#93: Jane McGonigal on Getting More Done with Less Stress and The Health Benefits of Gaming

Jane McGonigal (@avantgame https://twitter.com/avantgame), PhD, is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of The New York Times bestseller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Broken-Games-Better-Change-ebook/dp/B004G8Q1Q4/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times. She has been called one of the "top ten innovators to watch" by BusinessWeek and one of the "100 most creative people in business" by Fast Company. Her TED talks on games have been viewed more than ten million times. In this conversation, we dig into everything from recovering from head trauma to how you can use Candy Crush Saga to lose weight. Not enough? How about using Tetris to prevent PTSD, or using Call of Duty to increase empathy? Her latest book is SuperBetter http://www.amazon.com/SuperBetter-Revolutionary-Approach-Stronger-Resilient-Powered/dp/1594206368/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which offers a revolutionary (science-based) approach for getting stronger, happier, and more resilient. I've been testing it, and it works. Not only am I feeling better, but I'm having more fun. As adults, we often lose track of play. My hope is that this episode will help you to reclaim it. It's not frivolous; it can help you get a lot more done with less stress. In this episode we discuss: Examples of real world problems that are solved with games or by gamers How Jane climbed herself out of the hole of suicidal thoughts Action steps for using gaming lessons and applying them to real life How to build a quest into your life The health effects of Candy Crush Saga On the use of psychedelics to simulate traumatic experiences And much more... Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This episode is sponsored by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at Athletic Greens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results http://99designs.com/tim. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run... Enjoy!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Well, what a scene appropriate timing.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The Four Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. And you can get 50, oh my gosh, 50% off, yes, 50% off, if you go to athleticgreens.com/tim. That's athleticgreens.com/tim. Check it out. It's tasty, but more important, it will help you not screw up when you're doing your nutritional planning.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  So for me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body, and check it out. Athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 1:19Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. I've used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mock-ups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project, and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mock-ups and designs. You choose your favorite, and you have an original that you love, or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it and created some amazing things that

• 2:04Tim Ferriss?

  I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 2:22Tim Ferriss?

  Hello ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and I'd like to ask you, "Why are so serious?" We're gonna get back to that, but this is another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where my job is to try to deconstruct world-class performers, to try to identify the things that make them as good as they are at what they do. That is a mouthful of a sentence, whether that is their morning routines, their favorite books, etc., etc. And this episode is a fun one because we're gonna focus on how to use games to get more done with less stress, among many other things. And my guest is none other than Jane McGonigal, PhD, one of my favorite peeps. Jane is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of the New York Times bestseller,

• 3:07Tim Ferriss?

  "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World." Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, The New York Times, on and on. She's been called one of the "Top 10 Innovators to Watch" by Businessweek and one of the "100 Most Creative People in Business" by Fast Company. Her TED Talks on games have been viewed more than 10 million times. She knows of what she speaks. And in this conversation, we dig into everything from recovering from head trauma to how you can use Candy Crush Saga to lose weight. And if that's not enough, we talk about how to use Tetris to prevent PTSD, or perhaps Call of Duty to increase empathy, and there are many other options.

• 3:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very, very cool discussion with a lot of science underlying all of it. Her latest book is Super Better, and I would like to ask you guys a favor. I got an advanced copy, I've really been enjoying it and testing it, and I want to ask you to go buy a copy of this book. So, Super Better, it's on Amazon, check it out. But what is the premise? "Super Better offers a revolutionary and science-based approach for getting stronger, happier, and more resilient." Like I said, I've been testing it myself and it works. Not only am I feeling better, and that's typically a sort of a morning issue or a late at night issue, but I'm having more fun in the process. And as adults, I think we often lose track of play. My hope is that this episode will help you to reclaim it.

• 4:32Tim Ferriss?

  It's not frivolous, it can help you get a lot more done with less stress. So, without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Jane McGonigal.

• 4:45Tim Ferriss?

  Jane, welcome to the show.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tim.

• 4:47Tim Ferriss?

  I am so excited to finally reconnect. It has been many years. And I have enthusiastically watched your sort of your, your growth and propagation of all these ideas that I hope we'll have a chance to explore in this conversation. But I missed quite a lot. And we'll, we'll get to, for instance, just the, the, the head trauma. I didn't know anything about. But before we get to the serious stuff, tell me about your dogs and the names of your dogs.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Well, I have two Shetland sheep dogs and their names actually reflect a pretty good evolution of my sort of work and interest in game design. So my, my oldest dog, Meche, a girl, is named after my favorite video game character from Grim Fandango. And my new puppy, Sanga, who's only two, is named after my favorite tennis player. And I think I, people ask me about games I'm playing and I'm actually playing more tennis than video games these days.

• 5:50Tim Ferriss?

  So when somebody asks you, for those people listening who are not familiar with your work, what do you do? How do you answer that?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  I usually lie, actually, because...

• 6:00Tim Ferriss?

  Like George Costanza style?

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I've told, I've been in like on an airplane. Someone asks me what I do and I tell them I'm a cab driver and they're like, "Why are you flying to China in business class?" I'll say, "Oh, I'm getting an award for being a really innovative cab driver." I mean, I, I, yeah, it's hard to, because it's hard to explain to people. Well, I research games and I design games and I try to design games to help people be happier and healthier and save the world. And then, then you spend the whole eight hour flight, you know, answering questions about it, so.

• 6:34Tim Ferriss?

  And well, instead of an eight hour flight, we're gonna have a long podcast about all of this. I'm afraid you can't dodge me with the taxi driver gambit this time around. But is it, am I correct in saying that you're the, you were the first person to earn a PhD studying the psychological strengths of gamers?

• 6:51Speaker 03

  And how they, and how they can apply them to real life. So I was the first person to really take seriously the idea that people who, you know, spend an hour a day or more playing particularly video games, might have some unique strengths, cognitive strengths, social strengths, imaginative strengths that could be applied to real world problems.

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  And what would some of those problems be? And of course, I have some familiarity with this because I've, I'm a fan of your writing and was also an early reader of your first book. But could you give some examples of what types of real world problems can be either dressed partly, partially, or solved potentially by gamers?

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, you know, I've been working with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto for, oh gosh, eight, nine years now. And one of my favorite kinds of games to create is future forecasting games. So to invite ordinary people to try to predict their own futures. And then when you get enough people predicting their own futures, you can learn some really interesting trends, sort of, it's sort of like a collective intelligence project where you might not be able to predict what will happen in the rest of the world. But if I tell you a short scenario, you know, peak oil scenario, you can very accurately predict what you would do, how you would get to work, how you would get your kids to

• 8:25Speaker 03

  school, what you would cook. And we take all that information and aggregate it to understand how the world might react to different future scenarios. That's my. Kind of game.

• 8:35Tim Ferriss?

  So now, this is very interesting. I mean, I know that, for instance, and you could probably elaborate on this, but whether you're looking at, say, protein folding, right, you could use excess processing power from gaming units to sort of collectively handle a lot of very gnarly computation, right? But in this particular case, are you getting pinged by hedge fund managers and people like that who want to try to develop investment theses around those types of scenarios?

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. Yeah, you know, I was the first game designer to be invited to give a keynote at Davos, right? So there are definitely powerful people interested in these, although I'm happy to say that, you know, my work at the Institute for the Future, it's a nonprofit organization, and we're mostly trying to help the world, you know, survive environmental catastrophe and pandemics and things like that. So have been used more for more for global good than individual profits so far.

• 9:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, and I suppose, though, there could be an interesting conversation about how you can utilize both, right, or make them, in some respect, a virtuous cycle. So if you have people who are incentivized, right, to help develop games that drive there perhaps their own benefit, but at the same time, they're facilitating the development of toolkits or architectures or whatever that address these larger scale problems facing humanity. I don't know. It is a very interesting conversation, but I don't want to take us too far off topic immediately. Could you please describe to folks, and this is much

• 10:26Tim Ferriss?

  for my, to satisfy my curiosity as anything else, but the concussion. So I am ashamed to say I knew nothing about this, but could you describe? For people, what happened and what happened after that incident?

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, you know, while it was happening, not a lot of people knew. I actually tried to hide it for a long time because I was so impacted by the concussion that I was afraid I would never be able to work again. You know, I was afraid I'd never be able to speak publicly because I couldn't remember things long enough to to put together a talk. I was in the middle of writing my first book and I thought, my God, I'm never going to finish my book. My publisher is not going to get. I mean, I was, you know, I was not screaming from the rooftops that I was having so many problems. But it was the summer of 2009 and I was, it was just an ordinary day rushing around my apartment and

• 11:26Speaker 03

  wound up hitting my head on an open cabinet door.

• 11:31Tim Ferriss?

  Did you like step up? Did you stand up quickly, like hinge at the hip and whack your head? Or how did you go? How did you hit your head?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  I did. Sometimes people ask me if this was a sports injury and I say yes, kind of, because I am a runner, you know, a marathon runner. And so I have very strong quads and I just, I was in such a hurry, I just used like the full force of my quads to power up. And it was, it was crazy. I mean, literally, it was out of, out of a movie. My husband was like joking around, oh, you know, who's the president? And the only thing I could remember was that it wasn't George Bush. I'm like, I know it's not George Bush, but I couldn't, I couldn't even remember who the president was. That's when I knew, okay, this is, this is bad. And it was really bad. So a lot of concussions heal within a week, but after the first month, I was still completely concussed. I mean, all day, every day, nauseous, vertigo,

• 12:22Speaker 03

  couldn't remember people's names, lost everything. I would put something down and never find it again. And I couldn't even really get out of bed. I couldn't talk to people. It was, it was a disaster. And my, my current work, my new book, my, my new game, the clinical trial I'm running, all of that comes out of my attempt to use game design to fix my brain.

• 12:46Tim Ferriss?

  And the, this is, you did a great job of hiding it for those people who were not interacting with you on a daily basis, because we had, we had quite a bit of interaction for Reality is Broken, and while you were finishing that, so this was happening at the same time that we were interacting, so.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Right, that would be fun to dig up the emails and see.

• 13:10Tim Ferriss?

  See. See if they read like haikus.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:15Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, you know, I had a very similar experience last year with Lyme disease.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  I know.

• 13:23Tim Ferriss?

  Where I tried to keep it under wraps, but with, with respect to the concussion, can you describe then what followed? I mean, because you, you had some very dark periods, and I'd just love to hear how this work that you're doing now, at least some of it, evolved out of that concussion.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Sure, so, by the way, I'm like the world's expert on concussions now, because I've learned every bit of research that has ever been done. So, one of the things I learned is that there is a 30-day window for recovering from concussion. Most people recover within 30 days, and if you miss that window, then they tell you that the next window is three months. And, and then if you miss that window, if you're still having all these symptoms, then it's likely to be a year, and if you're still totally symptomatic in a year, then you may have the symptoms forever. Now, that was something I learned on day 34 of my concussion, when my doctor told me, "Oh, you know, you sort of missed the first window of recovery of 30 days, so this could

• 14:26Speaker 03

  drag out for, for three months." And, and at that point, you know, you have to imagine, I couldn't do anything. I, I mean, you're basically on bedrest, but you can't, I couldn't watch, you know, TV unless it was episodes I'd seen before, because I would get really confused by the plot. Like, I remember watching an episode of TV, and just like, "Who are these characters? I can't keep it straight." So, you can't do anything, you can't go running, you're not, you can't drink coffee, because it aggravates the symptoms, so I was more depressed. Never been in my life. I was super anxious that I would never work again. And you know, my husband had just been laid off from his job. So the only upside of that was that he was able to stay at home and care for me. But the downside being neither one of us was working.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  And so I was just, I was a total mess. And sometime in that first, you know, thirty days, I also, to make things even more dramatic and awful, started to have suicidal ideation, which, you know, just meant that I was sort of hearing these voices in my head. You wanna, you should kill yourself. You're never gonna get better. You're gonna be a burden to your family. This, you know, every day is gonna be this awful for the rest of your life. Just get out now. And I did not know at the time, although I found out later, that this is actually really common with traumatic brain injuries, that it happens to one in three people who even just from a mild concussion, one in three people will have suicidal thoughts, which, first of

• 15:55Speaker 03

  all, we should tell everybody, because when it starts to happen to you, it's, it's such a relief to know that it's not your brain actually wanting to die.

• 16:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  That it's just, it's just the neurochemistry of the brain, your dopamine levels are, I mean, zero out. You literally, your brain cannot imagine any positive outcomes in the future. You have no access to dopamine. And so, literally, it is impossible to imagine anything good ever happening again while the brain's trying to heal. So this is like, this is where I went. And I was, I was basically, you know, worried that I was gonna kill myself. And, and, and then my doctor was like, oh, yeah, and you've missed the window of recovery here. So, you know, good luck for another three months. And if, you know, and maybe you'll be like this forever. So that, that was, that was where things went. That was, that was rock bottom.

• 16:47Tim Ferriss?

  And. How did you dig yourself out of that? I mean, what were the conversations or interactions that allowed you to get out of that hole? Because there are people who don't get out of it, right? And like you said, it's important to have these conversations so that people can view it as a collective symptom and not a personal singular, individualized flaw.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 17:11Tim Ferriss?

  But how did you? How did you start turning the corner? What was it?

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Well, there were two key things going on that summer that really helped me. So the first was I had been writing my book, the first book, Reality's Broken, which was all about how games make us happy and there's happiness engines. And I thought, well, shit, this is this, I should really, really, really test these series out. You know, take this really seriously because if anything could jumpstart my brain into being happy, even though dopamine was zeroed out and my brain was telling me I wanted to die. Well, games should be able to do it. The other thing that was going on that summer was I was watching, rewatching the entire Buffy, the Vampire Slayer series.

• 17:54Tim Ferriss?

  You just earned so much dork cred.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. But because, because I knew all the episodes so well, so it wasn't taxing to my brain. So, um, so I was watching Buffy and I just decided, you know, I'm going to try to turn this recovery process into more of a game because I know games make us more optimistic and motivated and, and it's, you know, it's easier to ask people for help when we're playing a game. And so I decided to just invent this game called Jane, the Concussion Slayer. And I was going to be like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, who did not choose to be the Slayer, right? Fate just thrust it upon her and she had to just step up to the heroic occasion. And, and I was going to step up to my own heroic occasion and, and treat all of these

• 18:39Speaker 03

  symptoms like demons and vampires and, and just be a badass. That, that was a, that, and that was the start of. A game that I played for the rest of the year and that now half a million people have played and that we just ran a big clinical trial on. So it's been, and that was, it's been, what, almost six years that that kind of crazy idea has been developing into something, you know, much, but much, much bigger now.

• 19:06Tim Ferriss?

  And I feel like Rip Van Winkle, I'm so embarrassed that we haven't talked about this before I got an early copy of the new book, which by the way, I should just say, it's super better, that I get sent a lot of books and my assistant sees all of these books. And this is the first time that she's said to me, when you're finished with that book, I'd like you to give it to me.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 19:32Tim Ferriss?

  So, very, very, very fascinating. And I'm already into the book, which is saying a lot because it's, it's one, I get 20, 30 bucks a week, and this is the one that I'm focusing on right now. And it's partially because I want to fix my own problems, right? And in reading the introduction, you talk about being gameful. And I'd love for you to talk about that. And then also just talk about the first incarnation of the game as you played it for yourself.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, I am excited you want to talk about what it means to be gameful, because I feel like this is a really good opportunity to kind of set the record straight about something that makes me crazy, which is the topic of gamification.

• 20:21Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, yes.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  You know, the idea that you can just give people points for doing stuff and that's going to motivate them and give them achievement badges and that's going to make them feel proud. And it's like a very simplistic notion of motivation and reward. And I don't do it. Even though like if you look up gamification on Wikipedia, it's like Jamie McGonigal patron

• 20:45Speaker 03

  No, I've never, did you see that word in my book? No. I don't do it. I like to think that I

• 20:52Tim Ferriss?

  It's like when I get motivational speaker and I'm like, oh, my God, really? I've got to live with that one forever.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  But so, so this book is really about something totally different, which is the gameful mindset, which is a way of approaching obstacles and stress that most of us naturally adopt when we play games, when we play sports, or we're doing puzzles, or board games, card games, video games. Almost every single person on this planet and throughout history has been able to adopt a very powerful mindset that makes us better able to learn from our mistakes, more determined in the face of obstacles, better able to amass resources from other people, build allies, and all these really wonderful things that help us solve problems. But few of us use that same mindset in everyday life. We only use it in games.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  And so that's what I've been researching since my brain healed, you know, it took about a year. That's been the new research topic that I've been obsessed with, which is, how do we help people take all the benefits of a gameful mindset, which mean you're more creative, you're less likely to give up, you've got better social support, you know, more curiosity, more optimism, all these wonderful things. How do we bring that into the real world? And it doesn't necessarily mean gamifying anything. As it turns out, it's the most important thing you can do to really access your gameful mindset is to play games, any games that you like.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  And then remember to call on those same strengths in real life.

• 22:31Tim Ferriss?

  So how, how did you do that then initially when digging yourself out of this hole? And I think it's, it's, it's also important. I think a lot of people listening are like, wow, like they're imagining sitting in front of a screen, playing Zelda or a first-person shooter game or something like that. But what did, what did you do concretely for yourself in, in the beginning? And then how has that evolved?

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, it really wasn't even a game so much as it was a process for being gameful in everyday life. So, you know, the first thing I did was adopt this secret identity, Jane the Concussion Slayer. And the idea behind that is it was just like an avatar for real life. You know, when we have avatars in video games, we're really focused on, you know, what are they good at? What are their strengths? How can I level up those strengths? What are their special secret weapons? How do they use them? And we're very focused on strengths and the skill sets. And so I wanted to start focusing on, you know, what are my strengths and skill sets, even though I feel completely hopeless and helpless and like I can't do a single thing right, to adopt that that kind of avatar

• 23:38Speaker 03

  for everyday life. And it was not a digital avatar on a screen. It was literally me just telling people, I'm Jane the Concussion Slayer. And as it turns out, now that I've done all this research, literally just talking about yourself in the third person with a focus on your strengths, is this incredible kind of brain hack that, I mean, it changes so much in terms of anxiety and depression. So that was the first thing that I did. So this sort of avatar.

• 24:05Tim Ferriss?

  So when you would go like get a cup of tea at Starbucks and they're like, what's your name, miss? No, but but is this something that who would you use that name with?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Um, you know, I first started just with my closest inner circle. Um, you know, I called my sister, my twin sister Kelly, who is a psychology professor at Stanford University, by the way. So I got a lot of good tips from her. And, you know, I'm like, oh, I'm playing this game to heal my brain. I want you to play it with me. I'm going to be Jane the Concussion Slayer, and I want you to be my watcher. So I actually adopted the mythology from the Buffy series to give everybody of my life like a particular ally role to play. So, you know, if you remember Buffy, her watcher Giles, he would oversee her training. So my sister's job was to give me one thing to do every day, like a little quest or mission, and then she would call me the next day to see how I did. And

• 25:00Speaker 03

  that was actually amazing because I had not really done anything successfully. Until she started giving me missions, stupid things like, um, okay, can you see out the window from the bed that you're not able to get out of? Yes. Okay, I want you to look out the window and uh, find one interesting thing, like try to see one interesting thing and tell me about it tomorrow, you know, when we talk like spot something kind of crazy outside your window. Um, and then then I was then I'm able to have a sense of purpose for the day, like I'm lying in bed with nothing to do, but I have a, I have a goal now, I have a mission. Um, and it turns out, I learned from all my research later, that having a clear goal and being able to anticipate succeeding in that goal, that's one of the fastest ways to get the dopamine

• 25:43Speaker 03

  back cycling through your brain, which is, which is key to reversing depression. Um, so uh, so even just being given a little tiny quest, it's like, you know, it's like a, it's like a good role playing game, like World of Warcraft, here's, here's somebody who comes up to you and says, I have a quest for you, do you accept it? And you, and you agree to do it. Um, that's like, that's also like a brain hack where you're just um, spiking those dopamine levels and learning to anticipate success again.

• 26:10Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's, you know, I've, I've been thinking a lot about uh, resource allocation, that's the most boring way I could possibly put it, but I've been thinking about how people allocate different currencies, right? Time, income, and so on. And uh, looking at the difference, for instance, between buying possessions or experiences and the, the data very strongly support the psychological superiority of buying experiences, generally speaking, because the, the value of a purchase decreases very quickly. I mean, it's, it's like driving a new car off the lot and suddenly it's depreciated 30%. But when you plan, and I experienced this last year for myself, when you

• 26:55Tim Ferriss?

  plan, uh, in, let's say a trip six months from now, you have those six months of anticipation.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:02Tim Ferriss?

  And uh, I recently took, uh, took my family on, on our first real family outing in many, many, many years. Uh, and we went to Iceland, but it was something that we planned for Christmas and New Years, and we had a good five or six months to look forward to it. And it, it just made all of the bumps along the way, uh, C minor and, and very easily overcome. So putting that, and it just gave us some, some north star to look towards when the going got rough, right? So what other, what other aspects or what other features did you, did you build into your life? So you had your sister.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Right. So secret identity, you have allies that you recruit and then you have these quests that your allies give you. We also collected and activated power ups. So in this, in this system, power ups are anything that give you a quick burst of a positive emotion, any, any feeling at all. It could be pleasure. It could be, you know, laughter, it could be delight, whatever. And so I started collecting, you know, like cuddling with my dog for 10 minutes, what would be a power up or listening to a, like a powerful song that made me feel powerful or eating walnuts because that was supposed to be good for brain healing. And so just trying

• 28:26Speaker 03

  to identify things you could do in just like a minute or two to create a positive experience, which, you know, having a traumatic brain injury is kind of an extreme example of needing power ups because you, otherwise literally you just lie there in a state of, you know, abject, you know, just boredom or frustration. But making sure that you have these tiny moments of positive emotions, because as I've learned now in all my research, happiness and success and a good health can coexist with all kinds of negative emotions. And you don't actually have to get rid of your negative emotions to be really successful and thriving. You

• 29:08Speaker 03

  just have to balance them out with positive emotions. So the most like happy and successful people actually have more negative emotions than people who are depressed or anxious or, or struggling. They just manage to balance them out with even more positive emotions. So these power ups are just a way to kind of game the math. Every time you feel something really bad, you try to do a couple of quick things that will make you feel happy.

• 29:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right. To offset it, to tilt the balance in your favor.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:37Tim Ferriss?

  And, and, and how is that, what is the current game? Look like when you have people, for instance, seeing measurable improvements within two weeks and even bigger improvements between four to six weeks and you have hundreds of thousands of people who have played, what is the the current state of that game or the the format?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  So there's a website and there's an app and it's again, it's not a video game. It's it's like a life management tool where we walk you through the process of, hey, do you think you might have a secret identity? Here are some ways that you can investigate it. You know, we we have you think about who your heroes are, your favorite fictional characters are, what your strengths are until you are able to craft one. We ask you to collect power ups. We we find out more about you and we say, oh, you're trying to lose weight. Okay, here are 10 power ups that we validated to be really helpful for other players. Or here are 10 bad guys that we know that people who are struggling with anxiety that

• 30:40Speaker 03

  also struggle with and and strategies for for wrestling with them. So we have bad guys also. And so we just kind of walk you through the process of looking at your life as if it were a game. So it's almost like you're the game designer. You craft your secret identity, you pick your power ups and and define your bad guys and and you eventually create your own quests and get the help of your own allies who you invite. And we just sort of teach you the process of thinking and living like a game designer by offering you, here's some, here's some sample power ups and bad guys and quests to get started.

• 31:12Tim Ferriss?

  And let's, let's, let's talk about, I mean, I'm going to come back to the power ups because I think for those people who haven't played games, it might be easy to dismiss these things as childish, but I have did some personal experimentation today, which was, which was pretty fun with some of your exercises. But let's, let's talk about some games that people might be familiar with. For instance, Candy Crush Saga.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:39Tim Ferriss?

  And so I've, I've read you, or I've, I've noticed that Candy Crush Saga has been talked about as being used to lose weight in some cases, and I wanted to just hear you elaborate on that.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  So this is amazing. There are so many games now that people are playing every day and have no idea that they're powerful, life-changing tools. So Candy Crush Saga has, I believe, half a billion people have played this game. And like 0.00001% of them know that there have been these clinical studies showing that a game like Candy Crush Saga can reduce cravings for things like food or cigarettes by 25%, which sounds like not a lot, but it's actually been shown to be enough of a reduction of the craving that you can make a better choice. This sort of gives your willpower a fighting chance. And the way it works is the game is so visually intensive,

• 32:40Speaker 03

  right? So a game like Candy Crush Saga, or Bejeweled, or Tetris, the kind of games where when you walk away, you see these sort of visual flashbacks, you see the blocks falling, or you see the pieces swapping. They occupy the visual processing center of your brain so that you cannot imagine the thing that you're craving. And it turns out that cravings are very visual. Anyone who's ever had a craving knows, you imagine what you want. And the more that you see it in your mind's eye, the more irresistible the craving is. So it turns out you can just get your brain to stop picturing it and obsess it with some other visual process. You can block cravings, not just while you're playing, but afterwards, because these games have been shown to create this kind of visual

• 33:22Speaker 03

  flashbacks. Your brain thinks it still needs to keep working on this problem because you were so focused on it. So your brain is going to keep working on this visual process. And even hours after you walked away from the game, this can last, you know, three, four hours, you've played just for 10 minutes, but your brain is no longer obsessing over the thing that you were craving. It's like-

• 33:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's fascinating.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  There are like so many studies like this. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book. And you, Tim, you actually inspired me because when, you know, when I read The Four Hour Body, and you were like, people, there's all this amazing science, and you should be experimenting with it in your own life. And, you know- That's, that's kind of where game research is now, too. It's, you know, people still have a little bit of skepticism and rightly so because, you know, we haven't tested the Candy Crush Saga Diet over 10 years with, you know, 10,000 people. But it's so easy to test in your own life and with no downside, most of these games are completely free to play. And so I'm just like, wow, people should be experimenting with this in their own lives

• 34:29Speaker 03

  because studies, there are, you know, I think this book cites 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies. So there is a lot of research. We just need to help people get their hands on it.

• 34:39Tim Ferriss?

  So, well, thank you for the for our body. Kind words, I appreciate that. I mean, the, I, I sometimes push it so far that, you know, I hope it serves as a cautionary tale to others, but, you know, I'm like, let me be the guy who's, you know, sort of getting himself perfused in, in any number of ways so that you don't have to be that person. But the Candy Crush Saga Diet, let's talk about that. Or let's just, let's say you know you smoke when you go out and drink. And if the effects last like three to four hours, does that mean that a potential prescription

• 35:21Tim Ferriss?

  would be to play Candy Crush Saga for, say, 15 minutes before you head out for Friday night? I mean, is that the way that it might be used as an intervention?

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that is a recurring finding in a lot of these studies is that a very short dose of play can provide this kind of, these preventative benefits for hours or even in one of the studies I write about in the book, two hours of gameplay change the player's behavior for three months afterwards. Yes, I don't know if you've gotten to the chapter yet about the cancer patients who Were better able to take all their chemotherapy medicine because they played a video game. Have you?

• 36:06Tim Ferriss?

  I have not gotten to that point. Which video game is this?

• 36:08Speaker 03

  The game is called Remission.

• 36:10Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds cancer related.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's actually a sequel that's out now, too, which is awesome. And they're all free to play the Remission game. So if you know anybody, anyone who's listening, who has a friend or family member or is battling cancer, this game has been shown in clinical trials to improve the patients', first of all, optimism and self-efficacy. They don't feel so powerless in the face of cancer, but also to increase the doses of chemotherapy that they're able to take. When you're, if certain kinds of cancers, like leukemia, you have to take these pills for two years, three years, at home, ongoing basis, with all these kinds of side effects. And almost more than a third of patients miss a significant

• 36:57Speaker 03

  number of doses because of the side effects, or because it's really hard to never miss a pill on schedule over two to three years. But they know that more than 80% of cases where the cancer comes back is related to missed doses. So if you can get people to not miss any doses, you have dramatically improved their recovery outcomes. And then so this group called Hope Lab in Palo Alto created a game designed to, basically, they didn't know what they were doing, but they basically hacked these patients' brains to change how they viewed themselves and how they viewed chemotherapy, so that they started to view it as empowering, rather than something that made them sick or that they hated. And

• 37:40Speaker 03

  it was able to hack into their hippocampus, and the cauda enthalamus, which we know are related to motivation and not giving up. And they know this because they did brain scans of the players and had them in FMRI machines and looking at their brains while they played the game, so they could see what was actually going on to change their behavior over a three-month period. But the upshot is that, you know, when they measured their blood three months later, the cancer patients who had played Remission for as little as two hours had 41% more chemotherapy medicine in their bloodstream, and they had missed

• 38:19Speaker 03

  18 or 19% fewer doses of antibiotics as well, which they use electronic pill cap monitors to measure. And that was over a three-month period, two hours of playing the video game. This is a big clinical trial they run with dozens of hospitals around the United States. So it's amazing that these games exist and that I think, I think something like a quarter of a million cancer patients have, have been given access to these games now, but you kind of want every cancer patient to get access to them.

• 38:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What's the downside?

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. That's the thing about games as treatment, there is extremely little risk of negative side effects or kind of opportunity costs because you can do a game alongside traditional therapy for depression, or if you know, you feel like you want to, you have some kind of pharmaceutical solution that you're pursuing. Games really add no downside and all upside.

• 39:17Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about just a couple of other games. Tetris and Call of Duty.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:24Tim Ferriss?

  Can those be used in any particular way?

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Tetris, oh, by the way, it's so exciting because literally yesterday, a new study came out about Tetris that validates the studies that I write about in the book. And I was so excited because people have actually been a little bit skeptical about when I encourage people to play Tetris to help prevent post-traumatic stress disorder, which I will now explain how that works. People are like, "Oh, that could be really dangerous to tell people to do that because what if they never see a therapist because they think they've cured themselves with Tetris?" Right? So of course you always have to preface this by saying, "If you're having problems, you know, you should see a doctor or a therapist." But it turns out that if you play Tetris within six hours of witnessing a traumatic event, they've only tested it on witnessing.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Trauma, rather than, you know, you yourself were traumatized directly. But if you, if you play Tetris for 10 minutes after witnessing a trauma, it prevents flashbacks and lowers symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder afterwards. And it's really actually very similar to how the Candy Crush Saga diet works in that.

• 40:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's overriding your visual visualization.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. Prevents your brain from kind of obsessing over what you saw. And what's amazing is this new study that just came out this week shows that if you miss that six-hour window, because one of the reasons why people were skeptical was, who's going to remember to play Tetris within six hours of a trauma? Even though I've been doing my best to kind of create public service announcements so people know, kind of like stop, drop and roll if you catch on fire. You remember that? Stop, drop and roll. Right. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to like drill into people's heads, you know, play Tetris, don't replay the trauma, like play, don't replay. If you were like, nobody's going to remember after trauma to play. So now they have found out that you can actually wait 24 hours.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  And if you re-stimulate the memory, so you ask somebody to visualize the trauma for just a minute or two, so it's kind of fresh in their brain, their brain is accessing those memories and dealing with them directly. And then you go play Tetris for 10 minutes. You can kind of, you're not erasing the memory.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  You're like overriding it.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Well, it's just interesting. So they, this is super critical detail. You can still recall the experience if you're asked questions. You can remember details of the experience. So it's not like, it's not like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. You can still, you can still remember, but your brain is not forcing you to think about it when you don't want to. So it's voluntary recall only. And so this new study shows you can wait 24 hours, prime yourself by thinking about it, and then play Tetris for 10 minutes right afterwards. And then that reduces the flashbacks and PTSD symptoms as well. And they think, you know, if it can work after 24 hours, that this might be able to work with people who have been suffering

• 42:27Speaker 03

  for months or years with flashbacks now too, which is, which is amazing because it is literally the hardest to treat symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. And when people get flashbacks under control, their quality of life improves immeasurably.

• 42:42Tim Ferriss?

  And Call of Duty?

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Call of Duty, there are like a million things that Call of Duty does really well. You've already covered some of that on a previous podcast. I know you were talking about sort of cognitive enhancement benefits.

• 42:56Tim Ferriss?

  With Adam Gazali from UCSF.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  Who's amazing and I love, I love his work.

• 43:01Tim Ferriss?

  He's a great guy.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  So we won't talk about cognitive enhancement, but Call of Duty can, well, the first thing it can do is it can really improve relationships with people if you play in the same room with them. If you can actually be physically in the same space with somebody playing with them, because it dramatically increases mind-body synchronization. So what that means is if you were playing Call of Duty with someone in the same room, you start to sync up with them at every possible level. Your breathing rates, you'll start to breathe in and out at the same pace. Your heart rates will synchronize, so your pulses are kind of equalized. Your facial expressions will start to mirror each other. Your body language will mirror each other and your brains will actually, will start to show

• 43:46Speaker 03

  blood flow in the same region and the same tempo as each other. They call that mirror neuron effect. And it happens, it actually happens in basically all video games, but the more intense, sort of high-speed, fast-action intense a game is, the more it happens. Because in order to do well in a game, whether you're competing against someone or collaborating with them on the same team, you have to be able to anticipate what they're going to do next, right? So that you can either cooperate and be effective or so that you can outmaneuver them and beat them. And that, that forces your brain to try to mirror what their brain is doing. And as soon as your brain starts to mirror each other, everything else starts to mirror each other. And it turns out this is like the building block for compassion and love.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  So basically you love people more when you play Call of Duty with them, but only, only if you're in the same room.

• 44:38Tim Ferriss?

  Physical space.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Yes. So something, which is, we spend, I mean, most gamers are, you know, playing with people.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Remotely and a distance, but if you can get in the same room, that has this really magnificent benefit.

• 44:53Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a, a digression into what might be an urban myth, or it's not really an urban myth. Old wives tale, not, also not totally appropriate, but you are, you have an identical twin, is that right?

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, yes.

• 45:07Tim Ferriss?

  Do, have you, the two of you experienced anything that's kind of like spooky accent, action at a distance? And you must be sick of answering this type of question, but I'm really curious.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Well, you see, now you're gonna like, I have to, you know, I'm really into science. So I'll, now I will say something that will sound like, oh, you know, mystical, spiritual.

• 45:29Tim Ferriss?

  Can I, can I, can I add a caveat just to, to make it easier?

• 45:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:35Tim Ferriss?

  I believe a bunch of stuff that seems quackier than the quackiest of quack. I mean, but it's from empirical firsthand experience. And just because we can't explain it, doesn't mean we won't be able to explain it.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I, I think there's actually probably some, you know, the, in physics, they talk about these, uh, like, you can have the twin effect, like protons will be separated, but then still be able to communicate at a distance, like, you know, a billion light years away from each other in the galaxy. So maybe the fact that we were once the same egg, we are identical twins, you know, and we, maybe, maybe we have some weird spooky twin effect. So yeah, I, I call it twinfection, because it only works if, if something really horrible is happening to my sister. So I will like, I will, it, it almost feels like I'm having a heart attack, I'm feeling like I'm gonna throw up, my like, I can't breathe, I feel like I'm being attacked.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  It just, it happened a couple of years ago during a really emotionally traumatic time. But this is the most recent, it doesn't happen all the time. It really only happens if something truly horrible is, is going on. And I was like, I was at a, I was at a store in Los Angeles, and I like fell to the floor in the dressing room, and I'm like, what's going on? And then literally two minutes later, you know, my sister called me sobbing, like the worst pain I'd ever heard her in. Um, it was, uh, she was dealing with a death in the family. And I was like, okay, well, that explains what just happened, because, uh, you know, we were, I was having a twinfection.

• 47:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, wow.

• 47:12Tim Ferriss?

  And you have a pretty twin-rich life at the moment.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  I do. I have little twin babies. I have my own little twin girls.

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  And are they identical or fraternal?

• 47:22Speaker 03

  They're fraternal, so it'll be a totally different experience because I think, you know, having someone with the same DNA, it feels like your whole life is an experiment. Like, whenever she does anything amazing, I'm like, why am I not doing that? We're like the same person. I should be able to do that, too. Because I think fraternal, it's less pressure, I think.

• 47:42Tim Ferriss?

  Less pressure, but there's still something there. I have relatives who are fraternal twins. There's still, there's still some unusual connection there.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Oh, good.

• 47:50Tim Ferriss?

  But I don't want to take us too far off the reservation here, but I am fascinated by this stuff. And, you know, I was, partially, I was reading the, at the beginning of the book, the new book, the Super Better book, and there were a couple of things that jumped out at me. The first was, in effect, let me just find it here. There's a line that reads, "But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering." And I think this is a really important concept because, not sure if this is from the military or elsewhere, but I've heard, pain, pain is mandatory, suffering is optional.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Right, or, or pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, which is a Buddhist saying, actually.

• 48:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, well, there we go, maybe.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  The Buddhist military.

• 48:35Tim Ferriss?

  From the Buddhist special operations far as this. So, so I think this is really important because, like you said, it's not necessarily about eradicating all negative experiences, which is not possible, but about increasing, if you have two bank accounts, one of negative experiences and one of positive, you just want to make sure that the balance in the positive is higher than in the negative. Could you talk a little bit about post-traumatic growth?

• 49:08Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah. So, you know, the idea of a gameful mindset is that it's exactly that, that you look at pain as inevitable, but, but suffering is optional. Because if you think about when you play games, you're always trying to suffer when you play games. Like, games are voluntary suffering. You think about golf, you know, if, if, in real life, your goal were to get a small ball in a small hole, you would just walk up to the hole and you would put the ball in it and you would be happy with the outcome. But you volunteer to suffer by standing really far away from the hole, which is a stupid way to achieve the goal. And then you use like the stick to try to aim the ball, which is also pretty inconvenient. The every game we play is like Scrabble, the same way, you know, you don't

• 49:51Speaker 03

  get unlimited letters. You, you only get the seven letters and we're gonna, you can't even pick them yourself. So it's like, it's, it's voluntary suffering. Things are harder than they should be. And that's what unleashes the creativity and the curiosity and the optimism and, and the recruitment of friends and resources. So, the gameful mindset is really about how do you look for voluntary obstacles in real life? How do you look at things that you are currently experiencing as suffering as instead a way to get stronger or happier? And then that's where the idea of post-traumatic growth comes in, which is not, not all that new field of research now. There's probably a decade's worth of research now showing that many people

• 50:35Speaker 03

  who undergo a traumatic experience, in addition to suffering, and by the way, post-traumatic growth is not the opposite of post-traumatic stress disorder. That's a misconception that that many people sort of stumble onto. Most people with post-traumatic growth first experience post-traumatic stress disorder. So just because you have one doesn't mean you can't ultimately wind up with growth. And it's a process where By wrestling with these really difficult things, you get to know yourself better. So at the end of post-traumatic growth, you feel like you understand your strengths better. You feel like your friends and family understand you better. You feel like you know your priorities in life better and you have more courage to make decisions

• 51:17Speaker 03

  so that you're putting your time and energy on the things that matter most to you. It's kind of similar in that way to a near-death experience. A lot of people have near-death experience. Suddenly, they relish every day. They're not afraid to speak their minds. They really do put more time on their personal dreams or spending time with friends and family. So post-traumatic growth is the same way, but you only get it by really wrestling with this incredible, almost existential crisis in your own life, which for me was the traumatic brain injury and not knowing whether I would ever work or really be myself again.

• 51:54Tim Ferriss?

  But it can take the form of setting a goal like running a marathon or fill in the blank, right?

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Well, yeah. Now, this is so this is, there have been now a couple of books about post-traumatic growth, but I am happy to say that I have the first book on post-exstastic growth, which is a concept that was originally discovered by this amazing researcher, Anne-Marie Ripke at the University of Pennsylvania. Not a lot of people are familiar with her research, and I'm hoping this book will shine a spotlight on it. She found that many people seem to be exhibiting characteristics of post-traumatic growth by doing things that they had chosen for themselves and that were not, you know, traumatic experiences per se, although there might be trauma involved.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  So training for a marathon, becoming a parent for the first time, starting your own business, going on a kind of spiritual journey, like a physical Mecca somewhere, things that are really challenging, that you will probably fail at at some times, you know, make mistakes, struggle, and that really force you to cultivate that same understanding of your own strengths, reaching out to friends and family, taking stock of your priorities. It turns out you can have all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, which is amazing.

• 53:13Tim Ferriss?

  You can engineer it.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Yes, and so that's, that's why, you know, the super better method is basically a roadmap to post-traumatic growth if you have an illness or injury, or if your life is pretty good and you still want to get all these amazing benefits, helping you define for yourself a challenge that will be meaningful and, and difficult enough, but also doable that you can get to these benefits.

• 53:40Tim Ferriss?

  So I've, I've two, one observation and then a, then a question. The observation, when I was reading this and also just listening to your description and talking about, for instance, the post-traumatic growth following a near-death experience, which is of course not something that you, it's dangerous to try to engineer near-death experiences in the literal sense.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Although a lot of people do, right? I mean, there's, you know, people, people pursue extreme sports and things like that because of that, that ability to really see so clearly what you want out of life.

• 54:13Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it magnifies and really exaggerates a lot of the emotions and provides clarity in those moments in some cases. And I couldn't help but think about a, the wife of a friend who used to work in hospice care and she would palliative care, she would sit with people in the, in the weeks and then moments before they passed on, before they died. And she wanted, she, it turned out she was basically a Michael Jordan in that capacity. She was really good at guiding people through that. But she wanted to have the opportunity to help more people.

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  And she ended up then working with psychedelics to help people.

• 55:05Tim Ferriss?

  Simulate that type of near death experience and I don't, we don't have to take, we don't have to go far down this road, but I mean, I've had conversations, for instance, on the podcast with Jim Fadiman, who talks quite a lot about microdosing, but also the use of higher doses for these, what some people would call spiritual or mystical experiences.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Yes, well, this is actually very interesting because, you know, when I was at Berkeley doing my PhD, I actually wrote a research paper on the commonality of experience of people who are playing these certain types of games, these kind of very collaborative, collective intelligence games, and these spiritual drug-taking, you know, like the psychonauts, they call themselves, right?

• 55:50Tim Ferriss?

  Berkeley is a good place to do that.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've actually, because, so that's something I've actually been interested in for, you know, a very long time, because there is, I do think there is a spiritual element to a lot of gameplay in that, that sense of really wanting to open yourself up, particularly in, in games that require, you know, to be a part of a massive community and part of these kind of epic narratives, like, you know, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, there, there is definitely a spiritual element to that and a lot of spiritual benefits that come out of gameplay, which, which is, you know, maybe that I might, for my third

• 56:34Speaker 03

  book, I keep saying I want to write a book called Super Mario Was a Buddhist, so maybe, maybe, maybe we should come back to that for episode 800 of your podcast.

• 56:46Tim Ferriss?

  Super Mario was in the Buddhist special ops, as we, as we mentioned earlier.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I actually, I actually got to go to a Buddhist conference and give a keynote with like all of the most important Buddhists in the world were there, and I actually gave a keynote called Super Mario Was a Buddhist, but it had a question mark after the title.

• 57:03Tim Ferriss?

  That gives, gives you an out.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:05Tim Ferriss?

  If there's a crowd, mutiny in the crowd.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 57:08Tim Ferriss?

  So games, let me, I'd like to ask a personal question, and this is, Because I, I love playing games. I was, I was Dungeons and Dragons aficionado slash obsessive growing up and that was my refuge. I mean, I was, I was a real kind of runt dork growing up and got beat up in elementary school and whatnot. So I used games as a way to escape, but also as a way to, to live this sort of virtual life that enabled me to, I think in many ways, develop characteristics I wanted later in life, right? And, but when people ask me now, like, "Oh, are you a gamer?" I don't know how to answer

• 57:50Tim Ferriss?

  that because when I look at how slick the games are that have been developed and how much money has gone into developing games that are as addictive as possible, I, I choose not to play those games out of fear. And the fear is, the same fear I would have if I tried heroin. People, you know, if someone asked me like, "Have you tried heroin?" I'm like, "No, I haven't. I'm sure I'd love it." And that's the problem. Like, I don't want to become a heroin addict and I worry about becoming one of these people who, say, sinks 40 to 60 hours a week into World of Warcraft, because I know I have that capacity, right? I know it's there. So how, what are ways that people can reintroduce

• 58:32Tim Ferriss?

  gameful mindset or gameplay? Let's just say it's somebody who's working 80 hours a week and they recognize, they're like, you know, "I want the joy and all of the promises of a gameful mindset and/or gameplay, but I don't want to go off the deep end and end up becoming completely consumed."

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I can really relate to this, by the way. You know, I, people ask me what my favorite games of all time are and I always have World of Warcraft in the top, you know, three or four, thing of best games of all time. But I only played it for a very short time because I saw what my future was going to be like if I didn't get out quickly. And I was, my husband and I, our plan is, you know, when we're retired and old and maybe, unless they've invented life extension technology so that like at 150, we're running around. Like a 20 year old, assuming old age is similar to how it is today. I'm going to be totally addicted to these games when I'm like 90. Because it'll have all these cognitive enhancing benefits and I'll be socially connected to other people.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  So I'm, I'm waiting to get addicted until it really is better than, you know, trying to live my old life. But there's lots of things you can do. And I should just say also, as a sort of public service announcement benefit. One of the things that I write about in the book, there is a chapter, an entire chapter on what makes the difference between somebody who benefits from playing games and brings a gameful mindset to real life and somebody who develops some kind of addictive or pathological or compulsive gaming behavior. And there are two things that predict whether you will benefit and be gameful in real life or whether you will kind of get addicted and the rest of your life starts to suffer. So the two things that are predictive, one is really simple. It's 21 hours a week.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  That is the tipping point. I've looked at all kinds of studies from, you know, people in the military to, you know, young, like elementary school students. 21 hours a week, when you go over that, we start to see suffering in other aspects of life, such as physical health, mood, your ability to do well at school or at work or other aspects of your life.

• 1:00:43Tim Ferriss?

  So Three hours a day.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Three hours a day. But you could, you could, you know, pile up on the weekend. I mean, it doesn't have to be. Yeah. And so I always say, if you, if you feel like you're addicted or you have a family member who you fear is addicted, do not take the games away because as you learn about reading the book, games are very powerful. They, they help treat or prevent depression and anxiety. And if you take games away from somebody who's gaming 30, 40, 50, 60 hours a week, you're basically like taking them off an antidepressant without tapering. And we've seen a lot of people who, I mean, there are many cases of people committing suicide, young people when their parents have taken away the games. And it's not just that they're upset or angry.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  It's that literally their brain has had this powerful antidepressant ripped away from them. So, so just go down to 20 hours a week. That is, that is one piece of practical advice for people who are really dealing with. Addiction or compulsion, do not give it up, just get it down to 20 hours a week. And that's actually very manageable for most people, even people who are feel like they they love to play, they don't want to give up games. You can get it down to three hours a day. And so that's, that is a practical tip. But the other thing that predicts negative outcomes, or you're just not getting the benefits of games in real life, is looking at games as escapist. So I was really interested to hear you say that, you know, you thought about games as escaping, but you also maybe thought about them as a way to build these kind of character

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  strengths. So it turns out the number one predictor of who will suffer from gameplay is people who think that games are an escape from real life, or a way to avoid thinking about or dealing with real problems. People who manage to bring the gameful mindset and all the benefits to games to their real lives are the people who identify benefits to gameplay and can talk about them and can can identify them and can say, you know, I'm not, I'm not just playing Candy Crush or Call of Duty because I just can't deal, like I just need to just shut everything off. They're the people who say, this is quality time, you know, for me and my brother, and when we play this game together, this is, this is a real benefit to my life.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Or, you know, I'm playing this game because I'm having really anxious thoughts and I want to shut them off and I know if I play this game for 10 minutes, I can shut down, I'm not going to have a panic attack. So if you have a real purpose for how you play, that's when you start to build up the self-efficacy to use the gameful strengths in real life. Now that, that is not, so you're asking like a very practical question, like what should I do or what should I play? Literally 10 to 20 minutes a day. If you do 10 minutes every day or 20 minutes three times a week, that's what's been tested in clinical trials and randomized control studies to have powerful impacts, first and foremost on depression and anxiety, improving your mood.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  For social interactions, 10 minutes a day improves the number of people you have in your life who will help you with a real life problem. So I think of it as just, it's like, you know, I make time to do, you know, ten pushups during every commercial of all the tennis that I watch on TV. So you should think about it that way. Like, how do you squeeze in a little bit of gameplay into your downtime? That was what I would recommend.

• 1:04:04Tim Ferriss?

  So what type, what I have to ask now, of course, since you mentioned it, what what's on your top five game list or whatever? Just a handful of your favorite games, but then also for someone like me who doesn't want to get sucked into the vortex.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Tim Ferriss?

  It feels like I should probably stay away from world building games in that case.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe go with the kind of more transactional kind of Tetris type of game or something that allows me a closed short session. But what are what are some of your favorite games? What are kind of on your your hits list? And then what might be games that I could use for those ten to twenty minutes a day?

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  And what should my intention be going into them, right?

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'll just, I'll just, I mean, we don't do like an all time favorite games. We'll just talk about, because otherwise, like, I'd be like, Dance Dance Revolution, totally on my top ten all time, but, you know, nobody plays it anymore.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  But, okay, so Tetris is definitely, I mean, everybody should have that on their phone because it treats so many different conditions from anxiety to, you know, post my stress disorder to, you know, building up your willpower. So Tetris, everybody should have Tetris. Games that other people you know are playing is really, really good. And so this changes depending on the time. So a lot of people are playing Clash of Clans right now or Candy Crush Saga or Words with Friends. You should just check out what people that you know are playing because a lot of the benefits that have been documented for games comes just from having these

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  sort of micro conversations with friends and family about the same game that you're playing or actually playing in game with them. So any of those three games would be good. I think Minecraft is really great, even though it's like the most popular game of all time for kids now. It's actually a really great resilience building game for grownups, you know?

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Because if you're, you know, if you, if you, if you die, if you have your stuff blown up and you have to kind of start over again, it has the qualities of the kind of game that we know builds resilience, builds determination and willpower that can benefit you in real life. So, you know, if you, I mean, by the way, if somebody has not played Minecraft, they've like missed out on one of the biggest cultural gifts, you know, of, of our, you know, of our generation. So.

• 1:06:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's me, that's me looking down at my feet right now. So I'll get on it.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  Okay. So definitely do that so that because the next generation, that's like all, that's going to be their number one nostalgia point. Like all you're going to hear about 20 years from now are like people in their twenties and thirties talking about Minecraft. So at least expose yourself. And then I think puzzle games, uh, single player puzzle games, uh, or single player adventure games are really good for, um, provoking positive emotions. Uh, so Portal is something I always recommend to people. There's Portal and Portal 2. Um, it's incredibly challenging, but hilarious, uh, puzzle game that, uh, even though it's, uh, the first one's single player, you can play the second one, co-op,

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  which is really cool. In fact, when, when I was playing Portal 2 with my husband and we were also training for a half marathon at that time, we actually used our Portal skills, uh, to better navigate like all the people that we were trying to run around and pass uh, in the race. We would, we would use the same gestural system that you use in, in the video game to communicate with each other, like how we were going to get around all of these people and still then come back and run together. Um, so I have an odd portal to that. So, uh, uh, yes, those are some, those are some good, um, some good games to start with. And, um, but, but, but really any game that you love, including, I mean, you could be playing Pandemic, the board game. You could be playing poker. I mean, you could be playing,

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  um, bridge or golf, whatever. Um, most games, even if they're not video games, also help you develop that, the gameful mindset.

• 1:08:16Tim Ferriss?

  And what is your, I mean, you clearly have, you've got some babies, you've got some dogs, you've got a husband, you have at least one or several jobs. What is your sort of weekly, let's just say this past week or next week, what is the, what is the workout schedule look like with the gaming? Like what is, uh,

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40Tim Ferriss?

  What is, where do you, where do you squeeze it in? What time of day? How many days a week?

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay. Well, so first of all, uh, with two babies, like I literally cannot play anything on a console now because I only at best have one hand, like one thumb, basically. So, uh, we're talking strictly games on my phone. And so for me, Candy Crush Saga is the best one to be playing now because both my parents-in-law play and they are helping us take care of our babies. So, you know, when they come over, uh, I can give my father-in-law a baby to feed and I can take his phone and try to get him off a level that's, you know, cause I'm like 400 levels ahead of him. So I can, you know, take his phone and help him get off the level. And now he's happy because he's ahead of level and I'm happy because he's feeding the baby.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  So, can, uh, for me, that's actually really important. Like using games as a, as a cultural touchstone or, or piece of, you know, a common experience with, with other people. And my mom's also playing and so that's, um, that's really helpful. And, um, then I also, you know, I play tennis with my husband once a week, which is really good for me because, uh, if I lose 6-0, 6-1, that is an amazing match for me. Like I, I won one game. He's, you know, he's six foot three. He's a dude. He's like, it's, I get clobbered.

• 1:10:05Tim Ferriss?

  So is he, is he just like a hundred mile an houring or that? I don't know my numbers. That might be slow. I don't know. But I mean, is

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  No, that's a, that's a good serve.

• 1:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  No, I mean, is he just going to like bean you? Is he going for the kill or is?

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  I mean, I finally just convinced him like three or four weeks ago to serve such that I could return.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  Like literally, he was, it was, it was like, it was, it was ridiculous. But my only points were like, if you double faulted, but um, but so that's a really good game for me that I play once a week because like I, I'm kind of killing it in other areas of my life, you know? I feel like very successful in other areas of my life. And I think getting clobbered, uh, once a week in a game that I'm very bad at. Um, I mean, I'll just think this, this is documented to be true. If you can take the clobbering and stay optimistic and still have positive emotions throughout that experience, it builds a lot of psychological resources that you will be able to draw on when it's on a game. But when it's, it's real life. Yeah. So, okay, so I'm getting clobbered in tennis once a week.

• 1:11:07Tim Ferriss?

  So which, which, which day of the week, what time of day? I love the specifics, like, so like, how, how many times a week? How many days per week are you playing Candy Crush Saga? And then what day of the week on tennis?

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, Candy, so Candy Crush is every day and, uh, you know, uh, how, but I would say I probably look at it, you know, twice a day, um, maybe in the morning, I make sure to spin the wheel to get my free power up. I might not play it, but I'm like, I don't want to forget to get, because every day in Candy Crush, you can get one free power up, otherwise they charge you like, you know, 99 cents for it. Um, so I make sure even like when I'm traveling and giving talks in other countries and have no time for anything, I always log in once a day and spin to get, so I can have like the stash of power ups for one. I'm on a really hard level. Um, so I do that in the morning and then later in the evening, um, I'll, uh, I, I will do it. Um, uh, I, I find it's actually good for me before I go to sleep

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  because I have one of those minds that will anxiously race about all the things that I have to do tomorrow.

• 1:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  Um, and, uh, so we know, uh, actually, but there's a, there's a set of quests and power ups and bad guys for insomnia in, in Super Better. And, uh, so I know one of the, the tricks for that, one of the ways you battle the bad guy of, um, of the sort of ruminating on things you have to do tomorrow is to totally occupy your brain with something else for 10 minutes. So I find that to be a good kind of nightcap for me.

• 1:12:34Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great idea. Maybe that's how I'll get my Tetris because I, I've used fiction for that, but sometimes I just don't have the. Concentration, uh, perhaps for fiction.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Tim Ferriss?

  And then the tennis is on.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Tennis is on Sunday afternoons and, uh, yeah, that's when we get, we get our, uh, his parents babysit for us and we go and play. Yeah.

• 1:12:56Tim Ferriss?

  So, so get it on the calendar, people listening. You can't just improvise your way through the entire week. It's very helpful to get on the calendar.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask a handful of last questions. I know that, uh, I want to be respectful of your time and make sure that your, your kids aren't climbing up, out the windowsills or something, but, uh, when you think of the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind and why?

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness. Um, I've heard you ask that question to someone else too, and they were totally stumped too.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  But I, I mean, I think, uh, okay, wait. I was gonna say Bill Gates, which first of all is very boring. Um, and also it's a man and I really want to answer a woman. So I'm gonna, because I, that's something I spend a lot of time doing, like making sure that I don't accidentally talk only about successful men, even in my book, like, you know, a lot of, I make sure I'm citing a lot of women scientists because, um, it's oftentimes the first person we think of as a man because they're so often talked about more. So, okay. I like to say, um, I think of Elizabeth Warren was actually the next name, uh, that came to mind, Senator Elizabeth Warren, because I think she is doing an amazing job of,

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  um, pushing back against powerful interests in this country and getting us to talk about, um, making big changes to, uh, to our financial system and our political system. And it's really hard for anybody to get any traction in that, in this country today. So that was who I thought of. And maybe that's, it's actually, it might be wishful thinking because I would love to see her run for president. So maybe I'm, I'm, maybe I'm using my futurist forecasting skills here to think that, you know, in 2024, she has just successfully been elected president. And that's why I thought of her as the most successful person I could think of. Cross your fingers, everybody.

• 1:14:55Tim Ferriss?

  Nostradamus. In fact, speaking of successful women, there are a number of exercises in the beginning of Super Better, and I did actually go through these exercises, including the quests, I should say.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:13Tim Ferriss?

  So I actually did both of these. So I was in a coffee shop and one of them was, you know, stand up and take three steps or make your hands into fists, hold them over your head as high as you can for five seconds. So I did both in this coffee shop.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  You're a totally gamer.

• 1:15:26Tim Ferriss?

  And I pretended to be stretching because as it turns out, five seconds is pretty long.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  Yes, it is.

• 1:15:33Tim Ferriss?

  But I love these comfort challenges. And then there was the, for instance, the snapping of the fingers exactly 50 times. And these very, very small things, looking out the window for certain periods of time and so on, that I found really fun to do, even as comfort challenges. I just enjoy anything that allows you to practice being uncomfortable. But how, so, all right, the line that struck me was, I've watched some amazing people complete the same four quests you're about to undertake, including Oprah Winfrey, legendary skateboarder and entrepreneur Tony Hawk. And then it goes on. So how did you get Oprah to do these exercises?

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  Right. That was a long story. Actually, I was on tour with Oprah on her Life Class show, not actually doing anything on stage with her, but I was, we created a game together called the Thank You Game, Oprah's Thank You Game. And it was a game designed to spread gratitude to as many people as possible because gratitude is contagious and has all these amazing life and health benefits. And so I made a game for her.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Oh, somewhere along the way. I mean, I had gotten a phone call from people, from her people, who had, they'd stumbled across some scientific research and then they saw my name associated with it. And I mean, I just got very lucky that, that her and her team were kind of suddenly interested in, in games and gameful psychology. And it was the first time I met her, I'd had meetings with her team like a dozen times. And I was like in a conference room and she comes in and gives me a big hug and says, I love you, which was like having, I basically look at her as having like saved my life as a kid. I watched her every day after school and like she really, I felt like it was going to therapy, watching her show.

• 1:17:30Tim Ferriss?

  She's amazing. She's amazing.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was like, I cannot, like literally her saying, I love you. I felt like I could have died on the spot and like my life would have had a full karmic circle. Like I was totally okay with that. And, but we just started talking about the power of games. And I said, you know, let me show you the game that I'm working on now. And, and had her, and, and I didn't know she was gonna actually do it and play along. And she did. And it was freaking awesome. And, and that, that led into making the Oprah's Thank You game where we, we spread gratitude. I think it was like, how many people did we get to? It was, it was like over 100 million people, which was pretty amazing.

• 1:18:10Tim Ferriss?

  The Oprah effect.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hundred million people. Like, oh yeah, just another hundred million people. What do you want? Incredible. What is the book that you've given most often as a gift?

• 1:18:24Tim Ferriss?

  Or any books that you've given a lot as gifts?

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. There are two. One is called Finite and Infinite Games, which is by a professor of religious studies at New York University named James Karas. And it's, it's basically a book about games, but then it turns out it's about the meaning of life. You don't know until the last page. It's like this big shock. It's like Sixth Sense. You thought you're reading a book about games and then suddenly it's like.

• 1:18:52Tim Ferriss?

  The red doorknob.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The last, the last line of the book is, "There is but one infinite game." And then you're like, "Oh shit, it's life. Life is the infinite game." Um, and uh, so that's it. And it's like a really easy, it's a tiny, tiny book. It's like practically a pocketbook. So anyone who's interested in philosophy, um, and looking at games as, as like the way of life, that's a really good one. Um, and then, uh, a book, um, uh,

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  well, uh, it's, it's called, "Suffering is Optional," actually. Um, so it's by my favorite Buddhist teacher, Sherry Huber. And, uh, so that is, I, I'm, I'm very inspired by Buddhist, um, practices. I mean, I, I, I practice Zen Buddhism myself and, um, uh, this was, I think that gameplay and Buddhist practice are both a way to arrive at a similar approach to life. Um, and so that's, that's another good book.

• 1:19:51Tim Ferriss?

  What was, uh, her last name?

• 1:19:53Speaker 03

  Huber, H U B E R.

• 1:19:57Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome.

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  She has an amazing podcast too, by the way. So if, if people who love your podcast, they can listen to her podcast too.

• 1:20:05Tim Ferriss?

  Just interviewed, I'm not sure if you know the name, uh, Tara Brock, but, uh, she's, she's an amazing teacher and, uh, focuses on mindfulness and Buddhist teachings and so on. Just fantastic. And I think that this has been a really interesting week for me because it's tying together a bunch of seemingly disparate activities. So you have the, say Buddhist philosophy and teaching. Then you have Stoic philosophy, of course, which I've read a ton of. And, um, just a huge fan of whether it's Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or others. And then you have the gameplay and they, they seem, they serve very similar. They can help you achieve very similar outcomes. Uh, it's very fascinating.

• 1:20:48Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, do you have a favorite documentary? Any favorite documentaries?

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Well, I have to plug a documentary called Gamers, which was made in 2003, I think, and it was the first full-length feature documentary about competitive video game players. At the time, it was the Cyber Athlete Professional League, the CPL. Now, of course, you've got League of Legends finals, like more people bought a ticket and attended League of Legends finals than the Stanley Cup finals this year. So, but this is from 2003 and it's available in its entirety on YouTube, so you can just like watch it for free. And that was, that was a fascinating documentary that I think as, as the years pass and competitive video gaming becomes even more a part of

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  our mainstream athletic lives, but that early look at it is pretty damn cool.

• 1:21:40Tim Ferriss?

  Have you seen King of Kong?

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:21:43Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, all right.

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  Yes, in the movie theater the day it came out.

• 1:21:47Tim Ferriss?

  God, King of Kong, you want to talk about like old school mullet vengeance, retro video game competition, so amazing. So, yeah, for, I will definitely check out Gamers. And for people who haven't seen King of Kong, it seems like a spinal tap sort of parody, like a mockumentary. It is such a hilarious, such a well-done documentary.

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  People take games seriously, which is, that's one of the great paradoxes of play, right? Is that it's, it's only play if it's not serious, except then we take it incredibly seriously, which is, which is, which is good, because that unlocks all of our gameful strengths.

• 1:22:24Tim Ferriss?

  What, what, just a few more questions. What purchase of less than a hundred dollars has most positively impacted your life in the last, say, six to 12 months?

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. I would say, well, this is so, I mean, this is not going to be surprising at all, but I would say a Bjorn carrier for the babies. So, we, we live on a hill and every day we take the babies out for an hour-long walk, half an hour, you know, trudging up this really steep hill and coming back down and being able to leave the house and get some fresh air. And also a great workout because the babies are getting fatter every day. So, it's like, like just, just when you're getting really fit, walking up the hill, the baby weighs another pound and you're, you know, so I would say my Bjorn carrier.

• 1:23:13Tim Ferriss?

  And now is that like a strap that attaches said fat babies to you? Or is that?

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like a harness that you it goes around your back and then the baby like kind of hugs your chest.

• 1:23:25Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, cool. B Y B J?

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  B J, B J O R N. Yeah, Bjorn.

• 1:23:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's it's, you know, the babies. This is this is progressive resistance for moms. It's kind of like the story of I think it's Milo or Milo of Crotona who who every day had to pick up a baby bull calf and and lift it over a fence. And then, of course, the story goes, you know, as became a larger and larger bull, he became the strongest strongest man in the world.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  So. Yes, and and and this is such a great way to tie back to video games because the one of the reasons why video games are tend to be even better for your gameful mindset than other games is that they always get harder, right?

• 1:24:05Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, right.

• 1:24:06Speaker 03

  There's all progressive resistance adaptive. Right. So you're it's like not like chess where it's very hard to find somebody who's just slightly better than you every single time you play. This is video games are designed to be that kind of progressive resistance. So you're always playing at the edge of your ability, therefore always getting better.

• 1:24:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's such a such an important point. I'm really glad you brought that up. What morning rituals do you are what morning rituals are important to you?

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  I'm a so I'm a terrible person, so I will confess.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  I, okay, so there's a neuroscience hack in here. So when I wake up, I basically like put on tennis, like like today's whatever the latest like last 24 hour tennis matches are on TV. Like I'm constantly recording on the tennis channel or ESPN, the live tennis. And and then I do email while I'm watching tennis and I spend an inordinate amount of time watching tennis. Like when I started my startup company for Superbetter, I would like disappear for eight hours to go watch, you know, the French Open live. Like that was just, you know, part of my that's that's working with Jane is she will go disappear and watch tennis for, you know, eight hours a day for for two to three week stretches.

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  But but it's a good neuroscience hack because all this is true for all professional sports. Every time you make a prediction about something, your brain increases the amount of dopamine that it has access to because it anticipates. Either success, you successfully predicted what would happen, so that's great. Or you'll learn from your mistakes. So you'll learn information that will make you have a better prediction next time. And every time you get a little boost of dopamine, it's like, it's like taking amphetamines, right? So I like to start my day with watching a tennis match because I will have a prediction about who I think will win. And then I will either be right or wrong, and I will either feel super awesome that I was right, or I will learn something about how somebody is playing right now and what their game is like right now.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  And I'll make a better prediction next time. And so it's like, it's like basically, you know, it's like a really strong cup of coffee or taking an amphetamine, giving my brain that kind of a boost every morning. But you can, any, you know, any, if you have a sports team that you like, that's why people who are really into professional sports are happier during the sports season than off-season. It's not just that they miss their favorite game, it's that their brain is constantly anticipating success for their favorite team, which is increasing dopamine. So I like tennis because they only have one month off all year. They play for 11 months. The season is incredibly long.

• 1:26:40Tim Ferriss?

  You can get your fix more regularly. Now, is there, I wasn't expecting to ask this question, but now that you mentioned watching tennis, I love watching tennis, mesmerized by it. And it's true for a handful of individual sports, like gymnastics also, same story.

• 1:26:59Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any, have any studies been conducted looking at the carryover benefits of observing gameplay as opposed to being involved in it yourself?

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Oh my gosh, yes. So, because, but it only works if you know how to play the game yourself. And if you know how to play the game, you activate mirror neurons. So I have found if I, if it's during Wimbledon or the French Open, it's a US Open, I've been watching literally eight hours a day for two weeks. I will go on the court that Sunday and play better because, because I know how to play tennis and my brain can physically embody, like if I see somebody going for a point, my body, my brain understands what that feels like, and so it creates a mirror neuron effect. So it's practicing, so it. If you have never played the game or sport yourself, like watching gymnastics is not going

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  to do a lot for you unless you have physically been on the mat or on the rings or the bars and you know what it feels like. But if you know what it feels like, then your brain practices while you play and it actually is beneficial and that that has been documented. So if you want to get the benefits of watching a sport, you should make sure you've played it enough times that your your body can, your brain can follow along in that neuron way.

• 1:28:18Tim Ferriss?

  So that that brings up all sorts of interesting ideas such as, for instance, if you knew that, if I knew I was going to have a surgery that was going to take me out of commission from a sports standpoint for three to six months, I'm just making that up. If I didn't know how to play tennis, I could do like a three day intensive or two day intensive immersion course for tennis and then use watching tennis therapeutically when I'm laid out for the subsequent period of time.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  You are so good at this. I love the way your brain works. Like, I think that is such an awesome and extreme idea. I really think you and I should write a book together sometime. We should take like all of, that would be, that would be something new and interesting. You could take all of this research to that extreme, really life maximizing level in ways that I would never think about. But that is genius.

• 1:29:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we need to hang out more. We need to hang out.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 1:29:20Tim Ferriss?

  The, just, I keep on saying a few more questions. I feel like five more minutes Turkish, like that guy had a snatch. But anyway, the, if you had a billboard, you could put anywhere, it could say anything. What would it say and where would you put it?

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. I, well, I would get a billboard that says,

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  I mean, I really want to do a public service announcement about Tetris. You know, I would, I would, about how Tetris can prevent post-traumatic stress disorder. And I would put it, you know, uh, I don't know where I buy would, or you should put it in games, really, I should, because you know, you can like buy advertising in video games. So I should have a, I should have a billboard in, in video games, uh, so that people who are open to this idea of games, uh, and playing them and benefiting from them. Because I, I, it really makes me agitated that there is so much good research that would have such profound, I mean, the difference between getting PTSD and not getting PTSD and what that would have on your life, um, is so freaking profound that, uh, I really

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  feel like, uh, I would like to, I'd like to get in people's faces about that. So, you know, 10, 10 minutes of Tetris after a trauma, done.

• 1:30:35Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  That's my billboard.

• 1:30:37Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. And I mean, I, I want to play with Tetris. I, I grew up playing Tetris on the Game Boy, so it doesn't take a lot to twist my arm to get back into it. Uh, but I heard a phrase recently, which was a take on PTSD, but it was related to worrying about things. So having anxiety about what might happen and they, and, uh, it was called, uh, pre-traumatic stress disorder. And I wonder, uh, I'll, I'll do some experimentation and report back to you, but I wonder if Tetris could have an inoculating effect against experiencing trauma or even foreseeing trauma. Cause you would imagine, since that worrying is a visual, often a visualization, it might

• 1:31:18Tim Ferriss?

  have the same type of, of, uh, kind of decoupling or, or coupling effect that minimizes the, the negative. I don't know.

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, as you get further in the book, you'll see, actually it's Super Mario that's been tested, um, for basically exactly that thing, to sort of prevent the predictive anxiety. Um, better than anti-anxiety medications.

• 1:31:39Tim Ferriss?

  I need to play more games. That, that is clear. And it's such a nice day. I think I want to go whack a tennis ball around.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Yay.

• 1:31:46Tim Ferriss?

  So, uh, if you could make one ask of the people listening or a recommendation, aside from, of course, the book, and I'm going to, I, I will put everything in the show notes, but what, what ask or recommendation would you make of the people listening?

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  I would encourage people to ask one person in their life.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  What is their favorite game? And it could be any kind of game, does it have to be a video game? And what it is that they think that game makes them good at? Because one of the things that I found in my research is the best way to ensure that somebody starts to use their gameful strengths in real life is to talk about what games they play and what those games make them good at. So if we could have everybody ask one person that question, not only will you learn something really interesting about someone you care about, but they will also benefit from now starting to think about their gameful strengths and then maybe how they might apply them in real life.

• 1:32:43Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Jane, dear, you and I should get together and scheme like Pinky and the Brain to come up with some type of massive experiment that we can do with people.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 1:32:53Tim Ferriss?

  We should definitely make that happen. This is really fun. Jane, where can people find out everything about you and learn more about Super Better and also say hi to you on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever you might be active?

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm super active on Twitter. I'm Avant Game, A-V-A-N-T Game, but you just search for my name. My website's jamegonigal.com, but I have another site that I think everybody who listens to you will like, which is showmethe science dot com, where I collect all of the studies that back up all of the things that I'm encouraging people to do with games. And you can actually get the full academic article, if you're a geek like me, and read it. And so you don't have to take my word for it. Everything that I've said in the book, I have literally a thousand studies online that you can click through to and read yourself so that you can be a geek like me. So show me the science, like show me the money.

• 1:33:52Tim Ferriss?

  Show me the money. You just brought up all sorts of visuals for me. I'm seeing Cuba Gooding Jr. dance around with his shirt off.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Play Tetris to block the imagery.

• 1:34:03Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Jane, it's always so much fun to hang out virtually or in person. We need to hang out more. Everybody listening, check out Super Better, a revolutionary approach to getting stronger, happier, braver, and more resilient. I am stoked to go play some more games. I'm gonna do that today and make it happen. And everybody who's listening, show notes, links, everything will be at 4hourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out, so you'll be able to find links to everything. And Jane, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  Thank you. You're awesome. You're one of my heroes, so this is really amazing to get to do.

• 1:34:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I feel the same about you, so we will go hatch some plans. And everybody, thank you so much for listening, and until next time, game on.

• 1:34:53Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. I have used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mockups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project, and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite, and you have an original that you love, or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it and created some amazing things that

• 1:35:38Tim Ferriss?

  I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 1:35:57Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:36:42Tim Ferriss?

  For me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body, and check it out, athleticgreens.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening.