Jane McGonigal shares her harrowing 34-day battle with post-concussion syndrome after a cabinet mishap, detailing how dopamine disruption fueled depression and suicidal thoughts. Her game-based recovery—using avatars, quests, and power-ups—achieved 100% improvement in NIH trials versus 50% for non-players. McGonigal argues addiction stems from focused goals, not disease, and that mirror neurons in observing skilled actions boost performance, like her tennis gains from watching Grand Slams. They debate trigger warnings and online harassment, noting text-based abuse (e.g., calling women "cunts") thrives without physical presence, while Rogan links societal resistance to change—like gender pronoun shifts—to discomfort over disrupted personal frameworks. McGonigal’s work reveals how gaming mechanics can reshape recovery and even societal progress, despite inevitable backlash. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I had been designing games professionally and researching them for 10 years by the time I hit my head.
And it was not my first instinct.
Oh, I have a brain injury.
Let me make a game.
But you know, about a month into the recovery, I wasn't getting any better.
I was really depressed and anxious.
I mean, it was like the lowest point of my life.
And I knew from my research that when we play games, you know, we have more optimism, we're more determined, we're better able to ask people for help, right, to team up with us, be your allies.
And I just figured, well, this is like the worst I've ever felt in my life.
Maybe if I can bring some of that gameful spirit to recovery, I could kind of jumpstart my brain back into healing.
So this is my public service announcement for the episode.
I was standing up from underneath an open cabinet, and I'm a runner, so I have really strong legs, and I was just in a hurry, and I was full force right up into the corner of the cabinet, hit my head, and it was like classic, you know, my husband was joking around, you know, who's the president, and I couldn't remember who the president was, and I was like, Oh, shit.
I would try to go into a Whole Foods, the fluorescent lights would feel like I was under fire from weapons.
I was in bed, basically, for three months.
All stimulus would make me nauseous and migraines and everything.
So it started out normal concussion, but then it's kind of unraveled into what they call post-concussion syndrome, which is a thing that I didn't know existed.
But a lot of people, concussions take up to a year to heal.
Yeah and I mean that's something I've gotten actually pretty active in the research community and trying to share information.
So it turns out like the first week of recovery can really determine if you're going to go into this extended you know it's gonna take you three months six months a year if you're not if you're not resting enough in that that first week.
And basically, you want to not do anything that feels difficult for you.
And so for me, I couldn't read.
I could only watch TV shows I'd already seen before because having to process plot, new plot, was not helpful.
So I was rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer because I'd seen them all like a million times.
And, you know, keep the lights off if they, you know, keep sunglasses on indoors.
But the first 48 hours and then after the first week, if you can avoid overstressing your brain, you have a much better chance to recover within the one to two week period.
I was in the middle of writing my first book, and it was due in a couple months.
And I'm like, I can't miss my deadline.
I've got to do this.
I've got to power through.
I mean, I can barely, I'm like, can't even see the screen.
But when you have a concussion, you're not thinking clearly.
You are not a rational person.
You're just like, I have to do this.
I have to try.
And other people will look at you and be like, what's wrong with you?
You are...
You know totally out of it.
Why are you trying to work?
But you're not you don't have that same kind of rational decision-making ability So sometimes you know a friend or you know a loved one needs to take you aside and say I'm not letting you do anything for this first week.
You've just got to let your brain heal and this is Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's relatively new our understanding of what takes place after concussion and what you have to do to recover and Yeah, no, there's just last year, there was a big study that came out showing that four months after a concussion, your brain is still different.
There's still, it's like a kind of a scarring that happens, like a scab, that certain parts of the brain will still be thickened.
For months after, even if you think you're feeling fine, which means that you're still vulnerable.
You know, if you were to get hit again, it would be more dangerous.
And And if you're still feeling symptoms after four months, you know, that's why it's like when you, you know, cut yourself open and you get the scab, you can't be picking at the scab by doing things that are triggering your symptoms.
And I was having my husband Google, do Google Scholar searches for traumatic brain injury research, because I couldn't use the computer.
It's like, you got to Is this normal?
I'm like, I started feeling suicidal.
That was new for me.
And I'm literally having him Google suicidal thoughts concussion because I'm like, am I really suicidal?
Am I rationally thinking I'm never going to be able to work again?
My husband's going to have to take care of me.
I should just end it, which is what I was thinking.
The voices in my head were saying, but it didn't feel, you know, that didn't feel like myself.
And so fortunately, he was finding articles like, wait, one in three people with a concussion have suicidal thoughts.
And that is actually a reaction to the neurochemistry.
When you have a concussion, you don't have dopamine in the reward pathways, which means your brain can't anticipate anything good in the future.
You become, like, completely unable to imagine That you'll feel better, that good things will happen for you, and that's just like a perfect neurochemical foundation for suicide.
Yeah, I mean, I was able to distance myself a little bit from the thoughts where, you know, because I was just at home, I wasn't going anywhere, I would say to my husband, like, I feel like I have this voice that's saying, you know, you should kill yourself.
And I would talk about it because I didn't...
I mean, I think if you talk about it, it becomes less, you know, this feeling that you have that you have to really believe and more like this thing that you can look at and try to figure out.
And so it was like, it just felt so weird to me because I'm like, why?
I don't know.
I had never had that before.
And once I knew that it was a symptom of concussion rather than, oh, Jane has figured out that her life is terrible and Logically, she wants to kill herself.
I was able to live with it.
And, you know, the research literature says they go away as the brain heals.
So I just thought, okay, you know, it might still, I might still hear that voice for, you know, a few weeks or a few months.
But I know that that's a symptom of healing, and not how it actually feels.
I did not try that, but actually this is sort of very exciting for me.
Because there's no good treatment for this, when my game worked so well for me and other people started using it and it worked well for them, we were able to get a grant from the NIH to test this with young athletes through Ohio State University Medical Research Center.
We just released our findings last week that the game that I invented did improve the post-concussion syndromes in 100% of the people who used it compared to only 50% of people who didn't play.
So this is one of the first validated treatments that can reduce the headaches and the nausea and the confusion and the difficulty.
Well, you know, so I was in the middle of writing my first book, which was all about the psychology of games.
And I just thought to myself, I should, I got to prove it.
You know, I'm writing this book saying that playing games makes us happier and stronger and more resilient.
I got to prove this theory.
I mean, there's all other kinds of proof in the book, but I'm like, I'm going to live it.
And that was just, I didn't know how else to provoke the positive emotions.
And when we play games, there's a whole list of positive emotions that we feel when we play games, like curiosity.
Excitement and awe and wonder and pride and she's like I gotta get some of these emotions because my doctor had said the more depressed and anxious you are that can actually slow down the healing process that is actually Detrimental right if you if you fuel if you can feed the depression anxiety detrimental and in terms of measurable effects or detrimental in terms of the way you feel like I That from the brain's ability to heal,
the neurochemistry of depression is not conducive to that.
I mean, the only thing that I really experimented with was trying to eat things with like omegas, you know, omega-3, omega-6, which are supposed to be good for brain healing.
And there is some scientific literature on that where, I mean, doctors will say eat walnuts, you know.
It seems counterintuitive to someone who doesn't know anything like me that you're saying that you could only watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer because he'd already seen it before, but playing a game isn't part of...
It's like a kind of pinball game where you shoot little pinballs around and pop pegs and they play like the Hallelujah Chorus every level you complete.
So it's like, yay!
I'm successful.
They're, like, playing a parade for me.
I'm like, that'll really help me.
But even that was too stimulating.
So I couldn't play video games.
So the game I invented was not a video game.
I mean, we did eventually make an app and a web version so other people could play.
But it was more like just a set of rules that I would follow.
You know, like, you would, like, oh, how do you play hide-and-seek?
Or how do you play poker?
You just, like, learn the rules and play.
So I just started making up rules for myself about doing things that you would do in a video game, like collecting power ups or spotting, like making a list of the bad guys and all the ways like where they would show up and what my strategies were for fighting them and coming up with a quest list.
So like what's something I can do in the next 24 hours to feel better, like something concrete that I can accomplish.
And so just starting to approach my recovery with these really concrete, gameful strategies.
And really, you know, the first thing I did was I adopted this secret identity, like my avatar.
I was going to have an avatar in my recovery, and that was Jane the concussion slayer, because I'm like, oh, I'm going to be like Buffy, and Buffy did not choose to be the slayer, right?
Like, they just told her, you're the slayer, you have to save the world.
And I'm like, I did not choose to hit my head, so I'm going to be like her and just rise to the heroic occasion and kind of try to Tap into my sense of determination and being a badass.
Bad guys were anything that would trigger my symptoms.
Bright lights, a crowded space, conversation, everything.
The thing with bad guys, in a video game, there's a monster.
You don't run away.
You've got to figure out how you're going to Tackle it or get past it.
And the same is true with recovery from any kind of injury or illness.
You have to keep testing the limits, right?
Because otherwise, you wind up never getting better.
You're kind of convinced that you're just flat on your back forever.
And this is sort of an aside, but as I was doing all the research for this new book, I found out that the number one predictor of disability after a back injury is avoiding things that make your back hurt.
Early on, during recovery.
So you would think like, oh, you have to, you know, don't do anything that will make your back worse.
But the longer you keep that mindset, that's the number one predictor of who becomes chronically disabled, not able to work, or their life is affected in a major way.
And it's not the severity of the injury, it's not the severity of the pain.
So with all kinds of injury and illness now, because you get stuck in that pattern.
And so, you know, it's like, but with all these things, it's a careful balance.
So you have to recognize that the bad guys are bad.
I can't go out and be in a crowded space for three hours.
I can't go to like a Lady Gaga concert, which I really wanted to do.
I'm like, you're not going to do that.
I'm like, the next time she comes through, that'll be one of my epic wins when I can go see her.
But you can do little things to test.
Let me go into the Whole Foods and see how many minutes I can make it before the symptoms come back.
So you're kind of like testing.
Oh, today was 30 seconds.
I got to leave.
Maybe next week it'll be five minutes.
And then you kind of start to get your life back because you don't want to get on that course towards seeing yourself as kind of chronically...
Disabled.
So that's, you know, you come up with these ways to battle the bad guys, you know, every day.
And in the version that we tested with the NIH, the game is activate three power-ups a day.
So for me, that might have been eating walnuts or like cuddling my dog because that made me feel like safe and happy.
So anything that provokes a positive emotion, if you're depressed, you have to really find what are the things that can get through that depression and And still make you feel good.
So, you know, I'd cuddle my dog, I'd eat walnuts.
You do three of those a day, one bad guy battle a day, where you really test the limits to see if you're getting better, and one quest a day, which is the smallest possible thing you can do That will kind of move you in the direction of your goal or recovery or just feel like something productive that you want to do.
So I remember one time, my quest, I decided to bake cookies for the baristas at the coffee place down the stairs.
I felt like I couldn't do anything for myself.
So I'm like, I'm gonna bake cookies for someone else today.
And as a result, randomly, I wound up getting free coffee for a year.
Because they were like, I could not believe somebody came down with this giant plate of cookies fresh out of the oven.
But I did not expect that.
But that was just like, you know, find one thing I can do today that will have a positive impact.
And that's the sort of, there's other stuff, you know, in the game, but that's sort of the main, you're basically using game models to kind of structure your life to make sure that you're staying engaged, not hiding, you know, actually making progress to getting better.
Like, more difficult than I think most people would ever imagine recovering from a concussion would be.
I think most people would think that...
I don't want to say most people.
Let me just say what I would think.
I haven't had a concussion, I don't think, since I was probably 20. And I would think that what it would be like would be like, oh, my head feels like shit.
You think it'll feel like a hangover or something.
The problem is that your thinking becomes muddled, too.
So it's not just that you have these physical symptoms.
You're not able to think clearly.
You're not thinking like yourself.
And that can really lead to a lot of confusion, bad decisions.
You know, people, they try to hide the severity of the symptoms because they think that it will, you know, Other people will judge them.
That's very common, I've now learned, with concussions.
People hide the severity of symptoms because you're not thinking clearly and you think it's important that other people not really see.
But I've become this weird spokesperson slash guru for concussions because of my TED Talk about it.
So every day, literally, I hear on Facebook or Twitter from someone who's just been concussed.
And they're like, what do I do?
And I actually, I mean, I, you know, I'm like, okay, I'm your ally.
And I'm like, always, you know, sending direct messages to like random people I don't know, checking in on them to see fit in the right thing.
Because it's not even like if your friends and family will not understand, they will think, oh, you'll be out on the couch for three days, and they expect you to be back to normal.
And they don't understand why three months, four months later, you're still Struggling.
It's not, I mean, it has not been discussed enough, although I think that's changing now.
People, especially with so many soldiers coming back with long-term symptoms of the concussions.
So depending on the studies you read, it'll say between 48 hours to one week is the most crucial stage where you want the most cognitive rest and you want to avoid basically just exhausting the brain.
Because anything you do that's cognitively demanding, it directs blood flow to different regions of the brain.
You don't want your brain spending time trying to figure out your email because there's only so much blood to flow around and you don't want it to be spent.
And trying to do an email will require So much more effort from you than it normally would.
So it's a sort of like vicious cycle.
Now, eventually, the brain kind of gets into this sort of, I don't know, stasis where it's like, okay, now we're working or you've got kind of your thickened up lesions that's going to take, you know, four months to kind of dissolve and...
Be back to normal.
So you can test and you can stay engaged.
And not being engaged will fuel depression and anxiety.
So partly it's like you're trying to balance the mental health with the cognitive health.
I mean, if you were to do cognitive rest for a month, it would be like being in solitary confinement.
And we know that that has really bad mental health effects.
So, this is why I wrote the book, because I didn't really understand why it worked.
I knew it worked for me, and then I put the rules online, and people started writing me from all over the world that they were using it, and not just for concussions.
I mean, people were writing for, you know, I have cancer, I just had knee surgery, someone who was just diagnosed with ALS starts playing it, and it It seems to be extraordinarily effective at treating depression, anxiety, and also making people feel just stronger, just like better versions of themselves.
And I did not understand it.
And I say this all the time to people because there can be a lot of skepticism that a game can be helpful during a really serious It's a challenge in your life.
It sounds like trivial.
It sounds stupid.
So I freely acknowledge I didn't understand why it worked.
It seemed kind of absurd to me for people with much more serious problems than I had, too.
So that's why I wrote the book.
It's why I started doing our clinical trial and the studies we've been doing for the last few years to try to understand because all I knew was that it seemed to be having all these positive effects.
Even to a game designer like myself, who believes in the power of games, I was really taken off guard.
I did not, I was like, I don't know if it was like four or something.
I actually didn't know that I'd had a concussion.
I thought this was my first concussion in 2009. And the doctor was like, oh, have you had a concussion before?
No.
Because obviously everyone knows now if you have more than one, it can start to, the healing will take longer.
I didn't know until like a month into my injury, I'm talking to my parents and they mentioned Well, you know, the last time you had a concussion, you were feeling better much faster.
And I'm like, what?
What last time?
Oh, you remember when you fell off the sliding board when you were, you know, four.
Yeah, that's the recognition of vulnerability is an issue with people that get hurt because then all of a sudden you realize you can get hurt and sometimes you just walk on eggshells all the time.
You tweeted that, didn't you tweet the roof topper, like the guy in Russia who goes, hangs off?
So that's, you know, I'm really interested in like neuro hacks, how you can do little things to like, you know, change like how your brain is working right now.
And that video, it seemed to me, would be really good for people to get a little bit of adrenaline going.
If you're like on your couch and you're like having a hard time getting yourself out of bed.
There's no way, I mean, they're not faking this, unless this is some sort of advanced CGI. No, I was gonna say, I mean, it almost could be a video game.
Like, watch when he reaches his hands down.
He has some kind of crazy gloves on.
And when he reaches his hands down, there's certain parts in the video where he's touching the sparks.
Look at the sparks.
See the sparks?
Look at that.
Jesus fucking Christ, that guy.
He almost fell.
I mean, he's getting, like, really close to falling.
Like, there's a couple times there where there's, like, this intense wiggle.
And he's tucking himself like a speed skater so that he can go faster.
Crazy fucker.
Like, what is wrong with kids?
I mean, I get it.
This is an adrenaline rush.
But when you see this, knowing what you suffered from standing up under a cabinet...
I think that's something that a lot of people are struggling with these days with all these, you know, the real sports story that they did on traumatic brain injury and the issues that people are having and the all the stuff I've seen from fighters over the years is definitely affected my enjoyment.
What's this?
Retiring after concussion, next hit to my head could possibly kill me.
Yeah, well, there's more of that now than ever before because guys are realizing, first of all, at the end of their career, they're most likely going to be debilitated.
I mean, almost all of the players that take a lot of hits suffer from serious injuries for the rest of their lives.
And so when you're young and you're looking at your future, you're going, look, I could put all my energy into this and...
You know be a mess or I could say you know what I'm still young I'm 23 I could do anything I want like look I've been in the NFL I've experienced it.
It makes you worry that the future of the sport is going there's gonna be a big Socioeconomic divide where the only people who who really want to play and are willing to take that risk are people who feel like they have nothing to lose, you know There's that, and there's the people that want to watch it.
There's a bunch of people that want to watch the head injuries.
They don't know what they're seeing yet.
They don't understand.
Like, when you watch somebody get KO'd, like, really badly, when you see someone get head kicked or dropped in their head or something like that, you just see excitement.
And that's why it's like, when you realize how vulnerable people are and how much is out of our control, I mean, those are the people who are the first in line to try this and who benefit the most.
So we had half a million people play an electronic version, like logging their power-ups and their bad guys in Quest so that I could get data on it and see what are the most effective power-ups?
Like, how often do you have to, you know, check in to get better?
And we found that people with the most painful and difficult situations were the ones that were benefiting the most.
It's like sort of the more you realize how vulnerable you are, the more open you are, and the more this kind of concrete, purposeful, positive action can actually make a big difference.
I mean, once you feel the vulnerability, it becomes real.
Whereas when you look at someone who has a broken leg, and you go, oh, I can intellectually understand that that person broke their leg, but I don't know what it feels like.
And the reality of you having that head trauma and trying to figure out, like, there's got to be a way to get out of this swamp, this mental swamp that I'm stuck in.
Let's fucking make a game.
Like, let's do it.
Like, you're just...
I mean, it makes sense to me.
A person who's been through a bunch of surgeries and injuries and stuff, it totally makes sense to me because there's a reality that every time I've really badly injured myself, like when I needed knee surgery or something, there's like a, just an acceptance.
Just go, let's just go do it.
Let's go do it because now this thing's broken.
And until that happens, there's a bunch of people that tell you, well, why don't you try rehabbing it?
No, and a lot of times you'll have an injury and you won't know if it will get better, if you'll be able to get back to what you were doing before, which is actually where the name Super Better comes from, because I wasn't sure I would ever have the same cognitive capabilities I had.
And at that time, I had just gotten my PhD.
I was doing research.
I was used to being able to have an intellectual profession.
And so everyone's like, get better soon.
And I'm like, well, what does that mean?
That means get back to who you were before this happened.
And I didn't know if I would ever be able to do any of that again.
So I thought, well, I'm not going to get better.
I'm going to get super better.
I'll just be different.
I'll be like this new super version of myself, like Spider-Man.
You know, he got bit by the radioactive spider and this concussion is my radioactive spider.
And I don't know who I'm going to be, but it'll be someone different.
And instead of just trying to You know, because anytime you have an injury or an illness, you don't know who you're going to be at the end of it.
It might be back to normal.
It might be different.
And you want it to be the best different that it could be.
Well, that's one of the weirdest things about online interaction, is that it's kind of a combination of both, introvert behavior and extrovert behavior.
Because even though you are interacting with people, you're not seeing them.
I think that one of the issues with online interaction is that you don't see the people.
It's just like, my intention is kind of ambiguous.
You write something, or you put something out there, and it's not completely clear.
If you say something, I get the tone.
I can tell if you're being sarcastic.
And if you say something mean to me, like we have to look at each other, I'm like, fucking really?
And there's this weird thing to it.
Whereas if you do that online, there's like none of that.
I think that there's something very strange that's going on in our culture right now with so many people spending a giant amount of their time only interacting with people through text.
Well, that's one of the areas of research that I was diving into.
So, you know, because I don't just research brain injury stuff.
I typically research video games and how they change how we feel and think and act in the rest of our lives.
What did you get your PhD in?
The field is called performance studies.
So I was just basically studying how people perform in video games and as a result of video games sort of collaboration skills, their sort of psychological performance, things like that at UC Berkeley was where I studied.
And so one of the things that we know that's happening in video games is that there's a really big difference between playing a video game in the same room with somebody and playing online.
So like if we're playing Call of Duty and I'm trying to kill you, if we're playing in the same room, We actually undergo really great, it's kind of, they call it synchronization.
So our heart rates will sync up.
Our breathing rates sync up.
We get a kind of mirror neuroning process going on where it's like blood flow is mirroring where it's flowing.
The patterns of activation are mirroring each other.
And all of that's associated with More compassion, more empathy, we like each other more, we trust each other more.
Even if the game is violent, even if we're competing, all of this happens.
And it happens because, you know, when you're playing a game with or against someone, you have to try to get in their brain, like, what are they going to do next?
What's their next move?
And so your brain starts to mirror what you think they're doing.
So it's this really intense mind-body mirroring that goes on.
Yeah, well, you're trying to think, what are they doing?
And there is just something about if you're...
You may think you're looking at the screen, but there's also just a general awareness.
Like when you're sitting next to someone, you're aware of sort of what's going on.
And cues that you're picking up, body language cues, and if you turn to look at them, even just in a split second, you'll get this sort of facial expression cue.
So what we've seen is if you take the same game and play it against somebody in the room, you wind up with these positive impacts, like more compassion, more empathy, you like each other more.
If you play the same game online, you're not able to see their facial expression.
You're not able to get the same sinking phenomenon.
You actually dehumanize the opponent.
Your testosterone goes up.
You feel less empathy towards them.
And so it's one of the reasons why in the book I talk about how, you know, unless you're actively trying to change your personality to be more aggressive and you want to, I don't know, for some reason you feel like you want to be kind of more of a Half your time is a lot of time.
But if you put a barrier up, but they're in the same room, or if they're in a room that's right next door, but you know they're there and maybe you can hear their voice, or if you shut that door and you can't hear their voice, have you changed?
The studies that I've seen show that you have to be in physical proximity.
So if there was a barrier and I was unable to look over and get those cues from your body language or from your facial expression, that it would not happen.
The thing I'm really curious about is with Twitch and now YouTube Gaming, is if you can watch somebody playing and now you're seeing their face while they're playing, A game.
Studies have shown that watching someone play a game that you know how to play will trigger the same mirror neurons because your brain can kind of emulate.
If you're playing a game, I don't know how to play.
I don't know the controls.
I don't know the goals.
My brain will just be like, I don't know.
But if I know how to play a game, I'm like, oh, I know what she's trying to do.
So one thing I'm interested in is if I can see someone's face, you know, while they're playing the game, they're playing a game I know, could you get some of the benefits?
But it would only be unidirectional because if you're, like, live streaming your gameplay, you can't see me.
Of course.
But it would be interesting because we know that if you get this mirror neuron effect, it makes people want to help each other more, like each other more.
I'm, like, thinking, like, being a powerful, you know, Twitch streamer or YouTube game streamer will, like, Could make you really cultivate a large community of people who really want to help you.
It seems like if I were building an empire of a new kind of community, I feel like that would be what I would be building because it would be like a really tight bond.
And the mirror neuron thing helps explain it because it's not like watching TV where it's just passive.
If you know how to play the game, your brain starts working to process it and anticipate what they're going to do next, trying to figure out what decision they'll make or where they'll go.
And so you're actually getting a lot of the same stimulation as if you were playing the game yourself.
And that's the thing people don't understand.
We do this with musicians, too.
If you know how to play a musical instrument and you watch somebody playing that same musical instrument, your brain starts to, you know, activate as if you were playing it yourself, which is why it can be more interesting for someone who knows how to play the piano to watch someone else play the piano or listen to someone else play the piano versus somebody who doesn't know.
I wouldn't get anything because I'm not gonna play again, I don't think.
I just don't have time in the day, but I totally understand that.
That totally makes sense.
I think that probably is the case with pretty much everything that people do.
It's one of the reasons why a sense of community amongst people that are all involved in the same sort of endeavor is so important because you kind of push each other and inspire each other and also you kind of feed off of each other.
Maybe one, like if we were all Maybe you would have a certain kind of style that I don't have, and I would see your style and go, oh, Jane's got this crazy thing she's doing.
Oh, that's kind of cool.
And then maybe I would do something that you didn't do, and you're like, maybe I need to be more this, and sort of tune in to how people are doing, to the point where a lot of comics, when they're around each other, it becomes an issue sometimes because they kind of mimic each other's personas.
There was all these Tell Babies that were running around it, but really they're just young comics that admire his sort of case, and they're trying to do it too, and they're super inspired because they're young and they're just trying to make it, and then they're seeing this guy who's this fantastic comedian, and they're like, God!
And then they don't even realize it, but they're just adopting it.
I mean, everybody sort of, there's, everyone influences everyone around them to a certain extent.
We all want to believe that we're some rogue, independent operator that exists out in the fringe of society and lives in a fucking wooden house in the woods somewhere.
The sentence you just read, it changed your brain.
So, I mean, on one hand, it's sort of silly to look at research that says, oh, games change your brain like this, or music changes your brain like that.
Because everything you do, everything you're exposed to, changes your brain.
You're making a memory, or you're sort of activating a pattern.
So, I mean, like, even this conversation, you know, congratulations, like, you have changed my brain today.
But this is something to think about.
Like, it's a lot of responsibility in how we interact with each other.
And, well, that's one of the weirdest things about doing a podcast is how many people will tell me after they listen to the podcast for 500 episodes, dude, you changed my life.
That's a lot of responsibility.
But we really are changing each other's lives.
I mean, the podcast has changed my life just being able to talk to all these different people.
That's why it's important not to have dipshits in your life.
Because if you're around people that are just constantly fucking up and constantly making the same mistakes over and over again, like that pattern affects you too.
Well, they say, you know, it's really good to surround yourself with people who inspire you because they talk about having a cognitive model for behavior change.
Like if you're trying to get better in some way, if you can visualize, if you know somebody who's already done it or doing positive things in their lives, It requires less energy for your brain to imagine yourself doing it.
If you're not surrounded by anybody who's trying to get healthier or trying to get fit or whatever it is, it's literally harder to imagine.
And so it's more exhausting for you to try to imagine yourself getting better, whereas if you're surrounded by people who are doing it, It becomes familiar to your brain.
There's all sorts of examples that your brain can call on.
It literally takes less energy for you to imagine yourself actually doing it.
And weirdly, they found at Stanford University, using avatars, if you can see an avatar that is designed to look like you, doing the sort of things you want to do, like being really physically fit, like working out in the game world, if you just watch an avatar custom designed to look like you doing that, It lowers the cognitive threshold for you to do it and then you will do more in real life.
You will work out more, you'll spend more time committed to those goals just by having watched the sort of mirror version of yourself having done it.
Like, one of the big things that they say it's important for progress in sports and in pretty much anything is visualization.
Visualize yourself doing things.
It's a big thing with martial arts.
They take a lot of fighters.
They talk them through their scenarios.
They will sit down and they'll close their eyes and meditate and visualize themselves getting out of bad situations, visualize themselves winning, and do it over and over and over again to the point where it becomes like a part of this is your reality.
Your reality is you win.
It seems like if you could watch a video of you doing all those things, an artificially created you, Absolutely.
There's a little bit of nuance to it that's really interesting.
For example, if you are walking on a treadmill while you're watching a custom avatar of yourself and the avatar starts running faster and is getting fitter, you will run faster.
You will work harder.
If you are engaged in an activity, it can really...
It would be good to tie it to when you're actually working out.
It might not last for...
I watched this movie today and a week later I'm still feeling more powerful.
You kind of want to do it in the moment.
The one study at Sanford found for 24 hours they were more physically active, like taking stairs or doing more push-ups or whatever.
But I do like the idea of using it The one thing they know is for positive visualization, I don't know if you've seen, there's been new research coming out, that you have to visualize the effortful action and not the outcome.
If you're visualizing getting lifted up on people's shoulders like, I'm the champion, that actually seems to sometimes have a counterproductive effect because your brain can imagine it so vividly, you kind of feel like you've already had that payoff and you put in less effort.
There's been studies for a few years that show this.
But if you're visualizing the effortful activity that it takes to get there, you're picturing, you know, here's what I have to do on game day, and you're thinking about the things that require effort on your part, techniques or, you know, the actions you're going to take, that is helpful.
So you just don't want to think about, you know, I can't wait till they, you know...
I focus on self-efficacy as what you're trying to increase, as opposed to inspiration.
So self-efficacy is when you feel like you have the skills and abilities and resources you need to achieve your goal.
And it's different from self-esteem.
Self-esteem's like, oh, I'm a good person.
You know, I just sort of...
Like myself.
Self-efficacy is very specific.
If I have self-efficacy about running a marathon, it means that I have done at least a few 20-mile runs.
I know how hard it's going to be.
I've got my resource.
I know how to fuel during the run.
I know how much sodium I have to take at different points.
I know what the course looks like, so I've got a mental plan.
Having that sense of reasonable optimism and focusing on visualizing what you'll do successfully that's focused on your own skills and abilities, that in all of the scientific literature is linked to better outcomes.
Whereas if you're imagining things that are outside of your control, it just doesn't...
because how is...
it might inspire you and maybe you'll, you know...
Get out of bed and put more of an effort as you picture something good happening to you.
But the mental model that seems to be most powerful is when you're focusing on things that you have direct control over, if that makes sense.
Well, how much of all that is just a little like what you're talking about is just focus is just Thinking about what you're doing and the more you think about what you're doing and the more energy you put towards what you're doing makes you better and how much of this is just and is it possible that all these ideas of just Visualization is what you're doing is really just focusing more and loving more what you're doing I think that could be a big part of it.
I think part of it is also something to do with the dopamine system.
You know, in video games, So I've talked to lots of neuroscientists for this book, and a lot of them will say, if you want to increase someone's self-efficacy, you have them play a video game, because in a video game, you're constantly required to take action And then wait to see, you know, I try to fire my weapon, I wait to see if I shot successfully, I try to orient around an obstacle, I'm gonna see, I'm gonna get information.
Every time that your brain expects information about your performance, it gives you a little dopamine release.
Dopamine feels good, so you get excited, but increased dopamine also allows you to pay closer attention and to learn faster, right?
So anytime you're trying something where you're constantly taking actions, getting feedback, And you have to kind of learn and improve.
You'll get all this dopamine going, and that is associated with the ability to build self-efficacy.
So I think that there is a...
I mean, I think there's a neurochemical process that's underlying this.
It's not just...
I mean, it's not just a matter of what you think.
It's also about changing what is going on in your brain so that the brain is primed to learn faster, And that's why there seem to be so many cool applications for video games,
because if you can get a cancer patient who feels really powerless and overwhelmed to play a video game about chemotherapy and it starts building self-advocacy and getting all the dopamine going, there was a clinical trial that showed that kids who played a video game about cancer were for Two to three months later,
missing fewer doses of their medicine, taking more antibiotics, they were more engaged, which leads to more cases of cancer going into remission.
And the increased dopamine is going to, it changes.
So what's, well now we'll get really deep here.
Every time that you consider a goal, Your brain stops and says, is it worth it?
Because your brain's trying to conserve your body's energy and, you know, your cognitive energy.
And we'll say, if I do this goal, do I really want it?
Am I going to put the energy to do it?
And what researchers have found is the more dopamine you have in your reward pathways, The more you focus on the positive outcome and the less you think about the effort required.
So if I give you a bunch of dopamine hits, you're going to be thinking about, I might be cured someday.
I don't care how many side effects there are to this medicine.
I'm swallowing this pill, you know, and I'm going to do it because you're focused on the positive outcome, not all of the other things that stress you out about it or make you, you know, the nausea and the energy that it takes.
And this is true if you're doing push-ups, you know, like, do I really feel like doing 100 push-ups right now?
If you have more dopamine going, you're gonna be more likely to say, this is important to me, it's important to my training.
And if you are low dopamine, which is when you're clinically depressed, you have really low dopamine.
So everything seems too hard.
Oh, why am I gonna bother getting out of bed?
There's like, the effort required seems so much more important than the goal.
So there is a neurological underpinning Self-efficacy is sort of this combination of really wanting to achieve your goal and having that increased attention so you learn faster.
It's not just a matter of saying, I'm going to pay attention now.
You have to be priming your brain to increase the dopamine in your reward pathways.
And that experience of getting better, that's the basis for self-efficacy.
Sometimes people ask me, like parents will say, what games should my kids be playing for a learning experience?
But I say every game is designed to be a learning experience because you're supposed to be bad.
And that's why games feel so good.
Every time you play a new game, you're figuring it out, you're learning how it works, you're getting better.
That experience of constantly getting better And proving to yourself, I can figure something out, I can improve, I can master something.
That's one of the reasons, this is a fundamental reason why people like playing games and why they don't play the same game forever.
I mean, sometimes you do if the game that you can never master like chess or something, you know, but most people will will really get into a game for a while and then feel like they have stopped improving.
And so the brain gets, you know, wants to keep learning, wants to keep getting better.
The dopamine hits are only going to come if you aren't sure how to be successful.
So you have to play a new game.
That's why we don't play tic-tac-toe as adults, right?
No dopamine hits with tic-tac-toe because you know exactly what's going to happen.
But he wrote to people that he was worried that he was addicted to it.
He talked a lot about how he had this game addiction, which is fascinating when you think about today how many people worried about I'm addicted to World of Warcraft or whatever game.
So even Einstein worried about being addicted to his favorite game.
The biggest predictor for who will become addicted to games and feel like it kind of gets out of control, spirals out of control, is if they're playing for escapist purposes to try to block other feelings.
Like, I have all these problems.
I'm going to play the game instead.
I'm feeling anxious.
I'm going to play the game instead.
So the way you reverse it is you have to...
I mean, I talk about it as playing to get better.
You are...
Instead of playing to avoid something, you focus on what you're doing that is making you better.
Even if it's just to start getting better at this game, then you focus on, you know, I'm playing with my friends.
It's like improving my relationships or I'm focusing on strategy or building my teamwork skills or whatever it is.
You start to think about...
Other goals outside the game that the game is connected to because the biological process of addiction is the narrowing of goals that the brain responds to.
Right, so you know I said you get like this dopamine hit when you anticipate something good.
In addiction, the brain starts to believe that the only source of the next dopamine hit is the thing you're addicted to.
And you can't imagine other things that are going to make you feel that good or feel that excited.
And there's this great new book called The Biology of Desire that a neuroscientist kind of lays out all the new thinking on addiction.
And one of the ways you break out of cycle for any addiction is to start priming the brain to anticipate You have to stop thinking about the game as the only source of that good feeling.
You have to start thinking about other goals that you have besides just the sort of sense of relief that the game is going to provide.
But what we're seeing with games is because games aren't inherently dangerous.
You don't have to quit playing games.
And in fact, it can be dangerous to just go cold turkey on games because it's like taking someone off an antidepressant without tapering them because games have such a powerful...
There are like suicide I mean their cases of kids who have killed themselves when their parents Turn off the game those kids would have killed themselves over anything I, I think, I think it is likely related to, it's the same thing when you take someone off an antidepressant and the brain is no longer having that, it's like, you lose your ability to imagine, to feel positive.
I've done some work with some rehabilitation centers, recovery centers for addiction, where they're starting to be more aware of this, the new sense of what addiction is.
But if people are interested, the book that just came out this year about that, The Biology of Desire, does a really good job of explaining it because it's, I mean, it's a pretty provocative argument.
It says that addiction is not a disease.
The brain is functioning absolutely perfectly.
It's just focusing on...
It's like hyper-focusing on one goal.
But if you had that same brain chemistry about running a startup company...
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg was addicted to his startup in the same way that someone can get addicted to a video game or addicted to a substance.
You get hyper-focused on one goal.
It's your only source of pleasure and anticipation of these positive feelings.
And so it's like the intervention for that, you know, if you were to sort of follow the guidelines of how you get people to sort of focus on other goals, is you would just start by asking him, Well, why are you good at making money in this game?
What does it take in terms of skill or commitment or research?
What are you doing?
And start to think about strengths and abilities.
And then when you are thinking about yourself and what you're good at and what you're capable of, it kind of takes you out of you own it.
It's not the game.
The game isn't making you.
It's your own skills and abilities.
And that seems to be, if you look at the scientific literature, just talking about what you own and what is a result of your skills and abilities, that that helps you broaden that.
Well, I figured it out from trial and error over a long life of addiction.
I grew up being addicted to a bunch of different things.
At first it was art.
And then it became martial arts.
And then as I got older, it became stand-up comedy.
And it became pool.
I had a real problem with pool to a point where my manager thought it was ruining my career.
I was playing eight, ten hours a day.
I was playing in tournaments.
All I wanted to do was play pool.
I would go do my comedy sets, and then I'd go play pool until three, four o'clock in the morning.
And then I would get up in the morning and go work out.
I'd go, you know, go do my comedy and do the same thing every night.
But all I was thinking about was the game.
I was thinking about, like, knocking the balls into the whole, like, the dopamine effect or whatever it is of winning or of being successful, of running out the table, of having the ball do what you want it to do.
And because it's so difficult, the reward is so much, like, anything that's really, like, if you play a game, it's really easy.
Like, When you win, it doesn't mean anything.
But when you play a game that's really hard to do, that reward is so fucking exciting.
Because I just needed that rush until it got pretty chronic and then I had to take a long stretch off and really let it heal up but it It gave me that perspective.
It feels like, I mean, just hearing you say that makes me think really how important it is for people to understand like how this system works so that you can say, look, my brain's telling me to go back and work out now, even though my doctor said don't do it and I can Google and it says stay off it for six weeks.
And to understand your brain is telling you that because it wants a dopamine hit.
If you really want to rehabilitate properly, you need to start doing other things that produce dopamine hits.
And that's, I mean, fantasy sports, for example.
Do get really into that for the season that you're taking off because that's you're making predictions.
Well, I think my brain was wired with martial arts and competing, which is extremely exciting but dangerous and thrilling, and the thrills are so high.
The thrills of competing are just beyond anything that you can ever get from something that's non-physical, non-threatening.
It's high-level problem-solving with dire physical health consequences.
So there's all sorts of craziness involved in it, and the intensity and the focus that you need So you understand that guy on the skateboard really well then, actually.
Oh, yeah, too well.
That's what's scary about it to me.
That could have fucking easily been me when I was 17 or 18 years old.
I understand all that shit.
That's why one of the things that freaks me out most about those people that are tightrope walking and jumping those squirrel suits where they jump off of cliffs and fly around.
But it's like, it's why somebody seems, you don't understand, even if you're dating and you kind of like that person, but they're already, they're down the road, they're in love, they are addicted.
And then your behavior might seem totally crazy to me, because I'm not there yet.
And even though I liked you, because you're further along in that process, and that sort of narrowing of attention, I freak out.
Whereas, you know, maybe if I had waited a few more weeks.
I might have been far enough along that it actually doesn't scare me off.
People fall in love at different rates.
It's not that you're a crazy person and I'm a normal person and therefore I shouldn't date you.
It's just the biochemical processes look a little faster for you.
I think there are couples who break up too soon because one of them kind of got further along in the addiction process than the other.
You're just syncing up whatever personality aspects that you have, holes and square pegs and round holes, and everyone's trying to figure out where everything fits in.
There's also a weird thing where we've all had friends that alter who they are when they start dating someone.
But isn't that a biological trick, just to get us to breed?
Like, you stick around long enough to make a baby, and then, you know, fall in love with the baby so that you raise it, so that that baby can go and have a baby.
And the sense of community that you have all sort of is addictive, and it keeps you together, which ensures survival.
Yeah, I mean, you can kind of intellectualize it down to the point where it's no longer enjoyable.
Isn't life itself a trick, in a sense?
Because it's really temporary.
No matter what, you can accumulate all the Audis and beautiful houses and boats you want, but at the end of the day, it's over.
You know, like the sun rises and the sun sets and you got a certain amount of time and that's it.
So you can intellectualize that to the point where you're like, what's the fucking point?
I'm just going to end it now.
And some people do do that.
They almost get to this thing where they can't be in the moment because they don't know how long the moment lasts and the anticipation of the moment ending is just too freaky.
So they're like, fuck this, I'm out.
It's sort of the same thing as my friend who can't play the video game if he's going to lose and he pulls the plug.
I mean, really, there's a lot of the same sort of qualities and characteristics of that kind of thinking.
There's over-intellectualizing or over-analyzing to the point where you can't even enjoy what it is.
You'd be so happy that you're trying to help them because that means you're talking about him.
It's like you're focusing on him.
Aww.
But no, he's alive.
He lives in America.
He's not in Ethiopia living in a grass house.
He's lucky as fuck.
You've got to think, at a certain point in time, that there's levels to happiness and harmony, the harmony that you achieve with the environment that you find yourself in.
And the more The chaos that you create and the more problems that you create just to solve those problems, that energy keeps you from doing something else.
That energy is going to block you from the other pursuits.
So he comes into the dressing room beforehand, and they don't do a pre-show interview because they want you to be kind of off guard and off balance.
And he comes in and he says, you know, have you seen the show?
Okay, I'm going to be in character now.
And I'm going to be really stupid and stubborn and your job is to disabuse me of my stupid and stubborn ideas.
And they said, now let me ask you a question.
Is, you know, is life a game?
And I was like, is this, is he like, is he practicing, you know, is this like, am I, are we practicing some kind of witty rapport for the show or whatever?
So I'm like, I'm trying to go into that mode and I'm like, well, you know, yes, of course it is.
And he's like...
Life is a game.
We spend all our time playing it.
Why are we so bad at it?
And I'm like, I'm like totally thrown off.
I'm like, is he being like philosophical?
I don't like...
Anyway, it turned out he was actually being quite philosophical.
Well, it's a complicated game and there's no instruction book.
That's why we're so bad at it.
I mean, it's not everybody's bad at it.
You can run into people who go, wow, this person is a really cool game going on.
But it is just a game.
Essentially, the problem is that...
There's loaded words, like the word addiction is a loaded word.
It's a loaded term.
I think the word game is a loaded term, too.
It's a complicated series of events that you're trying to manage.
And you're trying to manage risk and reward and benefit and the positive and negative aspects of behavior.
Essentially, it's exactly the same as a game.
They're completely indistinguishable.
It's one of them is just open-ended and There's you know, there's no clear pathway It's a game that literally you're standing in the middle of the universe BAM and especially in 2015 if you have the means you can get on a plane and go to another part of the game You know,
you can just hop on a plane and you know, we were talking before this podcast started about the Radiolab podcast that's out today and About that guy who was on my podcast Cory Nolton who shot that Rhino like that's a guy who took the game and decided to go to a fucking place He totally doesn't belong or is never you know never is not born there or whatever not and shouldn't say doesn't belong but a completely different area of the game and He's doing something over there and everybody over in this part of the game is like what the
fuck are you doing?
Over there like some guy who gets on a boat and decides to sail across the world They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?
Well, he decided that he's going to go to a different part of the board and he's going to get in a boat and he's going to drink rainwater and try to catch fish and travel across the fucking ocean.
Because if you run, like I have my friend Cameron, Cameron Haynes, he's run two ultra marathons.
He'll, you know, post about it on his Instagram, or he'll show you his time or something like that.
But he's trying, like, he's an athlete, and he's sponsored by a bunch of companies, and part of his gig is that he inspires people, and he really feels good about that.
It's a genuine thing that he does.
Takes people running up these mountains.
But you see these people that, like, bitch about it, like...
This guy's run 100 miles in 24 hours.
If that's not impressive, then you need to go look in the mirror and find out what the fuck actually impresses you.
There's a lot of people who, when someone will accomplish something, I'm fascinated by watching the observers.
And the Instagram observers are the most fascinating, because whenever I go to someone's page and someone's done something cool, like my friend Cameron running 100 miles, I'll look at the negative comments, and I go to their Instagram page, and they're almost It's always blocked.
It's always private.
Like, locked.
Like, you have to be one of their accepted friends in order to comment on their pictures.
Which means they don't understand the vulnerability involved.
Like, if you had the experience of having other people write on your stuff the same way that you were doing on someone else, you might not be doing that.
If life is this really super complex, open-ended game where essentially...
If you live in a free culture like we do, you know, we're not living in North Korea where you're assigned a job and if you don't cry when something happens, you know, you go to jail, your game is essentially open-ended.
That's one of the reasons why when people get out of jail, they find themselves like institutionalized is the word, but they find themselves so trapped in the game of jail that that's how their brain is wired.
It's really extremely difficult for them to deal with the open-ended game of life.
I mean, even for, you see it with, when someone graduates college, kids who have been from the top colleges who have been taught to play the game of achieving and achieving in this really rigid structure, and then they get out into the world and nobody's telling them, Here are the things you have to do to be considered a good student or be successful.
Well, it's interesting because I've been so steeped in It's psychology literature, and a lot of the folks who play Superbetter are traumatized, and they've been through PTSD. And it is absolutely true that avoiding triggers prolongs the problem.
I mean, I can look at the scientific literature and say trigger warnings are actually They're not going to help.
They're going to make you weaker over time.
It's like we were talking about, you know, oh, I'm so scared of the bad guy.
I have to avoid everything that is a trigger.
We know that that's not true.
So when I hear about that, I wish, and I try to talk to people.
When that article came out, I tweeted about, and I have a lot of people who follow me who are, you know, have PTSD, and they're very conflicted about whether they're supposed to avoid triggers and they like trigger warnings because they think it's going to keep them Safe, but everything we know is that you need to get better at controlling your reaction to the trigger.
It's their controlling behavior in such an extreme way that they want to penalize people for microaggressions.
Which is like, you say something and I go, alright.
Which is just a part of a fucking human interaction with you.
Like, if I say something to you and you give me a sarcastic response, I have to decide, you know what?
I don't enjoy communicating with her because she makes me feel bad.
Or I have to say maybe I'm fucking douchey and maybe people react to me in a negative way and I should think about not what I want to say or how I want to say things but rather how people might view what I'm saying and how they take it in and maybe I'm just an ineffective communicator and maybe what's going on here is just you know there's there's like two people playing soccer okay they're both trying to hit the ball and they collide into each other whose fault is it it's well they're both it's just non-smooth movement yep And that sort of interaction
that you would get when you're trying to hit a soccer ball, it's very similar to the interaction that you have when two people are communicating with each other.
The colliding people, one person is not necessarily totally responsible for that collision.
They're both sort of responsible for it, and there's a whole dance going on.
Poor decision making in the moment and lack of experience and collisions and lack of an understanding of the consequences of those collisions.
All that is a part of going to college.
All that is a part of growing up.
And when you have people that are shielding you from microaggressions, All that shit is just a part of being a human and dealing with your hormones and emotions and you're separated from your family for the first time and now you're in Michigan and some fucking crazy university and you got some fat stupid teacher that's never even existed outside the real world and they're dictating your behavior patterns and telling you you're not allowed to use male and female pronouns anymore.
Like, friends who are professors are totally weirded out by it, don't know how to handle it.
They're not creating that culture.
I mean, it's definitely something coming from the students who have been raised...
In this culture of, you know, I mean, it's a very protective culture, and nobody should have their feelings hurt, and nobody should experience failure or rejection.
I mean, I feel like it's more from that culture than from anything related to contemporary academia or the faculty.
I think the reason why a student culture would have so much impact on this is because universities are now like business models and the customer is always right.
I mean, that's not...
The professor is not the one who is...
The professors more often than not resist.
It's really more at the level of the business side of the college that is trying to make this a good customer experience for the student.
I mean, I think that is more of the divide.
I don't think the political affiliations of faculty is not...
I mean, none of that is really what's going on.
It's really more about the Students pay so much money for college now and they expect lots of perks and they expect they're paying for a certain experience.
I think that is really where you're seeing a lot of the friction come because this particular younger generation seems to be, if you look at what a lot of the experts are saying, they don't want the things that feel painful or feel like failure or feel like stress.
And do you think that happens a lot because of what we talked about earlier where there's the interaction of just dealing in text is very strange and the interaction without people being right there with each other?
And I mean, I don't use the terminology microaggressions.
I don't use the trigger warning terminology.
So I think we're like in this period where on one hand, things do need to change in some ways.
You know, you have Nobel laureate scientists giving speeches where they say that it's He doesn't like to have women in the lab because either they fall in love with you or you fall in love with them and then you can't work together.
When a Nobel laureate says that to a conference of young scientists, that's not helpful, I don't think.
So this is actually a perfect example, because if he was joking, right, so his intentions are totally good, is it possible that it's still not helpful to make that kind of a statement?
I think that's what people are talking about, right?
If on one hand there's a lot of interest in trying to increase the number of women in science and technology, is it possible that somebody would hear that?
And still be kind of demotivated by it or kind of have that sink in.
So I think people are, when we're discussing these things, you don't have to police other people's language, but I still think it's useful to say that might not be helpful.
Yeah, there's an article in the leaked transcript.
What happened was, the people that saw it, at least some of them, thought it was funny.
But there were aspects of what he said that were probably clumsy, or clunky, or, you know, he was trying to be funny, and he's really just sort of an odd guy who's a scientist.
And people decided that this is an awesome target.
Yeah, but he's joking, playing on stereotypes that girls cry and girls can't handle criticism.
I'm not going to say that...
I think it's totally fine to say, hey, when you say these things, it might result in some girl thinking, wait, maybe I'm not going to be a good scientist because people say that girls aren't good in the lab or whatever.
I wouldn't say it.
I wouldn't say it.
I try to be, you know, even when we say things like about people who play games a lot, you know, they're wasting their lives, you know, why don't you go out and do something real?
Well, I think any time you generalize, you know, men do this and women do that and girls aren't good at being in the lab and it's damaging.
And I think now he understands that a joke like that, as innocent as he might have intended it to be, when you're reading it in a text form, especially, and you're taking some of it out of context, it can be...
It can be offensive.
It can be hurtful for someone who's considering...
How many girls were reading that that were considering a possible career in science and went, I don't have to deal with fucking people like this.
Well, it does sort of expose, in some ways, it exposes Prevalent attitudes that this guy who is this esteemed Nobel-winning scientist has this attitude You know that he thinks it's funny to joke around about it Like even if he's not a sexist or a bad guy him making this joke about himself being some chauvinist monster Yeah,
and it's because one of the things is because his wife is a prominent feminist And so he jokes around about him being a chauvinist monster.
Yeah, you know, that makes sense Yeah, I mean that's it's all out of context and it's all also you're dealing with a guy whose whose real focus is his research not social interaction.
He's not like a nuanced speaker.
He's not a guy who is a carefully considered Speaker who gets on stage and thinks about everything and the impact of all...
I mean, we were talking about the awkward interaction that people might have in college.
Well, this guy's awkward interaction is him being forced to write a speech.
If he did this a bunch of times, he'd probably get really way better at it.
If you sat down with him alone and you guys were just talking over a glass of wine, maybe you'd understand how his brain works better.
Recreational outrage is without a doubt a real thing right now.
And I think that that's what's going on in colleges and that people are finding...
When you're in college, it's like when you were talking about the addiction that people have to video games, and one of the things that sort of stimulates that addiction is if you're trying to avoid things in your regular life.
Well, if you are in college, the overwhelming anxiety of being a young person who has gone from living with her parents, going to high school, now you're in college, and you're just a couple years away from the cliff of real world.
Like, you're fucking sliding towards it, and you're trying to define it and redefine it and change it and establish yourself.
And then along the way comes things that you can be angry at.
Well, you will point your fucking fury.
There are really unmeasured or unbalanced fury at those things where it doesn't necessarily make sense.
But it makes sense to you because what you're really doing is you're avoiding the angst of social anxiety, of sexual rejection and all the all the shit that makes a person feel weird things.
And you channel that towards microaggressions or you channel that towards someone, you know, deciding to address you with a male or a female pronoun.
But it doesn't mean, as a game designer would say, it doesn't mean that there isn't a better game that actually could have different rules, but it's really upsetting to be in the middle of a game and have somebody say, wait, those aren't the rules.
So, you know, maybe we should...
I don't know.
I don't know how to do it better because, I mean, look, I'm a progressive person and I'm glad that things are changing in society in lots of ways, you know, that I'm excited about.
Well, I'm really glad that we have marriage equality now.
I'm really excited about that.
I'm glad that, I mean, paternity and maternity leave, you know, becoming more people having longer maternity leave and the same length paternity leave for dads.
As a new parent, I'm really excited to see companies doing that.
And I like that we're starting to talk about income inequality.
I mean, optimistic that there will be changes in that direction.
And I think that the Black Lives Matter is a hugely important movement.
So I think there's a lot of conversations going on right now Where people are angry or have struggled or feel like they've been playing a rigged game.
And so it's not going to be pleasant.
And not all the tactics are going to be effective or good either.
One of the big instances I had was about my recommendations for playing Tetris after a trauma.
So there have been multiple randomized control studies now out of Oxford University showing that if you play Tetris within 24 hours of a traumatic event, it will reduce the flashbacks you have, the severity of flashbacks and other PTSD symptoms because it It occupies your brain and prevents your brain from kind of locking in in an obsessive-compulsive way on the trauma, right?
So I think this is incredibly important advice that everyone should know, kind of like stop, drop, and roll.
You know, if you catch on fire, you know what to do.
Everybody should have Tetris on their phone and have it available to them.
Because I know, having suffered flashbacks from my own head injury, how...
I mean, I would have nightmares and be...
Of which I was hitting my head and I would feel it as if for real and I'd wake up and I'd be convinced that I had hit my head in the middle of the night and was going to have this experience all over again.
Just nightmares constantly.
So I know how bad it's going to be.
I want people to do it.
When I started tweeting about it, People...
I got told that there needed to be like trigger warnings on my tweets because I was mentioning PTSD and I might make somebody think about like a trauma that they'd experienced and...
So you're uncomfortable with being unjustly accused of being insensitive when you're bringing out the scientific research that shows that a game can help you with trauma.
I think that all irrational behavior like that should either be ignored or shit on.
I really do.
I just think it's dangerous.
I think it's dangerous when it gets pointed out.
You're pointing out the scientific aspects of a very specific activity that's very good for trauma, and they're saying that you shouldn't talk about this.
You should ignore them or shit on them, depending on how you feel.
But I think that there's definitely...
I like how we're defining life as a giant game or as equal to a giant game.
Because I think that that's what's going on also with the reaction, the negative reaction to progressive thinking now.
I was tweeting something about...
This woman in Kentucky that was trying to stop people from getting gay marriage licenses.
I took a few days where I wasn't paying attention to Twitter that much, and I didn't know that there was this giant movement supporting this woman.
And I went to Mike Huckabee's fucking Twitter page and saw that this Crazy old asshole was, like, saying that there's a war against Christians and that, like, hashtag religious liberty.
And so I was like, that doesn't have...
Religious liberty doesn't mean you enforce your religion on other people.
That's so crazy.
And there was so much I got so many people tweeting at me angrily tweeting at me for saying like and I tweeted something about Ted Cruz about how Ridiculous his views are on gay marriage and like that He's probably gay and I'm like if you listen to the way that guy talks He's super feminine like this like how many times we have to see this where these men I have a bit that I used to do my act.
There's two types of people that hate gay marriage It's either you're really dumb or you're secretly worried that dicks are delicious.
Those are the people.
And this guy is like, there's something going on here.
Why does he care so much about two people that are in love, but watching the people that are angry that the game is being redefined.
And there was all this Christian stuff that was attached to it.
Like, guess what else it says not to do in the Bible?
It says not to get divorced.
Like, this lady, this same lady, has been divorced three times.
She's on her fourth marriage.
Guess what else it says?
You're not supposed to have tattoos, okay?
All these people are tattooed with religious symbols on them.
You've got a cross on your arm, and you tattooed it?
You've got to read the whole book!
This is crazy!
Like, the things that they choose and what it is is they're trying to define the world that they're playing in.
And I think it's important because even though I might disagree, I mean, I vehemently disagree with people whose perspectives seem to be fueled by hate.
But I think it's important to still try to have the empathy or the mental insight to understand why does this make them feel so bad?
I think what you just said, the feeling that you thought you understood the rules.
I mean, religion is a set of rules.
You thought you understood it.
You're playing the game right.
You're doing it right.
And it is psychologically distressing.
To have somebody else tell you, we're playing a different game.
You know, your game sucks.
And you're not gonna be able to play it anymore.
I try to understand where those feelings are coming from because if you're gonna change people's minds, you know, you have to...
I think you have to acknowledge that they are in a real...
They are really in distress about this.
You know, they're not doing this just to be jerks.
The overall looking at the whole existence as, instead of defining it by the word game, but looking at it with almost the same sort of attitude or approach that you would look at a game is very beneficial.
Yeah, I think also like the ebb and flow of culture, like the things that seem to definitely, even though I resist like this nonsense about microaggressions and trigger warnings and stuff like that, I'm very happy that things are moving in the direction of acceptance.
Very happy that you can be whatever the fuck you want.
You decide you're a woman today, go ahead.
As long as you don't hurt anybody, who cares?
This guy wants to wear dresses and he wants you to call him Jane now.
Fine.
Okay.
You know, these two guys want to get married to each other.
Terrific.
You know, these two people want to stop wearing makeup and they want to...
What do you give a shit?
Who cares?
Who cares?
Or they want to dye their hair blue.
That's fine too.
Eventually, we'll all figure out that we are all just unique individuals that are a part of this gigantic superorganism.
And the most conducive way or the most harmonic way Harmonious way for us to interact with each other is to fuck with each other's path the least Whatever path you're on your way in your game as long as it doesn't like negatively affect people As long as you're not a destroyer, you're not out there Your path is to burn down other people's houses.
Your path is to steal your path is to to hurt people as long as that's not going on Why care?
And then, ultimately, once that is established, I think then we will focus on, okay, well, what are our real issues?
Our real issues aren't gay people getting married to each other.
Our real issues are the people that actually are burning houses down.
I think that's also something you realize once you have children, like you have now.
And as...
Father one of the things has changed radically in my life is Seeing people now like when I meet people I see them as babies that have grown up Like I don't see them as in being in a static state, you know,
and it's it's very strange like even assholes that I mean I'd look at them and even go that guy's a fucking asshole I think of them as like what happened to that person and I practice Zen Buddhism and that's one of the big Buddhist meditations is to picture people as babies.
When you feel hate for somebody, try to visualize them all the way down to their little baby self and picture what they look like as a baby and to think about who they were when they were that baby before all of life happened to them to make them into somebody that has now triggered these You know, hate feelings of anger.
You know, I was talking to Michael Irvin, who's a famous pro football player, who's talking to me about kids that grow up in horrible environments, dangerous, volatile environments, where the mother has all this cortisol in her brain while the child's in the womb, and the kid literally grows up, like, with a short temper.
They literally, they're developed out of the womb, like, constantly worried about stress and danger.
I had a cat that was feral that I raised, and he was fucking terrified of everything from the time he was a baby.
And I locked myself in a room with him when he was a kitten because it was the only way to bond with him.
I stayed with him.
I just put a bunch of books in the room and cat food and a litter box.
I'm like, you and me, dude, we're hanging out.
And when I come near him, he'd be like...
He'd just jump on the walls.
You've never seen anything like a feral kitten.
I mean, he was really little, too.
Just a couple months old.
But when I would get to him and pick him up, he would start purring.
Like, finally somebody loves me.
But then when you put him down...
The same cat, because his brain was programmed from the time he was a little baby, and there was not a lot he could do.
I couldn't say, that cat's an asshole.
Well, no, that fucking cat was born under an apartment building, and his mom was running away from traffic and trying to eat rats or whatever the fuck they could kill.
Well, I think this is one of the reasons why game thinking is so powerful because you just zoom out and see the bigger structure.
There's always a bigger game and more pieces in play and you're getting other people's, you know, strategies or actions or, you know...
Or the rules, you know.
And being able to zoom out and see that makes you feel, I think, will you have more perspective, more wisdom, and maybe more compassion for other people.
Small, little environments, insulated environments that are very...
You know, very criticizing or very, you know, just have their way set, and they don't have a wide variety of experiences they can draw upon, or they don't have a broad, nuanced view of the board that they're playing on.
I think also as time is going on and This is one thing that the positive aspects of social media and of the internet itself is that we're getting more and more information instead of just Accepting these preconceived notions that we have about different groups of people now.
We're being exposed to so much data.
It's just inadvertently or inarguably changing the way we view those groups Yeah.
Very openly talked about the institutionalized racism and about how they had found papers from the 1970s that were describing how to behave in certain environments that were exactly the same as what's going on now.
It's like this is a fucking system.
Yes, it's a system.
That's right.
I don't think that attitude existed just a few years ago.
I think people are looking at all that data now, and they go, it's slowly coming around.
And even the hardliners are dropping, you know, if they were at a 10, now they're at an 8 or a 7. Well, fucking kids, you need to go to school or something.
You know, it's like everyone is sort of slowly recognizing the pieces that are in play.
It's a lot more complicated than we want to, you know, just narrowly sort of define them in these...
These really simplistic terms, where it's not simple.
There's a series of interactions that are going on all over the globe, where human beings are trying to find their way.
And they're also realizing, somewhere along the line, that their parents weren't these all-knowing creatures, neither were their parents, neither were the President Roosevelt or fucking Abe Lincoln, they were all people that were trying to find their way as well, and this is a group effort.
It's a group effort that's still going on, and it's not even remotely done.