#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

The Tim Ferriss Show

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 | Brought to you by Dry Farm Wines natural wines designed for fewer hangovers, Vuori comfortable and durable performance apparel, and Helix Sleep premium mattresses. More on all three below.

Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) is a future-forecaster and a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games that improve real lives and solve real problems. She’s the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future and the lead instructor for their series on the Coursera platform. She also teaches the course How to Think Like a Futurist at Stanford University.

Jane is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality Is Broken and SuperBetter, and the forthcoming Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today. Her TED talks on how games can make a better world and the game that can give you 10 extra years of life have more than 15 million views. Her innovative games and ideas have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, O magazine, and The New York Times, among many others.

Please enjoy!

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Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Margaret Atwood, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Balaji Srinivasan, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Michio Kaku, and many more.