Are metrics controlling your life?

0:00Have you ever loaded up Duolingo at 11.55pm just to hear this? Well, if you have, you're not alone. I've certainly finished a simple Duolingo task just to keep the streak alive, and millions of people are like me.

0:19C. Thi Nguyen: The kinds of rules that we use have profoundly changed over the last many hundreds of years. Today's guest has studied these metrics and rules. Why is it that these clear scoring systems are so delightful and so fun in games, and so life-draining in so many of our work and our institutions and our lives elsewhere? He's experienced the problems with metrics in his work. Here's the dirty secret that every professor knows. Student evaluations are a piss-poor rendition of teaching. And in his personal life. I went on Twitter. I wanted to connect to people. I went viral, like twice. and it just like seared itself into my brain.

0:59C. Thi Nguyen: And I just started caring about likes. All of that coming up on today's episode of Nudge.

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1:53I am C.T.

1:54C. Thi Nguyen: Nguyen. I am an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. And I am told that I work on weird crap that doesn't fit nicely into the standard philosophy categories. I asked what he meant by weird crap. I've written about games and how games like transform our personalities. I've written about like how social media networks change the way we interact. I've written about how we underestimate how much we're constantly trusting other people. None of these things fit neatly together inside the standard ways that my discipline categorizes the way people work. This other philosopher read all my things and said in a letter, he was like, you make perfect sense.

2:37C. Thi Nguyen: You work on how social structures, institutions, and technologies change what we value. And I was like, that's it. How social structures, institutions and technology change what we value. Later on, we'll get on to technology and how metrics might decrease the enjoyment we draw from certain activities. But first, let's start with an example from T's personal life. It's an example showing how metrics and scores can increase enjoyment. It's how T became hooked on rock climbing. My rock climbing story is that I was a very non-physical youth. I didn't like sports. I'm asthmatic. And I think the world I was growing up in was very inflexible about that.

3:26C. Thi Nguyen: They made all the high school kids run. And if you had asthma, they would make you run until you got asthma every single day. This is not a very adaptive institution. And so I thought that my body sucked and movement sucked and it was all terrible and I wanted to be reading and playing computer games. In my mid-20s, I randomly tried rock climbing. And rock climbing taught me so much, I learned how to move carefully. I learned to pay attention to where my body was. I think people that come into rock climbing, already athletic, don't have this experience. like my spouse, who came in heavily yoga experience, already knew where everything was, where our hips were, where all around was.

4:06C. Thi Nguyen: I had no idea. I had no idea whether my hips were two feet back from the wall or up against the wall. Climbing taught me all this in part because of its structured difficulty. T writes in his book that rock climbing saved him. He writes how he played games his whole life, how games offered him the joy of complete absorption in performing one clear task in a precise and well-defined world, those rules gave him a refuge with clear goals. In their restrictions, he found freedom. There were rules in rock climbing. You can't pull yourself up using the rope, you have to follow a certain line. Indoor rock climbing means you can only use certain holds of a certain color to complete a climb.

4:49And these rules, these restrictions got T hooked.

4:54C. Thi Nguyen: It made me try to climb harder things. And then in order to climb harder things, I had to learn to pay attention to where my body was. I did learn to pay a kind of intense, detailed attention. And at the end of this line came something that I did not expect, which is I came to love the feeling of movement and came to love the feeling of precision and control and inhabiting my body. And I got this from rock climbing. So if someone just sits there and tells me like, pay more attention to your body, I'll be like, whatever, and ignore them. Or if I try, I'll lose focus after a minute. There's no feedback in that system.

5:32C. Thi Nguyen: With rock climbing, there are two things that are going on. First, it's not random. It's very structured. It's telling you to climb harder climbs. It is telling you exactly what those are. And then the other interesting thing is that five years down the line, I had a wall. I just couldn't progress in difficulty anymore. I got much better for a long time. And then in the end, in the end, I'm not that athletic. And the original scoring system of rock climbing, the thing that had been so helpful for so long, it ran out for me. It became this like kind of gross, exhausting thing that made the experience miserable.

6:07To begin with, the structure was exactly what T needed. The grading system gave him feedback on how he was performing. It allowed him to push himself to complete higher graded climbs, and that was motivating. He could monitor his progress with these metrics. But then he hit a peak. Suddenly, these metrics, rather than motivating him, started to demotivate him. They made rock climbing seem pointless. If you can't push and complete an 8A graded climb, then what's the point? But then T did something interesting. He started to ignore the metrics.

6:39C. Thi Nguyen: So I stopped targeting difficulty in the way that the rock climbing system told me to. And I started targeting elegant movement and trying to climb lines as beautifully as I could by my own sense of elegance. The interesting paradox for me is I couldn't have started that way. First that I had to listen to the rules and learn from them and see all there was to see inside that rule system. And then once I'd learned that, I could diverge and modify the game to suit me. T changed the metrics he cared about and that allowed him to keep enjoying rock climbing. But most of us, in most of our jobs, we can't change the metrics we have to care about.

7:21A salesperson has to hit, quote, a call center staff are measured by average handle time. A teacher is ranked on exam results and Uber driver on their star rating. Most of us can't change the rules and that causes a lot of problems.

7:36C. Thi Nguyen: Games are an art form. It's not just that they tell stories. It's not just that they create worlds. It's that they tell you who to be. They give you an alternate self. They give you a point system and then you pour yourself into that point system. I open a board game with my wife and sometimes it says kill each other and we're like cool we're going to kill each other. And then sometimes it says, you're cooperating on a team to overcome this pandemic. And we're like, okay, cool. Right? So we just do whatever it tells us and we turn our souls on a dime. And I think games are the best case use of that technology.

8:07C. Thi Nguyen: One way to think about metrics is it's using the same technology. It's using the same clarity of value to get you to shift what you care about, but they're not made for your fun or your pleasure. They're made for something else. Why is it that these clear scoring systems are so delightful and so fun in games and so life draining in so many of our work and our institutions and our lives elsewhere? Here's the weirdest part of my life. I would go to work. I'm a university professor and my life is full of metrics and rankings. And I have to report student learning outcomes in terms that I find ludicrous that don't connect at all to why I care about teaching people philosophy.

8:49C. Thi Nguyen: Everyone is obsessed with these various internal ranking systems, like ranking systems of the status of journals where I publish and citation ranking systems and status rankings for different universities. There's the U.S. News and World Report that ranks universities and everyone cares deeply about where you're ranked and how anything that you do might impinge upon that ranking. And I hate this. I think I and a lot of other people know that not only is this like a relentless pile of bullshit, it's also like the thing that drains joy for most of life. So why is this? Why are the metrics that define T's work, the ranking systems and student well-being score, why do they drain the joy out of the job while the ranking systems in rock climbing helped him to fall in love with the sport?

9:39Well, T says it's due to something he calls value capture.

9:44C. Thi Nguyen: I think a thing that often happens, not always, is what I came to call value capture. So value capture is any case where your values are rich and subtle and dynamic and open-ended or developing in that direction. And you get parked in some social setting that feeds you a simplified, typically quantified version. like you go into social media to connect to people and then you start getting fed likes and follows and subscriber counts. And value capture is what happens when those external simplified versions take over your values, when they change how you think about yourselves. T writes how value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.

10:28For example, I first used Facebook to connect with my friends, to poke people, to tag my mates in photos. But soon, the metrics started to drive my desires. I became hooked on the number of likes my photo got, on how many messages I had on my wall. And it drew the joy out of social media because it captured the thing I really valued, which was social connection, and pushed me towards valuing something I originally didn't care about at all, likes and comments.

10:58C. Thi Nguyen: A lot of incentives for professors are tied to student evaluations. When you get good student evaluations, you get promotions, you get teaching awards, you get all this recognition. Here's the dirty secret that every professor knows. Student evaluations are a piss poor rendition of teaching. The things that make you get good student evaluations are being like funny and entertaining and grading easily. Tell a lot of jokes, make your class easy, you'll be gold. that is not actually the way to get to a good education right a lot of the best ways to educate students to give them skills to prepare them for like a life of creative flexible hard thinking is to push them to give them like harder tests so student evaluations are really poorly linked to student learning t says value capture can go even further than this not only does value capture change how a professor might act but it also might change how they perceive their work value Capture is the next step.

11:57C. Thi Nguyen: It's what happens when those external systems enter your soul and you start caring deeply about them. And this has happened to me a ton of times too. It happened to me on Twitter. I went on Twitter. I wanted to connect to people. I went viral like twice. And then it just like seared itself into my brain. And I just started caring about likes, not about some other thing that likes to be useful for, but I just cared about likes. Same thing with status rankings for a long time. This is really painful to, you know, confess. But for a long time, there's a status ranking in philosophy. Certain philosophy journals were fancier or more prestigious.

12:32C. Thi Nguyen: What got you into them wasn't what I cared about, but I got sucked in. I just started caring. I was like, I need to get into the highest ranked thing. That's what matters. I think one of the crucial things that happens when you get sucked in is you stop being able to reflect on whether the ranking systems are working for what you really care about. I've been desperate to finish reading a book, not because I enjoy the book but because I'm desperate to add it to my list on Goodreads. I've ignored stopping and taking a picture during a beautiful outdoor countryside run because I've wanted to hit a target pace.

13:05Early last year I started creating a second Weekly Nudge podcast episode, many of you will remember it, and it was partly because my paycheck was tied to the number of ads I could play on this show. I soon binned the idea because the second episodes were a bit crap, but these are were all examples of metrics capturing the value of the task.

13:25C. Thi Nguyen: My new favorite terrible metric, one of my friends is a student advisor at my university, and they got a new tracking system to track how good their student advising was. And the metric for quality of student advising is number of keystrokes into the student advising computer system per minute. I mean, clearly and obviously rotten. But you can also immediately here get a sense of why. We have it because it's very easy to track because our technologies already pick that up and that every technology that we have can already pick that up really easily and really quickly. It's easy to track keystrokes, pace, ad impressions and Facebook likes.

14:05It's hard to track student satisfaction, the enjoyment of a run, how moved you were by a book, how good a podcast episode is and how connected you feel. And because it is hard to track those things, we can't or don't build metrics for them. But why?

14:23C. Thi Nguyen: I had this gut instinct that many of the things we care about the most deeply, health, happiness, well-being, education, just wouldn't metrify well. So I went looking for a reason and I found one. And I think one of my favorite explanations comes from a historian called Theodore Porter, who has this book called Trust in Numbers, in which he asked the question, why is it that politicians and bureaucrats reach compulsively for quantitative justification, even when they know that the metrics are bad, even when they know the rankings aren't tracking, which is really important. And he has this answer that I felt like was like the matrix-like unveiling of the modern world for my eyes.

15:02C. Thi Nguyen: His answer is, he ended up saying like, look, there's two kinds of ways of knowing about the world. Qualitative, explaining things in words, and quantitative, like the kinds of metrics and data that we know about. And he said that they're good for different things. And the claim isn't that quantitative data is bad. It's that it's a tool for a specific use. And the problem arises when we take it too far from its proper use and use it when it's inappropriate, when we overreach for this particular tool. So he says that qualitative information is rich and open-ended and subtle, but it travels badly between people from different contexts because it requires a lot of shared background to understand.

15:43C. Thi Nguyen: Quantitative information, he says, is designed to get around this. It's designed to cross boundaries. It's designed to connect people. It's designed to be understood easily by people as different from each other, from as many different contexts as possible. And to reach that design goal, quantitative information has high context criteria removed. That is, in order to make it travel well between boundaries, we strip out the parts that have a lot of nuance, that have a lot of, that require a lot of expertise to understand or require a lot of shared background. So in my world, the easiest example is just grades.

16:18C. Thi Nguyen: When I write qualitative evaluations on my students' papers, they're long, they're complicated, they're subtle, they have a lot of information. They're comprehensible maybe to other philosophy teachers, but people far away, like in the business school and the CS department, won't understand them and I won't understand their written comments to their students. But grades travel easily, which means that there's this simplified, thin sense of meaning. Everyone about knows what an A is, a B is, and a C is. Everyone knows what an A student is and a D student is. And because we strip out all that high context information, we suddenly have this bit of information that not only can travel easily, but then instantly aggregate.

17:00C. Thi Nguyen: You cannot aggregate hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of qualitative evaluations into one quick number. But once you have the GPA system, you can aggregate a student's entire life's work into one number. You can aggregate a thousand students. You can aggregate a million students. You can aggregate a school district. You can aggregate every student in the United States into a single line chart over time. But what enables that is the sharp removal of high context information. Grades allow teachers to gather an enormous amount of information from various sources and aggregate that information into a small set of manageable numbers.

17:37That grade gives you an immense summary view, but the price of the summary is the loss of context, the loss of nuance. Are students less open-minded? Are they more creative? Are they better thinkers? Are they happier? We don't know. And we partly don't know because we've allowed metrics, in this case, grades to dominate our worldview.

18:01C. Thi Nguyen: This is, I think, the core lesson from Theodore Porter that truly took my mind apart and the thing that terrifies me the most, which is that quantitative information is socially powerful precisely because it's been made to be portable, because it's been made to be easily comprehended. And we made it that way by removing nuance and expertise. I care about making every episode of Nudge enjoyable and enlightening to listen to, but there is no metric to measure that. Apple podcasts don't have an enlightening score. So podcasters like me end up chasing what is measurable, downloads and chart rankings.

18:44But by optimising for that, we end up focusing on totally the wrong tactics. For example, a podcaster might choose to interview a famous person, not because they'll share relevant points and have an engaging conversation, but simply because their fame could help grow the show.

18:59C. Thi Nguyen: Here's a simple way to put it. What I care about in philosophy the most is encouraging people to think critically and originally. And I can evaluate that, but that quality isn't something that someone from a distant department would evaluate in the same way as me. So that criteria doesn't travel. And so it just can't be part of that large scale. I think another great example for me is wellbeing measures. It's really hard to assess in a way that travels easily between different contexts. Happiness or complicated flourishing. It's really easy to assess lifespan and heart attack rate. And so those are the kinds of things we tend to target at scale.

19:43One of the metrics I unfortunately have to care about is ad impressions. So in the middle of this brilliant conversation with T, I do need to place a short ad break. We will be back in around 30 seconds.

20:23of your results. So go and listen to The Ross Simmons Show wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew, and the philosopher C.T. Nguyen. So far, T has shared how the metrics that are meant to measure the things we care about end up replacing them. T's climbing grades, my Facebook likes, the professor's rankings, but T says this wasn't always the case.

20:50C. Thi Nguyen: The kinds of rules that we use have profoundly changed over the last many hundreds of years. This is a point made by the science historian Lorraine Daston. Old rules were what she calls principles. So a principle is a rule that's abstract, but admits of exceptions. And you can't write down all the exceptions. You have to really understand the heart of what's going on to apply the rule well in every circumstance. T experienced an old rule just like this while taking a creative writing course. So when I was in creative writing, I was told the rule, show, don't tell, which is a good rule in general.

21:27C. Thi Nguyen: But if you look at really great literature, people break it all the time, right? Tolstoy opens a book with all happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Totally breaks the rule. And he can do it because he understands the heart, the deep essence underneath the rule, right? That requires expertise. Then, Dustin says, the new kind of rule we have nowadays, the more dominant kind of rule, is a mechanical rule. And a mechanical rule is meant to be applied by anybody exactly as written, with no deviation, with no discernment, with no eye-for-exception cases. The goals I'd been given in all of my jobs are new rules.

22:07stuff like grow blog traffic by 10%, increase leads by 5%, increase email conversion, open rates, double user adoption. I'm not told create an email that customers will love to read. That requires too much expertise to measure and it doesn't scale. Rightly or wrongly, we've gone from a world where we were encouraged to use our expertise to a world where we're told to blindly follow rules. And nothing proves this point more than the surprising evolution of cookbooks.

22:39C. Thi Nguyen: I think the best example of this comes from her book. And it's about recipes. She says, in the old days, recipes used to look really different. So if you look in old cookbooks, I have a bunch of old cookbooks, so I checked, she's totally right. 1920s, 1930s, a lot of recipes look like this. It says, mix together some handfuls of flour with enough water until it's nicely springy. Knead until it feels rubbery and pleasant and has a nice thwacking sound. And then bake in a hot oven until it smells good and makes a nice hollow sound when knocked. New school recipes, I think you'll know exactly what this is like, look like add three cups of water, two cups of flour, two eggs, mix for 10 minutes on high on your KitchenAid, KitchenAid, bake in an oven for 450 degrees for 45 minutes.

23:32C. Thi Nguyen: So the first recipe, the old school recipe, is a bunch of principles, right? You're supposed to apply them with expertise and care, and it cues you to be flexible. And the second recipe, the new school recipe, the modern recipe, is a bunch of algorithms. It tells you exactly what to do, and you don't need to think. You can just do it exactly as written. But this isn't all bad, right? Because there must be some benefits to having an easy recipe to follow. I think a lot of people, when I tell them about this, they're like, oh, the modern recipe is great and the old recipe is just weird, primitive bullshit.

24:05C. Thi Nguyen: Actually, it turns out if you know what you're doing, the older recipe is better because it cues you to what's really important. Because the real thing about cooking is it's not inflexible. It's not done best when you do things exactly the same way. Ingredients vary. Even baking, which is one of the most measurement happy things out there. Humidity changes. The weather changes. Pressure changes. One of the interesting things I find is that like there's this direction in a lot of old school baking where you're supposed to hit the bread and listen to it. And that sounds so silly to us. But actually what you care about with bread is how the bubbles develop.

24:42C. Thi Nguyen: Actually knocking and listening is actually much more accurately tracking what we actually care about than anything else, right? If you really bake bread, you know some days it's going to take 30 minutes and some days it's going to take 50. what you really need to know when it's ready is smell it and knock it. But that looks primitive to us. And I think what's interesting is it looks primitive because it requires expertise and requires careful, sensitive listening and the exercise of a skill. And what looks real to us, what looks modern is what's been written so that anyone can follow it unthinkingly.

25:18It's not necessarily that one recipe style is better and one is worse. Instead, it just shows that both types of recipes involve sacrificing something. Just like how using grades to measure students involves sacrificing nuance, but using qualitative measures involves sacrificing scale.

25:35C. Thi Nguyen: What this teaches us is there's a trade-off. It's not that modern recipes are better or worse. It's that modern recipes have tuned to be more accessible and more usable by anyone. and these older school recipes are tuned to try to teach you how to be highly skilled and adaptable and they help people who have developed some skill navigate with more fluidity a complex environment so there's a trade-off between accessibility and kind of sensitive adaptability so again neither one is bad in fact here's the interesting thing i learned to cook mostly from cookbook modern cookbook recipes like i did not know how to cook in the beginning and old school recipes would have totally flummoxed me and I needed clear simple directions to start.

26:20C. Thi Nguyen: But also after you learn something after a few years you can start to improvise, you can start to adjust, you can start to look at the recipe and be like tasting like oh this isn't quite working and you know it's because all the ingredients shift and also you can shift around things for your own taste and discover new terrain. Metrics basically do what these new recipes do. They make it easy for anyone to assess what's going on but they sacrifice the need for expertise. A UPS delivery driver assessed only on the time taken to deliver a package might happily throw a fragile vase over a fence and smash it in order to meet his target.

26:57A delivery man with no metrics would never do this.

27:01C. Thi Nguyen: My favorite example of this, when I was writing the book, I kept looking for like, I was like, I just need a super clear example of this transition from subtler measures to more mechanical ones. And I realized it had been in my face for like three years. And even though this is what I was thinking about, I hadn't noticed. It's screen time, right? I was watching my kid play his iPad. And of course, as a parent, you're like, I need to decrease screen time. I need to decrease screen time. And then I was watching my kid play on his iPad. And I realized sometimes on his iPad, he's watching the dumbest possible YouTube shorts and TikTok ASMR videos.

27:38C. Thi Nguyen: and sometimes he's like learning to play chess or like building his own cathedrals in Minecraft or animating his own movies and sometimes he's playing idiotic clicker games on Roblox where you just click something and your number goes up. These are totally different things and the screen time measure treats them all the same and if you think screen time is bad then you'll make idiotic decisions, right? If you just unthinkingly target screen time as it's measured by your iPad. This is what I'm talking about. The way we get it now, it's just like your iPad and your phone tell you how much screen time you get.

28:12C. Thi Nguyen: Then if you stop your kid from playing chess and reading novels on their iPad and get them watching TV instead, screen time has gone down. And the whole point here is that screen time is a measure that does not track creativity. It does not crack richness. It does not track intellectual effort. It does not track interesting games versus dumb ones. The only virtue it has is that every device can count it in the same way automatically, until it can automatically aggregate it, without having to make judgments. T writes how, if we wanted to measure the informational richness of YouTube videos, or the degree of activity and creativity in playing games on the device, we'd have to constantly be making complex judgments at every instance of data collection.

28:59But our tablets can easily monitor the time they're on. Screen time. is an easy category to gather vast amounts of data, even if that data doesn't track what's actually important. And we tend to care about what we make at the end that's countable,

29:17C. Thi Nguyen: rather than some kind of joy or richness or interest in the process. What games really teach me is that the process is central to the value. So Bernard Suits, this philosopher that inspired me, The core of his argument really is that games are unnecessary obstacles that create extra struggle. A marathon says, don't use a car, don't use an Uber, don't use a bike, run in a bigger circle, don't take the most efficient path. If your goal is just the outcome, to be at that point, that would be idiotic. the only way to explain why we engage with these things is we care about a particular struggle or the experience of a particular struggle more than we care about the outcome so i think if you back up enough from an outcomes oriented mindset all this stuff is stupid at best it's a tool that'll help you get more outcomes down the line but unless you can justify it as like i don't know teaching you the kind of grit that'll make you a better business person.

30:18C. Thi Nguyen: You can't justify that. And I think what Suits teaches us is that this is an insane way of looking at the value of life and the meaning of life. That what we have lost is what Aristotle knew. Suits was an Aristotle scholar, by the way. And what Aristotle says is that a valuable life comes from the exercise of our capacities. Not what we do with them, but their exercise. The rich exercise of our full capacities of our ability to think, reason, move, decide, interact, communicate. They're the values in the doing, not the having. I mean, in a sense, we all know this. This is the most boring motivational poster ever.

30:58C. Thi Nguyen: The journey is the destination. We all know this, but also we don't know it because that's not how we live, right? We put it on the poster and then we ignore it. And T had a fairly depressing example to finish up. But while I was researching this book, I started researching pickup artist culture. And there are a lot of sociologists that study pickup artists. And one of the things that you find out is that it turns out pickup artists, I mean, I think we probably can guess that pickup artists compete for sexual success. And I think you already know that pickup artists are not competing for the best relationship, but it turns out they're not even competing for happiness or pleasure.

31:33C. Thi Nguyen: It turns out that in a lot of pickup artist cultures, from the people that study them, a lot of people are saying things like, You've got to get past happiness. You've got to get past enjoying yourself in order to win and perfect yourself. And so what pickup artists aim at is things like number of phone numbers you get, number of sexual encounters in a night, total number of sexual encounters in a month, speed from meeting someone to a sexual encounter with them. And you'll notice that the biggest difference here is that number of sexual acts, speed of sexual act, that's something that you can all count in public.

32:05C. Thi Nguyen: That is an outcome that is measurable publicly. Joy and pleasure is not. And this is the most spectacularly depressing thing for me. I mean, I thought when I started reading about pickup artist culture, it would turn out that pickup artists might be manipulative and evil, but at least were having a good time. And what I found out was so much more depressing, right? Even joy and selfish pleasure are sacrificed on the altar of getting a higher public countable. And I think I'm kind of worried that the world is becoming all pickup artists, that we are all forgetting to go for the hard to count, hard to justify happy thing and making ourselves miserable to chase the countable thing.

32:55That is all for today's episode of Nudge, folks. Thank you so much for listening and thank you to T for joining me on the show. I've loved chatting with him. I greatly enjoyed his book. It's called The Score. It is a fantastic read and I've left a link to the book in the show notes. This conversation, it was slightly different to a typical episode of Nudge. It was less about business, less about behavioral science, more about philosophy. But if you are missing this sort of classic Nudge behavioral science episode, then don't worry. Next week, Leslie John is back on the show and we'll be covering the worst mistake you can make as an entrepreneur pitching on Dragon's Den or Shark Tank.

33:31It's a great episode, so don't miss it. Do make sure you don't miss that episode, please do subscribe to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, why not leave a review? Now, I don't care what rating you leave because I'm above metrics now. I'm beyond quantitative rankings. All I want is to read your qualitative thoughts. So write a review about Nudge, about how it makes you feel, and don't worry about the ranking. But do also please leave a five-star review because as we know, the numerical ranking is a scalable metric that advertisers and potential guests use to rank my show.

34:04Anyway, please do subscribe. And if you have a bit of time, do leave Nudge a review. That really helps. And I guess it's worth ending by saying to please do something with your day-to-day that brings you joy, not because it is measurable and shareable, but because it makes you deeply happy. I'm off to bake some bread until it makes a satisfying knocking sound. Bye-bye.

34:29Thank you.