Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. Today, an episode from the TED Interview, another podcast in the TED Audio Collective. As we look to the year ahead, I found this conversation on how we can become futurists super illuminating for thinking bigger, far beyond New Year's resolutions. If you want to hear more, follow the TED Interview wherever you listen.
Jane McGonigal, welcome to the TED Interview. Thank you, Stephen. I'm glad to be here. So this is a conversation largely about the future and how to think more intelligently and creatively about it. But I wanted to start. in the past, actually, which is where your book, Imaginable, starts.
Because more than a decade ago, you ran not one, but two projects with thousands of people involved that simulated a global future pandemic involving a respiratory virus.
Chapter 2: How did Jane McGonigal's simulation game predict a pandemic?
I mean, simulations that ended up anticipating many things that we have lived through over the last decade. two years with COVID. So I thought we'd start there. And maybe you could just set the stage for us and explain how these projects came about and what their ultimate mission was. Great. So this type of future forecasting game is called a social simulation.
And it's social because it's not the kind of simulation where you put a bunch of algorithms into a machine and you crank them and see what The machine predicts what happened. You know, this many people will get sick. This many people will lose their job. This many people will die. That's not our kind of simulation.
At the Institute for the Future, we say we're low on algorithms but high on social and emotional intelligence. We ask thousands of people questions. Thank you so much for having me. what they would do, how they would adapt, and how they would try to help others if they were living through this respiratory pandemic. We called it respiratory distress syndrome.
And they played on a private social network. So it's like you're on Facebook, but 10 years in the future. You're on Twitter, but 10 years in the future. That game was set in the year 2019. We followed up in 2010 with
where we had 20,000 people this time, again, on a private social network, sharing stories about how they would try to help others with not only a respiratory pandemic that started in China, but complicating scenarios we imagined, like a misinformation global conspiracy theory campaign on social media led by a group in our game called Citizen X. And we imagined historic wildfires on the West Coast of the United States, and there were supply chain disruptions happening
We had moms saying, I'm imagining not going to work because schools are closed and I'm going to have to stay home and I don't know how I'm going to get my work done. So we were able to anticipate just by asking ordinary people.
These kind of surprising ripple effects or social consequences that many experts in public health or epidemiology weren't really thinking about, the sort of irrational behaviors. We were able, by talking to ordinary people, allowing them to be experts in their own futures, what they would want and feel a need to get a lot of really actionable information. intelligence.
And it was just, you know, I have to say as futurists, we're always looking about 10 years out. It's our favorite timeline. So in some ways it was just, I think, weird, dumb luck that our game was set in the year 2019 and 2020 and just sort of uncannily turned out to be exactly when we lived through what we imagined. I think it sounds suspiciously accurate is the way I think about it.
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Chapter 3: What is a social simulation and how does it work?
for the time being, just explain to us how you actually engage. Is it kind of role-playing? Are you describing the events as if they're happening and you're just sharing imagined stories from an imagined future? Is that what it looks like? Exactly. I mean, really, if people can just imagine their experience of social media and news during the real 2020, that's what it's like.
You go online to a website, you're seeing news headlines from a hypothetical future. So you can see, you know, We're not talking about real news. We're talking about future hypothetical events. And there's just this kind of collective narrative aspect to it. And we watch it unfold and we look for trends and we feed it back to the community and let it kind of seep into your imagination.
Well, you know, that's a perfect segue because I wanted to just touch on one last thing about the pandemic simulations. Sure. which is something you touch on in Imaginable as well, which is the feedback you eventually got from people when the real pandemic arrived in spring of 2020. So tell us a little bit about the response you heard from them. Yeah.
I mean, I started hearing from people in January 2020 who had participated. And it's interesting. One of the things that stands out to me most about the emails and messages I was getting on social media is everybody was using the word social distancing because that was a concept we had introduced in Superstruck. We had people reimagine
all the things they did in their daily lives in a socially distant way. And I think just having that fluency with pandemic terminology concepts, you know, understanding that masking was likely to become a requirement. I mean, it's like they had, you know, just enough information that they'd already put inside their brain just in case, you know, and, and,
Part of what we did wrong globally about this pandemic in 2019 and 2020 was a slowness to accept the potential scale and widespread ramifications. We just wanted to deny how bad it was going to get. And I think having pre-imagined it... It was a willingness to imagine, you know, literally what other people were saying. Well, this is unthinkable.
Like the idea that we would shut schools down or that borders would close. All borders around the world closing at the same time. Literally unimaginable. Except...
If you have previously imagined it, then, you know, you're not going to be caught off guard or blindsided and you're going to notice the changes faster so that you personally have more time to adjust and adapt and prepare to help others. It's such an important skill.
I mean, imagining things that aren't apparent to us right now but that might be possible in the future is an enormously important skill. And one of the things that you and I, over the years we've talked about this in the past, it's one of our kind of shared intellectual interests, is this idea, it goes by a bunch of different names, sometimes it's called cognitive time travel.
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Chapter 4: What surprising insights did participants provide during the simulation?
So we can really choose things that that relate to our biggest meaning, our purpose, or the things that bring us joy. You know what's interesting? I went first in starting to go through this exercise, I went to the technology side of it. So the very first thing I was like, an alarm clock, which is what normally wakes me up, that's going to seem kind of retrograde.
I mean, already people are getting woken up depending on cycles in their REM sleep or something like that. So the idea that some clock that would just be set saying, wake me up at 8 a.m., That will seem really out of date. And then I was thinking, what about mattresses? Like the mattress technology feels like it hasn't really changed all that much. Like what is my bed going to look like?
How could a bed be different? But it's also kind of a blank spot in the sense that I don't really have a clear picture of what the answer to that would be. first of all, you're one of the first people I know who has answered with like imagining the future of mattress technologies. That is so you.
And I think it actually does prove the point that we tend to go towards core curiosities and interests and values. I mean, a lot of people, you know, for me, I have seven-year-old twin daughters, right? The first thing I have to adjust for when I imagine 10 years out is I'm going to have 17-year-old twin daughters. So maybe they're seniors in high school. They don't like me anymore.
I don't know what we're... I start to imagine what defines my day most right now is my relationship with caring for my family. Some people imagine being in a different city or country. A lot of people will think about their body and how they want it to be different. They want to be stronger or they want to have some different change that they've achieved.
And it's really just interesting to talk to people through this imagination exercise and just, wow, like what pops into people's heads when they have the freedom to imagine anything? I think it's really telling. You imagine your children as a parent. I'm a parent as well. And I imagined what kind of future alarm clock I would have. That's... The difference between the two of us.
Clearly, you're a better parent than I am. You mentioned a specific set of ways we can measure how good we are at mentally time traveling. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that actually entails? So there are three different dimensions of mental time travel skill, vividness, immersiveness, and flexibility or creativity.
So to measure your vividness, try writing down what you picture so that you can literally go back and say, okay, I said that it was a blue truck or it was a Bill Withers song that woke me up. You're looking for every detail. That brings the imagined scene to life.
And when you bring the specificity of imagination to the future, it has a much more powerful effect on your ability to plan and prepare and actually shape the future. The second ability is immersiveness. So that's really a subjective measure, but you can ask yourself, how absorbed was I in imagining this future scene?
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Chapter 5: How can we use imagination to prepare for the future?
So much of the exercises that you talk about in Imaginable are building on something that we've discussed already, which is trying to trick your brain into getting outside of its default settings or assumptions about how the world is supposed to work and to imagine things that we might not otherwise imagine.
And sometimes those can come from kind of outside prompts by the game designer who's concocted a future world and we have to grapple with whatever they send us. But there are a number of other exercises that you can really do on your own that I think are really interesting. And one of them is this idea of fact flipping, which I think is really clever. Maybe could you walk me through that exercise?
Yeah. Yeah. So this is basically a future brainstorming game. Like, let's say you want to come up with some really vivid ideas for what the world might be like. And you want to surprise yourself, right? Not things you've seen in science fiction movies or the same old tropes. And so you pick a topic and then you just list as many facts as you can about it. I say try to get to 100.
It doesn't have to be 100 at a time. I will often have a Google spreadsheet going of facts that I'm sort of adding as the days and weeks and months go on. One of my pet research areas is the future of shoes. And so you list these facts that are just generally true about the topic today. Like you might say, most people own more than one pair of shoes. We take our shoes off at night when we sleep.
There's not like a norm or cultural practice of sleeping with our shoes on. Once we have those future mattresses, you can actually keep your shoes on because they self-clean. It's really impressive. Yeah. So you write these facts and then you just rewrite them. So you flip them so that the opposite is now true. And you're going to come up with a bunch of weird stuff that doesn't make sense.
For example, shoes are free. Nobody has to pay for them anymore. Most people only own one pair of shoes. And you just write this down. And then it becomes this kind of seed that you plant in your imagination and you start looking for signals of change. that could explain these weird upside down futures. And again, it's like increasing that salience, like your brain's ability to detect clues.
So for example, I was walking around for quite a while wondering why would people sleep with their shoes on in the future? Then I lived through an experience that was a lived signal of change. I was advised by a Red Cross evacuation and rescue expert
during our fall wildfire season here in California, that my family should sleep with their shoes right next to our bed or actually sleep with our shoes on because people panic and they lose precious time looking for their shoes when they need to evacuate. And in fact, he told me the number one injury that people experience during evacuations are foot injuries because they can't find their shoes.
And I realized, you know, Now I could imagine a future where people like me who've lived through months of these extremely anxiety-producing, you know, wildfire threats and maybe people like me start to sleep with our shoes on as like just one symptom of the extreme weather we might have to live through. Now, it's not a prediction of what will happen.
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