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Jane McGonigal

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2022-03-16
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2022-03-16
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  1. “Not get frozen, not be in denial. Overcome normalcy by it faster, and get on with adapting and helping themselves and others.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I spent like the last two years studying all of the people who participated, how they suffered less during the real crisis. And it wasn't even necessarily like, well, some people avoided getting sick better than others, but it was that the first feeling they had, the first emotion they had when this all happened was pre-recognition, which is an incredibly positive emotion. It's like you said no Shadamas, that feeling of having been right, I knew this could happen. I saw this coming. That makes us feel smart. It makes us feel capable, confident, powerful, even when we're in all this uncertainty and disruption and having that be your brain's first reaction to a new adverse situation, it turned out was really powerful. It allowed people to feel less shocked.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Tim, I don't know if you remember we were fighting reality early in this process. People did not want to change. Businesses did not want to send their workers home.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I started hearing from people at the start of 2020. I mean, people at the World Bank who had worked on the simulation and they were like, oh, are we reporting out? Are we like following up because the world looks exactly like we imagined, but also from participants, from players. And they were writing me very early on. The foremost people were even paying attention to what was going on. They told me like, you know, ever since that game pandemics have just been on my radar. It's like I pick up the information faster than other people. I notice the change faster. They were writing me in early January when most people were not really thinking this was going to affect them outside of China. People were writing me throughout 2020 saying, this has been terrible, but I feel like I experienced less anxiety and depression than my friends and family. I felt less shocked. It didn't take me as long to accept reality.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “We're like, this is going to be really tricky. And people aren't going to want to do it. It's just amazing how much we could learn that when the real pandemic happened and all the other intersecting crises, people said, well, that was unimaginable or that was unthinkable. But no, people are experts on their own futures. And if you ask them before the crisis happens, before the disruption happens, you can get really actionable evidence. But Tim, can I tell you what for me is the most important thing that happened as a result of all these people?”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “We're able to effectively imagine what they would feel and need and do and predict a lot of things that during the actual pandemic, people said were surprising. You know, we ask people, we ran another simulation called Quarantine back in 2008 looking at the year 2019. And we asked people during that simulation to wear masks. We gave them masks. We sent out masks. And we said, just try and wear these in your everyday life. And like, what is it like? And how comfortable is it? How socially awkward is it? When do you really need to take the mask off? And would you be able to adapt to it? And what we heard, you know, was it was going to be very hard to adapt. And there were so many social norms in the way and the physicality of it and the difficulty of expressing our emotions and feelings and connecting to others. So we're like, great, even though it sounds like a really rational intervention during a pandemic when the real pandemic rolled over.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “This order, right? Is there something that would make you feel compelled to go out, even if you've been told not to, you're contagious, you're at risk. And the number one thing people said was for religious services because it's so deeply ingrained in their values and the community is so important to them. We also heard weddings, funerals, and of course these turned out to be the super spreading events, the hardest to shut down when the real pandemic happened. People said, you know, I'm worried about schools being closed and how I'm going to work and take care of my kids at the same time if suddenly we can't send them to school anymore. A lot of women expressed concern that they would be the ones who have to stop working, of course, in 2020, there was a historic exodus of women from the workforce to take care of kids home from school. What was really interesting is the players back then.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And how would they feel? What would they do? How would they adapt? How would they try to help others? And it started with a respiratory pandemic that started in China. And then there was a misinformation and conspiracy theory group called Citizen X that started to spread all kinds of crazy information and people couldn't figure out what was really going on and they weren't trusting the government. And then they started experiencing historic wildfires on the West Coast due to climate change. I mean, it was essentially everything that we actually lived through in 2020. But back then, it was fictional. It was hypothetical. And we asked people, first of all, we want to just get some collective intelligence. Like, let's say you've been told to isolate for two weeks, can't go to work, can't go to school, can't go out. Under what circumstances would you break?”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I should just very quickly explain that one of the kinds of games that I specialize in creating is something called a social simulation, which is where you get thousands of people to spend several days or weeks on a fictional social network. So basically build Facebook from the future or Twitter from the future. And people come and they share messages and photos and videos and stories about what's happening, but it's all imagined 10 years in the future. And to get people all imagining the same future, we give them scenarios. So we say, okay, it's 10 years in the future. And one of the most popular simulations I created, we ran it in 2010 with the World Bank. And it was set 10 years in the future. So the year 2020. And we asked them to imagine a series of cascading global crises.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “There are other games that work. Candy Crush is great. Any visual pattern matching game where your brain is looking at colors, looking at shapes, looking at how things are arranged in space will be really good. Portal works for me because I'm not, I mean, I wouldn't use portal for a trauma, but it works for me for insomnia. But depending on how much, if you're trying to stop visual thoughts, if you have a really vivid imagination, the visual games will work better. And if it's just sort of abstract thoughts, you can really play any game.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Do you The main reason is that Tetris is widely known to be the most visually stimulating video game that has ever been designed. And what the researchers were trying to do was essentially to take over the visual processing center of the brain because unwanted flashbacks, the reason we experience them is that in the heightened emotional period after a trauma, our brain keeps replaying it over and over again, especially in this incredibly intense visual form of imagination. And if it gets really locked in during those first 24 hours, it essentially becomes a pattern for the brain that is very hard to disrupt. And there are therapies, but people will go to therapies for years to try to break that pattern. And if you can stop it first, it helps. So, and everybody, you know, you've had this experience, you close your eyes, you see the falling breaks.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “With natural human sleeping patterns. And the rest of us, because of the type of stimulation our brain gets from electric light or artificial light, we have a weird modern sleeping pattern. But I find that a lot of people can relax in that middle of the night awakeness. And I've definitely gone through periods of my life where I've fallen back into that two-leep cycle. And if you know that it's natural and actually kind of the original human sleeping pattern, it can take away some of the things anxiety and you just, you can get amazing stuff done in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep. And if we can kind of let go of the worry, this is weird, something's wrong with me, I have to fix it and think about, you know, maybe in the future we'll go back to the way we used to sleep in the past or not try to force people out of it. Maybe we'll just be like two ways of sleeping.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Sleep. And it seems like a lot of people if your insomnia is when you're falling asleep, do the game thing. But if you're insomnia is in the middle of the night, you may actually just be more in tune”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “You and I have talked before about this mantra that a lot of futurists have. I think it's in one of your books that in order to look forward, we try to look back at least twice as far and look for patterns in the past in human culture and history. And there have been a lot of people talking lately about a past pattern of sleep. I don't know if you have come across this. So before we invented electricity, the normal human sleeping pattern was to be awake in the middle of the night for two to three hours. And people used to sleep in what they called first sleep. And then they would be awake and they would do stuff. They would often do chores or have intimate conversations with whoever was sharing the bed with them, which wasn't always a partner because people used to share beds with, you know, more people. Family members. Yeah. And then they would after a few hours, they would go back to sleep for a second.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Q O R D L E. So it's just like Wordle where you have five guesses to get a five letter word, except you're doing four words at the same time with the same guesses. So you have to allocate your guesses to try to maximize information about all forwards. And you're looking at all forwards and I do it every night before I go to bed now. And it's great. I mean, you literally can't think about anything else while you're trying to solve. Four five letter words at the same time.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “First, some good news. The researchers at Oxford University who first did that study about using Tetris to prevent unwanted flashbacks from traumatic events, they had previously done the studies in the lab. They actually started testing it in the field for people who had experienced violence or accidents that sent them to the emergency room and they were able to replicate the findings in the field since we last talked. So there's even more evidence that it works for preventing PTSD or just for bedtime 10 minutes is the dose that's been tested. I mean, it's pretty easy just to pull out your phone. I've been using lately Quortal. So I don't know if you have found. Is the super masochistic version of Wordle, which everybody's been playing.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I have two recommendations. One uses video games and one uses the future. So the video game one, pretty easy. Video games allow us to control our thoughts and imagination. They focus our attention on a problem that isn't real. It's a game and we can be swapping candy tiles or catching Pokemon or whatever we're doing in the game and it allows us to shut down the busy thoughts, the hyper mental stimulation. And it does seem to be pretty effective as a bedtime routine. The only side effect is that you might dream or hallucinate about the game when you fall asleep. So you might see those tetris blocks falling when you close your eyes, but that's not too bad a side effect is, you know, better than ambient, I think.”

    2022-03-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #579: Jane McGonigal — How She Predicted COVID in 2010, Becoming the Expert of Your Own Future, Trust Warfare, the 10-Year Winter, and How to Cultivate Optimism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT