Pablo Torre Finds Out - The Points You Shouldn't Score: A New Year's Resolution

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Everyone complains about cellphones. But there's something bigger and more insidious going on, from football teams and Netflix shows to law schools and Instagram. So philosopher C. Thi Nguyen offers some gamified advice for 2026, to plug the downside of data into the upside of your mind: Metrics help you win at work, but can you free yourself from the algo? Hyper-optimization has changed the NBA, but what about your kitchen? We've handed over complexity for competition, but is there time to steal back our humanity from A.I.? Plus: punk points, art governments, sore losers at Twister, a context-invariant kernel... and The Meat Sack.• Read "The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" by C. Thi Nguyen Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. I feel like the entire purpose of my life is about to be met, because I think the purpose of my life is to be here talking with you about this question. Right after this ad. I wrote this article once about how, like, during pandemic, I fell apart, and I realized part of why I fell apart was I didn't have a commute anymore. This is, like, my basement office, and I would just take care of the kids

and then walk down here and do work and then be finished with work and there would be a 20 second buffer to go back upstairs. And I realized, like, during pandemic, I started taking a fake commute walk around for like 10 minutes because like I just like it was just not possible. Oh, I relate to that so much. Just the need to to move the meat sack that is my body just to make sure that like the juices start flowing again. It's real, man. It's real. Thank you for doing this, by the way. I'm so excited.

Your book, The Score, and I'll read The Subhead, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, It's One of those books where I pay at the highest compliment. It made me stare off into the middle distance a lot. That is what I want, man. Genuinely. So, Teen Wend, thank you for being the foremost authority and the philosophy of games and also metrics,

as they relate to each other and to ourselves, into my brain, and to the thing I can't stop thinking about, which is why the fuck I didn't really? realize this until I read your book. Why didn't I see this in the way that you see it so clearly? And I'm excited to figure out why I've been an idiot. Can you tell me what the this is? I want to know what you mean by this. So you're on a technically sports show. Yeah. And so for me, the question of games, of the metaphor of games, the reality of games, that's the entire foundation of this industry that I started in and then even just the language I use as I try to interpret other aspects of what is

left of our civil society and how we behave and how we care about things. And so I'm like the guy who's like, oh, I'm going to explain games to everyone else. And then I realize, oh, my God, I have not been articulating the way in which gamification has taken over everything beyond sports and how clearly I've been outsourcing the most fundamental parts of my, I mean, you call it values. They are values. I'm sure we'll talk about all this, but like there's one theory in which people that are really into sports and games should be immune to some of this capture by external metrics because we should be aware of how different scoring systems are and how like they can change our

mood. But I think there's also a way in which games prime us to just go into the, that mind state. It's just like, there's the point system. Let's do it. Let's go for it. Okay. So when I started thinking about how to start the new year on this show,

I started thinking about goals and resolutions and all that stuff. And pretty quickly, I caught myself thinking about how a content creator would answer this question. And this led me to thinking about more views and more subscribers and more clicks and more attention. And all of this felt pretty quickly. bad. And it felt bad in large part because the PTF staff and I take enormous pride

in using human editorial judgment to report stories that other people simply are not talking about. And stories also that our subjects often don't want us to uncover in the first place. It's kind of our whole mission at this point. But I still found myself strategizing

around how to win somebody else's game. And so this is why ultimately chose to start this year with T. Nguyen, who was an author and philosophy professor from the University of Utah, because T's perspective on the year 2026 goes so far beyond the cell phone as the technological innovation that we need to grapple with this year, even though the cell phone, by the way, is often identified as the main device which ails us. What T. thinks about, more deeply than anyone else in America, I think, is scoring system. Because a scoring system, T writes, in his book,

is not merely an instruction manual for how to win a game, and it's not merely how money, which we do need, gets distributed. It is also something a lot bigger that has been hiding in plain sight. So I went into this trying, first I was thinking about games, then I was thinking about social media, and I was for a while hooked into this thought that people are like, oh, this is a new thing, these are algorithms,

algorithmic gamification. This is new. And when I started, there's this field science and technology studies that I think it's too little red. And a lot of what I'm doing is kind of trying to translate this stuff out who've been thinking about quantification culture. And I came to see where we're at now as the end point of a three to 500 year movement towards bureaucratization and towards like ranking everything that everybody does in clear outputs that large scale governments and corporations can see. And now I think like the algorithmatization is just the little bit of the tip of the iceberg. And at the same time, I'm looking at Twitter being like, I think this explains a lot. Oh my God. Just like the ways in which we are living, again, up to an ancient observation,

because the other person in your book who you quote, and I, again, I'm just like banging my head against the wall being like, how have I not seen it so clearly, is Thomas Hobbs? Yes. Right? So what Hobbs says, as you explain, is that the ultimate power. is not military or economic power. It is the power to define terms and control language. And this notion, I need you to sort of unpack for all of us because the Hobbesian argument is,

if you control language and define terms, you control people from the inside. By the way, I love the fact, so I've been in a few podcasts like philosophy-y things, and I love that this is, I mean, I guess this is a sports podcast. Sure, allegedly. And this is the place where you've zeroed in on, I think, the most intellectually interesting idea. So Hobbes is a study of power.

This is a study of governance and power. And he spends a huge amount of time talking about how governance flows from whoever has power. And people mostly assume that it means military power. But he says incredibly clearly that the greatest power is the power of the definition of words, especially defining words like good, bad, virtuous, vice. because then you are telling people what to do in society, in governance. And I was like, you know what games are? They're like art governments.

There are things where we play around with incentives and rules and constraints to shape people's action. And with governance, we're normally doing it so we have an okay life. And with games, usually we're doing it for fun or joy or beauty, we hope, right? But what we're doing is we're shaping people. I think this is really what's going on with a lot of metrics. And so, like, a lot of what I'm really worried about are these cases where some external institution sets a metric, and then we take that on as a target. So I call this value capture in the book, like, when you have a rich value and you get exposed to a metric and you, like, internalize it.

But I think it's just all a version of Hobbs. Someone setting the meaning, like someone says, here's a watch. It measures your health. And if you accept that, you're letting somebody else, maybe like Apple, define what health means for you. It typically define it in what is easy for one of their devices to measure cheaply. The value capture concept. So just to explain, to define our terms here, right? Yeah.

Value is this pretty broad term you use to describe something that is deeper and richer and more subtle than what any single variable can capture. So there's always been some sort of concession that we're not, okay, not everything is going to be a holistic evaluation of your ability to think. We've got to create some amount of structure to sort people. And we've all sort of made peace with that. But where you're describing with value capture is the way in which consensually, it seems, or tacitly, lots of people have handed over complexity in exchange for what feels like at first a tickle in what it's like to compete at something. And then you realize that all you're doing is abandoning that deeper and richer and more subtle thing you actually enjoyed for the thing that helps you compete at a game that doesn't actually make you feel better or more fulfilled. Like, that's the broad strokes of what we're watching happen before us.

So value capture is any case where your values are rich or subtle or in the process of developing that way, and you go to put in an institutional setting. And that institutional setting offers you a simplified, typically quantized. modified version of that value, and then that simplified version starts to take over your decision-making, your conception of good. So value capture is not just an incentive case where someone says, oh, get a good GPA, then you'll get a job. Value capture is when you start to care about that as the thing you're trying to do. One of the really interesting cases I saw was in this book called Engines of Anxiety by sociologist Wendy Espland and Michael Souter. And they were talking about what

happened when the U.S. News and World Report started ranking law schools. Law schools were the first rankings there. And they said that, look, before that, one of the things you noticed was there was no single metric. Instead, colleges would, like, describe their missions and their values in really different language. Like, some colleges would talk about, you know, like making money. And some colleges would be like, oh, we're about, like, deep research. And other ones would be like, like, we're about activism and, like, social outreach and, like, serving the community. And students, one of the things they said was when they actually found internet archives of conversations between pre-law students, when faced with that decision between multiple values that were hard to commensurate, basically it triggered this deep, what I think of as existential decision. Like, what do I care about?

Like, it triggered, like, this process of deliberation about what you really wanted from your education, from your career. And then they said the moment the U.S. News and World Report started issuing its rankings instantly, what they saw in online discussions of pre-law students, was that students stopped talking about what they wanted, started assuming that the goal was to go to the best college, and started assuming that best was just set by the U.S. News and World Report. And we know what the U.S. News and World Report looks at. Mostly it looks at things like incoming class GPA, incoming class L-S.at, rejection rate and outgoing class employment rate in the nine-month mark. It's incredibly thin.

I was trying to explain what was wrong with this. And the best way I can put it is that you're outsourcing your values, and in particular, you're outsourcing the process of deliberation about your values. You're outsourcing figuring out for yourself what you care about, and you're putting it in somebody else's hands. And sometimes that person might just be evil, but even if they're not, even if they're well-intentioned. And the US News and World Report, it sounds like was completely well-intentioned, but it also, by presenting a clear, simplified scoring system,

it offered people a way to skip out the process of figuring out what they cared about and gave them a kind of prefabricated value system that they could just take on. And here's a bonus, other people now have it too. And suddenly, instead of having to have these complex conversations about what we cared about, we can just look at this clear external scoring system that immediately tells us which one of us won at the game of getting into college. I think about this acutely, and again, you've given me language to think about it more rigorously because when you make any sort of digital product, a podcast, a video show, a YouTube video, anything, you're constantly trying to reverse engineer it. So the whole like legend of Mr. Beast and his best practices, right? I've read his, I've read his manifest.

out of a morbid curiosity of what he's figured out. And what he's figured out is here are the things that get prioritized in the YouTube algorithm. Here is watch time, aka retention. And how do I then edit my video to maximize for that? How do I make it so that the thumbnail on this very video you're in right now is going to have our faces in ways that are going to attract people to click? All of that stuff is sort of now part of the process of making something that should

ideally, tell a story. I want to have a conversation. I want to surface these things that are meaningful, meaningful to me personally. And instead, everybody feels this. You're looking at something like, you know, Netflix's doing this, right? You write about Netflix and engagement hours and just the premise of we now have data, right? The big difference is we're talking about systems and data in the present tense eroding the quality that we're really hoping to receive. It's really important here for me that there's a huge difference between treating these measures as just incentives or information and internalizing them as your values, right? It makes complete sense to be aware of how the algorithm boosts things.

And if you have your own value, you can negotiate. You can be like, how much am I willing to compromise on what I care about in order to get my stuff seen? And how much am I going to stay true to what I care about in my care about in my care? content and my stories. So if you hang on to your own values, then you can make that trade-off in an informed way, and you can bow to the algorithm in a measured, informed, thoughtful way, keeping in mind the trade-offs. If you're on the other hand, you're value-captured. And what that means here is you stop caring about anything else, and your only goal is to make that number go up, then you will do anything it takes to make your subscriber can't go up. I want to get to explaining

just like what about it beyond merely it's the system is just philosophically and psychologically so enthralling because the articulation of a metric is also something that has clarity. The clarity of a metric in terms of its power over us is something that again runs through all the sports

but it also runs through everything else. I think the best way to talk about it is to talk about what it does for us in games and then why that's okay in games and why it's not okay elsewhere, right? Like this is, I mean, I think we mentioned this at the top, but like for me, this weird puzzle

as this person that's been working on this stuff is why these scoring systems are actually often so fun and delightful in games, why they lead us to new places, and why they suck out in so much of the rest of life. So in games, I mean, there's for me games are this incredibly interesting art form where someone designs a new self for you

I mean the the fancy language I have for this is that games are the art form of agency itself right like when a game a game designer is telling you what to want and then telling you what methods you use and then creating your obstacle environment and so suddenly you know you're playing soccer and you're becoming a being a feat or you're playing rock climbing and you're becoming a being

that has to use like balance and precision to like balance your way up the rock. Or you're playing my new dumb obsession is Kandamma. Do you know Kandama? No, what is it? It looks like ball and cup game, but with like multiple balls and spikes and skateboarding culture got onto it.

And like now you do these insane like tricks where you're throwing things and juggling and flipping and then catching in the cup. Like each of these games has a goal and it has a constraint. And then it like by playing with those goals and constraints, it can shape a kind of activity. It can tell you exactly what to pay attention to and exactly how you're going to interact.

They can make you in basketball, hyper-focused on making shots. I mean, think of how different basketball would be if there weren't like two-and-three-point shots, right? It would completely change the feel of a game. So those little decisions completely shape the feel. And with games, usually, we are shaping the feel for our pleasure, you are pushing around the rules and the scoring system to create this beautiful

experience. And a lot of what makes the experience so beautiful is its simplicity and clarity. We all have the same goal and it's blissfully clear and you can be blissfully concentrated and becomes absolutely clear what a good move is and what an elegant move is. But the definition of what good is, again, to go back to that premise, the clarity of, oh, you're good. This is a good school. You're doing well. You have this number of points. Part of what I think about is how a gamified system allows us the opportunity to outsource what is a complicated decision that ultimately redounds to our own personal sense of self and our confidence, right? It's saying to us, I will let you know when you're doing great.

And so the more you strive to be great by those standards, the more that you can seemingly tell yourself, the box is checked. But the other sort of wrinkle in all of this is the clarity of a metric also keeps us playing the game even when it makes us miserable, even when it isn't good for us. And how do you explain that aspect of it? I think one of the most important distinctions in thinking about games is the difference between the goal of a game and your purpose in playing the game. So usually in a game, these are different. So the goal of the game is the target you're trying to hit in the game, and the purpose of the game is why you play the game. For some people, the goal is just to win, and the purpose is just to win.

I call these achievement players. If your goal and your purpose are the same, if what you want to do is win, then there's no difference. But for a lot of us, there's a deep difference. So I think the easiest place to see this is like party games. In party games, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. Like if I play twister or charades, I'm doing a time. to have fun. To have fun, I have to try to win. But afterwards, if we all had a great time and I lost, I would be an asshole if I felt bad about it, right? Like, if you came in dead last in

Twister and everyone had a great time, you should realize the bigger purpose has been fulfilled. Similarly, if you're rock climbing, by the way, I love rock climbing. I'm a terrible rock climber. I am a garbage rock climber. I am mediocre beyond belief. I've been doing it for like two decades now. The reason I rock climb is, I mean, it keeps me healthy, but also it feels amazing to move elegantly. I'm like a very clumsy person. And rock climbing, the intense goal of rock climbing forced me to find like delicate movement.

And also like the absorption in rock climbing is one of the only things that will get my brain to shut up so I can actually have like silence in my brain. So the goal of rock climbing is to get up the rock. The purpose of rock climbing for me is the beauty of movement and clarity of mind and soul. And the interesting thing there is I cannot get that cleansingness of my soul without trying to win while I rock climb. But it actually doesn't matter. When I go to the gym, if I try and fail all day to hit this climb, when I leave, I still feel good. My body still feels good.

My mind still feels cleansed. So one important thing about games, when you have the right attitude, towards games. This is not the way everyone does it. You keep goal and purpose separate. The game tells you the goal, but you choose the game for your own purposes. And that, I think, is a huge dimension

of freedom that we often don't have with metrics. Look, I often think about if anyone's giving me a job to do or I'm hired for a job, one of the early questions I want to understand is like, what is my standard of success? What is the reason that you hired me? What am I here to do? From that pure, just like, practical purpose,

perspective. Sports are an interesting laboratory to think about this, right? So like a bunch of thoughts here, but like one is you mentioned like twos and threes in the NBA. One of the problems with the NBA right now for lots of viewers, including myself often, is that the metrics have created or rather even just the basic math. Three is more than two has created this incentive structure where there are lots of threes being taken. And so the efficiency of the three-point shot, is so omnipresent and obvious that people just take so many threes, more than they ever have. But it is at odds with what the fan is looking for, their purpose, because that's a worse product. And so there is this disconnect, right? The gap. There's this gap between, oh, I am here for an

entertainment. And what I'm getting is an increasingly optimized version of a machine that is trying to achieve to win. When I look at situations like this, so I think less about professional sports and more about like party games and board games and video games. And a lot of the times this looks to me like a game design problem, right? Like you have not tweaked the rule system to give you the experience you want. Then I think sometimes one of the things that happens is a lot of games

have to be played in the right spirit, keeping the purpose in mind. And what I mean is something like, if you're playing something like charades, you have to try to win while you play it. But you can over-optimise. Like, imagine the person that studies charades technique on YouTube and comes back.

I mean, I remember, okay, I'm going to crap on a close friend of mine, but there is this super great switch fighting game called Spider-Hack, which is this beautiful, like party fighter, simple controls. You play like spiders swinging around. You get guns to pick up, but you also get like lightsabers. But part of what's good about it is that it kind of evens the play. It's a new game, it's a weird game.

You can come to a party with your friends. You can play it and you're all pretty good at it. And one of my friends, like, this is awesome. And then he went home and for like eight months, like just became amazing at it. And then he came back to our gang and he just slayed everyone. and then no one wanted to play. And he was like, what? Wait.

And the answer is like, you had to keep the larger purpose in mind. And if you wanted to be a competitive player on the online spider heck world, awesome. But if your goal was to increase the richness of your experience here, then you should have held back

because you should have been a little bit guided by the purpose. The purpose should have been treated a little bit and guided how intensely you go for that goal. Now, I feel like professional sports is weird because, like, we have this purpose of like, interesting play, beautiful play. And then, especially because there's so much money on the line,

people start to hyper-optimize for the goal and, like, forget about the purpose. Although maybe the right response is to tweak the game design. Oh, no, the whole... I've talked to general managers and the NBA, these executives, these presidents of basketball operations, and they say to me, my job is to stay ahead of the NBA League office.

I need to know what I can spam as questions. and as often as I can, I need to be the friend who masters the game before they change the rules, before they nerf that advantage. But it raises the question, though, of why integrity and fair play and rules and not cheating really, this stuff matters? I wonder if there is an argument in your head that is beyond a moral one in terms of just like the whole premise of why we're here and why this matters and why we should preserve it mattering. I feel like

the entire purpose of my life is about to be met, because I think the purpose of my life is to be here talking with you about this question. This is the question I've wanted to... And this is the place. I've always wanted to talk about this question. So you're asking me about the purpose of games. I'm going to try to give you an answer,

and I'm going to try to tell you that it's also an explanation of the meaning of life. And then we cannot forget. And then we can talk about how both professional sports and bureaucratic metrics are the opposite of it. This is a hell of a way to start the new year. Yeah.

Okay, awesome. Okay. So you're asking what the value of games is and how we can lose out on the value of games by over-optimizing in a professional environment. So what is the value of games? I think the best understanding of the value of games, and by games here I mean board games and sports and all this stuff,

comes from a philosopher named Bernard Sutes. Bernard Sutes wrote in the 70s, this beautiful book called The Grouch. grasshopper that was kind of lost and then recovered. It's a cult classic. And he defines a game. And he says, what a game is is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them.

Another way to put it is that in games, the goal is intrinsically connected to the obstacles towards that goal, right? So he says there are two kinds of life, ordinary practical life and game life. In ordinary practical life, you have some outcome, and that's just valuable on its own. So you just try to get it as efficiently as possible. Like if I just want to get to a bakery across town, to get a bagel, just to be there, then I'm going to take the cheapest slash fastest way to get there, take the direct route, whatever's efficient.

If I'm playing a game, if I'm running a marathon, then I have certain constraints. I have to take this particular path, no shortcuts. I have to run there. I can't use a bicycle, call a lift. And one way to put it is that in a game, there's this game goal crossing the finish line, but you have to get there in a particular way. You have to follow the constraints or it doesn't count.

If you call a lift, it doesn't count as crossing the finish line of a marathon. Similarly, if you thought the goal of basketball was to pass the ball through the net period, and that's where the value was, then you would take a step ladder at night with no opponents and pass the ball through as much as it. possible. But that's stupid. That's stupid because the value of making baskets is intrinsically

connected with a particular set of constraints that sets a methodology. The value of making a basket is in dribbling and jumping and shooting often with opponents. So this means that whatever the value is, it is in the process, not the outcome. But if you're hyper-incentivized to win by the rules, then you're going to ignore that spirit, and you're going to cheese and spam whatever you can and destroy the spirit of the game. The guardrails that we've relied on historically, and this now speaks to the actual legal system and politics as well as all the games referencing, has been shame. Right?

Like, there's this assertion of like, this is f***ed up, man. Like, you're a bad friend. You're not fun to play with. This is, you are violating the spirit of what we're here to do. The macro observation that I have, though, is that shame has never felt less effective than it does right now. And it's not merely just who the president is. I also think about, frankly, a system, a capitalist system in which the one thing that matters is growth, is more, is. the green arrow going up and to the right, is the thing that is incentivizing and teaching all of us,

we need to win. We're here to win. We're still on the same page. One way to put what's happening is the good thing that happens with games is when you play the game with the goals and rules in mind, but you keep your eye on the larger purpose, which is bigger, right? And that purpose could be fun. It could be community. It could be like developing humanity. It could be joy. But when the scoring system doesn't give you that larger purpose, when it misses morally or spiritually or aesthetically, we either hold back or we know how to tweak the scoring system and the rules. If, on the other hand, you become so invested in the scoring system that you forget all the other values. If you become hyper-focused and let the scoring system

set all of your values. If your only values are, here's this number, make it go up for your whole life, then you've lost this larger reflective stance to start tweaking the rules and knowing that a scoring system isn't working for you or knowing that it isn't working for society.

And I think here it would be really useful to talk about why scoring systems miss what's really important. One crucial place to start is a big difference between the scoring system of metrics and institutions, and the scoring system of games, is usually the scoring systems

of games are totally artificial. They don't transform anything that was already there. But in other places, like on social media, likes are claiming to represent communicative value. And so if they're too thin, they're changing something we care about. Similarly, like Steps or VO2 or BMI, claiming to be representations of health. And so if you let them dominate, they're going to change our sense of health. This is the Hobbs stuff again. So one question you might have at this point is like, why is this data not going to capture what's important?

I started thinking about this because I was invited once to this conference as a philosopher of art. And the conference was all besides me, machine learning, CS and cognitive science people, training AI to make art. This was about like eight or nine years back. So this was before the current wave. And a lot of them were like, okay, we're still good. We're optimizing for great art. And I, as the philosopher of art at the back of the room, was like, How are you defining good art?

And they said, well, we're just using the Netflix data on engagement hours. And I lost my mind. And I was like, that's not good art. That's addiction. And they said, well, show me another massive data set about good art. And I was like, there's not going to be one. That's not the kind of thing that you can capture in data. And so I've been trying to understand why data is limited,

why data is very good for some things and why it's not for others. One way to put it is the thing that to get really interested in here is what I'm thinking of is the gap, which is the gap between what's really important and what's easy to measure institutionally. So the thing that was most useful for me here was this book from Theodore Porter called Trust in Numbers. So Theodore Porter is a historian of quantification culture. And he was trying to understand why administrators and bureaucrats often just reach for quantitative justification even when they knew it was crappy. even when everybody knew it, it was crappy. And his answer was that qualitative and quantitative forms of knowledge are good at different things.

So qualitative justification is like words, explaining yourself, quantitative justification is data and metrics. And he said, each of them was good at a different thing, and the problem wasn't that data was bad, is that we compulsively reached for it even when it was inappropriate. Qualitative understanding is rich and subtle and kind of, context-sensitive and nuanced and open-ended, but it travels badly between contexts, and it's often misunderstood by strangers because it requires a huge amount of shared background knowledge to understand.

Quantitative knowledge, as it works out in institutions, works by identifying a context-invariant kernel, something that everyone can understand no matter their context, and isolating it and keeping it stable and then making everyone collect into the same thing. And so suddenly what you've created is an engineered piece of information that travels easily between contexts precisely because we've stripped anything context-specific out of it, because we've removed any nuance from it and anything that requires a huge amount of background experience to understand. You have a term for this, right?

The facade of objectivity as well that this folds into. It's this notion that we are also being. sold this, actively sold this by tech companies often, as well as our governments, as if this metric data-driven system is also democratizing. It is populist. It is access expanding. But what you're describing is the thing that I think I have felt and have been frustrated by which is the decline in the value of expertise, of editorial judgment, of human decision-making. This is... so exactly the center of what's going on. It's a painful thought, but the thought is that there's a

downside to accessibility, and there's a downside to a kind of fast democratization. I mean, I think a lot about recipes. Loring Dassin talks about this movement in recipes between a kind of more complicated recipe that requires a lot of apprenticeship to understand, and this kind of hyper-clear modern recipe. So recipes, as you think of them now, they didn't used to be like that, right? Old school recipes look like this. So if you look, I have some cookbooks from the 1920s, and what they look like is they're like, well, need some eggs and some water and flour and keep adding water until it feels just under sticky, and you need it until it's nice and gummy, and then bake it until it like sounds ringing when knocked. That's actually a really good

recipe if you know what you're doing. Modern recipes are like two cups sugar or three cups flour, and what they give you is accessibility. Anyone can follow them. What they rob from you is the cues to adapt and use your judgment. And this is why I cooked from cookbook recipes, and I wondered why, even though I follow them exactly, it wasn't as good as my mom's. And the reason is because my mom has cooked a thing thousands of times

and she tastes everything and adapts. And the recipe, if you follow it strictly, is not telling you to do that. But the recipe is accessible, right? anyone can use it. So here's the worry. Metrics are that for values. What a metric is, is it's telling you something that anyone can use and understand. And I'm not saying accessibility is bad, but I'm saying there's a price, and that price is exactly what you're talking about. It's expertise. So here's a very navel-gazy example. In Apple Podcasts, you don't see

download count or view count. It is this weird, almost refuge from just like the transparency of metrics. YouTube, where you can subscribe, but Pablo Torre finds out, there is a total, just like, overwhelming avalanche of here's all the other people who are also doing the same thing that you are.

And when I was growing up, obviously, I knew there were like popular things, but it was not as if I read an article or read a book and had my view of it informed by how many other people simultaneously were doing that. And now, when it comes to just like what we've accepted, right? I think it's important to just point out visually. We clearly people who have played a ton of video games, we have studied and understood science and data to some extent in the stereotype of who we are,

two Asian dudes talking about like data and stuff. I get the value, so to speak, the upside of data in being, able to rigorously assess things free of bias, right? The pre-data era had its own wave and ocean of issues in terms of human bias. But the pendulum, man, has swung so far away from the original purpose. And I am just thinking to myself, we all feel the way in which stuff is worse. It's hard for me to say that it's disconnected from the entire conversation we've been having. And I'm with you. I will never say that data is bad, right? Large-scale data is really good at optimizing for things that are easy to count.

Like, I don't know, what stops an asthma attack? One thing I have to say is large-scale data approaches are why I am alive and why my child is alive because they're incredibly good at very clear targets. Right? Yep. Not dying of an asthma attack? Very clear. Second, they're incredibly good at debiasing. So if you have some company that's like super gender biased, they won't believe that they're gender biased. And the thing that knocks the door down is just numbers.

They're so clear. That's the point. You cannot ignore them. You're like, look, even though the women are getting these test scores just as good, you're hiring men nine times. Like, those are really clear. That's what tends to break down the door. And then you move 30 years forward. And what you get are diversity efforts that have been thin,

down to like numerical quotas of how many people from each group need to get in and seem to be missing the heart of the thing. And so the database approaches seem to be really good about at knocking down the door at the really blunt stuff. And then decades later, they tend to miss the subtle stuff and capture everyone's attention so everyone just games and optimizes for the little thing that's measured. The whole point is that what metrics are good, at targeting is what everyone can count easily together. And then the question is how much of what makes our life valuable is actually easy to count together. And then if you think not a lot of it is, then you get the second problem. If the world we're in is the world that hyper-awards with power,

people who are willing to cut out the rest of their humanity and hyper-focused just on the explicit measure, then we should expect to get a world in which the people who have the most power to communicate and control things are the people who have been willing to slash out their humanity and hyper-focus. What of my takes that I have for the new year, popularity will become uncool. And I say that just because we are all watching the mechanisms of what it is to get all of the views and all of the likes and all of the retweets. Right.

And I just think we're due for a movement that we've seen before, by the way, in which pop culture becomes uncool. And I just think that that is, it's just one of these things that feels like we're ripe for. Yeah, and less that gets captured and large-scale forces successfully game this sense of uncoolness and managed to, I mean, this is what's happening. Yeah, we're going to get punk points. Punk points. Yeah, exactly.

What happened with punk? It became pop punk, right? Some people resisted and were like, screw popularity, and then large-scale forces figured out how to game that, market that, and we got, you know, top alternative radio. Can I free you from this prison I've locked you in, in which you teach me philosophy with a question? One more question, because in your book, I was really moved.

When you explained the reason you wrote this book, like the person, who inspired you to write this book? Because all of us, we're on all of these devices and these apps and we're playing these games, and we are only now maybe beginning to open our eyes to what we've signed up for. And the person who inspired you to write this is not a famous or ancient philosopher, it's somebody else.

I give this talk. It was like something about games and then something about value capture. And I was like, God, these seem connected. And I don't know why. but here's, you know, here's what I understand. And I got this email from an undergraduate. And she was like, your talk pulled me out of a five-year depressive cycle.

She told me why it turned out, you know, she's a lot like me. Asian immigrant kid pushed to get a 4.0 GPA, also a varsity athlete. Also, she said, anorexic. And what she said was she realized that her life had been trapped in bad games. And that she hadn't even known she had, like, had any choice. That she had just taken the games that the world had shoved at her, and they were making her suffer. And that she said something about this framing let her be able to think to herself,

that she had some choice about what she was doing and how she was going to be measured. And so she changed the background of her iPhone to remind her every day of this. And what she had changed it to was the words, is this the game you really want to be playing? I got that email and then I cried and then I was like, well, shit. I guess we should think about this some more. Because if that's like, what more do you want from life

then to reach somebody like that? Is this really the game you want to be playing? Is I think a great thought for all of us to begin 2026? So Tien Nguyen, thank you so much for asking the question and, yeah, helping us think about it. Thank you so much for having me. It's been an amazing time.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out, a Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.