How To Live An Intentional Life with Professor C Thi Nguyen #670

23:30C. Thi Nguyen:He was calling me in as a philosopher of art. And I was like, I don't know anything about AI. He said, you have to come. You have to come. I need you here. So I show up and I'm in this room and there are all these people building AI and they say they're optimizing for good art. And I finally like carefully raise my hand from the back and I say like, how are you measuring good art? How are you operationalizing it? What's your training data? And they said, well, we're just using the Netflix database on engagement hours. And I lost it. I like cursed from the back of the room. And I said like, that is not good art.

24:03C. Thi Nguyen:And then they said, well, show us another large scale accessible database with a better measure for good art and we'll use that instead. And I thought in that moment, there isn't one and it's not an accident. I mean, I think a lot of the times when you point out a bad metric, you're like, this metric sucks, which we do all the time. People's response is, sure, okay, that's all right, but we'll just find a better metric. And I was interested in whether there was a part of life that systematically defied metrics, that systematically defied datafication, that systematically defied measurement. And I think I found the answer.

24:40C. Thi Nguyen:And the answer comes from a bunch of places. It comes to me mostly from a field called science and technology studies, which is a field that starts in philosophy of science and then explodes. It's an interdisciplinary field full of historians and anthropologists and sociologists. And the answer comes in a few places. But I think the first thing to put on the table, right where our conversation is, is an idea from Theodore Porter. So Theodore Porter is a historian of quantification culture. He has this book, Trust in Numbers, which is one of the, you know, like matrix type veil rips from my eyes moments.

25:10C. Thi Nguyen:So he tried to understand why bureaucrats and politicians compulsively reach for quantified justification even when we know that the metrics are bad, that they're not capturing what's really important. His answer is that there's two kinds of ways of knowing about the world, qualitative and quantitative. And they're good at different things. And the problem is when we compulsively reach for the quantitative, even when it's not the appropriate vehicle for knowing or thinking about the world. So he says, OK, qualitative justification, qualitative communication using words is open-ended and dynamic and rich and subtle and context sensitive.

25:54C. Thi Nguyen:But it travels badly between people with different contexts because it requires a lot of shared background information. So my example, since I'm an academic, my example is always like when I write responses to my student papers, they're rich. We can use all the language from the particular class. I can move in multiple dimensions. I can compare their rigor to their creativity, to their subtlety, to their originality, to their like ethical thoughtfulness. And first of all, I don't have to push those into one measure. I can just be like, look, this is really creative, but your writing isn't as clear.

26:30C. Thi Nguyen:And I can just leave that there. And I can also use all the richness of our shared time together. Like we develop a lot of language together in the classroom. And I can use that sensibility about what makes a good argument or why thinking is worthwhile. But that, I mean, surely, A, someone from the business school is not going to understand all those terms. And I'm not going to understand their evaluations for their students. And it won't aggregate. There's no way to quickly compress that stuff for someone in human resources or hiring, right? A student who receives a thousand of those evaluations.

27:03C. Thi Nguyen:There's no fast way to digest that qualitative stuff. So the solution to this at the institutional level, says Porter, is to create quantified data. And what quantification is, says Porter, is the intentional creation of a context invariant chunk that we keep stable. So we specify something. We remove everything that requires a lot of high context to understand. And then we've made something that he says can travel. So like a letter grade. I think letter grades are different in the UK than the US. But for us, you know, an A is great. B is medium. C is mediocre. And if everyone holds about that meaning, then the information can really travel.

27:51C. Thi Nguyen:A's and B's can move anywhere. People understand what they mean. and they aggregate incredibly well because we've removed all this multidimensionality. Sorry to interrupt, just to check I've got this. So you're saying with your students, for example, that you teach, one-on-one in your small groups, you have a variety of different ways to feedback to them. There's multiple dimensions that you're looking at, right? But the system requires you at the end of the course to give them a single metric, like an A, B, C, D, E. And the point of that metric is to travel. It's so that when they apply for a job, the person who's hiring them or interviewing them knows, oh, when they sat that university course, they're an A student or they're a B student to give them an idea.

28:44But of course, depending on what that job requires, it could be that a C student who wasn't particularly good at scientific rigor, but was exceptionally good at creativity. Maybe they're the perfect person for that job, but the grade doesn't reflect that. And you had quite a funny story in the book where I think at one point you said to your students, I'm gonna give you all A grades. So you don't need to worry about that. Let's get into the real kind of meat of the topic. But that didn't work either, did it? Can you just tell that story? So first of all, did I get you? Was my interpretation correct of what you were trying to say?

29:23And then if you could just tell us that story.

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33:12Yeah, I mean, it was mostly correct,

33:15C. Thi Nguyen:but I just want to caution you out to one thing. So I think it's not just that I can rate my students on multiple dimensions and then grades collapse that to one dimension. It's that I can use language and terms that don't even exist on a spectrum. Like not everything exists on a graded spectrum. Not everything exists on a ranked spectrum. The thing that I want to resist is thinking that what's behind – we give someone an A and that's a point on one ranking scale. But in reality, there's five ranked scales. It's not that. It's like not all communication exists on a ranked scale. I mean, the thing that Porter is trying to say is that quantified data is a summarized chunk built to travel.

34:04C. Thi Nguyen:And the way you make it ready to travel is you strip off everything that would give you a lot of friction when it moves between layers. And then you have this slimmed down smooth thing that travels easily. And what gives people friction is things that require context. So it's not just multidimensionality. dimensionality. It's the richness of context required to interpret a particular communication in a particular context. That's what has to leave the thing. At one point, Porter says, it's a remarkable thing. He says, because what information is, is a particular way of understanding the world that's been sterilized to be readily understood by a distant stranger with no shared context.

34:48C. Thi Nguyen:And one way to put the problem of value capture is that you're ruling yourself in terms that have been sterilized for consumption by distant strangers. You're ruling yourself limited only to the language that has had all context stripped out, specifically so it can be quickly summarized and aggregated. It feels like this is happening more and more in the world, where you almost have to fight so hard against a system to actually hold true to what it is you stand for. I mean, we've mentioned value capture, this rigid attachment to an external system of values. And you can kind of see that everywhere.

35:29You can see it in medicine, in healthcare, in the book, you make the case in journalism, you can see it. I think you make a really nice case in law schools, I think. We said law schools used to have different missions. They used to stand for different things. But when you sort of collapse it and go, well, what's the grade? Right. Or what's that assessment? Then you've lost all that nuance. You're just, you're looking at just a ranking table of, what percent of people get this grade? And what percent do you want to get a job at a top firm or whatever it might be, which is so unidimensional, isn't it?

36:07Yeah. But I also want to push back

36:09C. Thi Nguyen:Because I think now I want to speak up for metrics because I actually think that makes the situation more horrifying. 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. Yeah. Because we need metrics. I think this is the true pain 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.

36:51C. Thi Nguyen:Data works. Science at its best involves different people collecting into the same buckets so that they can amass 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 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 of what happened, what college rankings do to educational culture in a book called Engines of Anxiety.

37:32C. Thi Nguyen:It's a book by Wendy Espland and Michael Sauter, who are sociologists. And they studied what happened when U.S. News & World Report started ranking law schools. The first thing they say is that exactly what you noted, right? Like so law schools before the rankings used to have many dimensions of – many dimensions of value. Like some were more interested in getting their students high-paying corporate jobs. Some were more interested in social and community outreach missions. Some were more interested in theoretical and legal scholarship and research work. And they would represent these things in qualitative ways.

38:14C. Thi Nguyen: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 imposes a very rigid sense of value, and it also narrows down on measurables. 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, 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?

38:55C. Thi Nguyen: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 did the research, by the way, by looking at internet archives of like forums of discussion seeing prospective law students. And they say that the moment the U.S. News & World Report starts ranking law schools, students immediately take their goal to get into the best law school where best is just set by those rankings. So they stop value deliberating.

39:33C. Thi Nguyen:This is the example that led me to really – so one of the formulations from the book, 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 U.S. News and World Report that sets the terms of measurement, right? But – and here's the big but. But the US News and World Report also had a good reason to do this. Yeah. Their stated reason was that before them, every school could talk about itself in glowing terms.

40:14C. Thi Nguyen:Maybe its value mission was genuine or maybe it was BS. Maybe they were fulfilling or maybe they weren't. And 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 an immigrant's kid. My parents know nothing about 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 what portability is.

40:53C. Thi Nguyen:Portability is accessibility. And so what you get is actually the big vision is that there's this massive tradeoff 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. And I think the real, the real, the really terrifying part for me, in some sense, if it turned out the 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.

41:43C. Thi Nguyen:And 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 is the glue that binds us together. And it's a very costly glue. Yeah. I love it. And, you know, I'm not trying to, like you said, the metrics are really good or bad. It's just understanding what that metric is good for. Yeah, exactly. Being aware of that. Right. And also understanding what it's not good for. So let's take the, I don't know, I guess schools, right? Yeah. Not everyone gets to choose what school their children go to.

42:20I understand that. But I think with schools, what I've come to the conclusion, it's not that there's no such thing as a good school. Of course there is. But for me, if you have the choice, it's more about what is the right school for my child? It's subtly different. The school can look great on paper. People here, they get these grades and they go to this university, whatever it might be. Yeah, but is it the right school for the qualities that my child has? And again, as I say, not everyone has the choice, but it's an example that we can use. There's a couple of things you said there, which I found interesting.

43:00Of course, metrics have a value. But there's also that hidden cost. You mentioned politicians, and I guess through the lens of health, when an election comes around, one of the big things in this country will be the National Health Service. And no doubt, each party will choose the metrics that are most favorable to them. So they may choose, for example, how many people when they come to the A &E or the ER get seen within four hours. And have we made that better since the last party was in? But the problem is you can cheat that metric a million different ways. You can just churn people in, give them what extreme is, give them really poor care, but cheat the system so that actually no one waited for more than four hours.

43:53So by the metric that you're getting told, oh, wow, this party came in and actually no one's having to wait more than four hours anymore. But what if the cost of that is that everyone's getting poor quality care? I mean, that's quite an extreme example, but I feel it's super relevant. The other thing you said, which I really want to talk to you about is the scientific method. So yeah, the scientific method wants to look at large data sets, large volumes of people to try and come up with conclusions. But a lot of science by its very nature is reductive. And one thing I've learned over the course of my career T is that not one of my patients or very few of my patients are average.

44:39So the scientific data will generally try and tell you on average, this is the best diet. On average, this is the right approach to take. But even if you look into those individual studies, you'd go, well, yeah, but not everyone thrived on that diet. That was just the average. So this is the difference for me between population medicine and precision personalized medicine. And so one of my favorite parts of the book was the chapter on mechanical value. So let me explain what mechanical value is. And then I want to talk about principles, right? Because I really resonate with this section, which is one of the reasons why I thought I always have had these, I won't say difficult conversations with my publisher over the years.

45:29Not difficult at all, but I've always said, I can't prescribe people a plan because I don't know who they are. What I can write about are principles, not protocols. right this principle holds true but you need to adapt that principle right in the context of your life so talk to me about mechanical values then we can maybe talk about principles hold on before

45:52C. Thi Nguyen:we do mechanical values you said a bunch of stuff okay i really want to let's back up because i we have to talk about mechanical values but there's you said so much interesting stuff so the there are two things i really want to talk about in what you said um one thing to think is what are metrics good at picking up and what are they bad at picking up? And I think we already get a story from Porter. What they're good at picking up is things that are invariant between people that everyone can detect that don't take particular sensitivity or context to detect. This is why we aim at lifespan over happiness.

46:35C. Thi Nguyen:I want to notice something really important here. People talk like happiness or joy is intangible or impossible to track or like some evanescent magic. It's really obvious. You know when you're happy and you know when you're depressed. It's like one of the most obvious things in the world. It is radiantly at the forefront. And it actually, I think, takes a long process of socialization for us to be willing to ignore that stuff in favor of the measurable. Yeah. So what makes the measurable the measurable is not how loud it is, right? Happiness is really loud. Despair is really loud. It's also not, I mean, people, one of the funny things is when I give the cheese example for a long time, I'd talk about like length of life versus joy and food.

47:26C. Thi Nguyen:And people would be like, well, you can't just, you know, you can't really weight those intangibles. And I would accept that language. And then I thought, wait, cheese is intangible? What is more tangible than eating a goddamn mouthful of brie? And what is, right, what we've come to think is that word comes to us so easily because we've replaced our sense of reality. We've replaced like concrete things with what's easy to abstract. Yeah. So the thing that makes something countable is its kind of invariance across context and easy noticeability across context, which tells us exactly what metrics are bad at picking up, which is anything that is highly variable, highly context dependent, including, for example, your particular personality.

48:17C. Thi Nguyen:I think your example is exactly right about picking which kid to go to which school because when we use a metric like a college ranking, we're applying measures that have been put there because they're approximations of what everybody thinks. They've been de-particularized. Yeah. Hayek famously said central policy can never target any particular person. It can only target the average person. Right? I think that's very close to what you're saying. So that's one big thing I was thinking 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 – What do you mean interested?

49:01C. Thi Nguyen:So this is an enormous thing I learned from a bunch of these scholars I'm talking about in science and technology studies. And 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 specific value system on the world.

49:40C. Thi Nguyen:So 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 DSL 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. Okay, if I think about the map of the world.

50:17Yeah. Well, it's prioritizing borders of countries. Exactly. It's prioritizing big cities. Right. It might prioritize high mountains. But, yeah, and it kind of feeds this idea of metrics. Like, all metrics do something, but they don't do other things. Yes, exactly.

50:37C. Thi Nguyen:Dennis Woods, who wrote the book The Power of Maps, has this moment that 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 information is collected and displayed and which is hidden.

51:15C. Thi Nguyen: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 already represents prior decisions about what's worth noticing and measuring. So Jeffrey Bowker and Susan Lee Starr 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 international manual that gives different codes to accidents and causes of death.

51:57C. Thi Nguyen:And they point out that – 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. There are different codes for all of this. And for urban falls, there is fall from a cliff and fall other. And that's it. Right? That system has very high granularity for urban accidents and very low granularity for rural accidents. So, I mean, that system displays what it cares about and what it doesn't. I mean, here's another. This is an example I just – that has been staring me in the face forever that I hadn't realized until like a week ago because we were talking about this with my students.

52:49C. Thi Nguyen: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 nothing in it that tracks your ability to empathize or be aware of other people's emotions? Is this a quote? Is it attributed to Einstein? If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you'll believe it's stupid or something to that degree, right?

53:28C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah, but 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, a particular decision that rates 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. Yeah, but this is why, come back to the school system for a minute, schools work really well for some kids and really poorly for other kids, right?

54:14If you fit that model of what the modern schooling system, certainly I can talk about in the UK or in the US, these sort of Western countries, you may thrive at school because your skill set is aligned with what they deem to be important. And we all know the cases of children who are supremely talented, but the school measurements of success don't suit them. So they leave school thinking they're stupid when it was never that they were stupid. It's just the wrong metric was used to assess them.

54:49C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah. So there are two things to say. I think this is exactly right. The first thing to say is that, so we have like one of the big answers now. I think that we've been sumbling around for us. The answer isn't the metrics are bad. The answer is that every metric represents a specific set of interests and highlights a specific set of features and expresses a particular value system. So, for example, our intelligence measures express the value of logical and abstract thinking is important. Emotional artistic thinking is unimportant. That's embedded in that system. I'm not saying that's bad. The first thing to say is you just have to be careful about the tools you're using.

55:40C. Thi Nguyen:If you think they're just neutral representations of the world, if you forget that they represent specific interests and already represent a prior focus of attention, maybe that's one way to put it. There are decisions about what to attend to and what's worth paying attention to and what's worth remembering and what's worth noticing built in to the infrastructure of our data collection systems. And they can be used well when you are aware of the biases and interests in each of your tools and you're willing to select the right tool for the job. But we forget that. We just pick tools thinking they're true representations of a neutral world.

56:19C. Thi Nguyen:And then all those, I mean, selections bleed into our decision system. So I think an example would be if you just walk around sorting people via the IQ test, then without even thinking about it, you're carrying that bias in favor of the logical and mathematical over the emotional into your decision-making process. And then the second thing is the thing that you're talking about. So if we build – the way that Bowker and Starr put it is that when a lot of these decisions enter, they say, information infrastructure, they become background and they become naturalized. We start thinking that's the way things are.

56:59C. Thi Nguyen:So instead of thinking, oh, we have this particular intelligence test that was built at a particular time in which we wanted to boost STEM. And so we emphasize that. We think, no, this is the way the world is. Smart people are good at math. Dumb people, if you're not good at math, you're dumb. And so that kind of – that's a subtle social process by which a particular set of values gets built into a large-scale system. And then if we're not cautious of that, we can intake that and suddenly be guided by value decisions made by some other person for some distant reasons that we don't even know is guiding us anymore.

57:40And that's, there's no question to me, one of the major reasons so many people are struggling in their life and feel unhappy is because their values have been captured. And more importantly, they're not aware that their values have been captured. This is a theme tea 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. You shared in the book about being brought up in the US

58:14C. Thi Nguyen:in a family of Asian immigrants. Well, I was brought up in the UK and my parents were immigrants from India. And so there's a certain trait that gets valued, which is academic excellence. and that is great, but it also can come at a cost. 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, which is highly problematic. But I would say 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.

59:06Where did these ideas and values come from? 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 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 and to start looking internally, right?

59:49And I think a lot of what we're talking about today, and a lot of what your book is about is really that challenge and that sort of tension between external and internal. The metric is something that can be easily seen externally. But often what truly matters to us as individuals is what we can experience on the inside. I mean, life, I was telling my son last I overdid it. 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 off.

1:00:35But I really think most of life or all of life on an individual level 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, if you will, share the story about rock climbing that you opened the book with.

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1:04:56C. Thi Nguyen: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. 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 were talking about in the beginning.

1:05:38I was like, I need exercise.

1:05:40C. Thi Nguyen:Exercise will help me lose weight and live longer. That's what exercise is for. I need to exercise, so I'm going to do some climbing. 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.

1:06:26C. Thi Nguyen: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, I'm just going to 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 my body. And I also clambered over rocks kind of like casually. But again, I just took the easy road. And climbing said the scoring system of climbing is difficulty based.

1:07:05C. Thi Nguyen: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. And it also amplified my mental wandering. So there's this great moment from one of my favorite yoga writers, Godfrey Devereaux, where he says, the point of yoga is meditation. And it's a very good technique for meditating. He says, because I tried seated meditation and it never worked because when my mind wandered, I wouldn't notice because my mind had wandered.

1:07:43C. Thi Nguyen:But being in a hard yoga pose amplifies any mind wandering because if your mind wanders, you wobble and that helps you notice. And climbing is even more extreme in this sense because 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. I mean, A, I was never that athletic and B, became like an academic and a parent.

1:08:26C. Thi Nguyen: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 the activity. I changed the scoring system and I made it mostly one about climbing elegantly. And there are two things to notice. One, I think this is one of my – I've had a lot of bad experience – unhealthy experiences with scoring systems. But this is the one of the ones I'm proudest of because I think I got the best relationship I could get with a scoring system. which is I heard what was in it. I heard, because what we've been saying is that scoring systems and metrics have values that are fixed into them.

1:09:09C. Thi Nguyen: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, 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.

1:09:44C. Thi Nguyen: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 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 climbing example was the original scoring system was very external, this external difficulty score. But I needed that to be able to get onto it because I didn't have the value inside me.

1:10:28And once I did, I could kind of go off book and start aiming at something much subtler and more internal.

1:10:34C. Thi Nguyen:I could guide myself with my own sense of elegance. But it took years of following the scoring system to get to be able to do that. Yeah, I love that too. I really love that. And in my last book, which is called Make Change at Last, the first chapter is called Trust Yourself. And in that chapter, I make the case that we've outsourced our inner expertise to external experts. Right? Yeah. 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.

1:11:21So when two different experts are saying two different things, people are like, well, which expert should I believe? It's like, well, hold on a minute. Both experts might be right, but for different people. 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, how am I experiencing this? Is this still working for me? So that scoring system in rock climbing, from what I heard, it sounds as though it got you climbing, it got you pushing yourself so you start to progress 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 so it helped me for a while but now I'm better off experiencing climbing in the way that I want to experience it and I think about even the term non-negotiables a very common thing that people like me will get asked when we go on other people's podcasts is what are your health non-negotiables Dr Chatterjee right?

1:12:27And I will say I don't have any because a non-negotiable can work really well if you are stuck in your life, if you're not doing anything proactive for your wellbeing and you're sitting around all day, you're not making progress, you have no forward momentum. Yeah, I think a non-negotiable, you know, a few things that you commit to doing every single day without fail, help to start moving you out of that space. But after a while, they can become a trap. They can run the risk of perfectionism and beating yourself up where you don't feel like you're worthy as a human because you didn't do the meditation that you said you were going to do, right?

1:13:07So things work until they no longer work.

1:13:12C. Thi Nguyen:So I think there's so many things I want to talk about. So the first thing is, is this such a clear glimpse of what metrics are for and what they're not. So I'm going to push back a little against your thought about, well, there are these different experts that are good and you just have to choose the one that's good for you. Because the other thing we have to put in this space, that they're also fake experts. There's a lot of the background for this book. Because actually one of the things I was most worried about was how non-experts pick the right expert when they don't know anything in the field.

1:13:47C. Thi Nguyen:And a lot of the best uses of metrics are exactly, they do what they say on the tin. They help you figure out who is completely a quack. And they are best at sorting on that kind of broad, large scale, right? Yeah. I actually agree. If you're swimming in a sea of hundreds of thousands of experts now who are sharing information, of course some are gonna have valuable information and some are not but even within i really think this does speak to the book right and the ideas within it even within well-conventional experts who've been to the right university and done the right course they don't always agree yep right so just saying choose a well-conventional expert has an inbuilt problem within it, which is you're assuming that every expert interprets the data in the same way and has the same view, but the world doesn't work like that.

1:14:49And I often say to people, if you're waiting for a time when every single expert agrees, you're going to be waiting a long time. So my approach with people is to say, you need a balance, right? I'm not saying ignore external experts like me, but also learn to ask yourself, does this approach vibe with me? Does it fit my lifestyle, my culture, how I want to live?

1:15:13C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah, and I think the most important word you use was trust. And especially self-trust. Yeah. And isn't the risk with a lot of the metrics that are given to us from the outside that they, if we're not intentional about them, they start to erode our self-trust? Because we no longer trust ourselves, we trust the metric. 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 he was like I'd like to get to wines I I would prefer wines above 95 points and the the wine shop owner is 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 going to 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, what are you doing?

1:16:11C. Thi Nguyen: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 for what to buy to find something that you might like. It's a balance. But I think what had happened to him is something that's happened to a lot of people in a galactic scale, exactly what you're talking about. But he had been so attentive to external signals that he had lost any ability to hear. 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.

1:16:52C. Thi Nguyen:So the philosopher Elijah Milgram, 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 in 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 you're happy, you're engaged, you're flourishing. And the signal that they're not working for you is that you're miserable, you're bored. 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 metric.

1:17:41C. Thi Nguyen:And by the way, we have a story about why that's so easy to do. It's because metrics are built to be easily comprehensible. That's Porter's story. They have been built 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 for us. 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.

1:18:26You 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 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. Something that my body's trying to tell me something, trying to make me aware, but instead of listening, we distract.

1:19:12So I think for some people, at least, that has become an issue. I love what you said about values,

1:19:21because 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, we haven't spoken about games yet. 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. 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 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?

1:20:28How 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. People are going, this is crazy. You know, she's been out sport for five years. And then last year, sorry, last week, she ruptured her ACL, her 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.

1:21:17And 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. 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?

1:21:58I mean, what's your take on that? I mean, metrics

1:22:01C. Thi Nguyen: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 exemplify at their best 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?

1:23:02C. Thi Nguyen: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 thing that specifies exactly what you do. You try it on. And then you step back and ask yourself from an example, ask yourself from an angle outside that scoring system in a way that I think is cue to listening to internal signals. Like just the basic question, was that fun? Was that interesting? is a cue to be open to weird, hard-to-measure signals.

1:23:46C. Thi Nguyen:And then you use that to make a decision about whether you want to play the game again, whether you want to play a different game, whether you want to 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. Is that a bad game or is that a game that's just not suited to you? I mean, this is, I think, mostly I'm talking about games that are not suited to you. There are probably some bad games.

1:24:25C. Thi Nguyen:I think like purpose-built addictive games are bad, but whatever. I think you're right. 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, 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.

1:25:11C. Thi Nguyen:So a lot of my favorite role-playing games have scoring systems 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. Because the whole thing that we're generating here, the background thought is that values are subtle. And I think I just realized there's a slightly different alignment in the way you're talking about things and the way I'm talking about things. I think you are, to use my own, a little more purely existential in the old school, like Sartre style existentialism.

1:25:46C. Thi Nguyen: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 subtlety is driving both sides of this.

1:26:18C. Thi Nguyen:The reason we want games and we want rules is because values are subtle and it takes a long time to be let 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 over to see that subtlety. And it's also why metrics won't perfectly capture it explicitly, right? That subtlety is also exactly why you will never be able to get a metric that exactly captures a value. 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 what they're the best for, right?

1:26:56C. Thi Nguyen: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. But 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 on to what's subtle. Yeah. But if we're stuck on the metric the entire time, we'll never start to hear the smaller signals that will help us close in. 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 chats like i'm a huge music fan and you know music has done something to me on the inside um for many many years right that yeah sure we can try and quantify with scientific data and say that this is what happens in the brain or we can just go you know what want to hear that track i feel absolutely fantastic right which should be good enough in and off itself right but you need the external music to bring out that internal feeling so i don't think any of these things are black or white and you can say it's just internal or just external i do very much believe that you know I'm interested in primarily health and happiness.

1:28:24And I do believe it's very hard for people to truly be healthy and happy in the long term, if they haven't almost taken an internal inventory and figured out who they actually are. Now, they might need to experiment, they might need to make some mistakes, or I wouldn't even call them mistakes, you might need to experiment maybe with the wrong things to learn. Actually, you know what, when I behave like that, that's not really who I want to be, right? You've got this thing in the book called the gap, the distance between what's measured and what actually matters, right? And I talk about that as well through a different lens, which is whenever there's a gap between your internal values and your external actions, I believe that's where all of your problems start in life because you create this kind of void within you.

1:29:18There's not true alignment. And I think the closer you get to having your external actions matching your internal values, I think the happier you are, the more at peace you are, the less likely you are to engage in problematic behavior. So I do think we talk about similar things, but probably look at things slightly differently. And we have a slightly different language for them. When you came into the house this morning, I was sharing with you how much I enjoy snooker. And how in our front room, we have a little table that sometimes I'll play with my kids, sometimes I'll play by myself, but I play for the inherent joy of playing.

1:30:03I can just be there by myself for 20 minutes. And to the external eye watching, it could be the most boring thing in world. But to me, I'm trying to put little different bits of spin on the ball. I'm trying to see where exactly can I leave the white ball at the end? Can I get it to kick off a little bit more to the left when it hits the cushion? My wife would be watching that and she'd probably think, I don't want to speak for her, but let's put it this way. It's not her thing. That's the best way to put it, right? And I think that's okay, right? Because I would argue that Okay, this is my bias, but I would say if you don't enjoy watching snooker, one of the reasons might be is because you don't understand the game.

1:30:50If you really understood, and I played a lot of games and I will still say, to play snooker well on a full-size table, I think it's one of the most difficult games on the planet. I really do. It is exquisite the skill these players have, and they are doing things with a cue ball that to the untrained eye, you have no idea. You just think, oh, they're just hitting balls. If you play, you're like, oh my God, the way they caress the cue ball to come back to that position to make the next pot look easy is a thing of beauty. So a lot to unpack there, but I think when you came and you said there were things you wanted to talk to me about, about snooker and hobbies

1:31:31C. Thi Nguyen:and what's so great about them. I think that story encapsulates so much about why I think games are so important to think about and understand and to cherish. And I think there's two levels in which games and your relationship to snooker for me are kind of the opposite of the metrics to spare that we've been talking about. so a lot of this a lot of this came from me so the book that you read is my second book it's also my first popular book my first book was an academic book about the nature of games and trying to understand what made games valuable and so actually the first book I wrote basically out of irritation like that was my starting motive like I played games my entire life sports, video games and I had been teaching a course about philosophy of art and I wanted to do a case study about whether video games were art.

1:32:39C. Thi Nguyen:So I read a bunch of things with my students and I got really frustrated because all of these people tried to defend video games by pointing out how they were like movies, like they had cool cut scenes, they had good graphics, they had good dialogue. And I was angry because I thought it left out the thing that was most important to me about games, which was like the action part, the part where you exercise skill and were like lost in your skill or like absorbed in both like just pure skill or absorbed in like interesting decisions or like ecstatically rich choice spaces or just being hyper creative.

1:33:15C. Thi Nguyen:Like I think one of the most interesting parts of games is indie tabletop role-playing. And in there, the rules get players to be emergently creative together and invent stories together. And I love all this stuff and it was missing. So I was trying to figure it out and I got, I mean, the, it's funny because I feel like I'm telling everything in the reverse order from how it originally happened. There's this moment where I found this game designer I love, Rainer Knizia. He's a European board game designer. And he said in a lecture at the Game Developer Conference, the most important thing in my game design toolbox is the scoring system because it tells the players what to care about.

1:33:53C. Thi Nguyen:It sets their desires in the game. And I I was so struck by this. What I ended up thinking was what a game does is it specifies desires and then it specifies limitations and abilities. It says, use this cue ball. You can't move the cue ball around with your hand. You got to use the stick, right? You can't move the ball with your hands and stalk it. You got to kick it, right? It does these things and then by doing so, it plunges you into a very specific kind of activity. It plunges you into the hyper-calculating, like, little tiny deflections of movement or hyper-calculating exactly what toe angle will be able to use a rock climbing hold or hyper-calculating 15 moves ahead in chess about, like, what all the possible logical moves in logical space are.

1:34:48You need the rules to – you need the obstacles to inspire the creativity. Right. Don't you? You know, without the rules, it just wouldn't work. The definition, so Bernard Suits is a philosopher that has been one of the big inspirations for me.

1:35:03C. Thi Nguyen:And he has this definition of games I find incredibly useful. He says, to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. And what this, I mean, that is brilliant. you're creating obstacles so that you can experience the process of overcoming them and you don't because you don't need the obstacle do you right i think the example in the book is the marathon right you're like you know what is a road marathon it's like well it's not the fastest place you're made to be because you right you wouldn't do it that way but it only counts if you do it the way in which it's prescribed by the organizers suit says i mean marathons are a great example suit says that um that you can see from the structure i mean it's again it's one of these things that's so obvious it's just lurking under the surface uh when you run a marathon that's not the most efficient way to get to that point in space not only could you're supposed to run you're not supposed to take a taxi and you have to follow this course you you can't take the most direct route a lot of the times the finish line of the start line are like two feet apart you could have gotten there much faster.

1:36:17C. Thi Nguyen:And what that teaches us, I mean, one way to put it is it's due to saying is that games are inefficiencies on purpose, right? We're limiting ourselves and we're taking the most efficient way to do things out of the picture. And then we're trying to be efficient within an unnecessary efficiency, which means that it must be that what we care about is not the outcome on its own. We care about doing it a particular way. So games exemplify. I mean, we all, I mean, although the motto, you know, the journey is the destination, process over outcome, games rub that in our face. What they force us to admit is that the thing that's valuable is a process of doing, of choosing, of acting, of being skillful, of goofing off, that it's in the process.

1:37:04And I think this is,

1:37:05C. Thi Nguyen:so the first thing to say is I think the world of metrics ignores processes because those are very hard to count. The beauty of the process is very hard to count. And the world of metrics is very good at picking up outcomes and products because those are easy to count. And games are this weird, beautiful paradox on the outside because in games, we use hyper-clear scoring systems to get at a very unclear, hard-to-measure, subtle, ineffable thing, which is the beauty of doing. Yeah, the difference between goal and a purpose. Yeah, yeah. A lot of this I learned from a mentor of mine who casually commented one day, Barbara Herman, professor.

1:37:45C. Thi Nguyen:She casually commented one day that we all had to remember the difference between a goal and a purpose. And I was like, what's that? And she said, well, if you have your friends over for cards, the goal is to win and the purpose is to have fun. And I was just like, oh, my God, of course. Right? Like a lot of the times we have this goal and we pursue it intensely and you can't get the purpose without the goal. You can't have fun just by trying to have fun. You have fun by trying to win. But what you actually care about is not the goal. So the name I have for this in the philosophy of game stuff is I call it striving play.

1:38:23C. Thi Nguyen:Achievement play is where you try to win because you care about winning. And striving play is where you try to win just to have the process. But you need to try. So one way to put it is in normal life, we take the means for the sake of the ends. and in striving play, we take the ends for the sake of the means. Oh, yeah. There's a couple of great examples in the book of this where, I think it's your friend's 10-year-old son. He's playing Monopoly with his dad, your mate. Yeah. And your friend, the dad thought, oh yeah, I've lost, you know. But he was almost on the verge of losing for hours because every time his son would distract him and just sneak a bit of money into his pub because he wanted, he didn't want the game to end, he wanted it to continue.

1:39:10And then the other example, which, you know, we played a lot of chess as a family, although we haven't played as much recently. So this is a good reminder to get back into it. You say in chess that you want a long, intense game, but you only get there by trying to win as quickly as possible. I thought that's true. Whenever I'm playing with my kids and if it is like this 45, 50 minute game, it's great but you don't get that by trying to make it a 45 50 minute game you only get that by

1:39:39C. Thi Nguyen:trying to win yeah the most delicious thing in chess is a long drawn out struggle that's intense and perfect but you only get that if both of you are trying to win as quickly as possible um the there's a concept behind here that i think you would love the concept of a self-effacing end it's one of the deepest things i've learned from philosophy so self this is an idea from aristotle A self-effacing end is an end that cannot be pursued directly. It's an end that to get to, you have to pursue something else. So he – Oh, I love that. Yeah. So his – so I think for me the easiest example is flow state or relaxation.

1:40:16C. Thi Nguyen:I climb to relax. Here's a thing you cannot do. Relax by trying to relax. If you sit there and think, relax, you'll fail. So I relax by trying to get to the top of a rock. The best way to relax is to forget that you're trying to relax and just try to get to the top of the rock. A very clever example from philosophy is another self-effacing end is the pleasures of love. It is very pleasurable to be in love with somebody, but you can't love somebody else for your own pleasure. That's not love. You won't get those pleasures. And Aristotle thought that happiness was a self-effacing end. He thought you couldn't go out directly chasing happiness.

1:40:54C. Thi Nguyen:He thought you had to chase scientific discovery, artistic achievement, helping people. That was the way to be happy. That happiness as a kind of goal was too nebulous. It's a side effect. Yeah, it's what you really want, but it's a side effect of some other goal. So games are like a sneaky way to get it self-effacing ends. And we can, like, I can openly say I climb in order to relax. I fish in order to meditate in general. I can say that before I do it. But to get that effect when I'm doing it, I mostly have to forget that. I mostly have to just focus. Yeah, it scans me to really think about how captured we all are by metrics.

1:41:39And, you know, I touched on it already, but sometimes I'll talk about the importance of hobbies and doing things that you love, right? But what I'll usually say, right? To justify, why would a medical doctor be talking to you about doing something that you love? I say that there is research data showing that people who regularly do things that they love are more resilient to stress. I mean, what's wrong with just doing something because you enjoy it? Nothing. But something has happened where I feel the need to say, oh, yeah, yeah, but you know what? There are these benefits. Right, exactly. Of doing something you enjoy.

1:42:17As if the benefit of just feeling good and being immersed in something isn't enough in and off itself.

1:42:23C. Thi Nguyen:I mean, this is an air shuttle. I mean, how about this? The dumbest, stupidest question is, well, what's happiness for? What do you get out of it? And the answer is, no, it's happiness. It's what we want. And I feel like a lot of medical science has become, well, we need to justify happiness because it'll help us make more money. And you're like, no, you've got it the wrong way around. I think, okay, two things that are really important. Bernard Suit, at the end of this book, The Grasshopper, he has an argument. His argument is, imagine utopia. Imagine something where we've solved all our practical problems through technology.

1:42:59C. Thi Nguyen:What would we do in utopia? We would play games or we would be bored out of our skulls. So it must be that games are the meaning of life. They give this argument and people laugh. But what he's – so Suit was an Aristotle scholar. And he's just representing the Aristotelian idea that the meaning of life comes in human activity, not in human outcomes. The meaning of life lies in exercising capacities, doing things, doing things interestingly. And that outcomes are just the thing that either helps us focus us so that we can have these capacities or they're the kind of instrumental background resources we need to support us so we can get to the doing.

1:43:40C. Thi Nguyen:Right. So, I mean, I think suits, thinks that games just make that clear and obvious. But I think there's something else that's really interesting what you said. I totally see there's a philosophical position from which doctors should not really talk about what's meaningful. They should just talk about these affairs of health. And so there's a part in I hang out with a lot of medical ethicists. And one of the things they say is the problem has been when medicine tells people what the meaning or value of life is. That should be up to the person. That should be an autonomous decision for the person.

1:44:17C. Thi Nguyen:Medicine, objective medicine, should stand back and just tell people about what will help you survive so that you can make your own choices about what's meaningful. So that makes perfect sense to me. Once again, so long as we accept that health here is a resource that's useful on the way to the other thing that's meaningful. But then what it looks like is because of the value capture, we've forgotten about the meaning part because it's so variable and subtle. And we've just hyper-focused on what are supposed to be the instrumental resources. Money is useful to do other stuff. Health is useful to do other stuff.

1:44:53C. Thi Nguyen:Because some aspects of that are highly countable, we've forgotten that it was supposed to be on the way to something else and taken it as the end to itself just because it's so easy to publicly count. Yeah. I have realized over the last few years that one of the things I care the most about for myself and for the world is kindness. And I articulated this publicly last summer at the end of my Sydney show, when someone asked me, if you could prescribe one pill to everyone on the planet, what would it be?

1:45:44And I thought about it and I said it would be a compassion pill. And I explained why. And one of the things I said was that on the face of it, it seems as though what I do with this podcast or with my books or with my live talks or whatever it might be is that on the face it seems that what I'm about is health and happiness and it is but I don't think it's necessarily for health and happiness as the end goal I'm like why does it matter that you're healthy right well A it's up to you to decide if it does matter to you but I think if you're healthier and happier you're more likely to be a kind compassionate human being like I really do believe that I think a lot of the time when people don't behave well with other people or they're reactive or they're fighting people online it's because they're triggered they're stressed they're busy they're they don't feel good in themselves and therefore that permeates to the people around them.

1:46:45So I actually believe that I think what this show is about really is about trying to create a more compassionate world. Because when you understand yourself better, when you do the things that are going to give you energy and vitality, I think most people, maybe not everyone, but most people are going to behave in a much more compassionate way. You're itching to say stuff. So, you know, feel free. Okay.

1:47:17Okay.

1:47:18C. Thi Nguyen: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.

1:47:28And I think when people look to us,

1:47:32C. Thi Nguyen: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 is the real problem of metrics as values is they're dead. They can't change. They're prefixed. Their stability and rigidity is one of the core problems.

1:48:13C. Thi Nguyen: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. You're constantly alive to questioning the terms 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 midwives to the process. right 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 going to teach you philosophy i'm going to teach you correct answers and another conception of what you're doing and this was this is actually i'm stealing this by they're from socrates socrates thought he was a mid he actually used the term i'm a midwife to other people's ideas and conceptions 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.

1:49:08C. Thi Nguyen: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. But I would say that's what this show has always done. Right. Right. I never have told anyone what to do on this show ever. in fact I won't give people prescriptive advice what I what I think this podcast is about is sharing ideas right right and if someone listening to it thinks that might be useful for me and chooses to then bring it into their life great but I'm not trying to tell you what to do right that's up to you you're an autonomous individual who's got every right to live life in the way that you want to, as long as you're not harming other people, right?

1:49:53And when I say that my goal is to try and create or do my small part to help create a more compassionate world, that's purely coming from me. I'm not putting that on someone else that they may listen to this conversation because they want to understand the world better. They may listen to this podcast because they want to lose weight. They can take from these conversations what they will. I can also go in with my intention And I think both things can be true. Okay. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. Can I try? I think what you're doing is incredibly interesting and radical.

1:50:28C. Thi Nguyen:And I think, let me try to describe my understanding of what your understanding of what you're doing is in philosophy terms. It's kind of close to a journey I've been through. So I spent a lot of time intellectually worried about authoritarianism, worried about dictating people, worried about people's loss of autonomy. and I'll teach this stuff in the classroom. And then I realized that I'd grown up in a style of teaching philosophy that was deeply hypocritical because I was doing that by telling my students exactly what to think and giving them a clear grading system that told them exactly how they're supposed to learn.

1:51:02C. Thi Nguyen:And I was dictating to them about the importance of not being a dictator. And that's hypocritical. And I think one thing you might think is the goal of medicine is, I sound like, this is so Aristotelian. The goal of medicine is to help people become better people and more fully people. And if you do that by presenting yourself as an expert and telling people to stop thinking about what they want out of life and simply to obey the clear measures of what health is, then you've undercut the process because you're undercutting their autonomy. And so I think it sounds to me like what you're aiming for is a kind of richer medical practice that tends to a healthy and free person.

1:51:47C. Thi Nguyen:And part of that is about refraining from dictating specifics. And I see part of that's part of the relationship to metrics, because I think both of us are worried that metrics are a form of dictating value and procedure. And so there's something deeply paradoxical about trying to tend to people's like alive well-being by trying to kill the aliveness of the relationship to their lives. I really like the way you've articulated that. One thing I've never done in my career as a doctor is tell a patient that they must give up smoking. Right. Yep. What I have done on numerous occasions is if a patient came in to see me and asked my opinion, I would tell them what I thought smoking was doing to them and the impact it was having on their health.

1:52:38Right. if at the end of that conversation, I was confident that that patient fully understood what I had said, and they then said, hey, doc, I've heard you. I get it. I understand the risks. But I get so much enjoyment out of smoking that I'm prepared to put up with those risks. I'll be like, okay. I never thought my role as a doctor was to go, no, no, no. You must do this, right? And actually, I would argue that not that this was the goal, but I can think of many occasions where that same person, because I didn't try and tell them what to do, they'd often come back a few months later. Go, hey, you know what?

1:53:21A few months ago, we had that chat about smoking. I actually think I'm ready to start reducing or trying to quit. Can you help me? And again, my reasoning behind that is, I don't think any human being wants to be told what to do by anyone else. So if I can treat that patient with respect and give them autonomy and respect their autonomy, okay, fine. Who am I to say that you should care? It's like your brie example, right? A doctor might go to you and say, hey, listen, I've done your blood tests. You need to stop eating brie because I think it's going to shorten your life. You may, T may think, I don't care.

1:54:05I don't feel my life would be worth living if for the next few decades I can't eat any brie. I don't... You know what I'm... Do you know what I'm trying to get at? I... Okay. I mean... And I definitely want to acknowledge that I feel imposter syndrome talking to a philosophy professor about these kind of concepts.

1:54:21C. Thi Nguyen:No, this is... You are at the heart of it. I mean, one general feature of what I'm worried about is that we are by trying, we are like trying to help people and the methods we have of helping people have actually killed the most important thing about people-ness, which is freedom. And I think like if you dictate to people endlessly what they're supposed to do in the name of their being better and they come to have the posture of never thinking for themselves about what matters to them, then you have like removed the most important magic ingredient in the name of optimization. I mean, I think this is one of the reasons I care so much about play.

1:55:07I think playfulness is our name for a particular kind of freedom.

1:55:14C. Thi Nguyen:To be playful. So Maria Lugano is one of my favorite philosophers says that to be playful is to be able to move lightly between different rule worlds. to be able to like dance between different conceptions of who you are and what you're supposed to be. I think one of the things I've come to believe the most deeply while writing this was the reason I love games is that games are an encapsulation of something I really care about, which is how we can help each other to be free. because games are a system where people make them and write them and give them to each other, but give them each other in a system that encourages people to move between them and discover what they want.

1:55:58C. Thi Nguyen:Games are freeing because they let you play around with meaning making. And I think metrics in the way that we're presented with them in institutions are anti-free because they're presented as authoritative. They're presented as authoritative renditions of value. I think metrics are a way that we have, what's actually going on with metrics is a social system in which distant forces tell people what's meaningful and what they should pursue rather than giving them the structure that encourages them to figure out what matters to them. And I think games are one way to give that structure. And the thing you're describing sounds like you're reaching for a form of relating to patients that also is structurally designed to lift up their capacity to think for themselves and be free rather than to undermine it yeah who am i to say to another human being what they should care about yeah it's not my role whether i'm their doctor or not it's not my role you care about what you want to care about but the question is do you know what you care about right or is what you care about has that been shaped by external metrics i.e by somebody else there are a couple of things i wanted to i mean i could talk to you for hours honestly that the book is so freaking good and it's it's so it will really have people thinking about their own lives, how they make decisions, where their preferences and values have even come from in the first place.

1:57:42Earlier, you were talking about games and these voluntary obstacles we put up in games so we can enjoy the process of overcoming them. And we think about how that works in games, but perhaps it doesn't apply to wider life, but it could do. I think about the Jewish Sabbath, right? and I think about what a beautiful restriction that they're putting on their seven-day week that then gives so much value, right? So by on that seventh day between Friday sunset and Saturday evening, there are certain rules, you know, depending on how strictly you follow Judaism, certain things that you can't do. You can't go in a car, you can't use a phone, you know, whatever it might be.

1:58:36and 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 right but you need the kind of artificial restriction there to get the benefits whereas when we don't have that we think we're free to do whatever we want seven days a week but that freedom And the problem is that every day bleeds into another one. 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.

1:59:18And 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 One races together in the afternoon or whatever. Whereas today, in the capitalist culture that we live in, Sunday is no different from Monday, right? You can shop on Monday, 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 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 we can, maybe we can't go into mechanical values in detail.

2:00:01But 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 be to coordinate. So, you know, it's a 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 when we do it. And you say there are three types of mechanical values, principles, models, and algorithms. Let's forget models for the moment, but I really like this idea of comparing principles to algorithms. And I wonder if we can talk about it through the lens of cooking.

2:00:44And you basically talk about this idea that old school cookbooks are made up of principles. New school ones are more based on algorithms. I think it's such a beautiful analogy, and I wonder if we could just talk about it.

2:01:00C. Thi Nguyen:Yeah, 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 here's 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. You know, when I was starting to write about games, 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 uncontrable. It's totally creative. Games just destroy that. They're like they're prisons that pretend to be play.

2:01:35C. Thi Nguyen: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. And I was trying to understand this. And the best explanation I got from a yoga teacher, she said that when you let people be totally free, when you're not strict with your yoga poses, people just tend to repeat their bodily habits. and the strictness of yoga was a conduit to freedom because it forced you out of your habits and the strictness put you into a new posture and then you could reintegrate that, right?

2:02:13So, I mean, one of my weirdest claims in my first book

2:02:19C. Thi Nguyen:is that games are yoga for your soul because they force you into different postures of caring about things and different practical postures about the world. but they're freeing only if they're temporary. If you're not stuck like that. 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 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.

2:03:02And that I think is the weird beauty of games.

2:03:06C. Thi Nguyen:Okay. That was the first thing I would say. Mechanical values. So 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 a 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. She has an earlier book you would love in which she talks about how the idea of objectivity changes over time and how it mechanizes over time. 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.

2:03:43C. Thi Nguyen:And that conception is of rules as hyper-mechanical and hyper-algorithmic. 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 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.

2:04:31And the core thought there is what a rule – how we – life is so complicated that no explicit rule will ever capture everything.

2:04:39C. Thi Nguyen:It can only point us in the general direction. And once we get on to the real idea that it's unstatable but true, we know when to break the rule, right? The rule is a pointer and not the full thing. You know, cue the old 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. So, Dastin says, but there's a newer conception of rule, which he calls an algorithmic rule. And an algorithmic rule is a rule that's designed to be followed exactly as written explicitly with no exceptions automatically. And then she says, I think the most interesting thing I've read in like 10 or 15 years.

2:05:22C. Thi Nguyen:She says, people think that algorithmic rules arise with computing machines. But they actually arose about 100 years earlier in an attempt to cheapen labor by reducing large institutions' dependence on particular experts with particular long backgrounds and sensitivities. and being able to replace them with anybody. So one of the major examples of this for her, she says, in old school cooking, if you look at old school cookbooks, they're actually, they don't look like what we're used to. They say things like, add enough flour and water until the dough feels nice and bubbly and then knead it till it's stretchy and then bake it until it makes a nice ringing sound when knocked, right?

2:06:01C. Thi Nguyen:And you know what modern cookbooks are like. They say like two cups of flour, one cup of water, bake for 450 degrees. Hopefully it's clear that the first kind of recipe is a set of principles. It's a rough set of guidelines that point you in the direction and cue a kind of sensitive responsive judgment. The new kind of recipe is a set of algorithms and it can be applied, it's hyper accessible but very inflexible and very insensitive because it's been written to be usable by everybody. And I think what Dastin teaches us is that a lot of the landscape we're looking for has been made to make people replaceable, right?

2:06:46C. Thi Nguyen:The driving force is the desire for workers to be fungible. So if McDonald's, if your restaurant has a cook that has a long cultivated sensibility and that cook wants to leave, it's really hard to replace them. If McDonald's has written a set of rules that are very precise and engineered the inputs such that those work, then they can fire anyone and replace them instantly. And one way to put it is that I think that metrics are algorithmic recipes for values. What they've done is change what we value away from something that requires sensitivity and context and replace it with something that anyone can track.

2:07:29C. Thi Nguyen:And then if we fire that person and replace him on another, the tracking will continue uninterrupted and unchanged. Yeah. I love it. I love that comparison between old school cookbooks and new school cookbooks. And as you say in the book, it's not as if the new school cookbook is wrong, you know, and actually can be very useful, a bit like your rock climbing analogy, right? To get you started, right? I think that's exactly right. You get started, you learn how to cook from it, but then realize, well, when can you break these rules? You know, what happens when you're staying at an Airbnb with your mates and actually, you know, all the ingredients that you use at home are not available, or the oven is different and goes to a different temperature.

2:08:15Can you adapt? Well, clearly a very good chef will be able to adapt. Someone who's rigid to the rules is going to suddenly struggle. And why I wanted to talk about this is because principles is what I think a lot about in health. I think where we go wrong in health or where some people go wrong is where we too rigidly stick to rules. Rules can be helpful. A dietary prescription by some expert can be useful to get you started. But at some point, you've got to then start asking yourself, is this the right approach to me? Does this fit with my cultural values? Can I eat in this way? Would I be happy eating in this way for the next 10 years?

2:09:00Or whatever it might be. And I've always taught my patients principles as opposed to harsh rules. Because once you understand the principle, you start to gain a degree of self mastery. You know, oh, you know, I can tweet this here. And I think for me, I think that's the ideal state to get to is when you understand the core principles, but know how to tweak them for yourself. And, you know, the stuff with algorithms as a sort of modern mechanical value is something I think about a lot. You know, it is very common these days for podcasters to choose guests according to algorithms, right? YouTube is the prime platform for this where there are certain guests that will perform on the YouTube algorithm.

2:10:00And a lot of podcast hosts know which those guests are, so we'll 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've got to ask yourself is, is that the game you want to play, right? Because you could, for example, keep choosing guests that are going to 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 actually know full well that that is happening to certain people. Whereas I hope, by and large, what I try and do on this show is I've got, I literally have one metric that determines if I invite a guest onto the show or not.

2:10:50And it's simply, am I really interested in this human being? And do I want to 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, it doesn't matter how good the press release is, how good I think the topic might be. I'm like, you know, I just don't think I'm going to vibe with this person. I'm just not sure I'm interested. So 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.

2:11:34I 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 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. I kind of feel that's what the book is really teaching us through, you know, you explore it through a variety of different ways.

2:12:13But ultimately, I think the book is a philosophy on how we can live an intentional life that we've designed for ourself. Yes, exactly. 100%. Final question, T.

2:12:34For someone who's listening to this conversation right now and who thinks games are a waste of time, what would you say to them?

2:12:52What is your time for? Right? Like, if a game has taken you to a point, I mean, I think not

2:13:12C. Thi Nguyen: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. I don't know a better description of what it is to be alive. Yeah. What is your time really for?

2:14:09I think that's a great question to finish this conversation on. See, 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 going to 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 i hope to see you again soon

2:14:49really hope you enjoyed that conversation do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else remember when you teach someone it not only helps them it also helps you learn and retain the information now before you go just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect.

2:15:35And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday Five. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change, and movement, weight loss and so much more so please do take a moment to check them out they are all available as paperbacks ebooks and as audiobooks which I am narrating if you enjoyed today's episode it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on apple podcasts thank you so much for listening have a wonderful week and please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android.

2:16:45All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.

2:17:10Thank you.