Factually! with Adam Conover - How to Beat the Gamification of Our Lives with C. Thi Nguyen

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

The scoring mechanics of video games are ostensibly how the player is directed to have fun. Scores put interesting bounds on the experience of play, lead to creative solutions, and even inspire entirely new models of play, like speed running a video game. But when systems of metrics are applied to our actual lives, it’s… not as nice. “Gamification” is just one symptom of our society’s obsession with metrics, and while we tend to like to see Number Go Up, attempting to maximize our “scores” in various aspects of life only seems to make us unhappy. This week, Adam talks with C. Thi Nguyen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game. Together they unpack the hidden ways that metrics are used to control thought and limit perception of worth, and the life-affirming value of looking beyond the systems assembled around us. Find Thi's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. The episode you're about to hear is one of my favorite episodes of this show in a very long time, partially because of our guest and the way this episode ended, but also because it's just about one of my favorite topics, games. So let's get into it.

You know, we're all familiar with the score in a video game. That number quantifies and directs you based on how. you behave in the game. And it ends up shaping your interactions with the world of the game, right? For instance, think of the score at the end of Mario, right? That tells you how many Gumbas you jumped on, how high you got on the flagpole, right? But there are other ways to score the game. You could also speed run Mario, where the object of the game ostensibly is not to complete

as quickly as possible. But because you can see your time on the screen, it created an entirely new way to compete. So one of the cool things about how a video game is scored is that you can kind of choose your score to some extent, right? Some scores want you to go faster. Some want you to smash more things. You know, and I'm a sucker for the interesting behaviors that score chasing can cause you to pursue. I got so into improving my Tetris score that to get an S ranking on Tetris effect, which, by the way, is, I think, one of the best video games ever made. I briefly considered hiring a Tetris coach just because I was like, I want to learn to play the piano?

I don't know. I want to learn to play Tetris. These are equal pursuits in my mind. That's how into it I was. So a score in a game can help direct you. It can help you find entirely new ways to play. It can even make the very experience more rich and satisfying. But these same types of scores have recently started infesting our normal lives in our everyday reality. And in that context, they kind of suck. They can even constrain or distort our own values for why we do what we do. Think of how a simple score like a calorie count or a step count can become an obsession that distracts you from the actual goal of improving your health. Or think about how YouTube gives a creator like me hundreds of metrics to look at how my videos are performing, even though none of those numbers can actually tell me how funny the video was or how much you got out of it or how good it was as a piece of art. I'll give you an example for my own life.

Last year, I actually found myself changing what I was listening. to on Apple Music in order to get one artist or genre to show up higher on my end of the year recap. That is not music appreciation. It's metric distortion. So how is it that metrics or scores in our daily lives flatten the experience and often harm us, but in games they enrich the experience and help us? Well, to talk about this, we have a return appearance from one of my favorite guests that we have ever had on this show. His name is C. T. Nguyen, and he's a philosopher who thinks and writes about games.

He's a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and his new book is called The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. This is an absolutely incredible interview. I'm really not overstating it. I know you're going to love it. Before we get to it, I want to remind you that if you want to support the show and all the conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com. slash Adam Con, over five bucks a month, gets you every single episode of this show ad-free.

You can also join our online community. We would love to have you there. And if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy, coming up soon, I'm going to be in Houston, Texas, San Francisco, California, Sacramento, California, La Jolla, California, Kansas City. And on April 18th, I am recording my new stand-up special at the Den Theater in Chicago. I know we previously said I was taping it in San Francisco. we had to move it because of production concerns. We're now taping it April 18th at the Den in Chicago. I hope to see you there.

It's going to be an incredible night. Head to Adamconover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. And now let's get to this week's interview with the incredible C.T. Win. T. Thank you so much for being back on the show, man. I'm so excited to have you. I am so excited to be here. You know, I, when I was writing the book, you know, sometimes you put like an ideal audience in your head and one of them because of the last time

I was on here the kind of your reaction to all this stuff like you were in my head as one of the people that might someday read it and react so I'm excited to see what you'll think god that's that's like so intensely flattering I mean we've had past guests on before where we vibed but but not quite like this this is something a little new for me It's special, you know. I mean, the book is just out. I have not yet had a chance to read it. I'm really excited to read it.

As you know, I love thinking about games and I studied philosophy and I'm interested in how modern technology is controlling and perverting our behavior. And this book is about all these things together. So what's your essential thesis? Is that a good place to start or if you have one? Maybe I think a better place is the question, like where this came from. What a fucking philosopher answer of like, No, not the thesis. But let us, let us begin with the question.

And you know what? That's all we're going to get probably because we're talking to a philosopher. But that will be great. We'll explore it. I've got an answer, but the answer is weird and complicated. But the question, I mean, I don't know. I feel like part of the weird aesthetic of philosophy is that I care about a beautiful question more than I care about an answer. Like the question is the most interesting thing.

And maybe that's kind of related to like why. If you think, I don't know, the joy of intellectual explorers, is not just about having answers, about richness and interestingness of exploration. You might care more about questions than answers. You know, that's actually a really good point. I'd love to dwell on for one second

because sometimes I get frustrated in arguments because someone will come and they'll say like, Adam, do you think like we're trapped within a simulation? And I'm like, I don't want to talk about that. And they're like, no, do you think we are or not? And I'm like, no, no, no. The question is boring. I have no interest in it.

It's dull. Let's ask something more interesting. And that's sort of a philosopher's response that a lot of people are not used to, but it gets you to a much more interesting conversation. Okay. Here's the question. So last time I was here, we talked about my first book. And my first book was all about how games are these beautiful ways to explore new agencies and new selves in the center is the scoring system. I mean, I think we talked a lot about, you know, Reiner Kinitzia and his claim that, you know, the scoring system is the most important part of game design because it tells people what to care about. And when I wrote that book, it was like super optimistic. Like games are these beautiful, playful things. And scoring systems are like a gateway to like joy and exploration.

And then I started writing about metrics. I started writing about Facebook likes. And I had a bunch of work about something I was calling value capture. So value capture is what happens when your values are kind of rich and subtle and open, and you get put in an institutional setting or a technology next to a technology with a simplified, typically quantified version of that value. And then it takes over, right? You start to care about likes and retweets more than communication. You start to care about page views or subscribers more than like rich content. Right. So, and then I had this whole set of articles I'd written about how metrics, because they were so clear and simple, drained the joy and drain the meaning

and missed what was important and valuable from so many rich parts of human life. And then I realized I had two things that completely disagreed. But half of the stuff was about how clear scoring systems because of their clarity was a gateway to freedom and play and finding the weird part of life

that actually appealed to you. And half the stuff I'd written was about how clear simple scoring systems missed everything that was important and drain the value out of things. And the book is an attempt to answer the question of why scoring systems, in some contexts, inspire some of the most joyous, fluid,

storytelling, play, interestingness, and why in other contexts, they're like the defining feature that sucks importance and sensitivity out of everything. That's the question of the book. Okay, so I was going to ask you to give me an example of the first one where scoring creates play. But I'm sort of imagining, I really love the game, Tetris, incredibly simple game, elegant game, score-based game, the amount of complexity and skill that have come out of that simple scoring system.

People doing incredible things, people competing in new ways, you know, almost manipulating the hardware that the game came on in the case of the original NES Tetris. That all comes out of the simple scoring system. Is that sort of what you mean? Yeah, like the scoring system, I mean, game designers. I mean, some people say that game designers create worlds, and I think that's not sufficient to describe the awesome power of game designers, because they also tell you who to be. And that goal specification is what you care about.

Like in rock climbing, my desire is to go up using nothing but my hands and my feet. So one of the most interesting games, I talked about this in the beginning of the book, is a simple game called The Mind, the Mind. You've got to play The Mind. The mind is a cooperative game, which I normally hate. It's a card game. Three or four players playing together. The game has cards labeled one to a hundred.

You randomly, in level one, you randomly deal out one random card to each person. And then your goal is to play them in sequence in order with one limitation. You cannot speak, signal, express. You have to do it all basically through telepathy. and then you do it. It turns out the way you do it is you co-develop the sense of timing with everybody else. You start feeling how long, if you've got a 20 and someone plays a 5, how long do you need to wait? If someone has an in-between card to let them play it, how long.

And you develop the sense of like shared timing together. And that experience, which is beautiful and specific, in which I never would have had without this game, is there because of the simple constraint and the simple goal. Like that sculpts. And in games, we get to like jump between these completely different experiences of life, partially because the scoring system orientes us towards such different things. That's really beautiful.

Like you're, because the numbers are not sequential that you might have. So you don't, you play a 16. You don't know if someone has a 17. Right. So the way the game works is like, level one,

everyone gets one card out of a deck of 100. Level two, everyone gets two cards. And so you're sitting there with four people and you've got a two and you've got a 60. And someone plays a one. You quickly play your two. Someone else plays a 20. Someone plays a 30. You're sitting there with your 60.

And now you start to wait. If someone has a 40, maybe they should play it. But if you wait too long, someone might play a card above you. And so you have to feel out timing. And the experience of the mind is I asked my students what it was about when I made them play it. And they said it was about, like, intimacy. It was about, like, beginning to feel how time trickled through each other's heads. And that's an experience you don't get, except in this weird-ass game.

Yeah. I love that the name of the game is the mind because it puts me in mind of the phrase that we use in comedy in, like, improv circles, is group mind. You know, that you, when you bring people together and you have them focused on a common task that requires. that requires improvisation of some sort, everyone starts attuning themselves to each other and you end up with this sort of group consciousness in this group way of being. Another other examples of this

are the way a basketball team works or the way a jazz trio or quartet might work. One of my students, when we played this game, literally said, the closest I've had this experience was learning to play jazz with a group, except tuning in there took six months. And this game, because it's so simple,

gets you to tune in like 10 minutes to that same sense of timing. Super interesting. The score and the rules and the constraints help you focus very specifically on this one experience. I mean, because there's so many other things happening in jazz as well. There's music and there's intonation, there's timing. But it helps you focus on just that one thing.

So you could almost use that as it. You could use that in like a jazz class and be like, guys, this is what we're going to do, is what we're going to build our way to with the saxophone. I mean, I do think that games are like, So the philosopher John Dewey says that art is taking a part of normal life and concentrating it and crystallizing it and extracting some kind of purified unity out of it. And I think like, like, I mean, for me, like, I kind of like packing too much luggage into a car. And I don't get to do that often.

But Tetris crystallizes that experience. And I really think that a lot of this stuff, uh, that the mind crystallizes this kind of group experience. I mean, bringing up improv is really interesting. I mean, maybe we're too deep in the tech geeky details now. But for me, a lot of the most interesting game design going on and some of the most interesting scoring system design, if you want to talk about beautiful, expansive scoring system,

is from indie tabletop roleplaying. Yeah. And this world is a world where Dungeons and Dragons players collided with people from improv theater. improv comedy. Yeah. And a lot of these systems are built to formalize yes and to push it into a formal system. So have you played any of this stuff like Apocalypse World? No, I wish.

I'm aware of it, but I've never had sort of the friend group of people who want to do this. And I've never been the guy who's going to say, hey, guys, let me, let me beat the game master, you know, so, yeah. I am dying sometime in some world. I will GMU through this game. Please. And here's the interesting thing. So if you know a regular D&D works,

there's a group of people who made these indie tabletop role-playing games that broke away because they were, they said that the experience they wanted, they weren't getting from D&D. And a lot of them started thinking about it and realized that the scoring systems of D&D were oriented towards killing and shopping. Like it hyper-focused on the mechanics of those experiences, right?

There's a kill-lute shop cycle. And they started trying to break it. And some of the interesting, So there's a bunch of systems that have rules like, so fate is a system where you get fate points by generating trouble for yourself and your fellow players acting out of your character. And then you spend those points to get bonuses on those same character attributes. There are other games like John Harper games where you refresh your like health points by inventing shared. backstory. And just think like, I mean, there's another, Apocalypse

World has this incredible system where you're, your, one of your different characters have different skills and the skills when you roll well on them give you different question sets. And one character, for example, if you roll well on this skill, you get to, for another player character or non-player character, pick from the following list. What was your lowest moment in life or for what do you desire forgiveness and from whom? So, and the way the rules work, and this is the yes and end part is that when I'm the GM of such a game and one of my players ask that question, I'm not allowed to say, oh, the person has no low point.

Oh, the person has no guilt. I have to make it up. Yeah. And that's a way that the game builds in yes and structurally, formally, via scoring systems and constraints and opportunities. And that's, I mean, I think there's, if you want the best example of how very strict scoring systems rules and mechanics like explode interestingness and bring fluidity into the world, it's that stuff.

Yeah, that's almost the soul of good game design is finding a simple mechanic that creates complex, emergent, interesting novel behaviors in people that, that create that sort of, that that vortex, that whirlpool, that world unto itself. That's beautiful. I mean, the interesting thing here for me is, like, I think the reason people have misunderstood game designers as artists is because they're looking in the wrong place. I mean, we talked about this last time, right?

Like, I mean, I think I understand it better now. Last time what I was saying was like, I got really mad by all these people of trying to praise games by pointing at the cutscenes, the cinematography and the fixed script in the cutscenes, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's not. Make a movie.

if you want to make a movie. That's a movie. That's a movie. And I think it's really easy to use the language of movies to describe it because we have that language. But the game designer is doing something really importantly one step back. So I think a lot of the arts that are really familiar to us like theater or novels or movies. The artist makes a thing and then the beauty is in the thing. It's like outside of us. And the game designer is doing something one step back. They're creating conditions that get us to act. and then they kind of guide us towards beauty. They shove us towards being funny or being thrilling or being creative, but they can't push us all the way there. They can't fix it because that's not the point of games. The point of games is that they create a structure and then they leave an open space and then we fill it. And the interesting thing about games is when I'm rock climbing

and I move beautifully, that beauty is mine. When I'm in a tabletop role playing game and I tell a brilliant story. That story is mine. and I made it up. But also, the game designer created the situation that makes it so much more likely and guides me there. And that's hard. I have the best example of this, which is the game Cards Against Humanity. And every comedian I know hates the game Cards Against Humanity.

We don't want to play it. We find it annoying. And what we say to each other is like, this is a game that was designed for people who aren't funny and it lets them be funny. And that's why the game is popular. and the people who in my life who love cards against humanity the most are the people who are the least funny. But, and I would say that derisively, the way you put it, that's a beautiful thing because they actually do get the experience of being funny

via the game, you know, by putting the card down at the right moment in the context of what the other person played. And that is the soul of telling a joke. The constraint helped them get there when they might not have had the natural ability that others do. Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things I think about tabletop role playing, is you could also get to a similar. So I can't tell stories improvisationally

without a tabletop roll-blink system. I'm sure that people that did 20 years of improv long-form theater training could do it without that system. But I don't have that. But I can dial up one of these games and that formal structure can get me there and I can take people that have never done theater,

pull up this rule set, and suddenly they're inventing wild improvisational emergent stories. This reminds me of something. Okay, I'd have thought a while ago. This is one of the thoughts that I put in the book specifically for a few people, one of whom is you. Okay. Oh, I was.

I can't wait. Okay. I was on a podcast. It was like a fancy podcast. And it was like a very nice but very artsy New York person. And they were like very like ha ha about games. Like, oh, it's so cute that this philosopher is doing work about games. Like you have some theories, but surely it won't be real art.

And I was trying to talk through it. And then I said something. And I didn't have this thought before. And it was like, you know, I've just realized that all the arts that we think of as high, movies, fiction, painting, art where you essentially sit on our ass and look at some distant genius, do something that is amazing. But they're distant. And all the art forms where the right to be creative is distributed and encouraged to the whole community. Improv comedy. fan fiction,

Dungeons and Dragons cosplay are called low and geeky. Yeah. And I think that's like, I don't know. Yeah. Our minds have been colonized by the market. Like that stuff is the most beautiful stuff

and yet we've been taught to think like that is what we should be embarrassed about. What an incredibly great point. I mean, even like geeky stuff, comic books and science fiction, those are art forms that have the most fan participation and have fan works and stuff like that. Stand-up comedy has more audience participation

than most other live performance forms of theater. What a fucking great way to put. So, yeah, the high priests of fine art don't want the Hoypoloi to be part of the process of creation. No, you must watch the, you enter the cathedral and you look at what Michelangelo painted for you. You don't participate and do graffiti on the wall. even more cynically, you know, it's hard to marketize the fanfic world.

If everyone's making stuff for each other, right? Small scale and interchanging. It's hard to. You have to convince people that there's a special thing that you've got to get because it's better than all the other things. You're going to buy it. And I don't know. Like even if you think like the best novel, I mean, I think the best novels are probably, you know, the best novels. are probably, you know, the best pieces of fiction we have.

But it's a different thing to be part of a community where you get to be creating it. That's a different value. And I think a lot of what this book has become about is like the degree to which we've been convinced that our own act, our own actions, our own creativity, our own processes are not important. And what's important is these countable, stackable, extractable things.

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that can be a good thing and can lead to beauty and creativity and freedom. The other flip side is how scoring can constrain you and force you to do things you don't want to do, I assume via capitalist systems, most likely. So give me some examples of that. Actually, I want I just to pause because one of the things that really screwed with my head in this book, Bob was recently for this book, it was a book that you should read, seeing like a state by James Scott. Do you know this book? I've heard of this book, yeah.

So one of the things that he does is he's one of the people that really showed me this reading. And he alternates descriptions of globalized capitalisms with descriptions of centralized communisms. And he finds the same problem. And the problem for him, and this is one of the things I've been really convinced by, is a problem of information compression at scale. It's a problem that of institutions and bureaucracies, one of which is capitalisms, which have one distinctive kind of problem,

but which also show up in... So when I was working on this stuff, a lot of the stuff that I found really interesting where you would find the same problem in good-hearted non-profits. And I think... Okay, so, so, so, okay, I'll give you the basis.

So the thing I've been describing is a process I called value capture. Value, do I give you this concept already? Yes, at the top, but you can say it again. Okay, no, that's why. I just couldn't remember whether it's at this time. You've been doing a lot of interviews. I get it, man. I know what it's like.

Everything drift. Yeah. So I was trying to explain what was problematic about value capture. And a lot of people immediately, in my first theory was, oh, it's involuntary. It's being forced on you. Then I realized that couldn't be it because a lot of the, once people found really problematic, like BitBit or Twitter or Duolingo or wholly voluntary, and you often do it because you want to get that point system under your skin.

Right. So the way I started thinking about it was the problem, the problem is not that it's involuntary. The problem is that you're outsourcing your values. The problem is that you're taking values that have been fabricated distantly to fit large-scale industrial processes and you're internalizing them as your own. The problem is that the values that are embedded in metrics have a particular character. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why these things always missed, right? Like, why are education learning outcomes never the same as real learning?

Why are Twitter likes and follows never the same as real communication? And I found an answer that, like, took my mind apart. And it shows up in two places. One is theater reporter, this historian of quantification culture, who is trying to explain why politicians and bureaucrats compulsively reached for quantitative explanations, even when the metric sucked.

And what he said was, he said, okay, there are two ways of knowing about the world, qualitative and quantitative. And they're good at different things. It's not that quantitative is necessarily bad, but they're good at different things. And the problem is when we compulsively reach for the quantitative, even when it's inappropriate.

So what qualitative reasoning is good at is being rich, complicated, dynamic, context-sensitive, but it travels poorly between contexts because it requires a lot of shared background information to understand. So I think of, you know, like what I write in my students' essays. A, you know, it's not going to be understood by someone not in the philosophy department. And B, they don't aggregate well. They don't, like, add up because they're open-ended.

Like, because one person might be talking about rigor and other people might be talking about creativity. They don't blend. So to get around that problem, in institutions, we create quantitative data and we do it. He says by identifying a context invariant nugget, something that's stable between contexts that everyone from different contexts understand and stabilizing it. So like a GPA, right? Everyone means about the same thing as a letter grade, A, B.

That lets the information travel and that lets us aggregate easily. And then he says, the thing that makes it travel well is. is precisely that we've removed any kind of information that requires high context, high sensitivity, or high experience to judge. So the thing that makes it portable is the denouncing decontextualization. And that is embedded in the basic nature of metrics.

So metrics are by definition. Yeah, they're stripping out anything that an individual might know about the situation because that they are physically there in this, in the place that someone, somewhere else might not understand. Like, or,

or background knowledge or, or the person that they are being specific from someone else. Or the, the lived texture of experience. All that stuff is by definitionally stripped away because you're trying to, yeah, condense the information down to, right, a little packet, a one,

a two, a three, something that you can, you know, write on a piece of paper and give to somebody else or send through the internet or et cetera, which you cannot do with a nuanced experience. Yeah. Yes, exactly.

So, I mean, one way to think about it's before Porter, I think it's easy to think, oh, this metric misses what's important. But maybe we could find a metric that really captures what's important. And after Porter, what you think is metrics are really good at targeting things that are easy for everyone to see, like increasing lifespan. But they're intrinsically by design, systematically bad at collecting anything that has high. high lived texture, high context, important experience. And that's actually how they perform their function of crossing contexts and connecting very distant people quickly. Yeah.

And so how does this connect to the idea of metrics driving our behavior in maladaptive ways? So I mean, originally I thought this explanation was an explanation for why metrics were bad. And it wasn't. And we just we just like numbers for some reason. I think it's actually, they drive our behavior because they make us easy to be understood and make it easy for us to justify ourselves to other people. They're ready made instant justification packets. So if I like some weird jank, and I try to explain that to other people, the end of the book, you will see, has me confessing about my newfound addiction to yo-yo. And if you ever want to have people,

give weird looks to you. Be a philosophy professor at a dinner with other academics and try to explain that you're really into yo-yo lately. Honestly, that is what I want for my eccentric academics is for them to be into some sort of strange activity. Yeah, but it's supposed to be fancy. Yeah, yeah. It's supposed to be fancy, yes.

Right. But if you, if you, if you say like, oh, you know, yo-yoing helps me calm down until I get more words written, per day. That's, that's, right? And so there's this loop where the fact, the thing that makes it, the decontextualizing feature makes it instantly comprehensible to other people. And so when you speak in that language, if you align yourself to that language, it's easier for you to justify yourself. And if you believe in that, then you are no longer mysterious to other people, right? Then you can instantly justify your actions to other people. And the only price,

is giving up everything particular and high context out of your values. Wow. Okay. I think I have an example from my own life that I referred to in the intro that what you're describing makes me think of. I think of music listening tracking on streaming services. Like I found myself last year. I've been using Apple music more and more, honestly, over the years.

They recently put in a yearly recap feature. and in 2024, I sort of looked at the future. I was like, oh, that's interesting. I listened to this and that and that and that. I found myself throughout 2025, choosing the music I was going to listen to based on what I thought the recap might say about it at the end of the year. I was going like, man, last year it said I really listened to a lot of jazz. And I am a jazz guy, but I'm not just a jazz guy.

I like classical and I like hip hop too. And I was like, I should listen to more hip hop, right? And I would literally go like, let me find some new hip hop to listen to because I want that to show up on my thing. Now, why do I want that to show up on my thing is because at the end of the, at the end of 2025, I just looked at it. I went, oh, yeah, there's all the numbers. Okay, whatever. Like, I spent more time thinking about it while I was choosing on Apple Music throughout the year than I spent looking at it at the end of the year.

So what was really motivating me, it was sharing it on Instagram, right? And having the people who see it go, oh, Adam likes jazz. Annie likes hip-hop. What a complex human being. What an interesting guy. Look at that. Look at that. Now, how interesting is that fucking really for a for a guy my age and my background. But the point I'm making is that music, we've all sort of adopted this framework, but music is like one of the most

nuanced contextual art forms there is. People like music based on who they were, what age they were when they heard it, what mood they're in. You know, it's like such a fluid, fluid thing that we just experience is, oh, we like certain sounds in a certain order. Why did you listen to something a lot? Well, who's to really say? But this compresses it down. And it doesn't just like, is that just a number up on the wall for you? It lets you transmit the information about who you are and what you listen to very easily.

That is such a beautiful example. And one way to put the value capture problem for me is that, I mean, the reason we have metrics is information compression. There's a very good reason for it, which is that there's way too much information in the world. We have to manage it. It has to be channeled to central decision makers. And what metrics are good at is extracting, transmitting, and compressing information, right? The whole point is that a thousand qualitative evaluations of student essays won't compress, but a GPA will compress.

So, I mean, narrowness enables compression. And in particular, the standards for compression here are external and depend and constrained by the system by what will be easily and instantly transmissible.

So instead of responding to, I mean, the inner signal of your soul, the whole worry is you're responding on. Okay, wait. I got something for you. Please. Wow, I love talking to you. So I was talking about some of this stuff, and I met a political philosopher, and he was like, oh, yeah, this is like Hobbs.

I was like, what? He said, you know, everyone knows that Hobbs thinks that political, every political science is philosopher knows that Hobbs thinks that the ultimate source of political decision making is the tyrant, whoever is the most power. But most people don't know the next part where Hobbs. says, and the ultimate source of power is the power over language, because the tyrant who can define what success and failure, what virtue and vice are for people, control people from the inside. And one way to put it is that what metrics are when we permit value capture, what metrics encourage us to do is to redefine our values and our lives in terms that are specifically pre-designed to be transmissible, compressible, and minimized. Yeah.

Yeah. Oof. I think another example of this is books read in a year. A lot of people give themselves a hard time about how many books they read in a year. And then sometimes they go, well, should it be books? It should be pages, right? Because what if I read a bunch of short books? That's not the point.

And you go, well, the pages, what if I read a bunch of easy books? And then you start to remember, oh, yeah, isn't the point to either enjoy myself or to learn about the world? Right. Right. Great example. Okay. This is the perfect place to bring in like heavy number two that has been teaching me so much stuff. So this is Lorraine Daston. So this is another intellectual historian who was the other piece of the puzzle towards understanding metrics for me. So she has this book called Rules, which is amazing, which is about how the concept of what a rule is changes over time. She's like historically, a lot of the rules we use are what she calls principles, which are abstract. generalizations that admit of exceptions, but it's hard, you cannot list all the exceptions. So show, don't tell, right? You can break it if you understand the meaning behind it. She says the recent conception of a rule is a mechanical rule or an algorithmic rule, which is meant to be applied absolutely unthinkingly, exactly as written the same every time.

And she says, it's so powerful that we've come to think. That's the only kind of rule, but it's a really recent innovation. And then she says, to me, the most interesting thing I've learned in the last decade. She says, people think mechanical rules arose with computing machines, but they actually arose 100 years earlier as an attempt to cheapen labor. Because you didn't need to hire the sensitive expert. When you have clear rules, right, if you have like a sensitive chef who knows how to navigate by field and you lose them, you can't replace them.

If you have mechanized the procedure at McDonald's such, you have a, clear recipe that is precise, then you can fire anybody and replace them instantly. So the standard of mechanicity is the standard of simplifying things enough that they can be applied consistently by everybody. And that's the driver of things like, what's the difference between a good book, reading a good book and reading a book richly and reading a lot of pages? or a reading number of books, the latter are mechanically countable.

Yeah. And you can put those on a website and show it to your friends, right? And say, I read this many books. You can't, you can't really mechanistically relate to your friends how much you grew as a thinker over the course of the year. You could write a short essay about it, but you couldn't all compare your short essays.

Very quick. It would take you so long. Yes. And you couldn't, yeah. Oh my God. I have the perfect example. This is an example that got pulled out of the book by the editorial team because they thought it was so gross. But this is surely this is the place for it.

This is not in the book at all. Oh, exclusive. Okay. So while I was studying this and trying to understand how scoring systems sometimes pervert human activity, I discovered that there's a really good literature from sociologists and anthropologist who've studied pick up artist culture. Ooh. Notice that the literal term is scoring in pickup artist culture.

Yes. So pickup artists typically compete for things like most numbers, most sexual acts in an evening, speed from meeting someone to sexual act, all these things. Notice those all have a certain character. They're all mechanically countable in a public way. Here's things they don't compete for. Good relationships, obviously. And that I found out from a sociologist Eric Hendricks who embedded with pickup artists, what he writes is a common refrain in pickup artists was that you had to sacrifice any interest in pleasure because that would just get in the way of success and to truly perfect yourself.

Right. Okay. You see what I'm going, right? Because I thought what. Devastating. Okay. Go on, please. No, I had thought that pickup artists would be evil, but at least. having a good time. And what I found out was that pickup artists had sacrificed, in many cases, joy, happiness, and pleasure in the name of making a number go up.

And I am afraid that we are all pickup artists now. That is the best example. I cannot believe they took it out of the book. Yeah, because you would think when, you know, as a younger self and I was romantically frustrated, you know, like what I wanted was a pleasurable experience. You know, I wanted to feel cherished. I wanted to feel sexy. I wanted to have the literal sexual release. Those are all pleasurable things. I felt bad because I didn't have those things. I would have assumed the point of pickup artistry is like, they want to feel that a lot. Just like, I don't know, someone who loves food would want to eat,

have a lot of delicious meals, you know, and taste a lot of different flavors, et cetera. And be like a hedonist about it. Someone who enjoys pleasure, but you're right. Pickup artists are not hedonist. They're not going like, oh, I just, oh, I, I, I, I love kissing women so much. I love the feeling of their lips and I love, they're not doing all of that shit. They're going like, I did it 10 times. I got 10, I got 12. Like, and they're, they've, they've, they've destroyed their own enjoyment of it. That's not part of what you go look at the separatists or whatever. They don't talk at all about how much they, how good of a time they had or a little, let alone. Of course, out how good a time the other person had, right?

Isn't that, I mean, and the explanation is so devastating to me. If this is right, and I think this is right, this is the destined explanation. Here's the explanation. Pleasure isn't publicly accountable. It's not transparent. You can't instantly win fights about who had more pleasure. Oh, fuck. Yeah, you're right, because, well, oh, my God.

Oh, this is just, you're, you're, there's so much that comes out of this. No, you're, wow. Yeah, because if you're, well, part of pickup artistry, the whole point is, you know, to prove your masculinity, especially against threats to your masculinity, right? Right. Because other men will come up to you and go, oh, you get no, you get no pussy. Right. And you go, no, I get lots of pussy.

Look, says right here on my chart, I got 12 pussy. I got 12 of them. But you can't go, yeah, man. And I, and I experienced pure bliss, right, for this many minutes of the day. and therefore my life is better lived than, in fact, a life well lived is not the best revenge because you can't tell, you can't show anybody you had a life well lived

because they can't experience it. Every time you experience pleasure, I am sometimes in a romantic situation where I'm like, I'm feeling good and I'm like, man, I can never, no one will ever understand how good this is. You know what I mean? It's not transmissible. This is exactly why you are on my list of ideal.

Like this is, this is it. This is the thing. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Can someone clip this and post this on like the pickup artist subredits so that they like get a little whiff of you guys are missing out. You're missing out on life. Like optimize your own pleasure, not your fucking numbers, dummies.

No, they're just going to dismiss me because my body count isn't high enough to matter. I mean, that's. And wait, but it's just, you know, they're going to cut most of the philosophy to. departments. My philosophy department might get cut. And if we say anything, it doesn't matter because we don't get enough grants to matter. It's the same thing. You're at how do you measure the success of a philosophy department in a, uh, that's a perfect example in an academic context. Right. Because you don't produce patents. You don't produce discoveries. Right. You don't, uh, bring in money particularly because it doesn't take a huge amount of money to do. You know, you don't have grad students. What you, you don't like need a huge lab that. has, you know, a certain number of employees. You're literally just creating richness of life a lot of the time. Like, we're having this conversation right now, can't be quantified. And how do you prove that to the VP, right, of the department or of the university

who employs a thousand professors just like you? And he can't understand, he can't read all your fucking books, right? How is he supposed to get it? He needs a metric. How do you provide him with one? That's the bind you're in. That, you. you

I'm smart I got it well you you're a good teacher you've you taught it to me that's it okay but there's one more cycle okay

I ready so that's a lot of it that's a lot of it but here's the second puzzle the first what what Daston and Porter taught me

is why scoring systems when they're written to be so explicit miss out on what's really important but here's the next thing games have really explicit scoring systems. They tell you exactly what counts. So why are they fun, right?

Isn't that weird? Here's the answer. I thought about this for like a year and a half and I came up with the dumbest answer. It is the stupidest, simplest answer. So the thing about games is they're disconnected from each other. You don't have to translate. If I got 100 points in Mario Odyssey and you got like, I don't know, like 10,000 experience points in Hades, which one is better? We don't know because they don't aggregate.

And that's okay. And what this means is that games are this ecosystem of incredibly different scoring systems that we can jump between, that we can change, that we can modify, we can move. move games. In a game, we can change how we're playing it. If we don't like the game, we can hack the game, not all games, but the ecosystem of games well received is one in which you plunge into a scoring system and you step back from it. Okay? And you ask yourself whether that was good. And if it wasn't, you mob the scoring system to get what you want. Right. And that is not what happens with metrics by their basic function. Here is, after three years of thinking about this,

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Oh, oh, well, well, I do have a question about this. I want to push it you a little bit because I have two responses that come to mind, which first of all, I mean, the metrics also are all different. Like, you know, my Apple music, you know, recap is a completely different scoring system from my books read compared to my bank balance, my network. Right. Right. Those are all different. And I can jump between those and how much I care about them and how much I don't.

Fitbits are an example where I don't use anything. I don't do any body tracking because I don't want to. Some people will choose a particular thing they want to track. To me, the more salient thing that pops out of the difference between them is that Dungeons and Dragons doesn't make. matter. It's like fully not the real world. If I do badly, it doesn't matter at all. Uh, it, my GPA, my net worth actually does affect my life. And so there's a weird perversity towards, you know, boiling down my actual life into something so simple. Whereas in the realm of, hey, who gives this shit ultimately at the end of the day? Part of why I probably said to you last

time you were on. The reason, I think the reason sports, the fundamental appeal of sports, is it's fun to care about something that doesn't matter. Like, you can be, I'm so sad. I'm so happy, but it doesn't actually affect your life. I think these are deeply linked. I think you're completely right, and these are deeply linked.

I mean, there are many metrics, and I do think, it's not that we're locked in. I think if you do it carefully, you can interact with metrics from the world like game. You can choose the ones that matter to you.

You can navigate between them. But unlike games, when you're in a particular social arena, there's usually a single dominant metric. Page views for journalists. subscribers or follows for podcasters for, right, H index or citation rates for academics. And the reason is because because there's a desire in each social realm to be able to quickly rank people against each other and activities against each other, we tend to

cohere on a single metric. This is one of the things a lot of the sociologists say in a lot of spaces. People will generate a bunch of metrics, but decision making will tend to pick one as the central one, right? and force everyone into that. And the reason that's so easy to get sucked in is that they're connected to real world affairs. Like it's hard not to care about your subscribers, your page you're used because that's directly linked to incentives, to power, to all this stuff. And I think you're exactly right about games.

Like I think one of the other slogans from the book is the games matter because games don't matter. Because nothing is tied to the points. that's what lets me shove them around. Yeah. That's what lets, I cannot take my students off of GPA because the world listens to it. If we're playing a game,

I can fuck with it because nothing hinges on the comparison and interconnection between that game and another game. The disconnection of games, I mean, the disconnection of games is driven by the fact they don't matter. And I think one way to think about it, since we care so much about technology,

is that the philosopher Langdon winner really convinced me that one of the most important ways to think about technology was to think about these social restructurings and he was really interested in which technology is centralized decision-making and which one's decentralized decision-making. He was really interested in the fact that the printing press, no matter what use you put it to, centralizes the ability to create and disseminate information.

And one way I've been thinking about it is that games are a technology that encourage the decentralization of meaning making and figuring out what matters and what you like. And metrics are a technology that tends to centralize it and standardize it and put it in somebody else's control. I have a dozen different thoughts based on what you said. I mean, when you talk about how people tend to centralize on a metric

and you're forced to use it, right? And you cannot change it. Sure, if you don't like, you know, the way Mario scores, you can speed run it instead. Yeah, exactly. But you don't get to do that in other arenas of life. One of the things that reminds me of is when we were making Adam Ruins everything for True TV. And the network said, you know what, we're not going to do an FYC campaign this year to try to win an Emmy. You know, we're just, we're giving up.

We're not going to do it. I was like, well, fuck, you know what? I have to do it anyway. I like paid my own money to hire a publicist. I took out billboards. and I like paid my own money to literally submit the show to the Emmys. And the reason I did that was because we don't have a choice. Me and the careers of all of my, all the people who work on the show who I care about

depend on getting Emmy nominations. And we were never nominated for a single Emmy in any field, right? But like I was like, I know it's important to our costume designer to at least be eligible. And by the way, for the Guild Awards, the costume designers have their own awards, etc., etc. and it's because like we had to because it was important for our careers. Now, why do those awards exist at all, though? Because when you look at their existence, there's this constant perversity of people trying to chase the metric.

The two big metrics for movies are box office and awards. And if you ask the people who run the companies, they'll tell you all they care about is the box office. It's a capitalist company. At the end of the day, they're just. trying to make money as every company is. And yet, for some reason, for historical reasons, there is this other thing, the awards, right?

And as a result, every single year, dozens of movies come out that are optimized to win awards and not to make money, despite the fact that they're made by capitalist companies that only want money at the end of the day and don't even care about art. And we know the metric doesn't actually optimize for art. It optimizes for a certain type of art that might win the award, right? But like the existence of the metric causes people who don't even think the metric matters to make stuff to try to achieve the metric, even though no one, there's no benefit to it other than social status, which is a driver of human behavior. But still, it's sort of bizarre that this is motivating people to do this. Okay.

I have a bunch of answers. And I think do not let me forget that at the end of this, I should give you my doom vision. I've got a happy vision and a doom vision. But I'll do you this. The doom vision. Okay. So here's, so one thing to think is, so the first thing to be careful about is, metrics are always going to be connected to incentives and we can't help that.

And the thing that I at least can talk about as a philosopher is even if we can't redesign the metric, you can keep the incentive at arm's length. Like this is the point of the value capture idea. There's a big difference merely being incentivized by a metric and taking it on is the center of your heart. I think there's a huge difference between, I need to emin nominations to keep this alive and support people because that's important external resources

versus thinking, what validates me as an artist is Emmy. That's all that matters, right? And I know people who feel that way in Hollywood, and I've tried to avoid that demon, right? Of like, I must win the award or else I'm worthless. That's like, talk to your therapist if you feel that way. Right, yeah.

No, so there's a huge difference between navigating a world in which there are these large-scale simplified incentives and being able to trade off between what you really care about and the kinds of resources they offer and actually just simplifying your soul. I mean, part of the big idea for me is that games encourage us to a life where we plunge into scoring systems and then we back off and we ask them, ask if it was worth it.

They encourage us to reflect on scoring systems from a distance. And if you get value captured, you lose the stance from which you do that reflection. The second thing you asked about was why do we have these in the first place? And I think it's really important. I don't think we can avoid these things because I think it's an essential feature of the need for information compression given the size and complexity of the world. Like we're constantly needing summaries because, I mean, as much as we wail on this stuff, I mean, so much of my life depends on doctors following the research. And the research involves a filtration system where good articles are published in highly ranked journals.

Yeah, ranking, yeah. Yeah, when I'm on the inside, right, you can tell the difference. But if you're on the outside, what you're relying on is a compression system to deliver the things you really need to see. And so the problem is that information compression at scale is deeply lossy and absolutely requisite for our lives together. So we're not going to get around it. It's not like there's a utopia without metrics. It's that in our lives together. And like, you, okay, but the worry is that because we need these information compression

systems and it's lossy, that you can always game the system. I mean, okay, here's the doom vision. This is, this is towards the end of my book. There's something I'm worried about. I'm calling it value collapse. So here's value collapse. Value collapse happens when there's what really matters. And then there's what the world, how a large-scale institution counts.

your success. And what we've seen is a lot of arguments why those will never be the same, right? There's always going to be a gap. So imagine there are two populations of people. Some people trade off, they know that the incentives are, but they also remember in their hearts

what really matters, right? And another group of people are going to burn out what really matters and they're going to just game and chase the metric. Yeah. If the institutions give rewards and power and influence for the metric,

then rewards and power will accumulate to the people who've been willing to burn out a sense of real value and hypercontradent the metric. And if they get power, they will probably alter the system to make the metrics more powerful and intrusive. So you'd expect a feedback loop where social power concentrate on the people that have forgotten what actually matters. That's the doom vision. T, you're calling this a doom vision. To me, it sounds like you're describing the structure of American society. This has already happened.

What are you talking about? Like, you know, billionaires orienting our society around who has the most money, money being equated with political power, you know, yeah, metrics are, metrics are everywhere. I feel like this is the case all over the place. People who are, who drive themselves nuts and forget what really matters are the ones who win and then they create the new values that the rest of us follow. I don't know. I, I, there's a part of me that thinks it is already. happened that this is it, that it's over for us. And there's a part of me that, I mean, what we're looking for on the other side

is any kind of infrastructure that promotes play, right? Like distance from the rules. And I think like the fact that, I mean, it's not like the fact that there's a flourishing world of indie role playing player game players and that this is happening like that that's a sign of life and I think okay I had I had a realization it was too late for the book but I've been saving it for you oh my God please which is um a sign of hope okay so a central part of the book is um I was trying to characterize these bureaucratic forces I actually this happened because my editor and my agent read the first draft of the book. They're like, it's really good. But by the

middle, there are all these fucking words were exhausted. We need something to simplify it. And I ended up, I went out to a Beers with my wife and we brainstormed ideas. And what I came up with was the mnemonic that, you know, in a previous era, we had, we tried to conceptualize abstract forces as people. And we had, you know, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, right? Baman and war and death. And so I have in the book is the new version, the Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy. And the Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy are rules, parts, scale, and control. Rules is the desire to make everything follow clear mechanical rules. Parts is the desire to make everything, including people, interchangeable.

Scale is the desire to make everything work across vast scale. And control is desire to control it from the center. Yeah. And what I realized was I should have talked about the other side, which is saints of play. Like, what is the countervailing force? The countervailing force is a place. What we would expect to be the countervailing force is like people who are developing systems that encouraged you to play with rules, to modify them, to change them, to be engaged,

to absorb yourselves in them. and and but to constantly modify them, speed runners are an example, house rulers, but I realize we actually have a central glimpse of like the opposite of the four horseman of bureaucracy. We have like true states of play and it's goddamn game changer.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The dropout series, yes. Yes, the dropout series game changer, which is a series about the, the endless invention of scoring systems and constraints, constantly not stuck in it, but constantly modified and reinvented for the joy of the process, but for people that are really going to plunge into it.

Yeah. Yeah. That where constant novelty, constant improvisation thinking on your feet, a resistance towards systemization of any kind. But inside, temporary rule structures and temporary point structures, which are central, right?

Wow. There's the vision of hope. It's Elon Musk versus Dropout. That's what I got for you. You know, the number of people who come up to me and they're like and say some version of, do you think Dropout will save the world has started to become almost worrisome? I do have to go, you know, it's a media company, you know,

but it is, it is, but it is, but it has tapped into something that is like, makes people deeply hopeful. Right. And,

deeply, I don't know, enlivened and, feels like an antidote to all the horrible systems we live under. And I think you've put your finger on a big part of what it is. Yeah.

No, I think it's, it's, I mean, I think Doom Vision is 95% true. And the thing that gives me, a tiny bit of hope is the existence of the indie RPG community, weirdo fanfickers, you and like weird crap you do, like, and dropout.

Like the fact that that can even exist means DoomVision hasn't completely won. Maybe it will still win, but like, right? Yeah. The little bits of hope are the systems and infrastructures and ecosystems. I mean, here's one way to put it. Like, you can't, there's a vast infrastructure of bureaucratization and. simplification, and you can't just fight it with grit and pluck. You need a system. And what you need are systems of play, not just systems of minimization. And what does that look like? And I think

that looks like the indie RPG space. It looks like game changer. It looks like, you know, a classroom where you don't get to be authoritarian. Like little, like my way of nurturing this is to like try to de-authoritarianize my grading system. Like this is, these are the little pockets. Mm-hmm. You're giving me a couple of different thoughts here that I want to share. One is that you mentioned, you know, you're focusing on bureaucracy and systems specifically. And when I said, you know, about 40 minutes ago, the incentives that capitalism pushes on us, I bet is what you're going to talk about. And you're like, well, no, also, you know, we're talking about communism too.

And you've really made it clear to me at this point that, like, look, I think a lot of the time living under a capitalist society, we talk about capitalism. as a system and all the horrible things that it does to us. And the structure of it and the way it causes us to do bad things, other people to do bad things. It causes human misery. It causes destruction of things that we love and cherish as humans. But those things have also happened under, you know, authoritarian communist regimes. And there is a degree to which we can also recognize that the problem is systemization itself. and that like, hey, if you're living under regime that demands you, you produce 100 bushels of wheat and everyone's value is measured in bushels of wheat, you're going to end up with a lot of the same shit you don't like under capitalism.

Yeah. I think that's a really interesting point that people should take seriously, especially if they're on the left. I think that's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, so a lot of this I learned from James Scott because I think, I mean, there are distinctive problems of capitalism. but what Scott is interested in doing is identifying the degree to which capitalist markets, which compress information and lose a lot of information through prices, that the same problem shows up with large-scale bureaucratic systems that use like metrics for, I mean, I've been in a lot of public universities that seem good-hearted,

and yet who's getting the most, right, maybe you could say it's just part of capitalism, But I think there's this discussion that what's going on is information compression. And one of the things that really freaked me out the most was one of the early versions of this book was a paper in which I was working on transparency metrics. And transparency metrics are often set up by very well-meaning people with my politics and my hopes. And there's this moment from this philosopher, Anaro O'Neill, who's this incredible bioethicist, ethicist. And she's got this book on trust. And she says, people think transparency and trust go together, but they actually come apart because transparency asks experts to explain themselves to non-experts. And they can't because by definition, expert reasons are not accessible to non-experts.

So they have to make shit up. So they have to lie and deceive. And I think what she's exposing is something really important, which is the logic of transparency metrics is you're rating someone's success and value in terms. that everyone can understand, right? That's the entire decontextualization, de-accessibility. And it's not to say the transparency metrics are bad. Like they are how we get out corruption, how we discover bias. But the way we do it is by imposing an ultra-simple measure.

And that's incredibly costly. So I started thinking was we can't live without transparency, but you can't just max out for transparency either because transparency and trust are in deep tension. What this might look like is total transparency of our art, what that looks like is, and this is historical cases, Congress saying, any your granting is totally corrupt. You've got to use a clear public metrics. So we're going to judge you on whether the art you funds gets a lot of ticket sales or box office sales. Right. And so the key pain here is that a lot of the metrics that were the most simplifying that I looked at were actually put in place by well-meaning. nonprofit organizations trying to do, okay, I'll give you an example. Sorry, I'm going to on too long, but I think you might like this example. So there's a really, there's a really interesting study of Charity Navigator. Do you know Charity Navigator?

Yes, I do. Yep. So for a Charity Navigator tries to rank charities for their efficiency. And for a long time, I used it and I used it in my classrooms. And then I read some criticisms of it. So the way that Charity Navigator works is, for a long time, It's become less now once they've realized this problem. But it uses something called a throughput score.

So the throughput score is the ratio of how compared to the amount of money donated, how much money goes out the other side. So it's supposed to be an efficiency metric, right? Okay. Yes. You can immediately see the problem. So the problem is that this actually forces nonprofits to compete for cutting internal costs, which means they can't pay staff well and they can't hire experts and they can't do internal surveys. Right.

So this is. I think charity navigator is a very well-meaning organization. The reason it's doing this is because to order to actually compare charities, different charities, you would need an enormous amount of expertise about specific domains like housing, food, nutrition, medicine, arts. That's really hard to do. But what's really easy to do is accounting. Accounting is a single mechanical layer that's shared across all these organizations.

and you can extract this easy comparison and rank things really quickly on this easily extractable measure that everyone can transmit. The only problem is it doesn't actually track what matters at all. Wow. I find that really fascinating. And it explains a couple things. First of all, sometimes, you know, I'll work with, I've worked with some nonprofits in my work here where they want to, you know, sponsor some videos or do a message. and sometimes these nonprofits have said, hey, could you invoice us before the end of the year?

Like it's December 15th. And they're like, hey, do you want to do something next year? And could you invoice us like before the end of the year? And I'm like, what's up with that? I'm like, oh, they need to get some money out the door. You know what I mean? And it's fine. They just, there's just a little bit of urgency.

And like, I've always wondered, maybe it's tax reasons. Could also be some of what you're talking about. We need to have, we can't have money sitting on the books. The other thing, though, it makes me think of is I've always felt that way about Charity Navigator. I used to go to the site and be like, you can't rank every single charity across four metrics. That's not going to give you any information.

So I used to spend a lot more time reading Givewell. Do you know Give Well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They review charities. I started reading about 10 years ago. They do like very deep, deep, deep dives on what do they actually do? What services are they providing? And they boil it down to exactly one metric.

how many lives are saved per dollar. And I was like, that's really great. That's what I want to know. How many lives are saved per dollar, right? You got your finger pointed at me. Keep talking. Well, it's a pretty good metric. But then I started going, hey, how come they don't have any,

they don't recommend any charities for climate change. They recommend anti-malaria charities. They recommend hunger charities, economic charities. Nothing for climate change. I want to know how to help climate change. change. And I found some study on their site where they're like, well, it's pretty hard to measure how many lives are saved per dollar. And then they started doing stuff about like AI risk mitigation. And I was like, and this by the way was in like, you know, 2018. And I was like, what's with these white papers on AI risk mitigation? I figured out, I figured out first of all, this organization is funded by Facebook billionaires. And this is the beginning of the effective altruism movement, which became part of like the whole AI thought bubble. A. And B, well, with AI risk mitigation, the number of lives you save per dollar is potentially infinite. Because the argument of AI risk is, well, if we can stop the AI from found it, we can save

billions of lives over the next billion years with a small investment today, which is, of course, a bullshit thought experiment. But if you're trying to optimize for that metric, you can get, the number of zeros at the end is just like, you can just keep tacking on zeros, man. you know how many lives you're going to save. That's wild. Why are you pointing your finger at me? This is 100% right.

And I think, to the end of the book, there's a long discussion of, like, health and lives saved. And, I mean, I talk about this stuff. And sometimes I feel like an asshole. People start looking at me like I'm a terrible person. Because I say things like, I mean, there's dangerous shit to say about the COVID pandemic where you're like, look, people made a lot of decisions

exclusively focusing on live saved. And they did not focus on mental health, community, tradition, child development. And every time you say this, people are like, oh, you're a murderer. You don't care about people's lives.

And I'm like, no, no. It's just that the calculus is super complicated. And then people just drop out the stuff that isn't easily accountable. Yeah. I think you're completely right. Like the lives save metric, it's obviously it's important.

But it's not the only thing that matters. I mean, so people in biothics care about the, here's another version. I think people will really recognize. Well, if I can just speak on that point really quick, part of the reason that people have that suspicion about COVID was a lot of people were making that argument in bad faith

or similar sounding arguments in bad faith. So it's socially difficult. But you're right in that, like, if you want to just maximize live saves, then keep up all the, keep all the human potatoes hooked up to the ventilator forever. You know, like that's what you could end up doing. But no, we know you should unplug those folks

because they're brain debt, right? I mean, this is something that this is, but this is exactly, yeah. The thing I was going to say is it's really easy to optimize for length of life and really hard to optimize for quality of life. Exactly, yes. Right. But please go on. Yeah. So there's, there is, here's another version.

This is, this is something I put in the book, but I, I think, I think you might like this thought. So, so I was writing about cheese. And the fact that when you do. such a long pause before gathering his thoughts like I gotta say the press so I was reading about cheese not what I expected oh that was so delightful please go on I just maybe maybe I understand I'm an essentially ridiculous human being this is I get it so if you have public health arguments about cheese. On one column is numbers about length of life and heart attack rates.

And the other column is deliciousness, joy, community, tradition. And I said this and I would say this and people would say kind of the same thing. They'd be like, yeah, I get that's important. But how do you make public decisions in terms of such intangibles? And I would nod. And it took me like a year of hearing that to be like, wait, intangible. cheese is intangible? What is more tangible than Brie?

Yeah. What people actually mean by intangible is that it's hard to abstract into a number. Uncountable. Yeah, exactly. And what countable means is cutting out all the tangibility and replacing it with an abstract, agribal extractable. Yeah, you know, it's intangible. what's intangible is a cholesterol number, right?

I guess the way to put it is that we've been so colonized by bureaucracies that it's rewritten our sense of reality. Yeah. That we think an abstract abstraction is more tangible than a thing. Yeah. That's the word we use. Yeah. Well, this returns me, though, to my other point I want to make a little while earlier,

which is that you were talking about, you know, how do we avoid the doom vortex of value collapse and that we need to build structures that support, you know, play to find those tangible joys. Right. But it does occur to me like, you know, we do all exist within reality, right? Yes. We all do eat cheese. Well, vegans don't, but you know what I mean. We all have the experience of the joy of eating cheese that is something that is available to us to return to.

at every moment. You can always try to go, oh, hold, when you listen to music, the Spotify ranking is one step away from your experience of actually hearing the music. You know what I mean? And so there will always be a wellspring of the infinitely various stuff

of human life, you know? And like, I often think about, you know, we get so regimented, you know, on our little rectangles. We're looking at our little rectangles all day, you know? Yeah. But we do, in fact, exist within, a larger room that's on a planet that's spinning around that's full of like messy shit that's not on a rectangle.

The rectangle is in fact a subset of reality. Yeah. We all exist with it, you know? Yeah. So we can always return to it. And maybe it's just a matter of like creating systems that help us return to it over and over again in a meditative way to attend to the world around us. I mean, this is, I guess one way to think about what I've been writing about is that the

worry is that large-scale bureaucratic forces have convinced many of us to ignore the world in favor of the abstractible, that there's so much rich experience in the world, but that doesn't guide our valuing and decision-making. What guides it is the abstractable? Another version of the worry is, oh, it doesn't happen to everybody, but you know what happens to people that are deeply guided by rich texture in life? They go off into a little world. and they can't make decisions. And the people that get to make decisions are the people that are willing to thin out their souls enough, right?

To only chase. That's the value collapse story. But I think you're right. And I think like this is why like this is why I mean, I know you have what I said like, you know, drop out is the hope. But I think it's just emblematic of, I think we have names for the things that encourage us to stop looking at abstractions and start looking at like thick, weird values.

And they're really familiar. art and play. That is just what those procedures are. And you will also notice that the large scale forces are trying to cut that out of journalism, of higher education, right? But out of games, out of games themselves. Right.

And like there's, okay, wait, no, I got something for you. Please. No, maybe it is. So John Dewey, another point. He says that one, One of the most important distinctions is between recognition and perception. And he says, when you recognize, you go around the world and when you see something, you find a category. And the moment you categorize, you stop looking.

The category is all you need. Perception is when you find the category and then you keep looking. You both know the category and you keep going to find all the stuff that doesn't fit in the category. And I think we are constantly faced with the rich, weird, thick beauty of life. And but a lot of the times we seem to be trained to like very quickly dismiss and cut and only pay attention to the abstraction. And if we're good enough at that, then we can walk through the real world and not smell it. Yeah, I don't think, you know, Jeff Bezos is smelling.

smelling the real world that much, right? I think because he's so successful at reducing everything to a number, every element of humanity, and optimizing for those numbers to the expense of all else. But the alternative is to what? Tell me the alternative one more time. Yeah. Perception? Perception.

Actual perception, rich perception. Yeah. The alternative is not very efficient. The thing about categorization about dismissal vision is you're really fast. Yes. But it's miserable to categorize things and do things that quickly. Like the best parts of life are the ones where you don't do that, where you are not worried about your body count and you're just worried about the feeling of your lover's lips.

Right? I mean, for real. Like, and you descend into the experience, right? You lose yourself. Yeah. Yes. True. Yeah.

I guess the thing is, I guess the thing is it's so clear and so obvious and so valuable, but I don't think I need, as a philosophy professor, I don't think I actually need to give a theory of why that shit is valuable. But I need to give a theory is why it's so easy to forget and lose touch with it. Yes. And I think you've, I think you've done so. But it's fascinating how you have used games to figure out how. with like a tweak to our categorization system, our information reducing system,

we can instead create a space that has more play within it, you know, because these are information reducing spaces. Tetris is more simple than real life. The mind is more simple than real life. Yep. But within them, there is actually more rather than less.

Yep. Because they're structured such that you can change the rules if you don't like them, you can choose your metric and some other things as well. Yeah, it's constantly triggering. I mean, one way to put it is, in the value capture case, you're constantly within the abstracted, minimized category.

That's the end of the line. And in the games case, when you're playing games in this way I'm describing, which is not the only way to play games, but the hopeful one, the playful one, you spend time in the simple system, and then you step back. And you ask yourself from outside that,

with direct exposure to like the thickness of reality. Like, was that a lovely time? And that's the end of the line. And that's a very different end of the line. I think that might be the end of the episode. That was such a beautiful, that was such a beautiful note to end on. T, I could talk to you for, for 10,000 years.

I should come up with a metric to score all my guests. And you'd be the top one. you've optimized to score on this particular metric. Actually, I have one last question for you. How do you, because you're literally, you talked about you have this problem in the world of academia, right? Right.

How do you represent thickness and specificity? And since you spent so much time thinking about this specifically, have you figured out a way to do it in your own case to stop your own budget from being cuts? You know what I mean? To represent the value you actually create in the thickness of reality up the chain

to someone who's not an expert? and can't ever get it? I mean, the answer for external reality is maybe not. My department might die, you know? Like, they're killing us. Like, yeah. Humanities departments are being cut left and right. I mean, I try, but I don't, I don't know.

Although, yeah, no, I don't, I don't know. Yeah, like the fact that hundreds of students can write letters about how the philosophy course was the most meaningful they ever took and it doesn't just doesn't matter that's like that's that's part of the background experience for thinking about all this stuff um for my own life i mean i genuinely think games are the salvation for me i don't know if that particular structure is a salvation for everyone but like they are like um holy shit can i do something really weird and like i don't know cringy. Can I read you a tiny bit of the book like right now, right here? Of course you can. Of course you can. Because I think I have the direct answer for this. It's going to take a second.

You might need to cut because I got to find. Now, we're going to live in the thickness of experience. And we're going to experience you finding it in the pages, the paper pages of your book. We're not going to cut any of this out and optimize for the YouTube algorithm. Instead, we're going to live in this moment in reality. That's like the most horrible. Like, um, um, okay.

This might be, whatever. This might be a little, a little long, but I think, whatever, this is, this is,

if there's any better context for this, uh, that I, I don't, I don't know how to do it. Okay. Here we go. It's towards the end of the book.

Okay. Over simplification time. Let's divide the world into processes and outcomes. Processes are the activity of doing something, and outcomes are what we get out of it at the end. Suppose aerosaddle and suits are right, and what makes our lives good and fulfilling is rich, meaningful activity. The meaning of life is in the process and not the outcome. Meaning lies in doing, and thinking interesting thoughts, having interesting conversations, playing fascinating games. Meaning lies in the process of making things and moving your body in thrilling and elegant ways and loving people.

Of course, we also need outcomes. Outcomes are very useful. Some of our activities end up making stuff, shelter, transportation, nutrition, and medicine, all of which we need to survive. But the true value of those things is in the wonderful activities they get us to, the lovely processes they support. Outcomes are valuable only as means to our true ends, having lovely conversations, thinking interesting thoughts, moving and thrilling beautiful ways.

Outcomes are good only if they eventually cash out in meaningful action. Otherwise, they're empty, just tools bereft of purpose. This will be especially true if what makes something really meaningful is deeply personal, and if what's meaningful to you is deeply dependent on the particular weirdness of your personality, culture, and circumstance in life. But the physical stuff we make and the measurable increases in our capacities are easy to track. It's hard to measure the joy and wonder of a good trail run, but it's easy to measure your increased lung capacity, improved running speed,

and reduced body weight. The more of the world converges on the metric and eliminates any stuff that doesn't hit the metric, the easier it will be for us to collectively forget that there was any other point to doing anything except to hit that metric. What we need are reminders from outside the convergence. One of the major criticisms of large-scale modern agriculture

is that monocultures are very fragile. If the majority of our farms are growing one variety of corn using one farming method, then we become incredibly vulnerable. One deadly corn virus or beetle infestation, and we lose our food supply. This is part of the reason why biodiversity is important. We need old growth forests, untamed jungles, and fetid swamps because they are preserves for life outside the farming monoculture. Our world is dominated by a value monoculture, and not just any value monoculture, but one dominated

by measurable outcomes. So to save ourselves, we need some kind of wild. preserve, some haven for meaning diversity. We need places in life where a sense of meaningfulness and value runs wild. And we can't just see it from afar. What's valuable is often subtle. We need to be soaked in it for a long while to catch on. To be reminded of what's important outside the monoculture, we would need regular exposure. And if we have forgotten how to think of value and importance beyond measurable outcomes, if we have forgotten the value of processes and actions, then we will need frequent, lasting, and intense encounters with these wild values.

But we can't be trusted to stumble into them randomly or build them on our own. Valuable activities are often very specific and hard to find on your own. We need recipes and instructions. We need structured tools to ease our passage out of the world of standardized outcomes and into the world of beautiful processes. And we need lots of them, wildly different ones, to explore. We need a diversity of pre-packaged value starter kits. to help us find our way back into very beautiful action.

But we should also expect those value starter kits to look stupid, inane, and useless from the perspective of the outcome's mindset, precisely because they drag us away from a lifestyle, laser-focused on efficient outcomes. And for those of us who have been raised and nurtured in the metrified world of outcomes and measures, who are used to orienting ourselves toward a clear external measure of success, it would be useful if those starter kits resemble the, metrified world of outcomes. It would be useful if they had at their heart something familiar, some kind of clear ranking or scoring systems, so that we who are raised in the metrified world

will feel comfortable and secure. We need metrics methadone. But we would want those starter kits to eventually draw our gaze past those rankings and toward beautiful processes. It's goddamn games. T, you made me cry. You made me cry thinking about how beautiful games are. Oh my God. Oh, oh my God. Wow,

what a podcast moment. That was so beautiful. Well, you can't beat that, folks. You can't beat that. I have nothing, I have nothing to say.

I can't summarize anything better. That was absolutely beautiful. And I cannot thank you enough for being here, T. Oh, God. All right. as I recover. The name of the book, if you would like to read my new religious text,

it's called The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. You could, of course, pick up a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. T, where else can people find you on the internet? I am ADD-D-H-A-W-K ad hoc at Blue Sky. my website is objectionable.net and I don't know. You read the book. I put my soul in the book. Whatever.

You can read the book and whatever. You clearly did and I cannot imagine a book that I want to read more in this time. It's a very special thing that you're saying. You're saying something very, very special. And, you know, there's only a couple guests who I've ever felt this way about. Jenny O'Dell's work I felt this way about and a few other folks. It's truly exceptional. I'm just grateful to have you on the show, man.

And I hope you're back soon with something new to talk about. Or you'll come back any time just to share any thoughts you have on almost any subject. I'm grateful to have you. Thanks so much for coming to T. Thank you so much, man. My God, thank you once again to T for coming on the show. I'm a little bit overwhelmed by the end of that interview. But, you know, thank you guys for being a part of it.

Again, if you want to pick up a copy of his book, Factuallypod.com slash books is the URL to support this show and your local bookstore. If you'd like to support the show directly, once again, patreon.com slash Adam Kahn, for five bucks a month. It gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I'll read your name and the credits. This is going to thank new patrons, Troy Stifler, Fakriton, Ibrahimov, Yuri Lowenthal, Adam P, James Forshler, and Aros Harmon.

You know, Aros Harmon was nice enough to come out to see me at a conference recently. It was really fun to bump into a Patreon subscriber in the real world. If you want to bump into me in the real world, say hi. Come to one of my stand-up shows. Coming up soon. Houston, Texas, Sacramento, California, San Francisco, California, La Jolla, California. And then I'm going to be taping my new special on April 18th in Chicago. I'd love to see you there.

Once again, the Den Theater, April 18th, Adam Conover.comber. For all those tickets and tour dates. Of course, I want to thank my producers, Sam Routon, and Tony Wilson. Everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. Thank you so much for listening. see you next time on factually. That was a hate gum podcast.