The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game by C. Thi Nguyen

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game by C. Thi Nguyen https://www.amazon.com/Score-Stop-Playing-Somebody-Elses/dp/0593655656 A philosophy of games to help us win back control over what we value The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the philosophy of data—takes us deep into the heart of games, and into the depths of bureaucracy, to see how scoring systems shape our desires. Games are the most important art form of our era. They embody the spirit of free play. They show us the subtle beauty of action everywhere in life in video games, sports, and boardgames—but also cooking, gardening, fly-fishing, and running. They remind us that it isn’t always about outcomes, but about how glorious it feels to be doing the thing. And the scoring systems help get us there, by giving us new goals to try on. Scoring systems are also at the center of our corporations and bureaucracies—in the form of metrics and rankings. They tell us exactly how to measure our success. They encourage us to outsource our values to an external authority. And they push on us to value simple, countable things. Metrics don’t capture what really matters; they only capture what’s easy to measure. The price of that clarity is our independence. The Score asks us is this the game you really want to be playing?

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Folks, Voss here from thecrisvoss Show.com. Ladies and gentlemen, there are the latest things that makes it official. Welcome to the Chris Voss show for 16 years and 24-100 episodes. No, 2,600 episodes. I'm losing track.

That's how many stuff we do. I can't keep track of it. But for 16 years we've been doing this, I refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodrease.com, 4ch, Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com, Fortress Christchis Frisvost, Chris Vos 1 on the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the internet. Two amazing young man on the show, we're going to be joined by him telling us about his new book that comes out January 13, 2026. Oh my gosh, we're on the cusp of 2026. Who knew that this is going to, who knew we were going to live this long?

I thought we were we were supposed to nuke ourselves by now? Oh, we're working on it. I'm sure we're still got that in the can. We're going to let AI nuke us. There you go. He's the author of the latest book to come out. it is called the score. How to stop playing somebody else's game. Your husbands might like this. T. Nguyen calls us on this show, joins us on this show.

We're going to be talking about his book, his insights, what he's written about and researched in how to quit playing someone else's game. And I don't know. Maybe they'll make you win. But I don't know, maybe is life like a video game? I see a lot of NPCs walking around. That's for damn sure.

I'm going to. So, We'll get into him and all the good stuff. He is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. We won't hold that against him. I'm in Utah right now. That's a joke. And a specialist, but we do love the University of Utah over at BUIU.

And a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and theory of value. He's a former food writer for the Los Angeles Times, and he's active in public philosophy, writing for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the new statements, the stew. Let me get that right. new statesman and elsewhere. He's been a longtime fan of games. And he, I'm sorry, this is a quote from Steve Wozniak.

He loved the book. Welcome to the show. Sir, how are you? I am good. That was an unbelievable intro. I have never felt more like a pro wrestler. And thank you for making me feel like I'm,

you know, a boring academic, but I get to feel for one second like I'm awesome for like. And then, you know, I can forget about that. I could go, I could go full. I could go full on NWE or whatever the hell

things out there. He is an associate professor of philosophy. Yes. This is perfect. I love it. I think we're going to have to have some cocaine for that. Anyway, isn't that how it works for wrestling? There's something going on in the chemicals over there.

So welcome the show, sir. Give us.coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? I am. My website is objectionable. Dot net. My blue sky is ADD underscore. H-A-W-K, and that is it for right now.

So give us T a overview 30,000 view of the book. So I've got two weird streams of my life in philosophy. I work on two topics that you're not supposed to work on in philosophy. One of them is the philosophy of games. I'm trying to understand what games are, why we play them, why they're fun, why we subject ourselves to weird unnecessary tortures. You know, like I'm a rock climber and I just do absurd stuff that makes me bleed for reasons that everybody else thinks is ridiculous. And the other half of my life is I am thinking about I'm doing the philosophy of basically social media and bureaucracies and talking about how we get sucked into things like social media like, social media scores, US News and World Report rankings.

And then I realized at some point that I had all this work that said, Games have this clear scoring system, and they make things fun and delightful and awesome. And then bureaucracies and social media had the scoring system that makes things terrible and miserable into destroying our lives and destroying the social fabric. They're not for the billionaires that own them. I know. For the rest of us, maybe. Yeah, that's actually... Mark Zuckerberg's doing fine.

He's not depressed at all. No, but yes. The core question of the book is who made the game you're playing and for what purpose. Can I throw a religion in this one? Maybe. Tell me what you're thinking. Don't get me fired. Well, I mean, I'm not going to, I'm going to tell you what I think.

And I want to throw you into the bus with my crazy bad shit, whatever. But no, I mean, to me, I saw long, when I was growing up as a kid, I kind of recognized that game moment. I don't know if I identified as a game, but I remember looking through the Sears catalog. We used to get that big thing you could use to level tables and stuff delivered every year with all the phone numbers in it, folks. If you're Gen Z, you can Google what that is. And I realized there was this epiphany I had that because, you know, I was a teenage guy. And everyone's like, what are you going to be when you grew up? I don't know.

You should figure it out. You're like, well, I don't know. There's like all these choices. And looking through the book, I realized that life was a game. Did I just quote Megada? And I did. Atutem and Don. And so I realized that life was a catalog.

You choose what you want to be. If I want to go like yourself, or maybe a researcher, trying to be a professor in college, write books and things, there was that lane. I want to go be a male stripper. There was that lane. If I wanted to go, I don't know, try to be a politician, there was that lane. going to be a firefighter, a rocket person, an astronaut, you know, everyone wanted to be that when they were a kid when I was growing up.

There were all these lanes and you could choose, but you had to go down them. And so, you know, there were these forest paths that you would take. And so I kind of recognized that early on. It may have been because I was raised in the cold, religious cold, but it was trying to just beat me into submission and faithful, blind knowledge. And so to me, just about everything is a game. Politics is a game. Religion's a game.

It's all games being played by people that are trying to convince you that they have to this game. I don't know. Something like that. I don't know what your thoughts are. That is so, I think we're probably on the same way. I'm going to fight with you about whether everything is a game. Sure.

But I think, I mean, this is the exact. This is the, okay. So let me, let me. Let me give you, can I give you, since I am a goddamn philosopher, can I give you a definition of games, the one that are you going with? Let's see what you think about this. I was trying to think about this. And someone introduced me to this beautiful book from a philosopher named Bernard Suit. It's called the Grasshopper. You know the story of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant works. The grasshopper plays and then starves. And the moral of the story is be like the

aunt, not the grasshopper. This book is supposed to be a defense of the grasshopper. It's supposed to be the grasshopper that's the hero. And in this book, he gives you a definition of games. So here's the definition of games. Playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the struggle to overcome them. So the key part, the part that I'm hearing from you is this voluntariness. Like what a game is. So if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, you, if you're lost in the woods and you have to get to the top of the mountain to survive, that is not a game. That's something the world is forcing you to do. If you are sitting here comfortably in, this is my disgusting office basement that I set up during the pandemic.

Are you talking about my room or yours? I'm talking about my room. If you're sitting here in the basement and you think like, I'm a little bored, I'm going to climb to the top of that mountain for the sake. I'm going to put on some restrictions. I'm not going to take a helicopter. I'm not going to take a car. I'm just going to go to the trailhead and walk myself. And even though there are easier ways to do it,

even though I, I don't know, could spend a bunch of money to get a helicopter to take me to the top. I am putting an obstacle in my way. I'm putting constraints in order to have the struggle. That's the game. Does that track what you're thinking? Yeah, but let me ask you this. I think at that point I would say you're gamifying it. Is that a good analogy?

Or am I right? So gamification is a weird, weird term. Okay. I mean, I can, there, people use that word all kinds of ways. I can put you in the universe of how I use the term. Sure. So a game is something you actually decide to do for the sake of the struggle. It's like something that you do because you want to be involved in the struggle.

Isn't that just masochism? Wait, I mean, here's something, there's a very thin line between games and masochism. I mean, let me just list to you games I play. I rock climb. And one of the things about rock climbing is, in every rock climb, there's an easy way up the back. This is, you actually can, a lot of the rock climbs, you could climb the hard way. You could drive up the trail, but you decide to do it the hard way. Exactly.

I mean, literally, this is suit his theory. Games are doing it the hard way on purpose. Yeah. Think about a marathon. You could call an Uber. A lot of the times a marathon is the dumbest possible thing because the finish line and the starting point in the finish line are literally a block apart. Sometimes the starting line and the finish line are actually the same place. And you can just like, you know, walk around the block and be done.

But you don't. You do what seems like a stupid and idiotic thing. You run 26 miles and you refuse to use a bicycle and you refuse to call an Uber in order. in order. I mean, this is suit this question. Why are you doing this? I mean, masochism is, here's one thing. People call it masochism when they're on the outside,

and when they're in the inside with something they think is cool, they call it love. Oh, that explains some marriages I know. But we think about this. So I fly fish also to Utah. It's a beautiful place to fly fish. I actually kind of like winter fly fishing. It's pretty brutal.

It's pretty, yeah, it's like, Beautiful, though. It is, you're out. It's like your, your inner river, you're bundled up. It's a little bit dangerous, but also like it's like icy, pure. It's like a little spike to your brain. It's totally beautiful. And from the outside, it looks completely nuts.

Like, why would I leave my house to stand in a freezing cold river to do, like, use overly expensive gear to catch a fish and then let it go? What do you get out of that? Are you married? Yeah. With kids? Yes. Okay.

Yeah. It makes complete sense now. But this is, this is, this is exactly the, this is exactly the, this is exactly. I moved in with a gal one time with two, with two, with two, with two, with two, with two kids and moved in with her. And suddenly I wanted to work weekends. And she said to me, you know, you didn't used to like to work weekends. I mean, my problem is there's a lot of the, there's a lot of the, there's a lot of, there's a lot of life that talks to me. There's a lot of email. There's a lot of people. But even when I'm on my own,

my brain won't shut the hell up. It's like constantly going, and the thing that fly fishing does and the thing that rock climbing does is you do something hard, you do something a little painful, you focus, and suddenly your mind clears out. Yeah. And yeah, it looks like masochism. When I look at other people, when I look at things I think are dumb, I mean, I know they're not dumb, but like mountain biking. look at that and I think they are masochists, right? I mean, I think everyone's like that. I look at people that do ATVing. I like, they're bouncing. I'm like, that's masochism. And then I look at myself fly fishing at freezing temperature. I'm like, that is beautiful. Yeah. That's what a game is. It's picking, it's your choice of masochisms. It's your choice of difficulties. It's your choice of

doing something the hard and stupid way because you like it. And I think you said the key. A game is something where you have to pick, which, I mean, you get to pick the massacism. masochism you like and ignore the masochism you don't. How's that? It should have been the title of your book. And to correct myself, I'm teasing on the married thing. I tease all my gaming married friends because they always want to do the most heinous raids and the most heinous activities.

And then if there's ways to make it harder, and I'm like, and it's always the married guys. So I always tease them. That's where that joke comes from. Wait, what are your hobbies? In reality, gaming and different things. So in reality, I think especially why men feel that is appealing, is providing challenge to hone our skills or to hone our sword, if you will,

or our character. Sometimes it's a search for peace. Like I know that same feeling when you're out fishing. There's that piece element to it. There's the clarity. I do that with my photography. I go out and street shoot. And there's a clarity that I have.

And also it kind of stops time. It compresses time. And even when I'm gaming like Division II, Destiny. I do a lot of video games, but there's a social aspect to it where I have a lot of clans. But even then, you know, you do, you try and make things harder. And I think part of that's a meritocracy sort of climb that we have in, as men, we aspire to those markers of doing stuff. Is that a thing? Or I mean, I literally do not know why you think, why you're marking this to men, because I think men and women. I think women like it too, but I think it's more of a man thing.

But I think women like it too, the meritocracy part. Okay, let me say something that'll be maybe over stereotyping. I see in, I mean, things have changed a little bit now, but here are two intense competitions I see that are kind of gendered. There are a lot of guys that are going to compete for weightlifting for the highest weight. And then there are a lot of women who are in competitions to live. lower their BMI. It's the same thing. It is a brutal. Some people like it. Some people are caught into it, but there is intensive competitions along clear scoring systems that are often like life destroying in some cases, and often joyful in others. And you, and I mean, wait, do you,

do you actually think there's a gender difference right now? No. How people are competing on Instagram for likes? No, I'm just, I'm just saying it's a slight. It's a slight edge. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Joke aside. I do have this theory, though, about fly fishing in Utah.

Because I got to Utah and I met all these guys who had the super intense relationship of fly fishing. It was like they needed it all the time. And I eventually developed the theory that what they wanted was meditation. Yeah. But they were too doodly and been brought up to bro to actually admit to themselves that it was meditation they needed. And fly fishing is staring at the surface of moving water. intensely for eight hours. It is meditation.

But it's meditation under like a rapper or a cover. You get to tell yourself you're doing some manly hunting fishing thing, but you're actually just meditating. Sorry, that's what you're doing. It's what you need. It's what you need. We need those, you know, you can come back from fishing with your buddy

and your girlfriend's like, what did you do? What did you guys talk about? Nothing. I think that's the man aspect of the joke I'm referring to. But no, women compete. They compete. They compete with each other. I mean, between makeup and Instagram, like you say, and I mean, they even compete in waylifting and other things that

used to be kind of a sphere for men. But, you know, so your book covers, I want to get back to your book, I've kind of wandered a little bit here, because we want to promote your book. So, why do we create these games? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we play

this? What did you research and find? I mean, you're not wandering at all. This is what the heart of the book is. The book is why we do these things to ourselves. And the answer is, I mean, okay, let me give you a distinction from the book. I think there are two ways to play a game. So if a game is something where you've taken on obstacles voluntarily, there are two reasons you might play. One is achievement play. That's because you want to win. You actually care about winning at the struggle. The other is striving play. And striving play is where you want the experience of the

struggle. And you have to try to win in order to have that experience. But you don't, actually want to win. That's not what you actually care about. One of my, one of the professors that taught me, Barbara Herman, one day she was like, she was actually like, you know, it's just because the difference between a goal and a purpose. And I'm like, what's the difference between a goal and a purpose? And she said, if you have friends over for a board game, the goal is to win and the purpose is to have fun. And if you lost but had a great time in that context, then you had a satisfying evening and you got what you wanted. And I think a lot of the times, like what one of the things, I think it's very hard in the world we're in to remember this. But in games, what games emphasize if you're a striving player is that the points aren't the point, right? Like getting the point is just a way to get yourself into an interesting experience of balance or interesting decision spaces or beautiful movement or a cleaned out mind or like the Zen state of stare. at a lake looking for rising a trap. Like what you want is the doing in the mental state associated with the doing and different point systems and constraints like they shape what you do to get you there.

Like climbing is very like I mean first I don't I hate running. I hate running running is boring to me other people for other people running is like it's your flow state. Do you like running? No. No. No. I don't even like running when the cops are chasing me.

I'm just like, I'm too tired to do this. But like all the things later? Can you chase me later in cops? All the things. All the things I like are things where like, I think I have a very short attention span. And they're all things where the world is constantly changing and I have to keep up. And the rules force me to do it. Like the rule, the goal of going up and here's the thought.

the goal of going up in a rock climb forces me to pay hyper attention to the rock and hyperattention to my balance. And it's that that is the thing I love. There's some video games I love, like Hyperlight Drifter. And the reason I love it is because the goal of getting to the end of these levels. And then these enemy swarms forces me into this like reactive

reflex dance where I have to like let my fingers move faster than thought. And that's the thing I like. So it's like, I want to know if this tracks for you. Like the answer is that we like to be doing actions. And some actions suck and are boring and games when they're good. Let us like find the exact kind of action that's tasty for us. Oh, our flavor. Yeah, your flavor of action.

Your flavor of action. Some people, it's, you know, doing like, you know, a friend of mine just announced he's going to go to Everest. Yeah. I'm just like, you have a son. but no, I mean, there's a lot of people climb Everest to come back, more so that don't, but there's a lot that don't. But, you know, everyone's got their own flavor.

Like you say, it's interesting. Did you dig into the book as to why we choose certain things? Like, I might choose video games over your rock climbing, and I think you're crazy, and maybe you think my video games are crazy. But why do we choose certain things? I mean, what shapes that? maybe do you explore that in the book? Yeah, I mean, I...

Why are you crazy and I'm not? I mean, this is, I... Maybe this is the philosopher's side of me. I don't. That's just, it's a beautiful mystery and I don't have to. The whole point of games is you don't have to explain yourselves. The interesting contrast for me is between games and metrics and rankings and bureaucracy, because there's an effect on us when we don't get to choose.

I mean, in some sense, I can just leave the neat things. about games is that they are a weird soul black box. Like I, if the game that you love passionately, I hate, we don't, we're not forced to explain ourselves to each other. Sure. Yeah. You love yours and I'll mind. Yeah. But then, and then things are different in the world, in the corporate world, in the bureaucratic world, what metrics are are ways that force us to explain each other and force us onto the same scoring system. Does that make sense? Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. And you treat your life, you talk about in the book, treating your life like a game, and then you are the game designer and a beta tester in one. So how do I get this app on the app store on Apple?

No, I'm just kidding. I think, I mean, in some sense, the point is that you can't quite, like, if you're buying an app, it's kind of pre, it's kind of pre-purchased. And the whole point is, maybe you can modify it, but the closer you are to something that is kind of open and free, reform, the closer you are to being able to quickly change it under your control. And the closer you are to something that's on an app and preloaded, like Twitter, the closer you are to something that is hard to screw with, hard to house. Okay, let me try a thought on you. So one of the core concepts from the book is value capture.

So value capture is any case where your own values are rich or subtle or complicated. or developing, and then you get put in a social situation next to a simplified version of those values, like a metric or a ranking. And then the simplified version takes over. I don't know, starting a podcast to connect to people and inform people, but then getting obsessed with just upping your subscriber account, or becoming a journalist to communicate to the world and becoming obsessed with your page views, or starting exercise to feel healthy and be getting obsessed with like your step counts or lowering your weight or V-O-2 max. I mean,

I know people whose knees hurt and they keep walking because they need to make their step counts. And that's a case where, you know, the point system has come away from the true purpose. Yeah. There's kind of a, it's interesting when I look at games, and I think you're right on all that. I mean, you've done the research. I'm just an idiot podcaster who just, I don't know, tells jokes,

bad evidently. So anyway, but it's interesting, it took me a while to figure this out, but I started figuring out the gamification that companies use in video games. And I think sometimes we create our own gamification in places where it's not provided. Like for,

like you mentioned, the challenges that you'll add if you're going to go climb something and you're like, well, I'm going to go on the hardest rock face to get up and I'm not going to use or safety rope and I'm going to just the chalk in my hands and going to, you know, and I see that

as crazy and maybe some other people, but, but, but the challenge and then part of it is there's like a discipline action to it. So for me, you know, I get, you catch a lot of shit with video games from chicks because they're like, hey, you know, we can't be games. And I'm like, well, you guys play

your own video games, or types of video games, or games, just like you talk about in your book. they compete and do things for themselves as well. I guess it's a human nature thing. But of masochism. But, you know, I look at things where in video games, I'll gamify stuff.

But for me, a lot of it comes down to kind of a tribal hunter thing. To me, I'm honing my skills. When I'm getting together with other guys playing video games, it's the tribe. We're going to go kill Tyrannosaurus Rex. what we used to do in real life, we're virtually making or recreating here in other life. And then we like when we feel that score, that win. I don't know. Am I going anywhere?

Yeah, I mean, there's, okay. I'm trying to compliment your book in the best way I can't. The philosopher of John Dewey says that in every art form, we take something we do in natural life, and then we purify and crystallize it for like joy and pleasure and interest. And I mean, I think, so there are two theories. One, Norbert Elias, who's a sociologist, has this theory that what games are is we're basically naturally homicidal maniacs. And we figured out how to like make that safe. So instead of killing each other in reality, we play football and we like ground out our desire to kill each other.

So that's like the, that's like the psychotherapy version. Like we need to put it somewhere. So let's let's just beat each other up on the field instead of actually killing each other. That's one version. This is why I watch this in Metallica and watch video games is to keep me from murdering people because it's it's therapeutic. Exactly. That's one theory.

Games are a kind of therapy. The other kind of theory is that like, I mean, it's not just you're developing your skills. It's that ordinary life, I don't know, it asks you to do something. And it's a medium tasty, but it's not perfectly tasty. And then the game can just, because it's cut away from ordinary life, it can tease the details to the point where it's maximally tasty. Like, you know, and it's not just hunting and killing.

So, like, you know, I really like getting furniture through two small doors, and I really like, like, packing my friend. You're giving me a look. I'm just, I'm giving you that. That sounds crazy. Massacism to me. Right. Or I like, look, it's, I, I, another thing I loved when my friends were moving a lot is I would

love fitting too much stuff into a too small van because you have to like turn everything just right. I think you should have been a mover in your life. You've clearly got the wrong profession. But you know, this is not, I'm not weird here. This is why people play Tetris. This is the whole point. Yeah.

The point of Tetris is that pleasure is purified for you. That is kind of what moving is. It's a live Tetris game with a man. And there you go. Tetris, Tetris is, I don't know what's, Tetris is purified and uncut moving.

After we get up the show, I need your number because I want to be your friend when I need to move again. Because the rest of my friends don't return my calls when I tell them I'm moving. I hate the lifting part. What I like is the van stacking part. You like the stacking. That's usable. So,

and why is that applied? You said that was the second part. and and is either of them wrong or both right or? But either or both or what of what? Either both of those are they right or are they, you said there was two different types of thinking. There was that. Oh, yeah.

I mean, I think that, right, the, that games are for catharsis or games are for pleasure. I mean, I think it's both. I think that I both get, I mean, but it also depends on which you want. Like you can play a game that's peaceful and chill and non-aggressive at all, or you can play a game that's like stalking. I mean, I can definitely feel when I am fly fishing and I am stalking a trap that I can see and creeping up in the bank that there's some part of my hunter brain that doesn't normally get to live. That's like totally throbbing with excitement. And then other times it's like, no, I don't want to kill anything.

I want to stack things. Turn on Tetris. So it's your, I mean, again, it's your choice. The point of games is that unlike other parts of life, life, you get to choose the scoring system and the constraints that get you the action you want, whether that action be for like, therapyizing your homicidal side or for like letting you indulge in whatever weird geometry you want. And you can, you can have the version you want. I mean, the, the pain of, the pain of our exposure to things like social media metrics and

subscriber account is that we fairly get to do that. I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, I mean, actually, I forgot to tell you the upshot. The upshot of thinking about value capture for me is that with a lot of cases with metrics, what you're doing is you're outsourcing your values and you're outsourcing your love. You're letting somebody else set what you value and what you're trying to do for you, and you're not actually figuring it out for yourself. And that, I think, is the true difference between games and gamification. In a game, you get to choose the scoring system of the action that pleases you. In a gamification, typically, somebody else has decided to gamify your workplace,

your education, and giving you a scoring system profits them that's not built for your pleasure, but built to get you to work super hard to, I don't know, box things more quickly and efficiently. But is the game you're playing with their game, the, I want to be a provider for my family, my children, I want to have nice things, I want to pay the bills, I want to, you know, I mean, we do everything as humans to propagate the species. That's really our modus of operandi is propagate the species. Chase, chase the opposite. So, well, chase whoever we're interested in sexually and then procreate and then take care of those children. That's our whole modus of operandis. you know, sometimes we're like, maybe we should care about something beyond this.

Like, what's in this water? What's in this air? Anyway, and so that's kind of our game that we're playing, aren't we playing a game on game? If a billionaire's got his game with the corporation and you got your game to try and make your game work right, you got to work with my game. You're a DLC of me or I'm a DLC of you. Okay, let me, this is a, this is a, maybe I'm maybe I'm. I'm an NBC. I don't know. This is a very cool way

to put the question. Let me, let me, let me think of a, I love the way you put the question, let me think of a non-stupid way to answer it. I'm feeling pretty stupid this morning. You're a professor, there's nothing stupid. You can come. Okay, let me, let me try. I don't know about rock climbing,

though. I'm just kidding. I'm teasing you. Let me. I actually have a lot of respect for that, because that's, I mean, you have an element of danger that, you know, I'm just feeling here what you think. Yeah, I mean, actually, an interesting thing is you can actually run rock climbing in any direction. You can go for high danger, low physical complexity. I actually go for low danger, high physical complexity.

I go for stuff like bouldering where you're climbing on a cave roof and you're like eight feet above a gymnastics pad. So it's not that dangerous. You might twist an ankle, but it's super hard. It is brutally hard because that's- How long have you been married? No, I'm just kidding. Because it's, the guys who climb the big ones where they might die, those are the ones that have been married the longest. So what you think about that answer, I got another question for you.

Yeah. How about that? Okay. So let me, let me, hold on. Let me try to answer your last question. Then you can give me a new question. I can only handle, my brain is very limited. It's my name.

I can only remember one question at time. Okay. So here's, so here's a question. Here's a way to think about it. Some games, you're playing, and you get to choose whatever scoring system you want, and you get to tune it for the kind of action you like. Other games, the scoring system is fixed because it's connected to outcomes you want. So what I mean is, okay, if I want, if I'm going to make money by being popular on social media,

I can't change that game until it feels good. I'm stuck in that game in one particular game that's somebody else, and I may hate it, but I have to play it because it's the only way to get those resources. So does that make sense? I don't, I mean, I don't get to, I don't get to choose the kind of action. I mean, I guess it's like someone made the game. And the interesting thing about a lot of video games, a lot of board games is there are games that somebody made for my pleasure and joy.

And then I get to jump between, like if I, so if I get bored playing, I don't know, the last, the last video game I was super into was called Monster Train. I played it intensely and then I got bored and then nothing forced me to keep going on that game. I just skipped ahead and I played a different game. I actually started learning to yo-yo, which is a gloriously dumb thing to do. I grew up in the 70s. That was the thing back then. Everybody had to learn to yo-yo. Have you seen modern yo-yoing, by the way?

No, it's probably highly technical now, maybe. I don't know. All the technology changed in the 2000s. Yo-yo's can spin for about five minutes now. It's wild. Yeah, you can do. Anyway. Can we bring back hula hoops too then?

What'd you say? Can we bring back hula hoops? They were big during the yo-yo era, Hulu hoops. Yeah. I don't think they blew up with that. There was no, I don't know of any hula hoop technology changes that. I'm making investments now. This is the new, what's that tennis game?

It's the new tennis game. So your question leads me into my next one. that's worked perfectly. So you're saying that, okay, there's a difference in the types of games. Let me make sure and clarify this. So I understand this correctly because I flunk second grade. And so you're saying there's two types of games. One that you kind of have to do because someone else makes the rules. But what you're espousing in the book, I think, is that you can make your own rules in your own game and you can kind of take control maybe. And there's a difference between those two games. Yeah, I mean, that is the deep point.

And also, I mean, it's a little, because the thing about games is a lot of my favorite games, somebody else made. A lot of the most interesting games are board games or card games or video games that somebody else made. So with real games, I have two dimensions of freedom. One, I can move easily between games and pick them. And two, if I don't like them, I can try to mod them. Not all games are modable. Some are easily modable, like poker is easily modable. And then with a lot of video games, if I don't like how it's playing, I can speed run it or create some other goal.

I can like, I mean, with climbing, it's super interesting. There is a standard scoring system and climbing, a difficulty-based system. And I went off of it after about 10 years. I started being like, this is not the scoring system for me. And I think that's exactly right. So with a lot of institutional scoring systems and a lot of technical. logical scoring systems, you don't have that degree of choice. If you want to interact, if you want to work in this place, if you want to be, if you want to go to school, you have

to be scored by GPA. You do not have a choice about that. If you want, if you want to succeed via on social media, there's a very limited number of scoring systems that you have to interact with. And they were not designed for you and you have no choice. They were designed to game you would when you say maybe. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, uh, I, I think that the, It's me putting a bar in front of you and going, jump, bitch. I mean, the excessively... That's how it feels like. Here's a slogan I sometimes think about it.

You can tell me what you think about this. Either you play the game or the game plays you. Exactly. That's one of my favorite sayings. You either play the game or the game plays you. And the way you play the game is you pick it and you choose it and you decide whether it likes for you, you like it or you work for it and you kind of think about whether or not it's working for you,

or you can let yourself be pushed around by the game. And you can, that can happen. like normal games too. I meet people outfly fishing who are using some like fantastic new method that's like catches them a ton of fish and they don't like it and they get stuck in it. They're like, they're like, I don't like fishing this way, but I got to do it because you catch more fish. And the answer is you don't have to do it that way. You don't have to do it the most efficient way possible. You get to do it whatever you want. Yeah. And then and then the rest of the world is not like that. Yeah. I mean, technically you don't have to get the highest GPA. You can go rob banks and end up in prison. I mean, you don't have to do anything really in life.

Right. I mean, that's, I think that is. But you did present it as if you want this, you have to do this. Yeah. I mean, I think. But there's no have to is really. I think that is. Only if you want, only if you want what you say, you know, where you go if you want, you know. that's actually I think the thing I'm really trying to say in the book that the world is trying to trick you into thinking you don't have these choices about the games by saying, by not giving you any other visible options. Yeah.

And you and I think one way to put it is that the word gamification, the way I think about that is like that is typically companies or large institutions, institutions trying to trick you into playing their game. And the true response, and I think my word for this is being playful, the true response is realizing you don't have to do that, that you can interact with those systems only as much as you feel you have to. And then you can otherwise decide what you're going to do with them.

You can treat life more like it. So at the beginning you said, is everything a game? And I think what I'm trying to say is, you can. can treat things more like a game. Exactly. Yeah. I like how you're doing. You're advising people, if I understand correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're advising people to

take a look at it as a game. And thereby, a lot of systems make sense in the world. And some people you have your game that you're personally playing to get through life. And then sometimes you have these, you know, you may have a video game or rock climbing that's your side game. I don't know.

If you call it a side game, whatever. But you know, you've got these different hobbies and and activities you like to do that, you know, can sometimes take the edge off. But it's kind of interesting that we, you know, I'll play a video game because I'm either bored or I'm stressed and I want to think about something else and not think about that thing and I want to maybe walk away from it.

You know, sometimes I do that with all sorts of things. Like I've got a bunch of photography. I've got to do editing for a shoot that I did yesterday. But I spent so much time in it, I want to get a fresh return to that data and see it from a kind of different perspective. So sometimes that's why we maybe flip between these hobbies and games. But I think what you're trying to spouse people is like if you look at like a game, you know, a lot of stuff starts making sense when you start looking at it from a gamification process, right?

Or game process. One of my favorite philosophers, Maria Lagunas, says that what it is to be playful is to be able to move between different words. with different rulesets lightly and to be able to like spiritually shift between different senses of what you're supposed to be doing and what the rules are on how you're doing it. Maybe that's why we have different games and hobbies is because it gives us that flavor differentiation. That is the that is the thing that I am trying to say, which is when you spend your time dealing with some technical technological systems and some institutions, they pretend like there's only one way to think and

only one way to score yourself. Because what scoring systems are are prefabricated ways to evaluate yourself. They tell you what success is. And so sometimes you can be in a world and you're like, the world is like, for a lot of my students, it's like, get better grades, get better grades. They think that's the only way to go. Or you might be in some environment like journalism or podcasting and you might like the world is trying to suck you and there's only one way to think here, which is a subscriber account. And the actual environment of real games is one that's constantly giving you choice and constantly immersing you in the experience of, no, you get to choose.

No, you get to Twitch run. Think about why you're doing this. Is this the scoring system you want? Do you like this one? No, maybe you try that one. And I think, I mean, tell me what you think about this. I think the world of real games lets us practice being light. and fluid and seeing things from outside.

Yeah. I think it develops this. I mean, I see it as honing my discipline, my mindset, my strategy, my strategic brain, all the things that I would use

in a hunt of a woolly mammoth as a caveman. So I think it's making me better as a hunter. When I'm in my real world, I'm maybe more aware of my environment, et cetera, danger, et cetera. Maybe, I don't know.

Can I try another thought on you? Sure. I think there's two, there's two levels of this. Okay. Level one is each game trained you. Some games train you to be a hunter. Some games train you to be a cooperator. Some games train you to be a math decision.

Some games train you to be a balance freak. And then the act of playing games in general trained you to shift fluidly between them. So one thought I have is that games kind of make you train you to be a Swiss Army knife person. Yeah. That you suddenly can learn how to adapt yourself. and change your mental style. Like, I mean, I think like one, one way to be an asshole

is to be locked into the Hunter perspective all the time. Yeah. And it's really good to be able to be able to switch. I'm not. I'm not locked in the hundred thing. Yeah. You're not locked in. I just had to do the joke.

If you set me up a joke, I'll go down on it. So, yeah. I mean, that's your game. That's my game. The Chris Voss Show game podcast. The Chris, I mean, I entered the gauntlet.

Comedy. Is that, I think hunting, the hunting mindset, the victory at all costs, kill the thing mindset is one useful mindset among many. Yeah. And I think I'm like,

I don't know, I'm worried if what you take out of games is always be the maximal hunter kill everything you can. Another thing you think about games is sometimes you can switch from team mode to hunter mode. Sometimes you can switch from like peaceful balance mode to kill everything mode. And it's a really spiritually good thing to cultivate in yourself the ability to switch and not be locked into one style.

That's what games do at their best. I would agree with you. I do like the hunter kill everything that moves the thing, but the judge says I can't do it anymore and next week I get one of my six ankle bracelets off so that's good but no you're right like in video games there's several different versions of the game you can play like a raid is more like more cooperative yeah and then you have like the medic guy the healer guy or something you have the armory guy he's got all the ammo and like you say there's different roles that you play and I used to be that guy who was just the hunter guy like I just want to kill shit just give me something to

and I'll shoot it but now I've developed where I enjoy being the maybe the healer guy sometimes. Yeah, one of the interesting things is, I mean, games look hyper competitive and hyper solo only superficially. I think a lot of these games,

like people look at, look at a lot of raid games, a lot of team shooters and what they see is violence. And what I see is perfect cooperation. One of the only times in your life where your victory and somebody else's victory are completely unified and combined.

And what, I mean, that game is having you practice aggression. But the other thing is having you practice is being in a team, locked in, playing your role, thinking exactly about what the team needs. And that's a different mental state. Like, I mean, this is a thing that, it's as old as sports. We know this. But the point is that these different games, because of the way they specify rules, have us slide between the different mindsets. Suddenly, I mean, I mean, one way to put it, I think, I think a lot of. of what games do is they carve out different selves for you and you can try them on.

This is partially why you just don't want to make themselves. And I think it's super cool that a lot of games, some games have me being a purely supportive person. I love the fact that games have the sniper role, the medical role, the engineer role, because suddenly you have to think entirely from a different perspective and be plunged into and locked into a perspective that might not be how you normally live your life. But the game gets you there. Yeah, yeah. Let me ask you this. One of the challenges I have, I don't have an addictive personality, so I don't, I've never gotten into drugs and everything else. I do have a, I do have an OCD, ADHD personality, which is its own, you know, obsession. You probably have the same.

Yep. Squirrel. So one of my problems with gaming is, I think a business is a game, and I figure this a long time ago, I started my first company, I was 18. So I think a business is a game. I think a business is a game. I think a business is a game. game. To me, it's just widgets and doop-doop and buttons. I push and a toolbox that I use and I've created dozens of companies. I could do it in my sleep now. It means just it's all systems. The only thing it changes is the widget, okay? Is it service, a product? Is it a paperclip? Is it a car? Whatever the fucking widget is. But to me, it's all a game. It's a game to see if I can win and the winning is profitability, making the world maybe a better place, contributing a better product yada yada yada and i love that game and it's very it's very great for life and and stuff

but i go look at the hours that i play you know how stream and there's steam and other places you played 10 000 hours doing this and i'll sit and i'll look at the gameplay i do and i realize that i kind of have a problem i like short easy wins over the long game and the long game is really where it's at. And I get addicted to that. I don't know. I don't know. I get addicted,

but my OCD runs it because I like that dopamine hit of the cheap win. When really, I kind of reflect on sometimes when I see those hours and I go, Jesus, dude,

that's like three books you could write there with the hours you put into the division too. You know, for destiny. That's like, it's like a,

you know, and it's extraordinary the amount of time I put in the gaming. Do you ever, do you talk about that in the book, kind of the quandary of maybe we get a little too obsessed sometimes with our shit because we like the cheap win over the long game? I have two completely different answers for you. And you can choose which one apply to you more. One is one of the pressures that gets us out of playing beautiful games is addictive engineering.

There's a really good book you might really be interested in Natasha Darshall's Addiction by Design. She's an anthropologist, and she studied how basically Vegas engineers hacked our dopamine cycle using lights and sounds and video poker. And then after that, she tracked how those engineers basically got hired by a lot of the gaming companies and the social media companies to carefully engineer how it feels like when the likes go, when you get an experience point in World Warcraft. So that is all hyper-tuned for addiction. And one of the things about addiction is it, like, it can get you to do something. There are games I play that I find deeply valuable. And then there are other games, the most important of which is civilization, that I regret playing because it was this addictive.

I, like, lost months of my life. It's gone. I got addicted to it, too. That's the one answer. The second answer is playing a game you love is not a waste of time. I mean, the burner two. this philosopher I was talking about who talked about the philosophy of games and gave me my definition of games. At the end of his book, he says, imagine a utopia where we've solved all our

problems and there's just like technology that does everything for us. What would you do with our times? He says, we would play games or we would be bored out of our fucking mind. So games are the meaning of life. I mean, games, I really think games are the meaning of life. I mean, it's a big game. To me, I always tell people, It's a survivalist game of the fittest because the universe game is survival of the fittest. I mean, I don't, what? Why is that the game? I mean, why is that the game?

I mean, the whole point is you get your choice of games. Why are you like? There's only one game. No, I'm not saying if there's only one game. I'm saying it's the biggest game there is, I think. It's the big game. Because if you don't beat survival, you're not playing Call of Duty. If you didn't even by the line, you're not playing Call of Duty this week.

wherever you're not giving black update survival is the game that's forced on us but if you pass it you don't have to keep playing that and only that game when do you pass it uh when you i mean i'm not fighting for survival right now you're not i mean i'm not at the not with every inch of my soul not with every inch of my time your body is currently active you know, eradicating bad cells, fighting off cancer cells. I mean, you're always fighting off cancer cells.

Your body is always at work fighting for survival. I mean, I'm saying something. I'm saying something super, I'm just saying one game you could play, you could be stuck in the game of making as much money as you can unlimitedly, or you can make the amount you need to survive and be okay. and then play the other games you want. You don't have to be stuck in the money-making game if you don't. I mean, I'm telling you not to feel guilty to play destiny.

I'm saying that you've won't. I'm going to bring you in the room any time my girlfriend starts bitching about destiny. Because, I mean, they don't understand it. Just like I don't understand why people have rock climbing, so I get it. It's not their game, but they have their own game. Yeah. I mean, one, another way to put it is part of what makes the big, the big, big game suck is that they have to be the same for everyone and so you can't adapt them. And what makes the small games great is that you have the freedom to pick the one you want. And so this is why I'm so like, oh, survival is the biggest game. So it's the most important game. I think like that's, that's the way of thinking that will get you stuck in games you hate. Okay. Okay. Well, I mean, technically, I'm just saying it's, of the game you're always playing. I mean, when you get up and start moving around, you're like, okay, what do I not run into that

won't kill me? Okay. I have another way to put it. Let me try this. Okay. We're talking about the games you choose and the games the world forces on you. Survival is the ultimate game the world forces on you. And you do have to play it.

But you don't have to play it with every inch of your heart. Well, you don't have to focus on it. Yeah. Yeah. Your mind's working on that. He's in the background, but yeah. So what do you think about this? my quandary that I have where

I love video games, I'm OCD addicted to them. And I love the cheap dopamine win hits. Should I be really concerned about the time I'm wasting playing video games? And maybe that's the question I'm trying to ask you. You know, the question is, in what way do you love it? I think a funny thing I learned from civilization is you can be wrong.

You can make a mistake about whether you're having fun. one of the you know what I mean you played it yeah you're right the whole point of civilization is I spent

months and months playing it thinking to myself I was having fun and afterwards being like I can't remember any of that I feel terrible there was nothing interesting in that

and then there are other games I played I mean rock climbing video games like portal like tabletop role playing games with my like those games I play and I think back

and my memory is just full of different joys, like moments I figured out a rock climb, moments I figured out of puzzle and portal, moments that we came up with an incredible story in Dungeons and Dragons. And I think, like, I would say that I love those games, and I was kind of, like, erroneously tricked into thinking I loved civilization, where really I was just, like, addictively, like, and I guess the question is, when you say, you love these games and you feel guilty about it, is it that really you know that they're not,

you could be playing better games that would make you more deeply fulfilled, but you're just like stuck in this addiction cycle? Or is it that you really love them and you're guilty because you think you should be doing something more productive with your time? I think the second with the mix of the first. So, you know, I'm getting older. I'm 57 now, turning 58 next month. And I'm at that thing where you're starting to get that,

you know that you're starting skin's getting a little palpable where you're sweating a little bit going yeah I'm in the third or fourth quarter of the game actually I had that epiphany I don't know if this is falls in line with what we're discussing but I think it might when I turn when 2020

happened and COVID happened I really had awakening as to the reality of life and where I was in that place you know a lot of people think you know midlife is 50s it's not it's 38 your life's half over at 38.

Think about that, especially as a man. We die sooner than women. And so, you know, usually when men reach 50, they start breaking down. When 60, they really start health breaking down by 70. You're pretty much either out the door or you're in hospitals for the next five years and then you're out the door. And so men just, we just declined fairly hard and heavy. And so I sat down and looked at COVID and I was like, I'm either in the very very. very last half of the third quarter based on my age, or I'm in the fourth quarter.

And the game's over. This is crunch time. This is go time. This is not fuck around and find out time. This is Tom Brady at the Super Bowl who's behind and no NFL teams ever come back from being down this far to where you fucking go out the game or you don't go to the game. And you start measuring your time. You're like, you know, I only have so much time left. I got to start thinking about the quantity of time.

And so, yeah, I mean, maybe it's a little guilt game that I play with myself. I'm like, Chris, you should go be writing a book, another book, instead of dealing with this, you know, playing this distraction, if it were. But then, you know, sometimes there's cathartic, too, like I was saying, you know, if I go do something else, sometimes I'll think about an innovation of that other game that I'm playing or, you know, some aspect of it that I wouldn't have thought about it if I didn't get my mind out of the game. box, as it were. So I don't know what your thoughts are on that or if I'm just insane. No, I'm both. Okay. This is my whole life is preparing me for this conversation. This is therapy about games. This is what I'm here for. Okay. So the you've reached the final boss. I've reached the final boss. I mean, you know, the original subtitle of this book that marketing killed was it was called the score.

Games metrics and the meaning of life because I think this is actually about what life is for. And what Bernard Soutes, this philosopher of games I keep talking about, he was an Aristotle scholar. And what Aristotle says is the meaning of life does not come from products,

but it comes from the process and the activity of complex human action. That a meaningful life is one lived, having interesting thoughts, doing interesting thoughts, having interesting conversations, responding to interesting problems, involved in thick, complicated action.

The stuff we make is just a tool to get there. I mean, one way I've always thought about games, especially striving play, is that in ordinary life, we take the means for the sake of the ends, but in game life, we take the ends for the sake of the means. We pursue something for, I mean, this is a very complicated way to say the journey is the destination, but that is basically that, the modern version of the old Aristotle thought. I mean, the thing I would say is, I mean, if you think this time set with this game is actually a waste, and it wasn't interesting and it wasn't fulfilling, then screw it, do something else. But if you actually love doing it, what Air Settles telling you is at some point making shit doesn't matter.

What matters is that you are doing interesting things. and the point of making shit is to get to be able to do interesting things. And if this game is a beautiful, interesting thing you get to be doing, then you're fulfilling the meaning of life, brother. You know, that's the interesting thing about human nature and some of the quotes you made is we love to make things more complex sometimes than they have to be. But I think we do it for a lot of the aspects you talk about in the book and here, you know, the challenge of it, the, I don't know.

It's just, I don't know. it's a human nature thing I guess the this is you said is it masochism and the answer is if Aristotle is right what's the point of being alive

it's to do complex interesting stuff that's what it's for like what what else what what else what else what else did you want out of your life I just wanted

I just wanted someone to give me a throne and grapes and worship me and you have one of those palm leaves over me that fan me and that was pretty much it maybe a harem too yeah here I'm but yeah and just someone gives me my money at birth that I inherited or something that's that's pretty much I want and then and then everyone can just leave me the fuck alone so here's here's another way to put what I'm saying if it turns out that your true throne is playing destiny that's okay Aristotle approves

that can be your throne oh okay you know it it is interesting to me like you know I've often said that I'm like Jesus Christ some people make life so much more complicated

it has to be I mean even conspiracy theorists are playing a game they're taking like JFK and they're gamifying it themselves and you know I've used gamification

for me in my business so one of my game identification techniques is if a project's big think of it as an elephant and eat one bite at a time. And so, oh, you know, there's some business thing I got to do. Maybe I got to write a report

or some new pitch to a client or whatever it is. And I don't want to do it because it's going to take some time and I'm going to have to actually think for a change. Maybe that's why I like video games so much because they present the system for us. You know, honestly, that's why a lot of people like

working for the man. And playing that game or joining that game, you know, going getting the good grades, so you can work for the man and all that sort of stuff. I didn't play that game. I played my game. I made my own game. And really, I didn't meet my own game. There's lots of people that did it, but not as many you would think.

But, I mean, I started my first company 18, skipped college. I canceled my college sign up and never went to college. But I did my own MBA education on my own through Harvard. but I designed to learn the shit I wanted to learn for running a company and being successful in business. I don't give shit about what George Washington did I learn that in high school. It's important now, but at the time, that was my new game over the game that was being played. This is my point. But some people like that game.

They're more comfortable in the game of somebody gives me a job, and I lean on them to run the game. And then there's me who I'm an entrepreneur, so I do run the game. Although maybe my customers run the game. You can look at it from all different aspects. Everything's running a game, and there's a lot of game integration. Is that true or am I going too deep with the gaming? I mean... I'm running a game.

My girlfriend's running a different game. So she has what she wants. I have what I want. We're trying to figure out a way to work together. Yeah, I mean, one of the... And then we get together in marriage is its own game. So there's lots of games going on. layers.

There's one danger in the game analogy is sometimes it's one thing that you're talking about that's kind of close here is about the repercussions for other people outside of your game and how your game integrates with other games. So there's this core idea in the scholarship about games. where a lot of people have thought that what happens with a game is it's in a magic circle. And a magic circle is a space and time that's separated meaning and importance from the rest of life. So what it means is something like when you enter a game, your relationships and roles kind of change and cancel out. You know, like I play a lot of games with my wife and, you know, we love and support each other.

And in the game, we try to kill each other. And then afterwards, it doesn't, like, you don't, if you know how to play games, you don't have fights with people because you're trying to kill each other during the game, right? The meanings change. It doesn't, the fact that we're trying to kill each other in the game. Yeah, that's what a game does. And one of the reasons that it's so, it's fine to be hyper-aggressive in a game is because in most games, the points don't matter. They don't extend to everything, anything outside. So you have this freedom in a game to do whatever the hell you want, destroy.

everything else because it's not connected to the rest of the world. And that's a major... Because if you beat her really badly, she may not make you dinner. And I don't know. I'm not talking about your wife, just any wife. The... That could extend beyond the game. That's my point.

Yeah, no, games are not perfectly sealed. I've lost friends over video games and gameplay. Yeah. But you know what I mean? Like, there's a basic thing where it's over. okay because nobody's, I mean, you can get too pissed over it, but the reason that you don't have to be is because the points of the game aren't connected to everything else. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's one of the dangers, I think, of thinking of everything like a game.

Yeah. Because it's easy to pretend like they're just dissattached point when it's actually the world financial market or like, you know, stuff attached to people's retirement or something. It's interesting to me, too. I've had challenges with gaming where, especially like, you know, if you're done raiding, I'm sure you have, right? You ever done raids?

I have not because I checked out of that kind of game early because I became aware of how addictive I was. Yeah. I was to it. And I shifted, I shifted to a lot more non-addictive video. I found myself.

too addicted to many video games. So I started shifting more to basically kind of like tough indie puzzle video games because they warm me out. And a lot of the pleasure that I think you take in raids, I take in team-based board games, but they're safe for me because I can only play them for like a few hours before I have to stop. So that's like that's a personal addiction cut off.

I'm glad I mean, I recognize it too, but I still do it. But it's kind of like, I have an alcohol problem, but I still drink it. So I don't have a problem. But with raids, you know, raids are kind of what we've talked about throughout this thing. It's, you know, they're set up on a basis where everybody has to do their job and they have to do it succinctly. There's a very small window of error. And since there's six people playing that are the need to operate at their best, if one of them makes a combination or a series of combination between the same player or all the players. all the players actually because sometimes

one error creates a landslide effect that is going to throw eventually everything off you get two of those you're pretty much guaranteed to fail the raid and you almost you almost have to fly a perfect unison team performance win but that's the beauty of it when you finally get that fucking win with six people and you you know you've built something together there's that congratulatory ending where

you know even if you did it like 50 times when you finally beat that fucking thing, you feel like you're like, you know, I really, but one thing I, one problem I had with gaming was early on, especially when I couldn't do raids and I wasn't maybe that good of a gamer or maybe good at that game and I was, you know, learning through it, it would affect my self-esteem in real life. Like, I'd feel beat up if I failed or if I knew I failed the team or I got kicked off the team because I sucked. That's happened. It's affected by self-esteem in real life. And I think sometimes there's kind of a danger there. to how some of these things that maybe don't matter as much can affect you in ways that impact you maybe more so.

I don't know. Your thoughts? I mean, it's so tricky because there are two ideals. One ideal is that games don't matter, and that's what makes us free. The other ideal is games are thrilling because we make them matter. Like the whole point, the reason they're so engaging, is that we can be hyper absorbed in this hyper-clear value system and know exactly what we need to do,

and know exactly that we need how we need to do it to succeed, and know exactly when we, like, pull off that precise combination together, it's the clarity of the landscape that the hyper-clear rules and the hyper-clear scoring system have made that give you part of that feeling. But it's this puzzle, right? Like, if you are too invested in games, you can't do the thing where you transition between games and shift. You can't afford to buy the games. But if you aren't into the games, if you don't care about them, then you can't have that experience.

I mean, this is for me the paradox of games. For games to really work, you have to be able to care about them and then stop caring about them on a dime. Like the paradox of games is you have to care and not care. And maybe that's a mental state that gaming cultivated. It sounds like a healthy place to be. Yeah. Being able to put stuff down and put it down. You know, the other part, the other thing I get from gaming is social.

So where we used to live in communities, where we're close to each other and very small. And so we'd all go, hey, let's go kill a only mammoth. And that was the game because, you know, there wasn't Microsoft back then. I hear, I don't know for sure. But that was the game we'd go play. And the women would play probably another game of either gathering or sitting and talking with the women folk and taking care of children. There's kind of a game at, you know, corralling children and getting them do what you want to do sometimes. That's a game in itself.

But so I look at life and business as a game. And so I'll sit there and I'll be like, okay, do you want to do the hard game? Chris today, the long game where you do the work now in the gaming of your job, you know, writing the long thesis letter or whatever the fuck you're going to do or, I don't know, creating a new company, whatever you've got to do, you've got to learn some coding maybe. Or do you want to go for the cheap, easy wins and go spend the next hour getting a dopamine hit over and over again, winning five games in a row that you've so much game the game, you are the master of the game pretty much for the most part.

That's why games have to keep changing DLCs, and they have to keep changing formats and different challenges and changing the gun setups and different aspects of the game, I guess you call it, and then coming with new ways to play the game and new challenges in the same game. But still, I kind of look at it and I go, I really should go play the long ball game,

even though it doesn't have those quick dopamine hits. Sometimes the little dopamine is fun. sometimes it's a social thing. For me, it's a lot of social thing. I play with people. I've always run clans. I like the interaction of people. Some of my games, I don't get on unless my friends get on,

and then I go play and run with them. So I'm not even really there for the game, although there's that aspect too. I play the game. But a lot of it's the social aspect of it. Because you can't do that anymore. I can't go run around with a bunch of guys and kill Willie Mammis. Their wives won't let them out of the house.

Today's marriage joke day. So I know what your thoughts are on that. I mean, games are, I think games change who we are when we play them. And one of the things that good game design does is it creates a good social atmosphere. One of the things I was, one of the things I've watched,

watching some of those raid games is that, I mean, one of the thoughts about something like, say, League of Legends is that it is delicious when it works, but because it's so independent and fragile, the design itself actually encourages toxic behavior. So this is a comment some game designers have made about it, that there's something about that way, if one person makes one mistake, it screws up the whole team. That's a design that actually encourages people to hate on each other. And other designs can very delicately change the incentive structure and change the ways you

interact to build and make more likely better socialization. Like some of my favorite games are indie tabletop role-playing games and party games. And what they're doing is manipulating the rules to actually make for cooler social interactions. And you can just like, that's what they're doing. They're playing with the socialization aspect. There's this great game called Lady Blackbird. It's a tabletop role-playing. It's like, you know, an indie version of Dungeons and Dragons.

And it has one of my favorite rules, which is when you're running low on stamina points, you get it back by having a refreshment scene where you and another character reveal shared backstory. But you don't have that backstory yet. So what the game does is every time you get low on points, you have to make up shared backstory and do flashbacks to get your points up. And that's, I think, like, incredible social engineering, right? The game is designing, like, a whole social architecture. And it just makes you tell stories and goof off with your friends. And the social life that surrounds that game is incredible.

And it's been made by the game designer. Yeah. I've seen that in different games. Like the division for a long time had this thing called the Dark Zone. And basically it was a PVP, PVEE area. So for the first, you know, normally in the main part of the game is PVE. And this, so this was like a hybrid PVEE, PVP area. and then they have a separate place for PVP.

And a lot of times, it reached the point where a lot of times people just play in there and be, there's a lot of camaraderie. Oh, hey, see you fellow player there. Hey, I'm friendly. Oh, you're friendly too? Okay, you know, that was the code. Most times, unless they were lying. And they're like, okay, well, I'll help you and don't kill me and I won't kill you. You know, that's sort of agreement.

And so for a long time, for many years, that was going on in the game. where you can go in the dark zone and you know when at first the game first started out it was pretty much a horror show of players you know wanting to just you know cut your throat but then it turned into this commodity thing so it was very social you mean people there and be like whatever man I've been here getting the good stuff and it was an area where you got better gear so I think someone of the developer finally said hey man this is BS they're in this area and they're getting along and so they did one change they created a bounty for kill killing five people, and this is like a daily bounty they did, in the dark zone.

And immediately, just by changing that one thing and creating a bounty, they changed the whole dynamic of camaraderie that was in there and turned into a slaughter fest. Now the cheaters are in there and everybody, you know, and it's all about killing. There's almost no camaraderie whatsoever. It was interesting how that one metric changed everything in this. This is, I think, the most. most important, the most important thought for my entire book is this. And it's just developing, so Rainer Knitzy as my favorite board game designer. He's a German Euro game board game designer.

And he has this moment where he says in a game developer's conference, the most important tool in my game designer toolbox is the scoring system because it sets the players' motivations. It tells them what to want during the game. And I think that what game designers are really doing is designing an alternate self for you. And they're like designing your soul by telling you what to want. And some games lock you in in various ways. And what you're talking about is a case where you say like, oh, they just change the scoring system a little bit and everything changed.

And I think, of course everything changed. The scoring system is the heart. It's the engine that sets all the movement in the case because it sets the cares and motive like game designers are designing a world and alternate selves and putting us into it and like the scoring system is the thing that like sets the it's the motor that sets all the clockwork whirring in a particular direction so if you change that motor you change everything else also true social media yeah yeah it's interesting how social media is when it first came out everyone's like kumba it's going to bring the world together and and then finally the uh the the the the The demons had rose from the Pandora's box. I'm just kidding. I mean, I think it's a game design issue. I think the people who design social media have just as much control over our behavior in there

as your game designers had control over the dark zone. Little ways of tweaking the scoring system have changed the outcome. And most social companies, as I'm sure you know, have tweaked the algorithm not for community or connection or conversation. or conversation, but to increase engagement hours. And like that just changes our behavior. We orient towards scoring systems everywhere. It's kind of interesting.

And I know we're going along here. So if you need to leave, let me know. Normally we just do a 45-minute show, but this has been great discussion. The long shows are the smart ones. And I shouldn't say that because that makes the short sound stupid. No, the long shows are usually the most interesting stuff. We have a lot of novels on the show.

You're telling me I'm winning. You're winning. You're winning my game. And that brings me to my point, my question that I was setting up for you. So one thing I look at in life is frame. Who's maintaining frame? Do I come into your frame?

Do I come into your frame? If I come into your house, I'm coming into your frame. Now I can become bossy in your house and try and flip the frame of control over behavior and influence. But most likely it's your house. You're going to,

you're like, this is my house, Chris, you can't tell what the fuck to do in my house. But if you go to my house, like you're in my house now in the podcast, it's a frame thing. And so you kind of have to play my game. Like you, I'm going to roll the stupid, you know, funny noise at the beginning of the thing. And you have to sit there and wait for me to cue you up and bring you into the game. You're in my game. Or if I come on your podcast, I'm in your game.

It's kind of like, to me, almost the games are almost like frame of control. And you kind of espoused that where you say, you know, if you go to work for somebody, you know, you're playing their game and their frame, really, because they design that frame. That's exactly the heart of it. I mean, I think games are... I can't even read the book and I know it. Games are formalized framings. I mean, that's what they are. What a framing is, I spent a lot of time talking to this philosopher, cognitive scientist, Elizabeth Camp, who works on what frameworks on,

perspectives are. And see what she says that what a frame is is a bunch of rules for how to behave, but most importantly, an angle for attending to things. It's like what you pay attention to and how you take it. You take something as, you know, you give me some shit during the show. One framework is, oh, this guy's insulting me. Fuck this guy. Another frame is like, you know, we're just like joking around. Which framing I take will change how we interpret it. And that's what games do. They formalize it. They tell you exactly whether to take how to interpret other people's

actions because they tell you what they're for and they tell you what the world is. And one way to put the whole point of my book is that sometimes it's clear to you that you have control over the frame and sometimes the world can try to slip a frame onto you so sneakily

that you don't realize you've a slipped into their frame. And that's what I think, that's what I think metrics and rankings and likes and tweet, like, you go into this world and, and it's not just technologies, like go to CrossFit and suddenly there's a frame about what you're trying to achieve. Go into, you know, marathon world. There's a frame. Go into craft like yarn world, crochet world. There's a frame. Go onto Twitter. And because there's such an explicit scoring system that is in the the user interface for everyone, it subtly sneaks a frame onto everyone. Now, the point is, as you pointed out, you don't have to accept it.

Yeah. But it's really easy to miss that's happening and let someone frame all your actions on the platform by controlling what you're attending to and what you're trying to do by controlling the point system. Even like, even like, even like, you know, doing the drive-thru, for your Starbucks, it's a frame. it's a game and at the end you're going to win coffee and caffeine and you're going to wake up and not murder people like

if I don't get coffee but like you know like when I go to McDonald's now they started this a couple years ago or a year ago I find it annoying but every time you pull it to McDonald's now they go are you going to order through the app and it's like a force

frame game method and you almost feel like you get that fomo that they play you know part of the game they play on you in social media if you're missing out. You almost get like this phone with like, oh, I should be like everyone else at McDonald's and download the app. They're like, go fuck yourself. I'm not downloading your app.

Just take my order and shut up. That's easy. I'm not mean to people, but I just go, no, I'm not playing your game. But, you know, here I am in your game. I'm just not playing that feature of your game, I guess. I'm not playing your raid. This is kind of related to what you're talking. about, can I just go back for a second and talk about your dark zone again?

Were you sad when that's... Are you my psychiatrist? You're talking about my dark zone? I just had to do the truth. I mean, I, I... This is, I mean, I... Can we talk about your dark song, Chris? Who hurt you as a child?

This is what I'm going to ask you. So, did you... I mean, when you were talking about the dark zone and how friendly people were, I had this weird thought and this is, I don't know. Maybe this is too intrusive, but like a lot of the times when I talk about it, I talk about this space where we're required to, like in normal life, we're required to be friendly and cooperative and then games give us a chance to just like kill each other and be free. And you know, and you're telling me a story that made me almost think, I don't know,

you're in a world where everyone's super competitive and you're a CEO and you're all out to win each other. And then the game is this little magical release where you can just be nice to each other. well i mean you you kill all the enemies so you're still murdering the mpc's you're killing the the bots but you're still doing the murder you're released to be friendly to the other PCs but i'm friendly other human beings you know yeah yeah so maybe i should feel guilty about killing the NPCs now boy look what you've done maybe the emperies are playing their own game and i'm just maybe they want to die and i'm

killing them and it's like police suicide or suicide by police Maybe I should realize that I'm in their frame. I'm not here this whole time on the illusion that I'm in the dark zone frame of killing enemies. And they're just like, we just want to die. So you're not really doing anything you think is against our will. Oh, wow. Amazing. This is like the Matrix.

We're just going deeper, man. It's like we're getting into Matrix 2 and 3 at this point. Do you feel adequately therapist by talking about games? I do. I do. I'm going to, next time I talk to my therapist, we're going to talk about my dark zone. you can also find you're free to be nice don't forget that

the whole point is that you're free to be nice that's the weird thing and it's better to be nice folks but yeah you can find pictures of my darkson though on my only fans at onlyfans.com for slash don't Google that anyway guys

well thank you very much for coming to show you've made me I don't know if you created my whole that life is a game and everything is it's all series of games and you just have to either run the game I mean I've said that a million times is my favorite saying, you either run the game or the game is run on you. But, you know, a lot of times we volunteer to have game run on us.

I don't know. Some people pay extra for it in Amsterdam. I hear it's not. I mean, no, I think that what you're, I know that's a joke, but also I literally think a lot of the current world is people paying to let someone else run their game on you. Yeah. I mean, you buy video games. You pay for them.

I just paid $100 for Call of Duty. I was like, holy shit. Is there a sexual favor that happens here? A hundred bucks for a video game? But, you know, I'm old school, so I don't remember they were cheap. But yeah, I mean, it is interesting. We do play games. We accept those games.

I mean, if I choose to read your book, I'm entering your game, right? Your frame, your game. I'm choosing to play inside of your game and consider your thoughts and you're thinking and everything else. Wow, I just realized people are listening to this show and I'm playing my game to present the show and they're playing their game to listen. And, you know, like they tune down the volume when I talk and they turn it up when our guests talk. You know, that's sort of the game.

Well, thank you very much for coming to show. Give us your final pitch out for people who are up your book. We could probably talk forever. I love this conversation. It's been really great, T. Yeah, it's been amazing. Yeah, the book is The Score. How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game coming out from Penguin January 13th.

You can buy it in all your normal places. And I promise you the book, will be weird as hell and I will tell I will both tell elaborate stories about the history of bureaucracy and let you in on many of my most embarrassing hobbies and embarrassing life moments. There should be a big sign that comes up here and goes, T, you have just beaten the final boss, Chris Voss. You win. Finish him.

Boom! Thank you for coming and putting it all my bad jokes. but I don't know. I just, I really, you're, when I saw your book come over from the PRA, I was like,

I want to interview that guy, because, you know, like it, like we've talked about on the show. It's kind of interesting way to look at life. And, and I think,

I think it's kind of, if you understand these things, you kind of look at life from an out-of-the-box, sort of, you know, you're outside, you can look at outside the game.

And I think you're talking in the book about how it's kind of healthy to have that perspective. Yeah. Because if you can see the game from the outside, you're not, you're not, it's bitch so much. Yeah.

I mean, the whole point is that if you play a game and you don't let it dictate terms to you, but you step back literally outside of the scoring system and ask yourself, is that scoring system doing for me what I want? Or is that scoring system helping me to be a good, whatever? Like if you ask yourself if the scoring system is a good one, that is, I think, the most crucial out of the boxing that we can do in the current era. Now, if you're rock climbing, I mean, that's one hell of a score if you fall. I mean, if you're doing that, that halaceous stuff. I mean, I think maybe that was the other thing I was thinking about as we were talking is, you know, the one thing that is cool about gaming is it doesn't have that penalty of death.

death. You know, you always get resurrected when you get killed. And I was remember driving down the road thinking one day, man, I wish we could just play derby on the road. And I'm like, but then you die, Chris, and there's no, there's no resurrection, no one's going to revive you.

I mean, there might be a hospital that can provide you your revivable, but most deaths in gaming are pretty catastrophic. I don't think they're going to put you back together sometimes. So, think of life as a folks. Maybe it's more funner that way. Is it more funner?

Yeah. Unless you're losing. I do that sometimes. I lose consistently and I'll just be like, I'm turning this game off for a while and I'm going to go play a game. I can win it. Well, thank you very much to you for coming to show. We really appreciate it.com. So people can find you on the inner web, sir. Objectionable.net.

Objectionable.net. I thought that was mine. highly I think highly objectional Chris Foss is mine I'm just kidding it's all my people I've ever dated

that was the website they made for me and they just feature all my bad dates and I'm just making up jokes people give me a break don't write me he is the author

of the latest book to come out it's been a real joke day today January 13th 2006 it is entitled the score how to stop

playing someone else's game and that'll be on January 3rd teams get it so you can be the first one on your block to read it you can win the game of being the first one in your block to read the score how to please stop playing so else's game you gotta love it thanks for tuning in be good to each other go to goodrease dot com for chestchristchrist chris voss and all this is a crazy place in it you know the drill thanks for tuning in be good

to each other stay safe we'll see you next time you've been listening to the most amazing intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life warning good I mean too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed. All right, T. Thanks, man. Wonderful stuff there.