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Dr Rangan ChatterjeeDr Rangan Chatterjee

The Invisible Trap: Evidence You're Living the Wrong Life (& Don't Know It) | Professor C Thi Nguyen

The Thrive Tour: Transform Your Health and Happiness, a live show: Book Your Tickets https://drchatterjee.com/live This episode is brought to you by: LINGO BY ABBOTT: For users in the US and UK, Lingo by Abbott is offering an exclusive 10% off a 4-week plan with the code LIVEMORE10. Just visit https://hellolingo.com/livemore for more information. Terms and conditions apply. THE WAY APP: Get 30 FREE days and begin your journey towards peace, calm and wellbeing. https://thewayapp.com/livemore We’re living in a world that has become extraordinarily skilled at measuring success. But most of us never stop to question which standards really matter to us. Are you chasing success by someone else's definition, without even knowing it? This episode will help you figure that out. My guest is C Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and the author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game, one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read. This conversation explores where our values really come from, what games and hobbies can teach us about living with freedom, and why so much of what matters most in life resists being measured at all. Thi has developed a fascinating framework for understanding one of the defining problems of modern life: what he calls ‘value capture’. It’s the process by which our own rich, personal values are replaced by simplified external metrics (think followers and likes, salaries, exam grades – even health metrics like your weight or blood pressure score). These metrics can never show the full picture of a human life – but they can end up running it. And once you understand this concept of value capture, you’ll start to notice it everywhere. Thi and I discuss why our culture is so poor at honouring the ‘unmeasurables’. We talk about why joy, love, forgiveness and the quality of our relationships are the substance of a life well lived. Yet they’re systematically undervalued, not because they’re unimportant, but because they’re hard to count. He’s somewhat of an expert on play, whether through sport, board games or hobbies, and we discuss what these activities, often dismissed as trivial, can teach us about meaning and how to live well. Plus, we debate the difference between principles and algorithmic rules – a distinction that might change how you approach your health and your life more broadly. What I love about Thi's thinking is that he’s not telling us to throw out all forms of measurement. He’s more nuanced than that. He is asking us to wake up to the difference between the scorecard we have inherited from the world around us, and the one we would choose for ourselves. He wants us to know that the first step towards genuine fulfilment is simply becoming aware of whose game you have been playing. #feelbetterlivemore Find out more about Thi: Website: https://objectionable.net/ Twitter https://twitter.com/add_hawk Thi’s book: The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game UK https://amzn.to/4eO90DY US https://amzn.to/4oWWyq2 #feelbetterlivemore #feelbetterlivemorepodcast ------- Order MAKE CHANGE THAT LASTS. US & Canada version https://amzn.to/3RyO3SL, UK version https://amzn.to/3Kt5rUK ----- Follow Dr Chatterjee at: Website: https://drchatterjee.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drchatterjee Twitter: https://twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Newsletter: https://drchatterjee.com/subscription DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Dr. Rangan ChatterjeehostC Thi Nguyenguest
Jun 28, 20262h 8mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:04

    Value capture: when simplified metrics take over your real values

    1. RC

      Your new book, The Score, is probably one of my favorite books that I've read for years. It is so, so thought-provoking. One of the central cases you make in the book is that many of us experience problems in our lives because we're living by someone else's scorecard-

    2. CN

      Yeah

    3. RC

      ... instead of our own. You call this value capture in the book, so I wonder if we could start there.

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. RC

      Can you explain what it is?

    6. CN

      Okay. So value capture is any case where your values are rich or subtle, or they're developing in that direction, and then you get put in a social setting or an institutional setting or with a technology that presents you with a simplified, usually quantified version of your value, and then the simplified version takes over. So like, I mean, I went on Twitter to connect to people and to find interesting information and to, like, have these fascinating conversations with people, and that started happening, and then I went viral, like low-grade viral twice, and then I became just interested in upping my like counts and follower counts. And that became the kind of dominant core reasoning. I mean, I think a lot of people know that it's not good when y- your incentives are too simplified, where, like, the world is giving you money or awards to follow some kind of hyper-simplified metric. But I think the thing I'm really interested in is the next stage of when that transfers to your soul, like when the thing that you care about most becomes, uh, when your deepest value becomes expressed in terms of the metric. Because then I think you inherit, uh, the limitations of institutional data tracking, right? Every limit we have about the kinds of numbers that are easy to collect in large scale bureaucracies suddenly starts to inhabit your way of thinking about the world, about navigating your own life.

  2. 2:04 – 3:31

    Data isn’t neutral: scoring systems change the activity you think you’re judging

    1. RC

      Yeah. There's this thing you talk about throughout the book, this idea that data is not neutral.

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. RC

      The metrics themselves are not neutral. And where I've been thinking about this a lot is particularly because as we record this conversation, the Winter Olympics are going on.

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. RC

      So yesterday evening with my kids, I was watching the snowboarding.

    6. CN

      Yeah.

    7. RC

      And it was the women's snowboarding final. The standard was off the charts, but what was really, really interesting is they're doing all these kinds of tricks and I'm thinking, "Well, how can you compare-

    8. CN

      Right

    9. RC

      ... one snowboarder with another snowboarder?" You can, and of course they've got certain metrics which they're using, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the totality of that person's skill or their flow or their interpretation of the slope. Do you know what I mean?

    10. CN

      Yes. [laughs] I know exactly what you mean. And I think what's going on is that in many cases, the drive for objectivity, and I mean something like really specific by objectivity. We have to spend like a lot of time talking, talking what that term means, because a lot of people use that term kind of unreflectively or unthinkingly. I think the drive for objectivity often gets us to change the topic, to change the topic of what we're measuring and what we're trying to do. So I think sporting competitions are a really good place to think about this. So

  3. 3:31 – 6:32

    From skate parks to the Olympics: why official winners push culture toward countables

    1. CN

      for me, one of the crucial things about a scoring system is that it makes explicit the standards that you're gonna measure success by. And the reason it does so is often to get people onto the same page. So, uh, I started realizing this. So I, I... The first book I wrote about games, I had this assumption, um, and that assumption was that every game had a scoring system. And I got there because I think-- So I love a lot of games, but I particularly love board games. And then when I was working on my first book, on The Nature of Games, my primary model was a certain kind of board game. And in board games, board games tell you exactly what's gonna count as points. They're gonna-- Like the board games I play, like they say like, you know, "Collect cows, that's worth two points. Collect sheep, each sheep is worth three points." So you know exactly what it'll measure, and you know how to add them up, up together. And then I realized at some point that not every game has this kind of official scoring system. Um, so skateboarding in its natural state is from, and I, I need to not be a poser here. I am not a skateboarder. I do a bunch of other things. I climb, I play with yo-yos, I don't skateboard. This is all secondhand knowledge. Um, skateboarding, there are a lot of goals and success conditions in skateboarding. You can skate to be athletic and explosive. You can do incredibly hard tricks, or you can skate for flow, you can skate for style, you can skate for expressiveness. And if you're going to the skate park and competing, you can compete in lots of those dimensions. You can go with your friends, you can go skating, and you can be-- You can do it in two ways. One, you can just go skating and not have a pre-specified goal and just do stuff, and it might just emerge that some of you are more stylish or cool or beautiful or explosive. Or you can even decide, you can decide that we're gonna compete for the coolest trick. But you don't need to specify exactly the way that you're gonna measure cool, and you can have different people. Like, if ten people go skating together and they come out with different beliefs about who did the best job, like I think you were the most flowing and elegant, and somebody else thinks that it was me. I was the one that, like, did something really surprising and original. That's okay. Like you don't-- There's no loss of value in that. W- That's, that's the thing that we did the thing that we wanted to do. Um, but then skateboarding moves to, uh, more official cases like ESPN X and the Olympics, and you start to generate this need to generate a single official verdict to pull out a winner. And what happens then usually is that- The activity changes focus. So-

    2. RC

      Mm-hmm

    3. CN

      ... focus moves away from, like, style or flow or beauty, and focus moves towards height, number of flips, right? Things that are more easily countable. And that kind of shift, I think it's emblematic of an entire, uh, social tendency that I think we're all caught up in the grips of. Oh my God, do you wanna know the, the weird example that got cut from the book?

    4. RC

      Yeah.

    5. CN

      Okay.

    6. RC

      I'd love to see.

  4. 6:32 – 9:10

    The ‘too weird’ example: pickup-artist culture and the tragedy of scoring intimacy

    1. CN

      Okay. Uh, this is an example I'm obsessed with, and, uh, some members of my publishing team thought it was too weird to put in the book, and I cut it out. But, you know, I, I think about it all the time. So, um, [laughs] think about this. Um, while I was reading and I was researching this book, I stumbled across the literature from a bunch of anthropologists and sociologists that studied pickup artist culture.

    2. RC

      Okay.

    3. CN

      So you know pickup artists?

    4. RC

      Yeah.

    5. CN

      People that compete for sexual success. And I think... And, uh, it's kind of, it's kind of obvious in a sense [laughs] 'cause even the pickup artist culture term for a sexual encounter is scoring, right?

    6. RC

      Mm-hmm.

    7. CN

      And if you think about what they're competing for, number of phone numbers you get in a night, number of sexual encounters in a night, number, uh, speed, the fastest speed from meeting someone to a sexual encounter. And then it becomes, like, kind of clear, like, what they don't compete for. They're not competing for happy relationships. I think that's pretty obvious. But, uh, one of the things I discovered when I was reading this stuff, the sociologist Eric Hendricks, who studied pickup artist culture for a while, said pickup artists don't even compete for pleasure. They're not even trying for pleasure. Um, one of the things that you find is a common thread in pickup artist culture is that you're supposed to get beyond caring about pleasure, 'cause that will interfere in your quest for higher numbers-

    8. RC

      Mm-hmm

    9. CN

      ... and more victory. And [laughs] I find this, like, incredibly emblematic and incredibly tragic because, I mean, I thought when I started reading about pickup artist culture that I would find out that pickup artists were evil and manipulative, but at least they were having fun and enjoying themselves. And I found out something else, which is [laughs] they're not even enjoying themselves. They're miserable. Many of them are miserable in the quest for higher scores. And I think the examples are really revealing because what, why would you not compete for pleasure? It's 'cause pleasure is not publicly accountable. Like, there's no way to verify who had more pleasure. You make the claim, right? The things that pub- that, um, pickup artists are competing for are precisely the things that are easy for everyone to objectively measure in the public setting-

    10. RC

      Yeah

    11. CN

      ... and then adjudicate in an unquestionable way.

    12. RC

      I think it's a great example because the underlying principles within that example-

    13. CN

      Yeah

    14. RC

      ... can actually be applied to pretty much everything-

    15. CN

      Yeah, yeah

    16. RC

      ... in life.

    17. CN

      Yeah.

    18. RC

      Uh, our self-worth, our happiness, our health.

    19. CN

      Yeah.

  5. 9:10 – 11:33

    Measurables vs unmeasurables in midlife: why “success” can still feel empty

    1. RC

      On an individual level, one thing I've realized over the past years, and have spoken about with regularity on this podcast, is this idea of measurables versus unmeasurables.

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. RC

      And where this idea becomes really important to me is because I look around society and I see many, many people, particularly in the middle of life-

    4. CN

      Yeah

    5. RC

      ... you know, 30s, 40s, 50s-

    6. CN

      Yes

    7. RC

      ... where they have done the things that they thought they were meant to do-

    8. CN

      Yeah

    9. RC

      ... yet they still feel lost.

    10. CN

      Yeah.

    11. RC

      Maybe depressed-

    12. CN

      Yeah

    13. RC

      ... unhappy. I mean, I spoke to Joshua Fields Millburn from The Minimalists a few weeks ago, and he's got that classic story where in his 30s he had everything, the corporate job, the big house, a house full of loads and loads of stuff, but he wasn't happy.

    14. CN

      Yeah.

    15. RC

      And there's many reasons for that, but I think a lot of the time it, it simply comes down to what is measurable versus what is unmeasurable. So in my life, I do have a lot of the societal ticks of success-

    16. CN

      Yeah

    17. RC

      ... right? The things that you can measure. But it was a few years ago I realized that stuff is probably not the totality of what makes me happy. It contributes-

    18. CN

      Yeah

    19. RC

      ... so I think it would be naive for me to think that it didn't have any say at all.

    20. CN

      Yeah.

    21. RC

      But I realized, particularly as I get older, that the gold in my life comes from the unmeasurables.

    22. CN

      Yeah.

    23. RC

      Right? So the quality of the relationship I have with my wife, the quality of the relationship I have with my children, how much time I have each week to spend on my hobbies and my passions, but you can't easily measure that. Even if I think about my marriage, right, I could say to you... Because, because the, you know, there's this whole thing throughout the book about metrics, and you've got to be careful what metrics you use in life, 'cause those metrics are shaping you, whether you're aware of it or not. So I could give you a metric and say, "Hey, T, I've been married now for 18 years."

    24. CN

      [laughs]

    25. RC

      And you'd go, "Oh, great. Congratulations." Now, that metric doesn't even tell you that much. It, it tells you, yes, I've been with the same woman now for 18 years, and we're married, but it doesn't tell you about the quality of my relationship, how close I am. Do you know what I mean? It, it, it... I, I don't know, maybe, maybe you have a different take on it.

  6. 11:33 – 30:04

    Lifespan vs living well: when a single number ‘auto-wins’ the conversation

    1. CN

      Yeah, no, I, I have exactly the take. I just... There's a huge thing I wanna say, but let me start by saying while you were giving that example, I just noticed something maybe striking, which is I think people are really content to say the length of a marriage, like that number obviously isn't the important thing. It's the quality of that marriage. And then go- let's go over ano- another setting. It's often very hard in the medical setting and the health setting to fight against measures of the length of a life, right? Like, I think a lot of, I think one of the things we definitely need to talk about at some point today is lifespan as a p- a primary health metric. And I, I, I think it's, like, much more difficult for people to accept the view that th- there are things that you might wanna trade off against longer lifespan, that that measurable seizes too much public attention.

    2. RC

      Yeah. Let's talk about it-

    3. CN

      Yeah

    4. RC

      ... 'cause I think my audience will be super interested in this.

    5. CN

      Yeah. I mean, the... Here's, here's one way to put it. I'm interested in cases in which the easy measurable auto-wins a conversation, and I'm not, I'm often not saying that the... I'm not saying that the measurable thing is unimportant. So one of the key cases for me is lifespan. I mean, that's very easy to measure. And then you see these fights where lifespan wins against any other consideration. So consider, uh, trying to figure out a national health policy and rec- medical recommendations for eating saturated fats and eating rich cheeses, and you might say that, "Look, here's a clearly measurable correlation. You eat more of this, your lifespan goes down." Then there's stuff on the other side. There's deliciousness. There's culinary joy. There's tradition. There's, like, just, just the, the pure raw joy of a rich, properly cared for Camembert. But if you try to bring those into a conversation with someone that's wielding the number that says like, "But this will also make average lifespans go down," the other stuff loses, like, automatically. There's not, there's not even a... In most of the, uh, fights I watch in the public, in public health policy, that stuff can't even be put on the table. You sound kind of like a lunatic if you try to put a lot of stuff on the table, and I think the reason is because there's not a clear way to measure it obviously.

    6. RC

      I, I think this is a great example.

    7. CN

      Yeah.

    8. RC

      Right? The things we bias in medicine are the things that we can measure.

    9. CN

      Yeah.

    10. RC

      We can measure blood sugar, cholesterol-

    11. CN

      Right

    12. RC

      ... weight, blood pressure. And of course, these measurable things have value-

    13. CN

      Yeah

    14. RC

      ... but we can't measure joy-

    15. CN

      Yep

    16. RC

      ... love, passion, the quality of your relationships, right? But actually, if you look at the data, arguably the number one factor that, that will determine your health, happiness, and longevity-

    17. CN

      Yeah

    18. RC

      ... is the quality of your relationships.

    19. CN

      Right.

    20. RC

      So this goes back to what I was saying before about the measurables versus the unmeasurables.

    21. CN

      Right.

    22. RC

      I'm at the point in life, C, which is I think why this book has resonated so deeply with me, because I think about this stuff all the time. I think about on, in my personal life, wrong and it's the unmeasurables-

    23. CN

      Right

    24. RC

      ... that are gonna give you your happiness and your contentedness. I know that. I know that full well, that it's the things I can't easily measure that give me that joy. But as a medical doctor-

    25. CN

      Right

    26. RC

      ... the same thing applies, right? I put a video out on YouTube a few months ago that went, it went pretty viral, to be honest with you, and I was literally talking about this in medicine, saying how we don't measure or we can't measure-

    27. CN

      Right

    28. RC

      ... the things that I've just mentioned, or we can't measure your ability to forgive, right? There's a lot of research showing a strong relationship between people who are unable to forgive and people who hold onto resentment with the development of a whole variety of different chronic diseases.

    29. CN

      Right.

    30. RC

      And that's, and that's an association. It's a correlation-

  7. 30:04 – 31:39

    Sponsor break: glucose tracking and the appeal of real-time measurable feedback

    1. RC

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  8. 31:39 – 32:15

    Why we can’t just ‘abolish metrics’: portability, scale, and the hidden price of coordination

    1. CN

      There's an easy position that tempts people, I think, at this point, which is all metrics are bad, they're all information loss. Let's get rid of them. Let's be alive, rich people, constantly alive to the wonder... That doesn't work either-

    2. RC

      Yeah

    3. CN

      ... because we need metrics. I think this is the true pain because, um, because we need highly compressible, highly travelable, easily understood data chunks to organize ourselves at vast scale. This is, I mean, this is how science works, right? Science works by the collection of data. Data works,

  9. 32:15 – 32:51

    Porter’s ‘Trust in Numbers’: quantification as context-sterilized justification that travels

    1. CN

      uh, science at its best involves different people collecting into the same buckets so that they can amass ma- mass piles of data and do analysis on that data, right? And also, like, we do need large scale. There are many contexts in which large scale information transfer is re, uh, uh, and highly portable information is really valuable. So I think the college rankings example is a really good one because it shows us the tension between the two faces. So that example for me is a great example of value capture. So there's a really good study, uh, of what happened, what

  10. 32:51 – 44:10

    Rankings capture values: law schools, ‘Engines of Anxiety,’ and outsourced deliberation

    1. CN

      college rankings do to educational culture in a book called Engines of Anxiety. It's a book by Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder, who are sociologists, and they studied what happened when US News and World Report started ranking law schools. The first thing they say is that exactly what, what you noted, right? Like, so, um, law schools before the rankings used to have many dimensions of, many dimensions of value. Like some were more interested in, uh, getting their students high-paying corporate jobs. Some were more interested in social and community outreach missions. Some were more interested in, um, theoretical and legal scholarship and research work, and they would represent these things in qualitative ways. Um, and the coming of the rankings imposed one particular judgment, right? So the law school rankings are mostly based on incoming class GPA, incoming class LSAT score, and outgoing class employment rate at the nine-month mark. So that's a, that, that imposes a very rigid sense of value, and it also narrows down on measurables. Um, so one of the things that they say that I found really striking was that before the rankings, the process of figuring out a law school, um, which law school a student wanted to go to, would trigger a process of internal deliberation. A prospective law school student would ask themselves, "What do I care about more? Theoretical work, corporate work, social justice work?" And that value crossroads would lead them into a process of reflection about what they actually cared about. And the moment the rankings showed up, what they record is that students stop doing this. They, they did the research, by the way, by looking at internet archives of like forums of discussions between prospective law students, and they say that the moment the US News and World Report starts ranking, uh, law schools, students immediately take their goal to be to get into the best law school, where best is just set by those rankings. So they stop value deliberating. This is, this is the example that led me to really... So one of the formulations from the book, the, one of the things I end up saying is that the problem of value capture is that you're outsourcing your values, and you're outsourcing your values to an external... You might be outsourcing your values to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, right? Whoever is setting the measure. In this case, you're outsourcing the value of your education to the US News and World Report that sets the terms of measurement, right? But, and here's the big but, the US News and World Report also had a good reason to do this.

    2. RC

      Yeah.

    3. CN

      Um, the reason, their stated reason was that before them, every school could talk about itself in glowing terms. Um, maybe its value mission was genuine, or maybe it was BS. Maybe they were fulfilling, or maybe they weren't. And, um, if you were in the know, if you had the connections to people embedded in law culture, you could get the inside scoop. But, you know, they were trying to help people like me. You know, I am a immigrant's kid. My kids, my parents know nothing about the cul- the landscape. And so what they were trying to do was making that information easily digested and accessible, and they were trying to digest a large number of considerations that you might take as important to make information accessible to me. That's, that's what portability is. Portability is accessibility. And so what you get is actually the big vision is that there's this massive trade-off between making that information highly digestible and accessible so that everyone can have it and simplifying it and removing dimensionality from it in order to make it accessible.

    4. RC

      Yeah.

    5. CN

      And I think the real, the real, the really terrifying part for me, in some sense, if it turned out that metrics were just evil, the mustache-twiddling villain of the story, and we could just move beyond them, things would be... I can imagine a utopia. But what Porter teaches me is something more painful, which is that there's a thing we need that we have to have, which we have to pay an enormous cost for. And that's like, that, that, that's, that's an essential feature of our life together. That in order to communicate with each other at scale, we need these hyper-simplified, highly portable things, and that's, that is the glue that binds us together, and it's a very costly glue.

    6. RC

      Yeah. I love it. And, you know, I'm, I'm not trying to, like you say, the metrics are really good or bad. It's just understanding what that metric is good for.

    7. CN

      Yeah. Exactly.

    8. RC

      Being aware of that-

    9. CN

      Right

    10. RC

      ... and also understanding what it's not good for.

    11. CN

      Yeah.

    12. RC

      So let's take the, I don't know, I guess schools, right?

    13. CN

      Yeah.

    14. RC

      Uh, not everyone gets to choose what school their children-

    15. CN

      Yeah

    16. RC

      ... go to. I, I understand that.

    17. CN

      Yeah.

    18. RC

      But I think with schools, what I've come to the conclusion that, that it's not that there's no such thing as a good school.

    19. CN

      Yeah.

    20. RC

      Of course there is.

    21. CN

      Yeah.

    22. RC

      But for me, if you have the choice, it's more about what is the right school for my child.

    23. CN

      Right.

    24. RC

      Right? It's subtly different.

    25. CN

      Right.

    26. RC

      That the school can look great on paper. You go, "Oh, you know-

    27. CN

      Right

    28. RC

      ... people here, they get these grades, and they go to this university-"

    29. CN

      Right

    30. RC

      ... whatever it might be. Yeah, but is it the right school for the qualities that my child has?

  11. 44:10 – 53:03

    Metrics are ‘interested’: maps, medical codes, IQ tests, and built-in value judgments

    1. CN

      I think that's, that's very close to what you're saying. So that's, that's one big thing I was thinking w- from what you're saying. The other big thing is I think the idea that every metric is interested, and I think this is a m... This is an-

    2. RC

      What do you mean interested?

    3. CN

      So this is an enormous thing I learned from a bunch of these scholars I'm talking about in science and technology studies, and that one of the big views from that world is that people think that technologies and systems, like systems of representation like metrics, they think they're neutral. They think they're objective. They think-- People tend to think that metrics are objective. And what the people from science and technology studies have taught me is that different technologies and different ways of representing the world are deeply value-laden and deeply represent a specific perspective and a perspe- specific value system on the world. So, um, the, the easiest example for me is to back away from data for a moment and think about maps, right? There's a way in which a map just looks like, here's the world, but every map is a selection procedure, right? What maps do, not as an accident, but as an intrinsic part of their function, is they leave out most of the world, right? A map that includes every detail in the world is useless. It's the world. What maps do is highlight certain things and delete other things. That highlighting is a choice, right? It represents some interest, and it deletes others.

    4. RC

      Okay, if I think about the map of the world-

    5. CN

      Yeah

    6. RC

      ... well, it's, it's prioritizing borders of countries.

    7. CN

      Exactly.

    8. RC

      It's prioritizing big cities.

    9. CN

      Right.

    10. RC

      It might prioritize high mountains.

    11. CN

      Right.

    12. RC

      But yeah, and it, and it kind of feeds this idea of metrics. Like all metrics do something-

    13. CN

      Right

    14. RC

      ... but they don't do other things.

    15. CN

      Yes, exactly. The-- Dennis Woods, who wrote the book The Power of Maps, has this moment, uh, th- my students love, where he says like, "Why don't our maps show sound quality?" And he says that most of the maps we have represent two major interests. They tell us where the property lines are and the political borders, and they tell us how to commute to places in cars. That's what they're really good at, and they don't tell us where the nice spots are that sound nice or feel nice and have rich ecosystems, right? So I think it's really clear there to show that maps show an interest, right, based on prior decision about what they've collected and what, uh, so what information is collected and displayed and which is hidden. And I think what I want to say is the same is true of metrics. It's not that they're lying. Like maps are showing things that are real. It's that any data system has al- already represents prior decisions about what's worth noticing and measuring. So Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have this incredible book that I think you should read called Sorting Things Out, and they talk about-- they think one of the big roots of this is what's in the classificatory structure that underlies the data collection. So one of their core examples is they study the ICD-10, the, the, you know, international manual that gives different codes to accidents-

    16. RC

      Mm

    17. CN

      ... um, and morta- and, uh, causes of death. And they point out that, uh, so they look at the falls coding, and they point out for urban falls, there are separate distinct codes for fall from a balcony, fall from playground equipment, fall from hospital equipment, fall from a commode, fall down an escalator, fall do- There are different codes for all of this. And for urban falls, there's fall from a cliff and fall other, and that's it, right?

    18. RC

      Mm.

    19. CN

      That system has very high granularity for urban accidents and very low granularity for rural accidents. So it, I mean, it d-- that system displays what it cares about and what it doesn't. I mean, here's, here's another-- This is an example I, I just-- that, that has been staring me in the face forever that I hadn't realized until like a week ago, 'cause we were talking about this with my students. Intelligence tests automatically-- our intelligence tests right now highly weight logical, mathematical, and abstract skill. They don't rate emotional sensitivity at all, right? Like, doesn't this reveal something about the values embedded in the system? That the thing that we call an intelligence test that is measuring someone's intellectual capacity has no- nothing in it that tracks your ability to empathize or be aware of other people's emotions.

    20. RC

      Is it the-- I- is this a quote, uh, is it attributed to Einstein, "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree-

    21. CN

      Yeah

    22. RC

      ... you'll believe it's stupid," or something to that degree, right?

    23. CN

      Right. Yeah, but let me, let me level up that thought. A, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you'll think it's stupid. B, our intelligence tests are making one decision about how everyone should be judged and applying that univocally and unchangingly. So it's like taking that decision, that a particular decision that rates one thing ver- one set of abilities very highly and very lowly, another very lowly, and then building that Into the kind of background air of the data we swim in.

    24. RC

      Yeah, but this is, this is why, coming back to the school system for a minute, schools work really well for some kids-

    25. CN

      Right

    26. RC

      ... and really poorly for other kids.

    27. CN

      Yeah.

    28. RC

      Right?

    29. CN

      Yeah.

    30. RC

      If you fit that model-

  12. 53:03 – 58:12

    Not knowing you’re captured: identity, immigrant expectations, and rebuilding internal alignment

    1. RC

      And, and that's, there's no question to me one of the major reasons so many people are struggling in their life and feel unhappy-

    2. CN

      Yeah

    3. RC

      ... is because their values have been captured, and more importantly, they're not aware-

    4. CN

      Yeah

    5. RC

      ... that their values have been captured. This is a theme, Thi, that keeps coming up on this show with regularity because it's something I'm so passionate about because I think for much of my life, my values were captured.

    6. CN

      Yeah.

    7. RC

      You know? You shared in, in the book about, you know, being, uh, brought up in the US-

    8. CN

      Yeah

    9. RC

      ... in a family of Asian immigrants. Well, I was brought up in the UK and my parents are immigrants from India.

    10. CN

      Yeah.

    11. RC

      And so there's a certain-

    12. CN

      Yeah

    13. RC

      ... trait that gets valued-

    14. CN

      Yeah

    15. RC

      ... which is academic excellence, and that is great, but it also can come at a cost.

    16. CN

      Yeah.

    17. RC

      And for me, the cost was that I thought that my self-worth as an individual was contingent on academic success. Pros and cons. Pros are you get a ton of academic success. Cons are you need that level of success to continue in order to feel good about yourself-

    18. CN

      Right

    19. RC

      ... which is highly problematic. But I would say the, for me, the kind of hopeful point about this is that once you understand this, once you see through it, you're like, "Oh, wait a minute, where did these ideas and values come from?"

    20. CN

      Right.

    21. RC

      "Are they the values by which I want to live my life? If not, can I start to change them?" I think you start to generate a snowball in the other direction. That's very much what I've done in my life, and I shared with you when you just popped into the house before we started recording that the trigger for me to start questioning everything was the death of my dad in 2013. Until that point, I, I didn't have time, I had no real reason to start questioning everything about my life. But that moment, for the first time, it got me to stop looking externally-

    22. CN

      Right

    23. RC

      ... and to start looking internally, right? And I think a lot of what we're talking about today, and a lot of what your book is about is, is really that challenge and that sort of tension between external and internal. The metric is something that can be easily seen externally.

    24. CN

      Right.

    25. RC

      Often what truly matters to us as individuals is what we can experience on the inside.

    26. CN

      Yep.

    27. RC

      I mean, life, I was telling my son last night over dinner, I was trying to explain to him the philosophies in your book, right? And it was quite hard for me to try and simplify it. But I said, "Hey, son, listen, you got to understand that life is experience on the inside." And it's an early thought I have that I'm sort of haven't quite finished my kind of processing of, but I really think most of life or all of life o- on an individual level is, is how we experience it, and a lot of that cannot be seen by the outside. So by its very nature, external metrics, they may be useful, they may be helpful in some scenarios, but none of them or very few of them help tell you how you're experiencing the world, how you're experiencing those metrics. I don't know if, you know, rock climbing, you start the book talking about rock climbing. You also bring up yoga a couple of times throughout the book, and I kind of feel that those two examples really illustrate this point of external v internal. Can you just share-

    28. CN

      Yeah

    29. RC

      ... if you will, share the story about rock climbing that you opened the book with? Have you tried to meditate before? Perhaps you've heard about some of the benefits, like reducing stress and increased focus, and you've given it a go and thought it's not the practice for you. Well, I believe that may well be because you have not tried the right approach. The Way is the only meditation app with a single long-term pathway. You're not forced to make loads of choices each day. Instead, you're guided on an enjoyable and progressive journey that deepens your practice step by step. Since I partnered with The Way, I have had so much positive feedback. One listener said, "Dr. Chatterjee, I came to The Way through your podcast. I have tried other meditation apps in the past with limited success and like the idea of following a single guided path. I'm nearly two months in now and loving it. Henry's gentle and concise approach is very calming, and The Way is now a part of my morning routine." You see, that's the sentiment that so many people report when they start meditating with The Way. For listeners of my podcast, The Way is offering 30 free days to establish your own meditation practice. All you have to do is click on the QR code on screen or go to thewayapp.com/livemore to get started.

  13. 58:12 – 1:08:50

    Rock climbing as a ‘good’ scoring system: how metrics can teach subtle values—then be revised

    1. CN

      Yeah, rock climbing is, it's super interesting to me because, again, it's, it's one of these things that I think is expressive of my profoundly mixed relationship with scoring systems, because rock climbing saved my soul during graduate school, and it did so via an explicit scoring system. So I was super depressed, started climbing, and the interesting thing about climbing for me was I got the value of it wrong. Um, and I think this is an important ingredient in this whole story. The value of climbing is actually really subtle. So when I came into it, I came into it kind of in the frame of mind that we, we were talking about in the beginning. I was like, "I need exercise. Exercise will help me lose weight and live longer. That's what exercise is for. I need to exercise, so I'm gonna do some climbing." Um, what climbing taught me over the years is that climbing is valuable for its own sake, that climbing is an ecstasy, that there is a beauty and a poetry to moving well, and I don't... I mean, I'm mediocre. But climbing taught me that there is something so extraordinary in being able to be so sensitive to your body that you can adjust your center of gravity over half an inch and just pull in a little bit more with the lower part of your core, and suddenly feet that were impossible to use become perfect to use.

    2. RC

      Mm.

    3. CN

      It taught me that there was a wonder to, like, physical detail and precision for its own sake. And the way it did it was with a scoring system. Because, I mean, I used to hike a lot, but I checked out when I hiked. I was just like, "Ah, I'm just gonna go up this thing," and I would go up the thing, and I would be thinking about other things or, like, thinking about philosophy or talking to my friend, and I would tune out. Hiking was, in some sense, too easy to force me to pay attention to that, my body.

    4. RC

      Mm.

    5. CN

      And I'd also clambered over rocks kind of like casually, but again, I just took the easy route. And climbing said the scoring system of climbing is difficulty based, and there are climbs that are rated for difficulty, and then the scoring system tells you to increase your difficulty level. And that scoring system actually got me to pay attention to my body, because the only way to get up to the next level was to pay more refined attention to my body. It also amplified, uh, my mental wandering. So, uh, there's this great moment from one of my favorite yoga writers, Godfrey Devereux, where he says, um, "The point of yoga is meditation, and it's a very good technique for meditating." He says, "'Cause I tried seated meditation, and it never worked, 'cause when my mind wandered, I wouldn't notice, 'cause my mind had wandered." But being in a hard yoga pose amplifies any mind wandering, 'cause if your mind wanders, you wobble, and that helps you notice. And climbing is even more extreme in this sense, 'cause in climbing, if you're climbing a hard climb and your mind wanders, you fall 10 feet onto the pad, right? You cannot miss that. It's a very loud signal. And so that procedure, that scoring system and those constraints and the difficulty it pushed me to, helped me find the beauty of movement. But also After about six years of climbing, the difficulty system stopped working well for me. Uh, I, I mean, I, A, am n- was never that athletic, and B, became, like, an academic and a parent, and I didn't have enough time, and it was just impossible for me to progress up the difficulty scale. And so for a while, it became very frustrating. What I ended up doing was changing how I conceived of the activity. I changed the scoring system, and I made it, uh, mostly one about climbing elegantly. Um, and there are two things to notice. One, I think this is one of my... I've had a lot of bad exper- unhealthy experiences with scoring systems, but this is the one or the ones I'm proudest of, 'cause I think I got the best relationship I could get with a scoring system, which is I heard what was in it. I heard... 'Cause what we've been saying is that scoring systems and metrics have values that are fixed into them, and sometimes we've been talking about this as a bad thing, right? Like, "Oh, these are being imposed on me." But also, like, you can learn from them. I think things like climbing, activities like skateboarding, right? Each of these has its own values that you might not tune into, and the scoring system is so clear that it helps you tune into them. So you can use them to find your way into new, beautiful things that you had not experienced before. But then after a while, w- when I'd gotten the kind of brute area, when I was like, "Oh, I get this now," I was able to fine-tune it to myself. I was able to tailor it to myself. I was able to adjust what I was trying to do to make it better for me. And I think one way to put it is that I think scoring systems and metrics are kind of off-the-rack values. But that's useful to have, right? But it's also useful to use as a starting point-

    6. RC

      Yeah

    7. CN

      ... and depart from. And I think being able to learn from them, use their rigidity to get onto something, and then being able to depart from them and adjust them is a really valuable way to do it. And I think what's interesting about my s- my climbing example was or the original, the original scoring system was very external, this external difficulty score, but I needed that to be able to get onto it, 'cause I didn't have the value inside me. And once I did, I could kind of go off book and start aiming at something much subtler and intern- more internal. I could guide myself with my own sense of elegance. But it took years-

    8. RC

      Yeah

    9. CN

      ... of following the scoring system to get to be able to do that.

    10. RC

      Yeah. I, I love that, T. I, I really love that. And in my last book, which is called Make Change at Last-

    11. CN

      Yeah

    12. RC

      ... the first chapter is called Trust Yourself.

    13. CN

      Yeah.

    14. RC

      And in that chapter, I make the case that we've outsourced our inner expertise to external experts, right?

    15. CN

      Yeah.

    16. RC

      And I see this in health so much, right? Because I think one of the big reasons why people are so confused these days by all the conflicting information that exists online about health is, A, because there's a belief that there's one right way for everyone. So when two different experts are saying two different things, people are like, "Well, which expert should I believe?"

    17. CN

      Right.

    18. RC

      It's like, well, hold on a minute. Both experts might be right, but for different people.

    19. CN

      Right.

    20. RC

      Right? So which one of those people are you? And so I think that's one aspect of it. I think the other aspect is that we've forgotten how to ask ourself about, you know, how am I experiencing this?

    21. CN

      Right.

    22. RC

      Is this still working for me? Right? So that scoring system in rock climbing, it, from what I heard, it sounds as though it got you climbing, it got you pushing yourself so you start to progress-

    23. CN

      Right

    24. RC

      ... and really experience climbing in a slightly different way. But then after a while you realize, actually, now the scoring system starts to become problematic, right?

    25. CN

      Right.

    26. RC

      So it helped me for a while, but now I'm better off experiencing climbing in the way that I want to experience it.

    27. CN

      Right.

    28. RC

      And you know, I, I think about even the term non-negotiables. Like-

    29. CN

      Right

    30. RC

      ... a, a very common thing that people like me will get asked when we go on other people's podcasts is, you know, "What are your health non-negotiables, Dr. Chatterjee?"

  14. 1:08:50 – 1:12:29

    Eroded self-trust: wine scores, choosing experts, and relearning the ‘voice of pleasure’

    1. CN

      E- exactly. So I think there was a moment where I saw this very clearly. I was in a wine shop, and a gentleman came in, very well-dressed, and he was, he, he, um, he was like, "I, I'd like to get some wine. I, I would prefer a wine above 95 points."

    2. RC

      [laughs]

    3. CN

      And the, the wine shop owner was doing what they often do, which is try to talk you out of that and be like, "No, it's really, like, what, what are you gonna have it with? What do you like? Like, what do you want that day?" And the guy said, "Well, how am I supposed to know what I like?" And I thought-

    4. RC

      [laughs]

    5. CN

      ... [laughs] what do you do? What, w- what is the activity even here if you're consuming a wine unable to tell if you like it, being guided only by... I mean, it makes total sense to use an external score as maybe a starting point-

    6. RC

      Yeah

    7. CN

      ... for what to buy to find something that you might like.

    8. RC

      It's a balance.

    9. CN

      But I think what had happened to, to him is something that has happened to a lot of people in a galactic scale, exactly what you're talking about. He'd been so attentive to external signals that he had lost any ability to hear the... I mean, I don't think it's even that quiet a voice. The voice of pleasure had gotten swamped in his brain, and I think this is exactly what happens. I think... So the philosopher Elijah Milgram, uh, who is a major inspiration to me, one of his ideas is that there's no single correct value to have or goal to have for your life. Instead, you're trying to find an expression of a value or a goal that fits your personality and your context in the place you're in. And the way you do that is you try on values, and you see if they work for you, and the signal that they're working for you is that you're happy, you're engaged, you're flourishing.

    10. RC

      Exactly.

    11. CN

      And the signal that they're not working for you is that you're miserable, you're bored. Uh, and I think what's happened to many of us is instead of modifying how we think of the target in the light of this quiet inner voice, we're ignoring the inner voice in favor of the loud-

    12. RC

      Exactly

    13. CN

      ... loud metric. And by the way, we have a story about why that's so easy to, to do. It's because metrics are built to be easily comprehensible. That's Porter's story. They've been built to, for everyone to understand instantly and for everyone to be able to communicate to other people instantly. And I think one thing that's happened is that we have systematically become unwilling to listen or trust quiet inner signals, which makes us dependent on external sources to evaluate our life-

    14. RC

      Yeah

    15. CN

      ... for us.

    16. RC

      And I think one of the reasons for that, in my experience, is because we don't spend that much time with ourselves anymore. We're constantly distracted. You know, we're consuming stuff. And if you're constantly consuming stuff from the outside, no matter how good it is, you're probably less able to hear what's going on on the inside. So I believe for a lot of people, and this has certainly been my experience, is that stuff where you, you know, doing things regularly in solitude, you know, whether it's-

    17. CN

      Right

    18. RC

      ... a walk where you're not listening to something or you're drinking a cup of coffee in complete silence. You know, it allows you to start tuning into, oh, wait a minute, I'm... You know, something's going on here.

    19. CN

      Yeah.

    20. RC

      Something that, something, my body's trying to tell me something, trying to make me aware. But instead of listening, we distract. So I think for some people at least-

    21. CN

      Right

  15. 1:12:29 – 1:40:28

    Games as meaning-machines: striving play, self-effacing ends, and why the process matters

    1. RC

      ... that has become an issue. I love what you said about values because, and values are a kind of metric, right? But they're an internally generated metric as opposed to an externally generated one, which is why I think values are so powerful. I mean, you know, we haven't really spoken about games yet. You know, the, the-

    2. CN

      Yeah

    3. RC

      ... you started talking about games and what's so beautiful about games is that you have these rules, and the rules of the game shape the behavior and shape what you care about.

    4. CN

      Right.

    5. RC

      But actually, life's a game as well, and the rules of the game that are given to us shape what we think we should care about. So if we think we should care about money and promotions and status, we end up chasing that to find at 45 we're like, "What the hell's happened to my life? Why do I feel unfulfilled?" Because we've chased something that has been, or we might have chased something that was given to us from the outside.

    6. CN

      Yeah.

    7. RC

      But I think values are, in many ways, the polar opposite, but in a great way, that we get to choose our values. We get to try out these values and see, you know, how do I feel, as you said, when, when, when I'm acting in accordance with these values? How do I feel when I don't? And over time, perhaps we can tweak those values- To kind of know who we are and live in harmony with that person. I mean, yesterday, Lindsey Vonn, the American downhill skier, Olympic champion, and she decided after I think five years out of the sport to compete in the women's downhill. And people are going, "This is crazy," you know, she's been out of the sport for five years, and then last year... Uh, sorry. Last week she ruptured her ACL, her anteri- anterior cruciate ligament on her left knee, yet was still deciding to compete. And since she crashed, my feed on X is just full of people either saying she's the stupidest woman in the world for competing or people saying, "What a brave athlete." And all I can think of is, how do any of us really know? Like, we don't know who she is, how she values her life, and she's put out a statement this morning saying that she has no regrets. She knows who she is. She knew the risks, but actually this is how she wants to live.

    8. CN

      Right.

    9. RC

      And I thought there was something really powerful about that which we can all, I think, think about, which is do we know our own values, or have those values been given to us from the outside? And if they've been given to you from the outside like they were for me for much of my life, can you start the process of trying to understand which ones you'd like to change? I mean, what's your take on that?

    10. CN

      I mean, metrics are prepackaged values. And one of the things that I find powerful about games is that they balance the explicitness of giving you a goal or a value with a freedom to modify it. I think they really, uh, exemplify at their best th- the mode of life you're trying to describe because this is... Okay. This is the most philosophical on high geek description of the most common activity. Here's what you do when you play a game. A game gives you a prepackaged target. It gives you a scoring system. You do it for a while, and then you step back, and you reflect, and you ask yourself, "Was it fun? Was it a good time? Was it enriching? Was it interesting? Was it an enjoyable social experience?" And what you've actually done there is done a micro version of exactly, I think, the thing that you think is beautiful, which is first you plunge yourself into this alternate score thing that specifies exactly what you do. You try it on, and then you step back and ask yourself from an example, from an... Uh, ask yourself from an angle outside that scoring system in a way that I think is cued to listening to internal s- signals. Like, just the basic question, was that fun, was that interesting, is a cue to be open to weird, hard to measure signals. And then you use that to make a decision about whether you wanna play the game again, whether you wanna play a different game, whether you wanna modify that game. And I think that, as dumb as it might sound, I think that a life with games exemplifies a freedom and agency with respect to your values and activities. What it is... And not every game is like this. You can be pushed into bad games. It's not automatic.

    11. RC

      Is it a bad game, or is it a game that's just not suited to you?

    12. CN

      Um, I mean, this is... I, I think... And mostly I'm talking about games that are not suited to you. There are probably some bad games. I think, like, purpose-built addictive games are bad. But whatever. I, I, I think you're right. The, the thing that the social technology of games do when we experience them in the right context is they trigger reflection, and they trigger reflection by participating in and then stepping back from extremely explicit systems. They also let us leverage what's good about explicit systems, right? The whole point of game rules and game goals is they capture kinds of activities. That's what rock climbing is like for me. A lot of my favorite board games and a lot of my favorite, uh, I'm really interested in tabletop role-playing games right now, have a very interestingly strict rule set and a point system that gets you to leap into a particular kind of activity. So a lot of the, uh, my favorite role-playing games have scoring systems that encap- that tell you to do things like invent shared backstory or find tension in character drama, and having that as a quick, clear guide can help you find your way into new forms.

    13. RC

      Mm.

    14. CN

      Because the whole thing that, that we're generating here, the background thought is that values are subtle, and I think... I've just realized there's a slightly different alignment in the way you're talking about things and the way I'm talking about things.

    15. RC

      Mm.

    16. CN

      Uh, I think you are, to use my own lang- a little more purely existential in the old school, like Sartre-style existentialism. Th- the views you've been expressing are like your real values come from the inside. They're authentic to you, and the stuff from the outside is fake, and I don't think that. I actually think a lot of the most important values in life are very subtle and contained in the outside. I learned the beauty of jazz from other people. I learned the beauty of rap from other people. I learned the beauty of rock climbing from other people. Those values are embedded in external activities. I think, for me, the most important thing is that what is really valuable is often quite subtle, and that subtly is driving both sides of this. The reason we want games and we want rules is 'cause values are subtle, and it takes a long time to be led into them. That's why it took me years exposed to the scoring system of rock climbing to see the beauty of movement. I needed that structure to get me-

    17. RC

      Yeah

    18. CN

      ... over to see that subtlety, and it's also why metrics won't ... perfectly capture it explicitly, right? That, that subtlety is also exactly why, um, you'll never be able to get a metric that exactly captures a value. Which is, and I think the way that games do it is they don't try to get you there perfectly. They give you a shove in the right direction, and that's, that's what they're the best for, right?

    19. RC

      Mm-hmm.

    20. CN

      They're a shove in the general direction, and then you eventually, like, get up and teeter on your own feet and find your way. That's-

    21. RC

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CN

      But we, we need that help. We need both a combination of the assistance of external systems to help us find our way, and then the willingness to trust ourselves to navigate and hear the inner voice to catch onto what's subtle.

    23. RC

      Yeah.

    24. CN

      But if we're stuck on the metric the entire time, we'll never, we'll never start to hear the smaller signals that'll help us close in.

    25. RC

      Yeah. I'm not sure I necessarily think it's all internal and the external has no value. I think for me it's more, it's a combination of the two. We can, as you say, let's say with jazz, like I'm a huge music fan and, you know, music has done something to me on the inside, um, for many, many years.

    26. CN

      Yeah.

    27. RC

      Right? That, yeah, sure, we can try and quantify with scientific data-

    28. CN

      Yeah

    29. RC

      ... and say that this is what happens in the brain.

    30. CN

      Yeah.

  16. 1:40:28 – 1:51:15

    Freedom vs authoritarian metrics: medicine, autonomy, playfulness, and being a ‘midwife’ to values

    1. CN

      Okay. Okay. We're both experts of a sort. You're an expert in health. I'm an expert in philosophy to the extent that matters to anyone. And, um, I think when people look to us, they want certain kinds of advice about what to do. And what they're looking for us, and what it seems we might want to provide, is a definitive answer of what meaning is or what it's for, what happiness is, what health is, what the meaning of life is. And maybe what we should do is refrain because, I mean, I think this is close to what you were saying before. Sometimes I think the real... I don't have a good argument for this, but what my gut cries out to say-

    2. RC

      Mm

    3. CN

      ... is the real problem of metrics as values is they're dead. They can't change. They're prefixed. The, their stability and rigidity is one of the core problems, and maybe what it is to be a live being, a fully alive being, is you're constantly renegotiating what's valuable and meaningful for you.

    4. RC

      Yeah.

    5. CN

      You're constantly alive to questioning the terms-

    6. RC

      Yeah

    7. CN

      ... and resetting them. And maybe what we should not do here is say, "Here's the meaning of life. Be compassionate. Here's the meaning of..." Like, instead what we should try to be is a midwife to the process, right?

    8. RC

      Mm-hmm.

    9. CN

      Like, to set... I mean, I think about this a lot in my classroom. I think there's one conception of what I'm trying to do is I'm gonna teach you philosophy, I'm gonna teach you correct answers. And another conception of what you're doing, and this was... This is actually, I'm stealing this, by the way, from Socrates. Socrates thought he was a mid... He actually used the term, "I'm a midwife to other people's ideas and conceptions."

    10. RC

      Mm.

    11. CN

      What you can think of yourself as doing is being like, "Oh, no. I want you to be constantly alive and renegotiating and thinking, and, like, changing your mind, and I want to trigger that process." So maybe one thing we can do is refuse to give the answer of what it's for. [laughs]

    12. RC

      But I, I, I would say that's what this show has always done.

    13. CN

      Right.

    14. RC

      Right? I never tell, have told anyone what to do on this show-

    15. CN

      Yeah

    16. RC

      ... ever. In fact, I won't give people prescriptive advice.

    17. CN

      Right.

    18. RC

      Uh, what I, what I think this podcast is about is sharing ideas.

    19. CN

      Right. Right.

    20. RC

      And if someone listening to it thinks, "That might be useful for me," and-

    21. CN

      That's so interesting

    22. RC

      ... chooses to then bring it into their life-

    23. CN

      Right

    24. RC

      ... great. But I'm not trying to tell you what to do.

    25. CN

      Right.

    26. RC

      That's up to you. You're an autonomous individual who's-

    27. CN

      Right

    28. RC

      ... got every right to live life in the way that you want to, as long as you're not harming other people.

    29. CN

      Right.

    30. RC

      Right? Um, and when I say that my goal is to try and create or do my small part to help create a more-

  17. 1:51:15 – 1:53:00

    Meaningful constraints beyond games: Sabbath rules and the gift of deliberate restriction

    1. RC

      But it could do. I think about the Jewish Sabbath.

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. RC

      Right? A- and I think about what a beautiful restriction that they're putting on their seven-day week that then gives so much value, right?

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. RC

      So by on that seventh day, between Friday sunset and Saturday evening, there are certain rules, you know, depending on how strictly, you know, you follow Judaism, certain things that you can't do. You can't go in a car, you can't use a phone. You, you know, whatever it might be. And so the rule, the restriction for many families leads to real community, bonding, a sacred space once a week where they connect, and they cook together, and they play games together.

    6. CN

      Yeah.

    7. RC

      Right?

    8. CN

      Yeah.

    9. RC

      But you need the kind of artificial restriction there to get the benefits, whereas when we don't have that, we don't... We're free to do whatever we want seven days-

    10. CN

      Yeah

    11. RC

      ... a week. But that freedom, the problem is, is that every day bleeds into another one.

    12. CN

      Right.

    13. RC

      You know? So when I was a kid, probably the same as you, we're the same age, I remember the shops were closed on Sundays. You couldn't shop on Sundays, right? You had to plan beforehand, and Sundays were a family day, and you would, I don't know, hang out with the family, and dad would be doing the ironing, and you might watch Formula 1 races together in the afternoon or, or whatever. Whereas today, in the capitalist culture that we live in, Sunday's no different from Monday, right? You can shop on Monday. You can go to... You can do what you want. You can email. You could do all those things, right? So there's something quite beautiful, I think, about games and these artificial restrictions-

    14. CN

      Yeah

  18. 1:53:00 – 2:02:44

    Mechanical values: principles vs algorithms through cooking (and why algorithms make people replaceable)

    1. RC

      ... that create the joy that we can apply to life. That was one thing I just wanted to comment on. And the other thing I really want to touch on if, if we can, maybe we can't go into mechanical values in detail.

    2. CN

      Right.

    3. RC

      But in that chapter on mechanical values, you basically say that the more explicit and mechanical we make our goals and values, the easier it will, will be to coordinate.

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. RC

      Right? So, you know, it's the thing we've already touched on, that these values and metrics are great at coordinating with other people and communicating what we're doing to people, but we lose nuance-

    6. CN

      Yeah

    7. RC

      ... when we do it, and you say there are three types of mechanical values: principles, models, and algorithms.

    8. CN

      Yeah.

    9. RC

      Let's forget models for the moment, but I really like this idea of comparing principles to algorithms.

    10. CN

      Yeah.

    11. RC

      And I wonder if we can talk about it through the lens of cooking.

    12. CN

      Yeah.

    13. RC

      And, you know, you, you basically s- talk about this idea that old-school cookbooks are made up of principles. New-school ones are more based on algorithms. I, I, I, I think it's such a beautiful-

    14. CN

      Right

    15. RC

      ... analogy, and I wonder if we could just talk about it.

    16. CN

      Well, okay. Yeah, let me, let me go back and talk about what you just said at the top of that, and then I want to talk about mechanical values because you said something really wonderful, I think, about constraints, and I think games really teach us something incredible about constraints, and it's why I care about them so much. Um, you know, uh, when I was starting to write about games, there's a common, there's a common pushback where a lot of people think like, oh, games are just fake play, right? Because real play is totally free. It's totally unconstrained. It's totally creative. Games just destroy that. They're like, they, they're, they're prisons that pretend to be play. I don't think that's true. I think that, like, when you're totally unrestricted, I mean, there's a reason why a lot of people think obstructions are good in creativity, why forms are good in poetry. Uh, and I was trying to understand this, and the best explanation I got from a yoga teacher, she said that when you get... let people be totally free, when you're n- not strict with your yoga poses, people just tend to repeat their bodily habits. And-

    17. RC

      Mm.

    18. CN

      The, the strictness of yoga was a conduit to freedom because it forced you out of your habits, and the scri- strictness put you into a new posture, and then you could reintegrate that, right? So I mean, one of w- one of my weirdest claims in my first book is that games are yoga for your soul because they force you into different postures of caring about things-

    19. RC

      Mm

    20. CN

      ... and different practical postures about the world, but they're freeing only if they're temporary, if you're not stuck like that.

    21. RC

      Yeah.

    22. CN

      Yoga would not be freeing if you're in triangle pose forever, and a metric is not freeing if you have to care that way forever. Games are freeing precisely because they're strict but temporary. And I... the reason I think they're so interesting is that games are constraints used for the sake of freedom because we use them to move around. But because they're in a larger setting where we're not stuck in them, where they're temporary, then we can move past them, and th- that, I think, is the weird-

    23. RC

      Yeah

    24. CN

      ... beauty of games. Okay. That's, that was the first thing I would say. Mechanical values. So this is, this is... I mean, I was so... I will tell you, I was stuck on this book. There was a big chunk of time where I just could not explain what I thought was the central feature that I was looking at in metrics. And then I read this book by Lorraine Daston, who's a historian of science and one of the greatest thinkers alive. Uh, she has an earlier book she would- you would love, in which she talks about how the idea of objectivity changes over time and how it mechanizes over time.

    25. RC

      Hmm.

    26. CN

      Her new book, Rules, is about different conceptions of rules, and she says there's this new conception that has come to become dominant in the culture, and that conception is of rules as hypermechanical and hyperalgorithmic. But she says that's actually really recent. An older dominant conception of a rule is what she calls a rule as a principle. So a principle is an abstract generalization that admits of exceptions, but you can't list all the exceptions. So my favorite example is one I learned from creative writing workshop, show, don't tell. Good general principle for writing, but oft- but people break it. Tolstoy broke it. You know? Like, all happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way. That's telling, not showing. But what Daston says is the way that a principle works is when you understand the unstated heart of the idea which lies behind the rule, you'll know when to break it.

    27. RC

      Yeah.

    28. CN

      And the core, the core thought there is what a rule i- what we're, how we... Life is so complicated that no explicit rule will ever capture everything. It can only point us in the general direction. And once we get onto the real idea that it's unstateable but true, we know when to, to, to break-

    29. RC

      Yeah

    30. CN

      ... the rule, right? The rule, the rule is a pointer and not the full thing. Um, you know, cue the old, uh, thought, when a finger is pointing to the moon, look at the moon, not the finger, right? The rule is the finger pointing to the deep thing behind it.

  19. 2:02:44 – 2:05:44

    Playing your own game: resisting algorithmic incentives in media, health, and work

    1. RC

      And, you know, the, the stuff with algorithms as a, a, as a sort of modern mechanical value is something I think about a lot. You know, we, when, you know, it is very common these days for podcasters to choose guests according to algorithms.

    2. CN

      Yeah.

    3. RC

      Right? YouTube is the, is the prime platform for this, where there are certain guests that will perform on the YouTube algorithm.

    4. CN

      Yeah.

    5. RC

      And a lot of podcast hosts know which those guests are, so will choose them. And I'm not judging anyone for doing that, just to be clear. But as your subtitle is, right, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game, right? The question you gotta ask yourself is, is that the game you wanna play, right? Because you could, for example, keep choosing guests that are gonna blow up on the algorithm, so you win at the algorithmic game, you win at the game of views, but you may end up with a show that you hate, right? And I, I actually know full well that that is happening to certain people.

    6. CN

      Right.

    7. RC

      Whereas I hope, by and large, what I try and do on this show is I've got... I, I literally have one metric that determines if I invite a guest onto the show or not, and it's simply, am I really interested in this human being, and do I wanna spend two hours with them trying to explore their ideas? If the answer is yes, irrespective of an algorithm, I will invite them onto the show. If the answer is no, doesn't matter how good the press release is, how good I think the topic might be, I'm like, "You know what? I just don't think I'm gonna vibe with this person. I'm not, I'm just not sure I'm, I'm interested." So it's, it's curiosity that determines the guest choice. And I think long term, for me personally, I can't speak for anyone else, you know, eight years on from starting this show, I still love it more than ever. I, I feel like the luckiest guy on the planet that I get to invite people on, and because the show has such a big reach, they come to my studio, sit with me, and we get to explore ideas together. I'm like, "How lucky am I that I get to do this job?" But I believe that would change if I started to choose guests based on algorithms. And I, I really think that speaks to really one of the main themes in The Score, which is, as you say, how to stop playing someone else's game. So the converse is, how do you start playing your own game?

    8. CN

      Yeah.

    9. RC

      And I kind of feel that's what the book is really teaching us through... You know, you, you explore it through a variety of different ways, but ultimately I think the book is a philosophy on how we can live an intentional life that we design for ourself.

    10. CN

      Yes. Exactly. [laughs] 100%.

  20. 2:05:44 – 2:08:18

    Are games a waste of time? The closing challenge: ‘What is your time for?’

    1. RC

      Final question, C. For someone who's listening to this conversation right now and who thinks games are a waste of time-

    2. CN

      [laughs]

    3. RC

      ... what would you say to them?

    4. CN

      What is your time for, right? Like, if a game has taken you to a point... I mean, I think not every game is for every person, but the magic of games is not just that they are these design processes, but that we get to dance and move between them, that we get to find, like you said, snooker is for you, rock climbing and fly fishing and weird role-playing games are for me. And games have this magical opportunity. Games give us this magical opportunity for us to explore different facets of ourselves as acting, thinking, feeling, sensing beings, and then find the one that is the most beautiful for us. And I don't know a better description of what it is to be alive.

    5. RC

      Yeah. What is your time really for? I think that's a great question to finish this conversation on. C, I think the new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game, is a literal masterpiece. It is so good. I hope everyone goes out and gets a copy. I think once you read it, you will start to think about your life in a very different way. And ultimately, as I say, it's gonna help you live a more intentional life. Thank you for taking the time to write it. Thank you for coming up to the studio, and, uh, I hope to see you again soon. If you enjoyed that conversation, then I think you are really going to enjoy this one.

    6. CN

      If I were to choose to live my life over again, I would live it in this way.

    7. RC

      Yeah.

    8. CN

      I wish I hadn't worked so hard. When you're driven to work too hard, you actually ignore what matters. Then where does that come from? Again, that comes from childhood trauma

Episode duration: 2:08:18

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