Jessica Murrey won a Regional Emmy at 24 for an anti-child abuse campaign, then spent seven years training young activists and former extremists in countries recovering from genocide and civil war: Myanmar, Burundi, Nigeria, Colombia. She came home asking: how do you scale this?

The answer was a video game.

Jessica co-founded Wicked Saints Studios with a behavioral scientist and a former senior Pokémon GO engineer. They raised $5M+ from Riot Games, Precursor Ventures, and Reid Hoffman, putting Jessica among fewer than 100 Black women in history to cross the $1M venture threshold. Their game, World Reborn, runs on one mechanic no other game uses: you can't buy progress. You earn it by doing real things in the real world. Brands like e.l.f. Beauty and Discord are integrated not as ads, but as quests. In an industry where brand click-through rates average under 1%, World Reborn is hitting 31%.

In this episode:

• Why peacebuilding in conflict zones and mobile gaming for Gen Z are solving the same problem
• What the "Tattoo Method" is and why it works when traditional behavior change doesn't
• The fundraising reality of being a Black woman founder (0.3% of VC went to Black women in 2023)
• How World Reborn broke the brand ROI model that's stumped the rest of the gaming industry
• The question about startup culture she never gets asked: does "more money and more power" actually make your life better?
• A three-step conflict framework from the warzones, built for co-founder disputes, fractured teams, and difficult investors

One of the most unusual founder backgrounds Joshua has ever encountered on this show. Worth every minute.

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