basically curled up in a ball, safe, sound, not going to hit your head again, not going to get in any trouble. And it intentionally depresses you so that you don't take action because it wants you to conserve all of your energy for

healing and stay safe. But the problem is it can go too far, which is why one in three people with concussion get suicidal thoughts because literally their brain blocks them from imagining any, you know, good outcome of action. Like you basically, you literally can't imagine anything good happening. And so one of the, one of the things that worked for me in my recovery was essentially forcing myself to come up with this abundant list of things I could do, even though I could barely get out of bed, I couldn't read, I couldn't work, couldn't email, couldn't run, couldn't play video games, anything I would normally do, couldn't do. I'm like, I need an abundant sense of there are actions I can take that will bring about a benefit to myself or others today so that I could, you know, just force my brain, force those neurocircuitries back into believing something good could happen through my own efforts and actions. And I had really, I mean, like the list, you wouldn't think they were so exciting. Like, you know, smell a new perfume that I've never smelled before or bake cookies for the people who work

in the Pete's in the apartment building, you know, and not from scratch. I mean, like the pre-formed ones, you just stick them in the oven. But I'm like, maybe I'll bring cookies to someone today. And just by having a sense that when I woke up, there are all these things I could do, even though they're not the things I would normally want to do or derive meaning or purpose from. That turned out to be the most important thing I did in my recovery. experiments into Super Better, which is that app that so many people have used and clinical trials have been run and it really does help people recover from concussion faster. That's the thing that seems to work is giving people a sense of their own agency that there are abundant things I can accomplish even if my normal abilities are diminished or my normal opportunities are scarce. I'm going to come up with things I can

do, again, driven by my own values and whatever passions and talents I have. I'm going to find a whole list of things that I can do so that we can force our brain to imagine positive outcomes of our own actions, even when it's trying to make us curl up in a ball and be safe and still. Take one second and tell people about Super Better. So Super Better is an app that is free and it takes you on a kind of gameful journey to reframe a health challenge that you have as a kind of heroic quest in which you can collect power-ups that really do make you feel stronger and better, in which you get really clear about

your bad guys, things that trigger symptoms or things that prevent you from following through on new habits you're trying to form, and you're collecting allies from your real life or the super better community that can give you power- allies from your real life or the super better community that can give you power when you need them or help you come up with strategies for fighting bad guys. And then most importantly, you're coming up with these quests for yourself, figuring out things that you can do each and every day that are going to help you live a life that is true to your authentic self and your values, even if you have debilitating migraines or long COVID or this kind of crippling anxiety or post-traumatic

stress disorder. And I'm so thrilled that it has been tested in randomized control studies at Penn, at OSU, Cincinnati Children's Hospital. It's been evaluated by independent researchers to be powerful for depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and concussion. And I'm hoping, you know, as somebody who experienced a year of long COVID myself, when I caught COVID in the very first wave, early adopter, got there first, pre-vaccine, pre-treatments. And I spent a year recovering with a lot of neuroinflammation. And I'm hoping that Super Better will be able to help the many millions of people now who are experiencing a changed sense of self.

And so, yeah, if anybody could use help with their own recovery, Superbetter is a free resource and it seems to be very helpful for things like neuroinflammation and depression, anxiety, and pain. Nice. Let's talk more about an abundance and exponential mindset.

And I'd love to hear your thoughts here. I tell people, listen, if you're going to watch CNN, the Crisis News Network, 24 hours a day, you're going to be in fear and scarcity mindset because your neural net's being wired to think in fear and scarcity. And yet we're living in this world of massively increasing abundance and where technology is enabling extraordinary breakthroughs every day. How do you communicate this to folks and how do you frame this? So I lead a public community for the Institute for the Future called Urgent Optimists. And we, Institute for the Future called Urgent Optimists. And we are a community to practice building urgent optimism. And one of the activities that has been really successful, I think,

in increasing our sense of abundance and hope is something we call Signals of Hope Scavenger Hunt. is something we call Signals of Hope Scavenger Hunt. So once a month, we pick a theme. I devise essentially a scavenger hunt list where you go out into the real world, into your community or online, looking in the news, looking on social media for signals of change that give you hope for the future. So we can look for signals of climate hope.

This month, we were looking at local signals of hope. You had to take a photograph of it with your own eyes, find something in your own community. And then we share them and we talk about, you know, what would the world look like if these signals were scaled up? So yesterday, the community was talking about a very strange Very strange signal of change that on one hand, it's coming from a place of their full salary, but on the fifth day, they're being asked to go home and grow food in their own backyards or their own communities because there's a huge food shortage, food scarcity right now. And they're trying to figure out how do we make food abundant in this, what is a more resource-limited environment. So people are being paid now instead of that fifth day of work to essentially increase the food security of the community, increase food abundance, and to take a personal role in growing local food. And on one

hand, this is sort of a, I mean, it's sort of a scary signal of change, right? Because food insecurity is scary. And yet on the other hand, in our urgent optimist community people find a lot of reason for hope that such a radical experiment is being tried like in sri lanka yeah i mean that's awesome and and so you know if we could what would you know the idea that we could spend a fifth day if we do as many countries and organizations are experimenting with going to the four-day work week, and spend that fifth day doing something purposeful that builds local resilience or improves the health and well-being of our community or family. I just love that. I would love to spend a fifth day doing that. I find that absolutely fascinating. And I love this idea of signals of hope. When I run my Abundance 360 Summit every year, and I focus in on abundance,

exponential longevity, and moonshot mindsets principally, I put together a PowerPoint deck called Proof of Abundance or Proof of Exponentials. And it's like, over the course of the last year, I put together a PowerPoint deck called proof of abundance or proof of exponentials, right? And it's like, over the course of the last year, here's all the things that are proving we're moving in this direction. So one of the examples from this past year was in 2022, there's going to be more new electric power coming from solar than any other source, right? And it used to be something that was an ignored source of energy production in the United States. And so there's hundreds of these. And yet, I think about our brains are neural nets, and we need to be constantly

updating our neural net on this is now possible, this is now possible. I always say the reasons we look ahead to the future are so that we can be ready for anything, that's the risks, the disruptions, the crises, but also so that we can imagine what could be possible tomorrow that isn't possible today so that we can, I guess, motivate ourselves to stay with the hard work of making a better world, right? By really imagining that exponential benefit or outcome. And electrification of everything is definitely one of my biggest sources of hope. I'm a fan of all the jobs that could be created, of all the skills that could be created across society as we do a clean energy transition at scale. Hey, everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode.

I'll tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home to draw bloods to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co-founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range,

what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family, and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforce.com backslash Peter to learn more. Let's get back to the episode. So, you know, I know why the brain is wired for fear and scarcity, right? It saved us 100,000 years ago, but it's not serving us today.

And I think, you know, creating an abundance mindset that allows you to flip the situation, the analogy I use, instead of slicing a pie into thinner and thinner slices, we're going to bake more pies because we can. Any other tricks that you have for helping people envision an abundance mindset? Because people like hanging out with people envision an abundance mindset? Because people like hanging out with people with an abundance mindset. Oh, totally. And by the way, that's my biggest beef with the Web3 community is I think that while they talk about abundance and helping empower people financially and to own their own assets and their revenue streams. I think there's way too much actual scarcity baked into the products and services right now.

So I have a challenge to the Web3 community, which is to actually design systems of abundance and stop relying on artificial scarcity to create wealth. But I have a very practical technique that when I work with organizations to think about the kind of abundance that we encounter in games. There's a very specific type of abundance that is designed into some games. And I think some of the most popular games that exist specifically because of their abundance. So you think about a game like Fortnite, there are abundant opportunities to play. Like you're, you're trying to survive as long as you can up, you're out. Do you have to wait to play again? No, like right away, you can drop in again, drop off that airship. It's, it's as soon as you're

out, you're back in the game. That's really interesting. We have so many games where you're out, so you sit on the sidelines, you're done, you're out of the tournament, you're out of the realm. But Fortnite really created abundant opportunities to play the sense of you can just get right back in the game. That's a game to look at for abundance. Also, Pokemon Go, I tell organizations, spend some time in Pokemon Go and look how abundant everything is. Pokemon Go could have been designed where that first Snorlax that you encountered in Times Square, only one of them, first player to catch it gets the Snorlax. But instead, they designed it so that anybody who was in Times Square got their own copy of the Snorlax. So instead of competing with strangers, you had

people shouting out, anybody who has a phone nearby might be playing. You're like, Snorlax, Snorlax. And you're creating this sense of community and collective, you know, we're sharing our intelligence because we can all benefit. The way that they have used these Pokestops all over the world where you just walk on up and you can swipe, you can spin this disc and they give you free assets for the game, free balls, free potions, free powers, whatever. And that you can spin them every five minutes. They could have time limited it. They could have said once a day, you know, but they didn't. five minutes this incredible sense of they're giving me what i need to be successful everyone wins the economy is powered by abundant assets and i so i just challenge you

know folks spend some time in this world and think you know what if we tried to bring this kind of abundance to learning or to some of our workplaces or to other, you know, anything that you design or create any experience, can you steal a few of these, you know, design techniques from Fortnite or Pokemon Go because people feel, feel more, you know, likely to collaborate and share and try again, if they get out of that scarcity mindset and realize there's enough opportunity here for everyone, which is how it should be in the real world, for sure. And it is going that way, right? We are going to have a squanderable abundance of energy and water and food as we reinvent how we do these things. One of my favorite examples along the

lines that you're saying is the educational system versus the gaming systems. In the educational system, you start with 100% at the start of the year. And every time you get something wrong, your grade goes down. In the gaming system, you start with zero. And every time you get something right, your score goes up. Yeah, perfect example. How do we flip that so that when you're winning and everybody's winning, everybody's score is going up together? Yes. I mean, and I know college professors who changed their syllabus and their grading methods where

every activity, you earn points, stop whenever you want. You want to pass in grade, you got a C, you're happy, great. You do enough activities till you get 70 points, you're done. You want an A, there's abundant opportunities, you know, just do twice as much, you know, and you can get that extra report. Yeah, yeah. And from what I hear from the professors, it really changes, you know, they show up wanting to know what they can do today to earn points, not what do I have to do to get my grade. It can be very simple tweaks. Wow.

That's interesting. When I was in seventh grade, I was at a prep school that was on a 4.0 grading average. And I found out when I got a B on an exam, it dropped me from a four to something else. And there was no way to get back to a four. And so I negotiated with my seventh grade biology teacher that if I got 100% of the next test, he'd erase the last score. But I mean, yeah, so that was the young pre-med in me. But the idea of reinventing education where you can go as high as you want is your energy

and your passion drives. I love that. Do you want to go somewhere a little bit slightly dystopic, but it's exactly on this topic and I'm actually kind of fired up to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I've studied in my research at the Institute for the Future are the social credit scoring systems that are being piloted in China. And, you know, I think folks who have heard about it, but maybe not been exposed to the details of these programs, they have this idea that there's one social credit score program and it's designed by the government. And in fact, the government has asked different municipalities and different companies and organizations to

create their own versions. And they've been prototyping and experimenting with many dozens of different approaches to a social credit score, which, you know, for folks maybe who haven't heard about it, it's the idea that you have a number that reflects actions you may have taken that are beneficial to society or detrimental to society. So if you're caught smoking on a non-smoking area, then you lose points. If you visit your elder parents often to take them food, you gain points. And they have all these like surveillance technologies to track, were you jaywalking? Were you donating blood? And so on one hand, there's this whole dystopian surveillance state aspect, which is horrible. But still,

I think we need to study these things and watch what's happening and see what we can learn from them. Are there ethical versions or better versions? And what can people opt in? Right. And can people, one of the things that seems to make these systems work better in that they do not increase anxiety or a sense of, you know, being watched, but that people actually feel like their communities are getting safer or better is when there are very few ways to lose points. Hardly anything you do can decrease your score, but there are abundant ways to earn points so that instead of feeling like, oh, if I make one mistake, I'm going to be fined or not allowed to, you know, I'll be like lower on the list for medical treatment, which some of the systems do this, right? You mess up, now you're really experiencing significant harms.

Instead, those systems where it's like 100 ways to earn points for every one where you can lose points, those seem to have less deleterious effects. And I'm not in favor of authoritarian surveillance state technology. And yet, as I look at these programs and how the technology is likely to spread, I'm also a realist. And I do think surveillance technology will be scaled up and will be implemented. I want us to at least be able to think about what are the ways to minimize harms and maybe do something that could have a positive impact and avoid the dystopian version. Listen, I love this aspect of gamifying life and allowing people who want to do good to the world and their community to be recognized in that fashion in ways that are of real value.

And, you know, facial recognition, all of that is here now. You know, I just traveled back and forth to Greece and, you know, getting on the airplane, it's no longer, you know, showing your passport and ticket. It's like smile at the camera and it's like green light. Yes, you're the right person coming on. So it's here, it's coming fast. And, um, as I like to say to people, you know, do you really think you have privacy? Um, you know, so that's a completely different conversation. All right, let's talk about one of my last but most important mindsets, one that is, I know, true in your life and the work that you do, which is a moonshot mindset.

The sense of taking on a challenge that is a little bit scary and bigger than you normally would, going 10x bigger when the rest of the world is going 10%. What are your thoughts around moonshots? Are they good? Are they bad? How do you talk to people about it? Yes. Well, I mean, I famously set a moonshot for the game developer community back in 2008 when I started speaking publicly about the idea

that a game company or game designer would be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. And it wasn't, it's not a prediction. It wasn't a prediction. It was a provocation. I wanted to get developers and designers thinking seriously, what kind of game would we have to make that this would not be a laughable idea? What kinds of benefits could we conceive of for games? How would we measure them? How would we justify or really validate a global positive impact? Would it be on mental health? Would it be on a sense of social solidarity? If you think we have more in common with people that we used to feel divided from, how could we imagine the benefits such that even if a game developer never gets even nominated for

a Nobel Peace Prize, let alone win it, that we have shifted the types of games that we believe we have an opportunity to create. And it's funny, somebody just last month was asking me about this prediction. They're like, oh, you predicted that a game developer would get a Nobel Prize by 2023 because it was 15 years ago. I was like, that'll be plenty of time. Like, no problem. Now it's next year. And so, you know, it's a reminder. It's not a prediction. It's a provocation. Let's use the moonshot to expand our sense of purpose and what we might try to achieve and whether or not we actually get there. Now we've, we've created a new set of possibilities. In one sense, the gaming industry, um, you know, puts these moon shots

into every game where it's the, you know, the final boss battle, you know, and it's, um, and it's a, it's a journey to get there, but you've got this end goal that's motivating you in, you know, I mean, you know this better than everybody, how much energy people invest into a game over the course of weeks, months, years. But we don't necessarily have that in our lives because we don't allow ourselves, or maybe it's not framed properly. And we don't know how to frame it properly well i mean one of the things that always stood out to me about the x prize is that it's really about lifting up an entire community and increasing our collective capacity our collective intelligence about a problem that we're that we're trying to solve or a goal we're trying to achieve. And whether one team wins there, you hopefully are creating a whole field, a whole movement. And I think with gaming, that's always been so fascinating to me. A new game drops and a whole wiki goes up overnight

and you've got thousands of people streaming their play so that we can all... Learn from each other right you take a problem that literally nobody knows anything about and you've got hundreds of thousands or millions of people all trying to solve it at the same time and the collective intelligence about that problem the the incredible surge of intelligence that's created through everybody playing it at the same time right um One of my favorite stats was like one in four people who play the Call of Duty series take off work or school the day that a new game drops because they want to stay home and play and be part of that first 24 hours. That's, you know, I think it's trying to, how do we create that sense of incredible, concentrated, collaborative concentration on a problem,

whether it's through something like a game or an XPRIZE or these social simulations that I run. When you get that creative lift of everybody trying to do it at the same time, that's what gets me really excited. Is it possible? I mean, the amount of cognitive surplus that goes into gameplay is massive, right? Just around the world. I don't know if people have any idea of the amount. Is it possible to, and I know you've worked towards this, but moonshot here for me is how do we engage the same game dynamics and gameplay into solving the world's biggest problems. I mean, XPRIZE is a take on that in some regard.

But how do you think about that in the frame of moonshots and incentivizing people to go for something big? My personal moonshot for applying the creativity and collective intelligence of gamers to real world problems is to have something like a Super Bowl Sunday where once a year there is a game that drops that is related to a real crisis or challenge that we might face. So, you know, the most people I've ever had concurrently participate in a simulation of a future challenge is about 20,000 people, right? What if we, it's good. I mean, we definitely see a lot of cool, otherwise hard to predict stuff come out of that. But what if you could have 200,000 or 2 million or 20 million? Think about the amount of just having that 24 hours of creative lift around a problem and gaming out. The internet's got, you know, let's say this, you know, the satellites have been shut down,

internet's down, GPS is down, telecom's down. How do we like survive as we try to live through this incredible shutdown? Have people game that out for 24 hours. What would you do? What would you need? How would you help? What are your skills? How are you putting them in service of the problem? We could have millions of people do that once a day. I mean, for one day, once a year. We would have some very interesting ideas generated, but more so the people who participate what i have found the biggest lasting impact is that you are forever hailed by that problem that if things start to happen in the real world that are suggestive this is a growing

thread the risk is more likely it jumps out at you because you have essentially created that dopamine response in your brain the same way we had people playing pandemics for the next 10 years anytime there's anything new virus what what i should listen to that because you have a dopamine response to it so if we pre-prepped your brain yeah you prepared that network to pay attention. Yeah. So even if, you know, 19 out of the 20 million people participating don't have any actually great ideas, like 20 million out of 20 million will have prepared their brains to pay attention, be less shocked, be able to, you know, act faster, notice the changes faster, hopefully adapt faster, not get into this situation where we're denying reality, right? We want people to feel smart when a disruption happens instead of

denying it, which we saw so much of really in the past decade, especially as we instead of denying what's happening, let's make you feel smart when it happens. And you feel like you are one of the people on the planet who is supposed to do something about it. Yeah. Again, it's the concept of agency that, yes, I know about this problem. I'm familiar with it. I understand what it means. And I can take an action to help ameliorate it or move it forward.

I imagine when you take on a moonshot, it changes the way you think about what's possible. It stretches your mind in some way. And I go back to the game world, which is sort of the analogy for life, where I'm starting the game and I'm learning along the way. I'm such a noob at the beginning. And I've watched on YouTube videos the boss battle at the end, there's no way I'm going to possibly be able to achieve that. But, you know, as you play the game, you're gaining the skills to get to that final level. I mean, I really think that experience of personal growth and noticing, wow, I'm getting better i am improving i mean that's that is definitely part of the structural benefits of moonshots right is that because you're you're all if you set such an ambitious goal that you're not achieving it tomorrow you're not achieving it next month

or even next year you're going to stay on that path and be able to keep reflecting and keep noticing, I'm getting better, learning more, figuring stuff out, taking in that feedback. And I think, you know, I like to say as a futurist, working on the 10-year timeline and imagining things 10 years out, we have all this time spaciousness as a result. I mean, if you're trying to solve a problem by tomorrow, there's like a limited maybe set of actions you can realistically take. If you have 10 years to solve it, now you can imagine much more ambitious interventions and transformations.

So I think, you know, for me, using time spaciousness, it's kind of like a cathedral or Grand Canyon for our imagination, the same way that we're in these big, beautiful spaces with high ceilings or open expanses. We think more creatively. We think more optimistically. We just think bigger, right? So moonshot is like the same thing. I love that. the same thing. I love that. One of the challenges we have as humans is when we see a problem in the future, climate crisis as an example, we sort of see the disaster that's going to be hitting 10 years from now, 20 years from now, and we accelerate it to today. And we forget the fact

that we do have a decade or two of exponential tech growth that are going to give us brand new tools to solve it. And I think that's part of the exponential thinking that I'm trying to encourage folks. All right, we've come to the end of our conversation here, and I'm so excited about all of these topics. Here's my challenge, my question for you. If tomorrow, you could snap your fingers and I would fully fund an XPRIZE and launch it globally, what is an XPRIZE, a grand challenge that you'd want the world focused on solving? Do you have an idea of what you'd love? Yeah, absolutely. We need a long COVID XPRIZE or maybe think more expansively about post-viral chronic illness, post-viral

disability so that we're thinking about all forms of chronic fatigue, autoimmune responses to infections that have historically been so under-researched, under-treated. You know, people have been shamed out of, you know, even believing like that what the symptoms they have are real. We saw that replicated with long COVID, but now the world is waking up and saying, okay, our bodies do this weird thing and it is affecting many hundreds of millions of people by the end of this, you know, pandemic that we'll have lived through. I mean, that is to me that not only solves the problem we have today, but it makes the whole future better. If this is

something we can understand and know how to prevent or reverse or correct, then we can face any, you know, viral future we face, which we know there's going to be more viruses. This is what we're if we're if we live long enough, you know, knock on wood for decades more. We'll see this again. We'll live through this again. way. It's about making us, I think, braver for the futures that are coming and helping alleviate suffering that is on the ground today. I love that. All right. An X prize for addressing long COVID and for the implications of our future pandemics and actually preventing those future pandemics because you're right, is just this is the early warning system hopefully we humans are smart enough to have paid attention here dr jane mcgonigal uh pleasure jane thank you for your time and your brilliance and thank you for the work that you do

in the world thank you peter i can't wait to listen to all the other episodes