The TED Interview: How to predict the future with Jane McGonigal
How to Be a Better Human
TED
4.1 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2022
⏱️ 44 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal ran a social simulation game in 2008 that had players dealing with the effects of a respiratory pandemic set to happen in the next decade. She wasn’t literally predicting the 2020 pandemic—but she got eerily close. Her game, set in 2019, featured scenarios we're now familiar with (like masking and social distancing), and participant reactions gave her a sense of what the world could—and eventually, did—look like. How did she do it? And what can we learn from this experiment to predict—and prepare for—the future ourselves? In this episode, Jane teaches us how to be futurists, and talks about the role of imagination—and gaming—in shaping a future that we’re truly excited about. Jane’s new book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today is available now.
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| 0:00.0 | Ted Audio Collective. |
| 0:02.0 | Collective. |
| 0:04.0 | Hi everybody, we are taking a quick break from releasing new episodes this week, but have no fear. |
| 0:11.0 | We will have another episode of our show, a fresh new one for you next week. |
| 0:16.0 | And today, instead of our show, we're bringing you another show from the TED Audio Collective. |
| 0:21.0 | This is the podcast, The TED Interview, which is hosted by author Stephen Johnson. |
| 0:25.9 | This season of the Ted Interview is all about the future of intelligence and the future of work. |
| 0:30.3 | And this is an episode that we thought you'd really enjoy. If you want more, follow the Ted interview wherever you're listening to this. |
| 0:36.7 | Thanks. Hi there. I'm Stephen Johnson. Don't worry, you're in the right place. This is the |
| 0:50.2 | Ted interview and I am the new host. |
| 0:52.9 | If you're curious about who I am and where Chris Anderson went, |
| 0:57.1 | I'd really encourage you to listen to last week's episode. |
| 1:00.0 | Chris interviewed me and then I flipped the script and asked him a few questions. |
| 1:04.6 | It was a great conversation. But now on to this week's show. |
| 1:09.4 | If I were to ask you what you were thinking about right before you pressed play on this |
| 1:14.5 | podcast there's a good chance you were thinking about the future. A few years ago |
| 1:20.4 | a psychologist in Chicago performed a fascinating experiment to capture where |
| 1:26.0 | people's minds wandered when they were left to their own devices. |
| 1:30.2 | The scientists built a system to ping people at random times during the day to ask them, |
| 1:34.8 | at this exact moment, what are you thinking about? And it turned out that people were |
| 1:39.8 | almost obsessively imagining future events. |
| 1:43.6 | Everything from tonight's dinner plans to this summer's vacation |
... |
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