David Hoffman (5:33)

I think when we invoke the word game, when somebody invokes the word game in a conversation, people's brains probably go straight to something like, you know, chess or video games. We are obviously talking about games in a more expansive fashion than that, like, using games as a lens to view a lot of our behavior that we engage in.

C. Thi Nguyen (5:50)

Yeah.

David Hoffman (5:51)

How expansive can we really get here? Like, how far does this really go? Is, like, everything a game? No matter. No matter what environment that we're in, is it always a game? Or, like. Or is there. Is it possible to escape games? Like, how expansive can we really get here?

C. Thi Nguyen (6:04)

Right. So, I mean, this is. This is really important because I don't think everything is a game. I. When I started thinking about this stuff, I was kind of lost about what a game really was. It seemed like really an important concept, but I couldn't get my hand. My hands around it until I found this incredible book by Bernard Suits called the Grasshopper. He's a philosopher. He wrote in the 70s. This book is kind of a cult classic. And in it he gives a definition of games that I think is incredibly useful because it, like, points to one specific point of life, but not everything. So there's a short version, a long version. I'll give you the short version first, but I. I suspect you're going to want the details of the long version. So the short version is that playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them, right? It is. So what a game is is something where one way he puts it is in a game, there's always like, an easy way to get to the goal, and then we put a constraint on ourselves. We take, he says, like, the long way on purpose, right? You run a marathon, There are easier ways to get there. You can not only take a shortcut, but you could call a lift, right? I'm a rock climber. Like, you could climb up the front of the rock, or you could go back up the back, which is easy. Or you could climb a tree, or you could get a ladder, right? There are all kinds of easier ways to get there. And one of the things Suits is saying is that in games, when we're playing a game, we're trying to hit some goal, but it doesn't count unless we do it under the constraints, right? Like, if you thought the goal of basketball was just to pass the ball through the hoop, then logically what you should do is take a step ladder to the court and then pass the ball through the hoop as many times as possible. But that doesn't count, right? So the thing that's really important for Suits is whatever the value of basketball is, it's essentially bound up with doing the activity inside a constraint system. So if you believe that, right. Then the world just quickly divides into what. What Suits calls normal practical activity and game activity. In a normal practical activity, there's some goal you want, and you just do it as efficiently as possible, because all that matters is the goal, right? If you're hungry and you need fish, you take the most efficient means possible, which is actually like a net or like dynamite, right? Or right. When you're this. I think people forget about this, but when you're doing this other thing that I do, it's the technical term for it is angling. You're not trying to catch fish as tricky as any by any way as you can. You're not using a net. That's what commercial fishermen use, because that's actually the most efficient way. What you're doing is you're trying to trick the fish into biting your fake lure or your bait. You're like, you're engaging with the psychology of the fish, right? Like, all angling involves tricking the fish into biting a baited hook or biting a fake lure. That is a much harder way to catch fish. And it's a game, because if you're doing that, it's like, so I don't know if you know this, but if you're fishing, I don't know in my mind why my mind is not fishing today. If you're fishing and you're reeling in and you get something and it turns out that you accidentally hooked the fish on the side, it didn't bite the hook, but you just like, it doesn't count. You're like, oh, crap. I. The term is sn. I snagged it. It's not. I didn't really catch it. Because what you're trying to do is a specific tricking thing, right? And what makes it a game is that what it matters, that you did it that particular hard way, Right. Does that make sense? And under this, under this, under the SUTA's description, anything could be a game, but not everything is a game because it depends on why you're doing it. He has this great. By the. Tell me if I'm rambling on too long. This is like a topic on which I could talk infinitely. But one easy example he says is imagine two people climbing a mountain together next to each other. One is climbing it because there's some rare medicine at the top that they really want, and the other is a rock climber, right? They're. They're a mountain air. They're. They're engaged in the game of rock climbing. And the way you can tell that one is playing a game and the other is not is if, like, somebody passes by in a helicopter and says, hey, do you want a quick ride to the top? Then the person who just wants to get there for the medicine, right? They're like, of course. I just want the goddamn medicine so I don't die. Get me to the top as quickly as possible. And the mountain climber. And this is really important. It doesn't matter if they're a professional or an amateur. It doesn't matter if they're doing it for the reward of being the world's top mountain climber, if they're doing it for pure joy. The mountain climber who's playing a game will reject the helicopter because it doesn't count as climbing the mountain unless you did it under a specific set of constraints.

David (10:40)

Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry. Questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium and there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.

Ryan Sean Adams (11:22)

Okay T, let's, let's test this because I, I like that definition and I understand it very clearly through the lens of the mountain climber example. But so, so here are some serious, I, I'll call them serious games that I play. Like almost like career games, right? So one is a game that David and I play is maybe the podcast game, right? Where we create content. We haven't guessed subjects we want to talk about, but we also have a scoreboard related to that. Like we have downloads, we have views. Another game that David and I play is social media game where you have tweets. And some of them are successful. They get a lot of likes, they get a lot of retweets, some are not so successful. And we have social media games across YouTube as well, right? It's like the thumbnail. You can optimize a podcast thumbnail to be more clickable and thumb. Some thumbnails and titles do better than others. We also have business games that we're engaged in, right? Like revenue growth type games. As we grow our media company, crypto itself is just like one big financial game. It seems like, you know, all the games I played, computer games in my youth almost seem to resemble like the life games that I'm playing now. I mean, it's just about bouncing around and collecting coins, you know, like profit number go up. Which of these are games under the suits definition and which of these are like. Because if you asked about the podcast, for instance, I don't think that if there was a way for us to generate millions of views in all of our videos and podcasts by cheating in some way, by, I don't know, paying YouTube off or something like this, or paying Spotify, I don't think we'd do it. It wouldn't be fun. And so I guess we're playing a game.

C. Thi Nguyen (13:01)

Yeah, no, this is. That's. You already answered your own question. But like, so, okay, so first backup. Remember that for suits. And I think this is really important. What gaming is, is a motivation. And two people can be doing the same activity next to each other and it looks really similar. And what makes one a game and the other not a game is their reason for doing it. Whether they're doing it to be involved in the process and the struggle or that's essential or whether it's not. I think you just. So I also want to say it's really important that not everything that's game like is a game. There's this whole category of gameish things and I think it's really important that there are a lot of times where, where we, we hyper orient towards a scoring system. And they're not always games. A lot of, a lot. A lot of the examples I have in my book are cases where there's a ranking system. There's so much power attached to it and people just zero on the power via that ranking system. There's no other way to get it except by that ranking system. And I'm not, I don't think those are games. They're gameish. They look like games. They might grab on some gaming psychology, but they're not games in this sense. But you answered the question already, which is, I mean, here's one way to put it. Think about a video game, right? Like what, what are you trying to do with a video? You're trying to get to the end screen. How do you know that it's a game, that you're playing it as a game? Because there are all kinds of ways to get to the end screen that don't involve going through the game. You could, you could, you could hack it, right? You could hack the software, you could pay somebody else to play the game for you. Like none of these count. Because the point, maybe that's an easy example. The point is, is to do it yourself. And I suspect that there are some people for whom podcasting is not a game because they would do anything to make the number go up. And I suspect for you we could figure out all kinds of things that would count as cheating. What if I told you that you could get more of an audience by doing an optimized AI simulation of you who would like, pander perfectly via focus groups and we'd make your numbers go way up. Or what if, I don't know, you were. You wanted your social media count to go higher so you bought the social media company and instructed the programmers to, you know, an example out of nowhere, like, to like re. Change the coding to make your numbers go up. Right. I think if it weren't right, does it make sense? If it weren't a game, you would take any means necessary and it might not be a game. A lot of these systems, a lot of people respond to ranking systems just because they are incentives that are connected to money. They'll do anything they can to make them go up. That's an important phenomenon that's right next to games. But if we can find something that intuitively feels to you, like cheating, like not the way you wanted to do it, like if there's anything I could say where you would be like, I wanted that, but not that way, like what's it. What's in some sense, what's crucial to suits is that what a game is is something where we care about the method that we did it. We care that we did it out of this particular talent or using this particular ability. Right. You, you can. You probably care that you get podcast count by people listening to you talk and you doing the interviews live instead of having an optimized bot create a simulacrum of you.

Ryan Sean Adams (16:02)

Can we talk about social media for a minute? I recall you wrote an entire article about Twitter and its gamification. This is something that many listeners are very familiar with. Crypto is overactive on. On social media. Is social media a game and is it a healthy game? What are we doing here?

C. Thi Nguyen (16:24)

What really matters for thinking about social media? I think at some point the question of is this a game? By that definition I gave is a boring question. That's not what I actually care about here. What matters is the fact that certain game like things are happening. And I actually think what's really crucial to understand the damage of the gamification of social media is to understand that it's not a game in a really profound way, but it's superficially game like and it motivates us in a game like way.

Ryan Sean Adams (16:52)

And how is it game like can maybe get to that definition? Is it because it has points? Is it because it has a mechanism?

C. Thi Nguyen (16:58)

Yeah, I think the, the crucial thing that when I'm thinking about social media as a gamified platform, I'm thinking that's because it renders a clear, singular pronouncement of how well you did. So the, the crucial thing it has is a scoring system. I. Scoring systems are really interesting to me. So when I wrote my first book about games, about AC my academic book about games as an art form, I didn't realize something really crucial, which is that you can have a game without having a scoring system. So I think one way to think about it is that what a scoring system is, is it something that yields an instant, clear verdict that everyone agrees to? Right? Like, so if you, if we, if we play a game, we all agree to a particular scoring system and then the scoring system looks at our activities and it spits out a bunch of points and we know exactly how we did. And there's no way to, there's no way to argue it, right? So if you're playing like one of the classic German, like Euro games that I'm obsessed with, like, the game tells you exactly what each sheep is worth in victory points, what each, like gold. And you just add it up, right? There's no space for argument. One of the important things I think is that real games, you have that a lot, but you don't have to have them. So the example I've been thinking about a lot is like skateboarding before it went pro, before it went official. Like, if people go to the skate park in order to. They can have a game and they can compete even to have the coolest trick, but there's no actual system that guarantees that we'll all agree about the coolest trick, right? Like, in fact, you can have this competition. You can, you can have at home cooking competitions, and you don't actually need to agree in a verdict, right? Everyone can come out and be like, right, have a different opinion. That's, that's fine. That's a, that's a possible game. The thing that distinguishes, I think a lot of the, of the more formalized games that we're more familiar with is the existence of a scoring system that says something like, we're going to have people jump and then we're going to measure how they jumped on a ruler and. And then the winner is the person that went higher on the ruler. Or it says, like, we're gonna do this thing. And then every time you, every time you, like, collect a sheep token, you get two points, right? That kind of cle. That kind of clear scoring system is distinctive to board games. And that's what I think gets borrowed by social media, the existence of a single. I mean, here's one way to think about it. In kind of normal, communicative life, there are so many different values that we could be judging ourselves by and that we could be aiming for. You could be communicating to be funny or entertain each other, right? You could be communicating to connect. You could be communicating to learn. You could be communicating to figure things out. You could be communicating, right. That plurality of values means that different people can be judging a conversation in different ways. Like sometimes I've had conversations at parties where it's very clear that the other person is trying to one up me and I was trying to like have an interesting connection and then they think they won the conversation. I think it was like the worst conversation ever. Like that's, that's completely possible. But if you're on social media there is a scoring system and if you orient yourself towards it, then you have an instant and complete way to like, you know, insta compare each tweet, insta compare each post, right? And insta compare different individuals in terms of their like follower or subscriber count. So it's that like reduction to a single dimension that then gets quantized so that we can make instant comparisons. That seems that to me is like this weird intense feature that is an artificial feature of some institutions and technological systems and it's game ish. So we can get sucked into it and like start relating to it like a game. There's a crucial massive difference from most games. That crucial massive difference is it's interconnected to the rest of the world. So crucial. I think one of the crucial concepts from a lot of theorizing about games and play is that games are weirdly detached from the rest of the world. There's this concept that in the game scholarship that says one of the things this is from an anthropologist named Johann Husinga Hunger, and he says in the book Homo Ludens that what games and play are is an activity that occurs in something called a magic circle. And a magic circle is a space and time that's separated in some way from normal life. The way that there's a scholar, Anika Warren, and the way she puts it is we've created this meaning boundary where meanings change. And it, I mean, that sounds fancy, but what it really means is you and I could be, I mean I could be best friends with Ryan and hate David, but we play basketball and David's on my team and Ryan's the other team and it doesn't matter what my social relationships are. Those are canceled. And I am all in for cooperating with David and trying to destroy Ryan. And then afterwards, like it doesn't matter, right? It would be really weird if for people to like who were on the opposite team to be like emotionally hurt that I block their pass. Right? So and another thing that's really important about games is that in not all, but in most games the points are unattached. From ordinary life. So if you, if I, I mean, I mean this is. I, I can feel a question back there and I think maybe I'm jumping the gun on the answer. But one quick answer to a lot of questions is in a game, if I go all out and ignore, think about nothing but the point and think about nothing about maxing, but maxing out my point at the expense of everybody else, then nothing changes in the world. When the game is over, it does not matter if I slayed my spouse or my spouse slayed me. The thing that makes it okay, I mean, you know, my kids have just gotten to the age where I can play video. I've been playing a lot of Super Smash with my like 8 or 9 year old and so fun. There's, you know, I just, I was telling my class this, I have a class on the philosophy of games and I was like, you know, it's, it's kind of weird, but it's one of the few ways I just get to destroy, try to destroy my kid all out. And he gets like, we like, I don't have to protect his. You. I can just be like, it's important because I'm really bad at them. So platformers are about the same level and I can just try to fuck him up. And that's cool because that doesn't leave the game. Right, right.

Ryan Sean Adams (23:08)

It's just a game.

C. Thi Nguyen (23:09)

It's just a game. And on the other hand, if you are social media and the game, the game like thing that people are doing with finances, where they go all whatever Jeff Bezos is doing right. To max out his score in his activity is not in a magic circle. Right, I see.

Ryan Sean Adams (23:30)

Okay. Okay. I think we're starting to see the distinction between games which are fun, which don't have real world effects and consequences and which are time bound to these other game like things, these gamified things that we play in quote unquote in real life and both of them do have a scoring system. At least games don't have to have a scoring system, but many of these gamified objects do. Maybe let's talk about. Because, because that's I think more the point of your book, the score, it's like more about the scoring system and all of these gamified platforms and systems that we're engaged in like GDP or gpa as we talked about. I. Maybe we can go through this and you can help me to settle an argument with my wife. Okay, so excellent. This gets into some marriage counseling here.

C. Thi Nguyen (24:21)

So perfect.

Ryan Sean Adams (24:22)

One Thing I love to do is, before we watch any movie in my house is I have to look it up on rotten tomatoes and IMDb. Oh, no, I have to, I have to.

C. Thi Nguyen (24:31)

I'm sorry we can't be friends.

Ryan Sean Adams (24:32)

Okay, Right. It's like, okay, so let's talk about this. I want to get into the pros and cons of looking it up. I'll give you my rationale. The reason is, look, it's 90 minutes of my life, maybe two hours of my life. I don't want to waste my time on anything that's like 50% and under. And I look at the metrics like with clear eyes. Okay? It's not just the critic metric. It's also, you know, there's the user rating and audience rating and I'll cross reference with IMDb so it's, you know, a bit more pure. But I'm just like not going to waste my time on a low ranked movie, right? My wife is like, this kills it. This kills the movie watching experience. What you should be doing, Ryan, is you should watch movies you should that you like and you should form your own opinions and you shouldn't go into it with some preconceived notion of how good the movie actually is. Help settle this argument and talk about ranking and scoring systems that I'm seeing.

C. Thi Nguyen (25:27)

We could literally spend the rest, like five hours talking about this one question. This is actually when I started thinking about scoring systems. A lot of my book is about metrics and bureaucratic measurement, but the place I started thinking about it was Rotten Tomatoes and Wine scoring systems and what they. I'm on your wife's side, but why?

Ryan Sean Adams (25:47)

Why? Tell me why. She's right. Okay, let me hear this.

C. Thi Nguyen (25:50)

Let me take a simple pass at it and then I'll take the big, huge pass. So my friend Matt Stroll, who's a philosopher of art, who wrote the beautiful book why it's okay to Love Bad Movies, has an essay about Rotten Tomatoes. I think it's just, it's called, just called Against Rotten Tomatoes. And one thing to note is that he notes that if you think about like, if you ask most people who love movies to list off great movies by their own taste and you look at them on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the things you'll find is most of them sit around 50 or 60% because good movies are often controversial. They're often like a lot of things that are incredible, often push against. Some people are repelled by like David lynch movies, right? Incredible, fascinating, weird, provocative. Some people are repelled by Them, some people don't get them right. So, crucial thing about a movie that's kind of daring or kind of subtle is some people are not going to get it right. So if you're using Rotten Tomatoes as a measure, what you're going to pick up on, the kinds of movies that do well on Rotten Tomatoes are precisely the movies that are engineered or made so that everyone will get, and everyone will get about equally. So you're not going to get daring movies, you're not going to get subtle movies, you're not going to get provocative movies. You're going to get movies that are kind of acceptable to every taste. So you won't get anything that plunges into a particular taste. This is, by the way, this is, this is. This is different from the question about whether taste is objective or subjective. Even if taste is completely objective. Right. A measure like Rotten Tomatoes is going to give you rough. Okay, let me run the case on, let me run the case on social media and then we'll see if this applies to Ron's Tomatoes.

Ryan Sean Adams (27:29)

This.

C. Thi Nguyen (27:29)

Okay, so here's a. Here's my case against social media platforms, my worry about social media platforms. One measure of how important a communication is is how deeply it strikes people and whether it changes people. And sometimes when I'm communicating to people, well, here's something I can do in the classroom. I can say something weird and interesting and it falls flat on 80% of the people and like 20% of the people, like, get it. Maybe like one, one person. It like totally moves them. I can see in their face that their, that their life has been changed at that moment. Now let's see. Say that instead of looking at their faces, I'm interacting with them on a social media platform. I do a post and most people do not like it and one person hits like, like doesn't register the intensity of their relationship to it. It doesn't matter. Doesn't register the fact that their life was changed by it. It simply counts. One. Right, so an important thing about likes on social media is there's a flattening aspect. It only picks up. Like, it only picks up whether or not someone was pro or con and then aggregates. So let me back up. So you're giving me a very suspicious look. So let me try, try this. Let's say that Your audience is 1,000 people. One, one, one tweet that you have is kind of slightly clever and a little bit funny. And all 1,000 people mildly, like, find it mildly funny and then forget about it in 20 minutes. That tweet will probably pick up like a thousand likes or like 500 likes. Imagine you say something else that's weird and thoughtful and almost no one gets it, except two people have their life changed by it. That tweet will pick up two likes.

David Hoffman (29:12)

Right.

Ryan Sean Adams (29:12)

I think what you're saying here is the, the metric itself is like boiling all of the variants out of the signal here. And it's kind of flattening things and it's one dimensionalizing things. And you're probably going to say that same argument applies to my rotten tomatoes and IMDb rankings. So I don't get any of the high variance type movies. I just get kind of the low variance, popular, mediocre, but popular things.

C. Thi Nguyen (29:36)

Yep. This is Matt Schroll's point that if you look, if you go back and you look at the reviews of like, movies that are net, like generally considered great now. I mean, and I'm kind of dodging here because I'm using this, like, now they're considered great. But if you look back at most of them, most of them were incredibly divided. You had critics exploding, like with this is the most amazing thing ever. And other people being like, this makes no goddamn sense. Like the. Everything is incoherent and weird and like that. That when you, when you take that to Rotten Tomatoes, that's going to show up as 50%. Your mediocre crap. Krem will show up as 50%, but so will that.

Ryan Sean Adams (30:09)

Okay, I just want to add one thing then. Isn't that just a problem with the metric itself? We could devise better metrics.

C. Thi Nguyen (30:16)

Right.

Ryan Sean Adams (30:16)

So d your point? Yeah, the metrics aren't perfect.

David Hoffman (30:20)

I feel like better than no metrics is there's two different games trying to be played. There are the, there's the critics game, which is people who watch movies in a particular way that the average member of society does not watch movies in that they're not playing the same game. And like me guess, guessing, hypothesizing why Ryan is trying to watch a movie. He is trying to watch a movie so he can sit down, laugh at some stuff. You know, forget about life, forget about the Internet and like, have a good time for two hours and then resume life. And I don't think he wants to watch a movie that, like, is like gritty and thought. There's a movie I was watching not too long ago called Mickey17 and it was like, I think a critic would love that movie because it was a good movie. But part of that movie I was watching and I was just Uncomfortable the whole time because the whole thing was just gritty and kind of difficult to watch intentionally so. So the movie did a good job of what it was trying to do, which is make me uncomfortable and like, you know, squirm in my seat. And it wasn't enjoyable by any means. By any means. But a critic I think would have enjoyed that.

C. Thi Nguyen (31:32)

Nothing about this has to be grit. Weird ass comedies, like some of my favorite shit busting, hysterical comedies also don't do great on Rotten Tomatoes because they only appeal to like, there's nothing here that says gritty. Right. Some of this is just about particularity. Let's separate. There's so many things in this Rotten Tomatoes point, but let me separate a few things. There are two questions. One is whether Rotten Tomatoes will accurately give you what you're. What you want.

Ryan Sean Adams (32:01)

Yeah.

C. Thi Nguyen (32:02)

And even if it's a funny light experience, the claim is something like, no, it's going to steer you towards kind of the average funny light experience and not like the weird, peculiar funniness that's that you'll find. And then there's a bigger point that I think we should shell for a bit and come back to, which is like being worried that you won't develop your own sensibility.

Ryan Sean Adams (32:23)

Right.

C. Thi Nguyen (32:23)

That, that you're giving up some profound independence. So let me, I'm just going to give names to this because I don't want to forget either because I think these are the two, these are the things I want to talk to you to the most. The first one I'm going to, let's call portability. The second one is the value capture stuff that I've been thinking about. So, so let me, let me, let me go, let me, let me, let's do portability first. So here's, Let me give you the kind of like stepped back philosophical answer to what, what you're talking about. So you say, and I suspect you're just teeing me up to say this, so thank you. You say, look, shouldn't we just make better metrics? Right? Is this a problem of a particular, of this particular metric. Couldn't we just improve them? It's true that one of the things I've said is something like, oh, it's, you could shift from like the Rotten Tomatoes metric to like thinking about the agreement of the critics in the long term, something like that. But I think, I think that's not going to do it. You could do better, but not perfectly and not especially not in this case because of the nature of what data is and how data is collected insofar as metrics are based on data. So when I was trying to understand metrics, the thing that helped me the most was this book from Theodore Porter called Trust in Numbers. So Theodore Porter is a historian who works in quantification culture and he was trying to understand why people kind of like knee jerkly reach for. He was particularly interested in bureaucrats and politicians and why they always reached for quantitative justification, even when they knew that quantitative justification wasn't that great. And his answer was to understand what the particular nature of institutional quantification was. So he ends up saying there are two different ways of knowing things in the world, qualitative ways of knowing and quantitative ways of knowing. And he thinks they're both great at different things. And the problem comes when we don't like find the appropriate one or balance them against each other, but go all in for quantitative in every case. So he says qualitative ways of knowing are context rich, sensitive and open ended, responsive, dynamic. But they don't travel well between contexts because they require a lot of shared background information to understand. So my example for here, as you know, a professor is written comments I write on my philosophy majors papers, right? They're long, they're complicated, they're particular, they're responsive to the students, what they're doing. They use a lot of complex, like in philosophy language, they use a lot of particular concepts from the class. Someone else from elsewhere in the university or elsewhere in hiring won't understand them. Quantitative ways of knowing in institutions work by identifying a context invariant kernel and then holding that kernel stable across different contexts. So and making sure that everyone collects into the same kernel the same way. So the example here is like letter grades in the university system, right? So an A means about the same thing, A B means about the same thing. A C means about the same thing in every different context. And once we fix that, we can mi that information can travel easily. Like my really long, complicated qualitative discussion of a student is not going to be understandable by the business dean or by someone hiring in Silicon Valley. But A, B and C are immediately comprehensible. And the reason they're comprehensible is precisely that we've stripped context, high context, high nuanced information out of them. Does that make sense?

Ryan Sean Adams (35:54)

So yeah, it's a trade off. There's a portability trade off, basically, right? And so if somebody asks me about a movie, rather than give them a commentary, I can just say, well, it got in 92% on rotten tomatoes and it's Much easier. It's much easier to display in a UI for, you know, Netflix too, rating all the movies and they can say, oh, this one got, you know, 42% and this one got 89%.

C. Thi Nguyen (36:15)

Yeah. So that is, that is exactly the view that what you're getting, what quantitative data does and what quantitative data collection does is it trades away high context, high sensitivity and multidimensionality in exchange for portability. This is generally called the portability theory of data. Right. And so I think the same kind of thing that applies to GPA applies to Rotten Tomatoes, right? Like information that I have that I can put down qualitatively, like this student is not good at test taking, but incredibly good at community building and very original, but a little bit sloppy. Like that's all important information, but that gets squashed out into a B. Right. A B does not carry that information. But precisely because it's been squashed out, that's what makes it instantly comprehensible and that's what makes it instantly comprehensible and instantly aggregatable. So the fact you can create a GPA out of many different judgments depends on us having stripped out all that complexity. Same thing with Rotten Tomatoes.

Ryan Sean Adams (37:14)

Right, I got it. Now, could you talk about the second there? So that's portability. The second flaw in metrics and scoring that you identify, and this is a big theme in your book, is value capture. So what is that? Talk about that.

C. Thi Nguyen (37:28)

So value capture is any case where your values are rich and subtle or developing in that direction and then you get parked in an institutional setting that gives you a simplified, typically quantified rendition of those values and then you intake and let take over that simplified quantified version. So like going to school, caring about education, coming out, caring about gpa, starting to exercise, caring about health and fitness, and coming out obsessed with like step counts or weight or your body weight or BMI, or going to social media to connect to people or, and becoming obsessed with likes and follows. So my, my worry about this stuff is that you're outsourcing your values. And that part of what outsourcing your values is, is that you're not developing a sense of what matters to you. You're accepting a pre made value system from outside. And because of the nature of the value systems you're accepting, they're typically thinned out and portable in exactly the way we talked about before. Right. I think one reason that people often become obsessed with something like weight or bmi and I have been this is like in part like personal confession is it's very easy to communicate because it's just like my knees feel better and I feel healthier and I feel happier when I move through this stuff is very hard to cross compare or communicate. Right. I lost 10 pounds is something that every makes sense to everyone and that I can quickly compare. Like, I lost ten pounds, you lost eight pounds. I did better, yo.

Ryan Sean Adams (39:02)

Right?

C. Thi Nguyen (39:03)

So one of the worries about value capture is that you are taking on values from the outside and that those values have particular character. And it's this like, denuanced, decontextualized, portable character. But I think the deepest thing underneath, and this is the thing I wanted to talk about before, was that in value capture cases, part of the outsourcing means you don't have to figure out for yourself what you care about. I mean, so there's this example from. Actually, you left. I want to know why you left.

Ryan Sean Adams (39:33)

I laughed because I think that's so true, actually. I think that there's some psychological benefit to considering how well you're doing in your podcast, let's say, or in your social media feed, by the number of likes or downloads that you get, or one example, and I think part of the reason that is excited to have you on is because crypto is very much. We deal in the world of concrete points and numbers, right? Finance in general, net worth. Very easy for people in finance and crypto to just outsource their value to what's their net worth score. And they can check this in an app on their phone and, you know, they either feel good or bad, depending on the day and what that number says. I mean, it's so much easier than actually, like, confronting the real challenges in your life or in building up your own unique set of values. Because this is just what society hands to you. This is just what the industry hands to you.

C. Thi Nguyen (40:39)

One way to put it is that things like having a meaningful life, a satisfying life, a rich life, a fulfillment, fun life, having good friendships, these are all like, they're kind of quiet and then other things are very loud. I mean, I've. I feel this constantly. I feel like. I mean, some of the stories, like, some food is delicious and makes me feel good, and other food is low in calories. And it's really easy to grab onto that right to that number. And it's really easy to track the success of losing weight, which is how, like, I made myself miserable for a period of my life. It's really. I just went through this thing. I mean, I. There are moments where like, you know, for an academic like me, like you get a job offer and the job offers from a place that has a higher status ranking on this list of like what the status is of universities. And you know, I knew that I would be less happy at this other place. I knew that the place that I am at which is lower ranked on this official external ranking, right. I knew I was happier there. I knew I loved my colleagues there more. I knew I fit in better. And it was still incredibly hard to hang on to that super quiet sense of like, I mean it's not, it's not that subtle, like I'm happy here. I love these people. These are like, we work well together. It's all. And then the other side is something like. But that place is higher ranked. And it's really funny because there's a little quick vision because no one, if you are an academic like me, it's funny because academics like to pretend that they don't care about this kind of thing because they don't care less about money. But every academic knows the relative status of their various department and publications, right? And if I had made a move to a higher ranked institution, I never would have had to explain to anyone my decision. It would have been obvious to everyone. Right? Because ranking is a very legible, transmittable status. Ranking is a very external, comprehensible thing. But if I don't make that decision, justifying your self turns seems really hard, right? One of the things I say in my book, the Pleasure of Games is that they reduce value complexity. Like instead of having like a billion values to think about and trying to measure off the value of like health and work and family and all these things and decide make complex decisions that measure off between these things, you, there's just one thing and you know exactly how you did. And so if you suddenly accept a clear external scoring system for your life, like the ranking of university or your net worth or you know, your, your, your military rank or I, it's, it's like, it's wild. I think there are a lot of different institutions where they'll make fun of other, other places for being obsessed with net worth and they have their own internal system. I, I was on a podcast with a pastor and a philosopher and the pastor when we were talking about this was like, yeah, in my church there's an internal leaderboard for baptism rates and we're all competing to like see who gets more baptisms. And like, he was like, I've definitely found myself writing sermons that I find less meaningful, but I Know will get people more in the door and Baptist. Right. And more people baptized. Right. And there's another case where, like, where the simple. I mean, this is why the portability stuff matters. The clarity of the score when you have an external system that everyone can comprehend and they know precisely what it means and explain exactly how it's connected, makes justification to yourself and other people easy. And it seems to speak really, really loudly. I mean, this is, this is the same like, opening story what's going on with like, bro who's on the river, who's fly fishing away. He hates and is miserable and says he has to do it because he catches more fish, because the number of fish seems to be speaking louder than the actual point of what you're doing.

David Hoffman (44:34)

When I was reading some of your work, T, I kept on just thinking of Plato's allegory of the cave over and over and over again. Whereas, like, maybe just to recap the cave, we haven't talked about it while in Bankless. It's like, it's this idea, this thought experiment from Plato where you're. You're in a cave, right? Society, Society is collectively inside the cave. And then there are the social elites, you know, the governors, the, the leadership of society. They are casting shadows on the wall using the fire that is in the cave. And they point at the shadows on the wall and they tell society, this is, this is reality. This is what this is. What real is is the shadows on the wall. But really they're the ones making the shadows. And then, you know, the, the whole point of the cave is you're supposed to escape the cave and you go out into the daylight where you actually learn what real are out of the governance of the puppet masters, the people casting the shadows, the people producing the game. And you know, reading, reading some of your work, I was like, oh, like, what, what T is doing is he is expanding like Plato's allegory of the cave into like this game metaphor where like the game is the shapes of the hands that are. That are casting the shadows on the wall. Like they're. You're creating this environment where you get to dictate what reality is. And the whole. But the difference here was with Plato's allegory of the cave, it was like the, the whole point was like, it's noble to get out of the cave. Like, you as. Leave the cave, escape the cave and get out into reality and then write your own rules. But I think what you're kind of saying is like, oh, you know, at times Society really enjoys going down into the cave and creating their own shadows, like kind of creating their own game. Well, I think maybe one of the points of like what you're writing is like let's make sure that people know about the cave that they're in. But like, I'm wondering if you were were thinking about this kind of allegory or this kind of lesson when you were writing some of your work.

C. Thi Nguyen (46:21)

I'm feeling very pleased and understood right now because I actually have on the cutting room floor for this book is a chapter about Plato's cave which has the motto that metrics are the new shadows on the wall. I mean, here's one way to put it that the thing that I'm worried about is that we have substituted for our sense of reality that which can be quantified, metrified and datified and that we have put in front of us instead of a sense of well being or happiness, like some legible external tracker and we become convinced that that's the real thing. Now one thing I want to say I'm not like, let me just, I'm not saying data is bad. I'm not like anti science, I take my antibiotics. I believe in science. One of the things I think that's really important is that the large scale institutional methodologies I'm talking about this kind of Porter portability concept is very good at measuring some kinds of things. What they're very good at measuring is anything that's context invariant and easy for everyone to pick up on. So for example, I mean one of the reasons that, I mean this is vastly oversimplified, but one of the reasons that large scale database methods are good for basic medicine is because being alive or dying, that's very easy. That, that's, that's stable across contexts. Similarly, bacteria leaving your system, right? That's stable across context. That's exactly the kind of thing that large scale database methods and quantitative methods are incredibly good at capturing. They're capturing a real thing and they're doing it perfectly. The problem is if there's something that's valuable, that's highly variable between contexts, that needs a lot of sensitivity to pick up on, right? That's going to be the kind of thing that large scale data collection methods that demand portable, easily recognizable categories and recognition systems, that's going to be the kind of thing they're really bad at picking up on. This is why, like when I think about the kinds of things that we're not going to get good data on, I think about things like, well Being happiness, art, beauty, because, not because these things are like ineffable, but because they're highly contextually variable. Elizabeth Barnes, who's a philosopher of metaphysician who does a lot of stuff on philosophy of health and disability, has this really great discussion of why I think like health, you'll never get a metric on health. And the reason is because health is not a context invariant concept. So she points out that what health is, is highly variable depending on your interests. She's a great example. She's like, okay, you go to a doctor, you're like, is my knee healthy? And she says, look, what a healthy knee means for a 20 year old Olympian who has four years to train for the Olympics is very different from what a healthy knee means for me, right? For an Olympian, knee health, what really matters is maximum performance over the next eight years. Long term pain might be worth it, right? For me, I'm a climber. Like what knee health means for me is I want to climb as long as possible. So long term this matters more. But you know, I'll take some pain, it's okay. I, I, I wake up, my knees hurt every morning. That's okay as long as I can keep climbing. For other people, what health might mean is to be to walk pain free as long as they can, right? So this is the, because the concept of health is interest dependent, it's gonna vary between people and so no metric will capture it. Precisely. Does that make, does that make sense? So this, so the, oh God. How did, how did, how did we get. Oh, the cave. Cave. I need to go back to the cave. Okay, let me go back. So here's the worry. There are some things that is very, that data is a very appropriate method for something that's hyper context invariant, something that everyone can pick up on easily. There are other things that are subtle and rich and important that are highly contextually variable and highly dependent on interaction with a particular person, personality or a particular specialization. Metrics won't be good at picking up on that. The cave for me is when we start treating as reality only the things that we have metrics and data for treating those as the only real things. And then the rest of the stuff falls to the, and I'll just. So in the university, for me, it's like people will target, it's very easy to target student success and graduation rates. And if you want to say something like, but what about making students who are ethical and thoughtful, right? And you say I want to do an intervention that might slow down, slow things down a tiny bit, but it'll make students more ethical and thoughtful. Since I don't have clear metrics for that that like falls off the radar. Here's something I think I've been thinking about a lot that I think is that might be controversial to some people. I think when making public health decisions we often hyper target things that involve mortality rates and we don't hyper target things that involve maintaining communities or traditions. It's much, it's much. I mean I'm thinking here about COVID responses and I think like there was a period during that debate where mortality was the only thing that mattered and like mental health and communities did not matter. And I think part of the reason was that one of these things had a very kind of clear reality in the world of easy countability. And the other was like really it slips through your fingers when you try to get an easy count on it.

David (51:52)

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David Hoffman (52:20)

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David (52:21)

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David Hoffman (52:42)

Yeah, what I'm hearing from you is that you know, all of the games that society plays like using the expansive version of games are like, you know, we learned how to gamify some things or measure certain things and there's just like a series of games across society that that like people tend to participate in one. For example, if we're talking about health and fitness is like, you know, we've really codified down a nutritional label into like a protein, carbs, fats and sodium and a few other things and we say like, you know, get, make sure you get your points Here in the correct way and you know, get not the American Heart association gives these points like a thumbs up and then we, what we lose track of is like some of the more nebulous loose ideas of health, which is like, you know, eating food that was grown, you know, more domestically closer to you from farmer's markets, is actually also extremely healthy. But hard to codify that into a game when we have the allegory of the cave. Hard to make your fingers bend in the right way to make that show.

C. Thi Nguyen (53:43)

Up on the wall.

David Hoffman (53:44)

That's particularly hard to make show up on the wall. But we can make, you know, the points around calories and protein and fats, those can show up on the wall pretty well. And then downstream of that, society orients itself around that reality. And same thing with like, I think when we were talking about social media, like pretty easy to orient society around which tweet goes viral versus which tweet has the most amount of meaning. And so like I. One of the down downstream effects of what your book was talking about with the downstream effects of like a really well produced social structure, call it a game, is like, it's actually very easy to get a lot of people in line with these types of points or these types of optimized outcomes. And like, you know, honestly, frankly, a lot of society probably appreciates that. Even though we might call these people sheeple. Including, including myself, like sometimes I just don't want to think about like how to escape the cave and like think for myself on a wide variety of topics. I really want to outsource my thinking. But then there's like other parts of society where like I actually do want to escape the cave. Like for us, for bankless, it's about like personal finance and you know, don't live under the shadow of the banks. Like, don't let the banks be the puppet masters. But like, I don't know if it's totally socially scalable for everyone to be out of the cave amongst all possible subjects.

C. Thi Nguyen (55:09)

Right. So this is, this is amazing. I think like this is so good. Let me, let me back up. So I think you said to me what you heard in me. And so let me say back to you what I think I heard new, which is basically I think this is right, this is the view. The right view is something like one way to put. The thing I'm worried about is there's all these things that are important in life and then there's a few things that are very easy for people to count together. And Cat, I mean One way to put it is what I'm. What I'm really thinking about is what's easy and hard to count together. Some things are really easy to count together because everyone can recognize the lines. And some things are very hard to count together because the lines require a lot of sensitivity or nuance or historical experience to count. And in the metrified world, what, what's happening in the metrified world is that all our attention is fixated on the things that are easy to count together. Right. And one of the things that typically squashes out is any kind of value that requires, that is highly tailored to you or your sensibility or your experience or your history. Does that, does that, does that kind of track what you're saying? Okay, so there's more. Then you have this question about, but we don't have enough time. And I think this is exactly right. This is the whole problem. We don't have enough time. So, like, the thing that I think we have to recognize is I spent a lot of time crapping on outsourcing your deliberations. And the other feature is that we outsource all the time because we don't have enough time to do everything.

David Hoffman (56:44)

This is like time and just like cognitive capacity.

C. Thi Nguyen (56:47)

Exactly. This is, this is the most. Okay, this is the other half of what I think about in philosophy that barely made its way into this book, but I think is actually the crucial half. The. The other crucial thing which is the essential feature of human. Of humans right now is that we, no human being can understand even close to everything for themselves. Right? Humans are. The world is vast. We have to specialize everything else.

David Hoffman (57:12)

There's a game.

C. Thi Nguyen (57:15)

Explain what that means.

David Hoffman (57:17)

Well, because, like, I feel like at least most people are like somewhat at the forefront of at least one domain of knowledge. Like everyone has some thing that they are kind of the best at or at least the best that they know. And for that domain, for them, they're outside of the cave. But for everything else that they do, for everything that they don't really know that they're not a leading expert in, then they just have to collapse down to like the. What they think is the, the best game for them.

C. Thi Nguyen (57:44)

They'll.

David Hoffman (57:45)

They'll follow kind of the best. The, the. The.

C. Thi Nguyen (57:47)

Oh, I see the path that other.

David Hoffman (57:49)

People are also following.

C. Thi Nguyen (57:50)

I don't think that's exactly right. It's close, but I want to disagree with a. One big part of that. So I think part of what's going on is each of us has a domain where we are a Specialist. And we can really think clearly in that domain and a lot of other domains where we trust other people because we have to trust other people. We have to outsource stuff all the time. I mean, you outsource stuff because you don't care about it, right? I mean, I think that's part of what you're doing. Like, I, I mean, I'm going to horrify all of you, but I don't think about finance at all. Like, I just tr. Like, I spend a tiny amount of my time. I do totally normal. I just look at some general ranking. I'm like, I'll just put my money in some, like, whatever mutual fund that people think is right. I don't have the time for this. Look at the expression of horror on your faces. I'm just like, I know.

Ryan Sean Adams (58:42)

I think it's completely sensible to you. It's completely sensible for a lot of people to just put it in an.

C. Thi Nguyen (58:46)

Index fund, you know, like, whatever, like whatever. Like, let me find an expert quickly to figure out what to, what to do. And they will tell me what to do. And I think that's exactly right. One way to put it is, what do you get if you outsource all of your art decisions to either crowdsource or to crowdsourcing via Rotten Tomatoes or to a bunch of experts who tell you the correct things to, like, like, what does it get you to outsource that? Right. I feel like there's a space where developing your own tastes and finding things that please you is far more important than deference to experts. Because the experience of art is essentially personal. And because I think, like, developing your taste is like, part of the thing that's the game. Like, here's my real worry. I feel like I can think you're cheating if you just let other people push you into the artwork that you like. And not cheating because you're breaking some rules. Like, you're cheating yourself because the, the thing that is valuable is the thinking through about what's important and whether you like things or not. And if you just, like, suck that in from the outside, then you're not doing this, like, beautiful thing. You, you're, you're giving me the, you're giving me the stare. Tell me what you think.

Ryan Sean Adams (60:03)

No, I mean, I, I, I think that makes sense, right? It's like, I, I think you're losing yourself in, in the back to the fly fishing example of you just, you're becoming the person that's just trying to get quantities of fish. This is also there's an example of people outsourcing all of their thinking to AI or all of their artistic expression to an artificial intelligence, and they're kind of losing their ability to think clearly for themselves. And I think part of your. Your framework is the difference between, you know, playing games in an achievement sense versus, you know, for the win or the loss versus in a striving sense, where it's more about the process.

C. Thi Nguyen (60:41)

Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams (60:42)

T. Let's. Let's talk about this as we start to underline this for folks. And I mean, I think the initial prompt of really your book, the Score, and where we started this conversation was how to stop playing somebody else's game, how to start playing your own game. And I think there might be some people listening that get this sense or feel this sense, as I have at various times. I had like a whole burnout episode earlier this year to you, where I had to go and assess, like, what I was doing, what objectives I had, and really think about the. What wealth I wanted to kind of build and what that meant. And I think many folks are in that similar position of they feel like they're just playing somebody else's game. They're just grinding it out. They're not really living. They might feel some of the symptoms that we've talked about. Yeah. How do they get out of it? How do they start playing the right game? I think there was one, one idea that you had that spoke to me. Maybe we could start here is this idea of playfulness. So if you're finding yourself in a metrified world where you're obsessing over GPAs and algorithmic scores and likes and retweets and performance reviews and all the numbers, earnings reports, all the numbers that society throws out for you. Playfulness is a habit that can help you regularly distance yourself from the scoring systems at play. Like, have some fun. Is that what that means? Can you talk about that?

C. Thi Nguyen (62:07)

T. Okay, awesome. Great. Thank you. Thank you for that question. That's. Let me, let me, let me take a run up to this. Let me back up and take a run up to this question through, I think, some other ideas that you might find interesting. One of the things that I've really learned from a bunch of philosophers of technology and historians of technology is a particular way of thinking about the world where technologies and the systems we engage in have an interest. They have a point of view. They have something they're doing. So one of my favorite versions of this comes from a thinker, Dennis woods, who thinks about maps. And he says that maps Aren't neutral. Maps have a point of view and you can see that point of view from what they show and what they don't show. Right. Like the maps we look at. A lot of the maps we look at are there to serve drivers or people moving through, but they don't show things like where the soundscape is good or where the environment is good or where the people are friendly. Right? That's because they're built to serve people that are driving or they're built to serve like, you know, like tax people that are going to tax property owners. They're not built for people trying to look for a good place to hang out. Right. Does that make sense that like and one way place you can take this is to think that every scoring system also serves an interest. Right? Every scoring system is there to guide us to a particular kind of action. And I. The first thing we need to say, and we should have said this, I should have said this a long time ago, is here's something crucial. Thinking about games. To think about games, you have to understand that there's a difference between a goal and a purpose. So the goal of the game is what you're doing during the game. And the purpose of the game is why you play the game. For example, the goal of Twister is not to fall over. The purpose is to have fun. And you can tell that those are different because you can lose Twister and have a great time and your time was well spent, Right? Does that make sense? So a big reason. So I mean, I think for some people who play, there's no difference in goal and purpose. And those are people who only care about winning. If your goal is to win, then the goal and the purpose are the same. But for a lot of us, the goal and purpose are completely different, right? In fly fishing, my goal is to catch fish. My purpose is, I think to zen out on the river and like clear all thoughts from my head and have like a completely non conceptual relationship with nature where like my senses all tune up, right? Like I. So same thing with climbing, right? My purpose, my goal in climbing is to get to the top of the cliff. My purpose is, my actual purpose is to get my brain to shut up so I can like have a moment of silence in my head. So, so again now you think about scoring systems. There's a goal and a purpose. What is the goal of the score in a lot of the scoring systems we're surrounded by, I think we don't think about who they serve and what they're there for. Uh, there's a really in, there's a really convincing paper I read about the history of the American grading system that convinced me that what grades are for, what letter grades are for, is not for the per student education. It's to serve the interests of employers who want easy mode of certification so they can quickly hire people that have the qualifications that they need to do the job. I mean I think we could talk a lot more about that, but probably, hopefully it's intuitive that, that the American grading system doesn't serve the interests of student happiness or even student education. It serves the interests of employers looking to quickly hire like someone that can do a job. Right. That's what that scoring system serves. One of the interesting things about games is that their scoring systems, not all games are like this, but there's scoring systems built to serve you. Right. Their scoring system is built to make things fun or delightful or enriching or satisfying. And I think it's really important that like no one tuned GPA to make it fun or even to make it satisfying. Right? They tuned it for some other purpose. Purpose. Someone totally tuned Super Smash to be enjoyable and delightful and like to create like laughter and hilarity and intensity and enjoy. That's enjoyable in a lot of ways. But there's like, there's an even more meta important point here for games which is not only are games made for people but you can transition between games to find the ones who, which suit you, whose purposes suit your purposes. Right. Like I, I think a lot about which I'm drawn to some weird ass activities. Like I like rock climbing. I like, I've been really into yo yo lately. Like modern yo yos, wild competitive yo yo is like this super intense world. And like it's become clear to me that I like games which are super hard where there's always a harder thing to learn and where I can lose myself in absorption and hit like some non verbal state where I'm super into like the moment like what I love is this moment where this really hard thing comes into view that I couldn't have before. And so running a marathon is really boring to me. Rock climbing is great because over and over, over again when you're rock climbing you're like this climb is impossible. Oh, move your hips this way. Oh my God, I got it. Or like pay just a little bit more attention to where your thumb is. Oh, I love that. And so I can hop games and move between them and find the one that works for me. And for me, playfulness, the best account of what playfulness is comes from Maria Lagones, feminist philosopher. And what she says is playfulness is the spirit of moving lightly and easily between rule sets and normative worlds. Playfulness is the spirit of not being in a world and treating its goals dogmatically, but being able to shift between worlds and shift between rule sets and try on and off different conceptions of how we're supposed to do and what we're supposed to do. I think like a really rich relationship with games is about the spirit of playfulness. I mean, there's. There's terrible ways to relate to games. You can grow up and the only sport anywhere around you is like football and you hate it, but you think you have to play it right. That is a very non playful relationship to a game. And a playful relationship is one where you try them on and you see how different they are. And then this affords you, I think, this opportunity to actually reflect on which systems work for you. There's. This is. I think some of the biggest lessons I've learned from this come from indie tabletop role playing. I think it's an incredibly fascinating world because. Do either of you do tabletop roleplaying like Dungeons and Dragons?

Ryan Sean Adams (68:50)

I have before, but not in depth.

C. Thi Nguyen (68:53)

So there's a super interesting history of people that played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and some people loved it. And then some people really found that it wasn't giving them the experience they wanted. So there's this little indie world that basically their articulated response to Dungeons and Dragons was this just keeps making me tell stories of anonymous murder. And I didn't want to tell those stories. I wanted to tell, like epic character dramas. And then they basically realized that nothing in the rules pushed them. This is early D and D change. It's in or nothing in the rules pushed them to do character work or character drama or like family stories. It was all about killing things and earning money to make weapons, to level up, to kill more things. And so they changed the rules, they built a different rule set. So there are all these rules out there now that have these delightful rules that are like, think one of my favorite, very accessible ones is Lady Blackbird. And in Lady Blackbird, if you run out of energy points, you get them back by having a refreshment scene. And a refreshment scene is a quiet moment with another character where you reveal shared backstory. So the game just forces you over and over again every time you use up all your energy to invent shared backstory. And it forces you to do it whenever you're in trouble and it just like pops out narrative. Right. And it's a different scoring system. So one of the interesting things is old school D and D. Most of the scoring system is built towards like giving people experience points for killing things or completing quests. And one of my favorite new systems, so Lady Blackbird, it gives you experience points for, for acting in character, and it gives you double experience points for getting your team and you into trouble by acting in character. Right. To completely, like, it's. I mean, I think, like, does it make sense? Like, the, these people are for me, like the heroes where they were like, even in a game, they realized that a game wasn't giving them the experience they wanted and so they retuned it.

Ryan Sean Adams (70:48)

Is that an example of your concept of reflective control?

C. Thi Nguyen (70:51)

Yeah, this is like reflective control.

Ryan Sean Adams (70:53)

Okay, so talk about that more. Is that basically the principle when you, you kind of, you treat metrics like game rules, basically the metrics that the system hands you in your life, you treat them as much like, much more like game rules that can be changed or modified that you can adopt when useful but discard when they're not useful. They no longer serve your. Serve your values.

C. Thi Nguyen (71:14)

Right. Although I have to say, like, you know, the whole problem is that games are disposable and the metrics are not. Like, it's very hard. Just be like, well, ignore finance, ignore money, ignore, like when the world is actually pushing on you and saying like, well, you have to do well by this metric or we're going to fire you or kill your department.

Ryan Sean Adams (71:35)

Yeah. What's the way around that? If you're, you feel, if you feel like you're indentured into a game that you have to play it like you have no other option. And some of the, you know, not true games, but the, the gamification systems that we mentioned earlier in this episode. And some people might feel like, hey, like, I'm trapped in the wealth game or the Keeping up with the Joneses game or whatever.

C. Thi Nguyen (71:55)

I think we have to acknowledge that a lot of the world's scoring systems have a deep impact on us practically, and there's no way of completely disentangling ourselves with them. But there's a huge difference between knowing that something gives you some useful goods and that you all participate in it insofar as you get the goods you want, versus taking it to heart. As the, I mean, simplest example is just like, there's a big difference between being paying attention to how much money you have and how big your retirement account is. So you don't starve and have enough versus thinking. My goal in life is to max out my money score no matter what, right? Like, like, I mean, in some sense it's like a super simple thing to say. But like, I mean, I, there are a bunch of things that the world tracks about me as an academic. My publication rate, my citation rate. And it's a completely different thing to be like, well, I can't keep this job unless I hit this minimum. Versus my goal is to maximize my publication citation rate any way I can. I think if you recognize it as a merely external system, then you will, as we say, like, play the game to some extent, but then distance yourself from it and take control where you can. And I think, like, you know, there's some people, I mean, if the more, the, the less power you have, the more you, you can't exert this kind of reflective control. But the time, I mean, by the time you get to, I suspect, the stage that I'm at and that you're at, I, I suspect that you two, like crypto experts, are moderately financially independent and you're not about to starve and you can get health care if you need it, right? Like, if you're at that stage, right. Then you have a real question about whether or not the scoring system of continuing to max out your financial wealth is the one that's valuable to you or whether that is a useful resource that can be used as a background to. For some other pursuit. Does that track, does that make sense?

Ryan Sean Adams (74:09)

It does, yeah. I love it because I think the message of your book is one of agency with respect to the games that you play and the scores that you use to measure your pursuits and your progress. At the end of your book T, you have two different endings. There's like, choose your own adventure. There's like an A and a B. One is a cynical, sad one and the other has a bit more hope. Measure of Hope. I preferred the second. I preferred the Measure of Hope version. I think that the second reflects a bit more agency maybe in the individual than, than the first ending, maybe. Why'd you write two different endings to your book? And like this whole thing, I, I feel like very much as I was reading the score, I saw sort of the trade offs, A world of a landscape of trade offs, right? The pros and the cons of scoring systems and gamification of everything. You know, some of the pros are, wow, we've really scaled out society, haven't we? I mean, nation states bring all of these and Bureaucracies bring all of these improvements to our net welfare overall. And look at the GDP growth and look at post enlightenment everything. It's all fantastic. And then also this acknowledgement of the costs of that score, the one dimensionalization almost the, the feeling that we're all part of this machine and the loss of purpose, the loss of hope. But it is a trade off, right? And I'm not sure that I'd want it, you know, I'm not sure I'd want to go back to 400 years ago, before the metrification of the world and the way things are. But anyway, why two endings to the book? Why are few of two minds on this whole scoring system?

C. Thi Nguyen (75:48)

We're recording this before this book has come out. And I'm just super happy right now because I feel like mostly I've shown this book to other people in philosophy, so I have no idea how it's going to hit elsewhere. And talking to you too makes me just incredibly happy because I feel like I keep hearing the quiet things I hope would come out. And I think the biggest quiet thing that I hope would come out is this trade off. Because I think the thing that thinking about this stuff has really convinced me is, and I think this is something that is obvious to you because you work in finance, but not to me in philosophy, because I work in philosophy is the importance of scale. That the biggest driving force in what I've been thinking about is what scale does to the nature of information collection and what scale does to the nature of judgment. Right. The whole point is the bigger the scale and the more we can coordinate on some clear measure, the more efficient we are at hitting exactly what we've coordinated on. And also the more likely we are to miss anything that we're not coordinating on. Right? So if you set up, if you, I mean the bureaucratic institutional world is so good at optimizing for anything you can measure. And what, what I'm just trying to point out is that there's a cost. And it's not that we should give up on institutions. I mean, I, without large scale bureaucracy and large scale data collection, I would have died at age 11. Right. I'm an asthmatic with poor health. Like I would be dead 40 times over without this stuff. So I'm not saying go back. I am saying exactly. I mean, you've picked up exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that the vast power of scale also comes with this, the seductive call to forget that there's anything else outside of what the institution can measure. And I'm just trying to say, like, know there's a trade off, know that there's other stuff that you've forgotten and know that sometimes it's okay to detach yourself. And there's, there's gotta be. What I'm hoping for is some middle groundwork and be like, yes to science, yes to increase gdp, maybe not yes to like defining our entire lives only in terms of, of our network.

Ryan Sean Adams (77:58)

Why?

C. Thi Nguyen (77:59)

Why two endings? I mean, I'll give you a simple version. There are times when I look at this and I'm like, this is, this is terrible. This is so depressing. The world is so efficient in squeezing out everything good and human. And there are other times I'm like, no, this is just another trade off. This isn't just another trade off thing. And we just have to be careful about the trade off. And I like, there's something we should be careful about which is, you know, going too far in the direction of only metrifying and only recognizing as important what we can measure via large scale institutional data. But we can pull back from that. So part of it that I'm of two minds, but there's a deeper, there's a deeper, there's a. This is my artsy fartsy reason. The two endings to the book are kind of my own private, glorious joke. I know. And the joke is this. This whole book is about what kinds of external systems tell you what's important versus what kinds of external systems let you find what's important for yourself. What kind of external systems squash agency and which kinds of ones permit agency. And one of the interesting things to me is that large scale institutional metrics, even though they superficially look like games, are agency squashing machines because they tend towards singular renditions of value that suck everybody in. And games, I think, are agency promoting machines in that they let people jump between different scoring systems and try on different things. And towards the end of the book, you probably noticed like there's this moment where I'm talking about this stuff and I'm like, hey, look, there's some kinds of technologies and ways of presenting things that encourage agency and other ones that don't. And my example of an agency encouraging. So I think there's some earlier in the book I talk about agency destroying cookbooks that just tell you this is the right way to do things. This is the perfect muffin. This is, this is in the end gonna go back to why your wife is right about Rotten Tomatoes, right? And I think, look, this is terrible. Cuz like, you make this thing and it's good, but you're never gonna explore and find out what's the muffin for you. And then there's this other cook by Jacques and Julia cook at home, where the whole structure of the book is in every recipe. There's Jacques's version and Julia's version, and they're different. And then they argue for each with each other about why theirs is better. And there's no conclusion. It ends you in an inconclusive choice where you're allowed to try out different ways of making a burger. And I think that's agency promoting.

David Hoffman (80:16)

And it sounds like it gives you space to understand the gap between the two versions and understand why there's a gap there.

C. Thi Nguyen (80:22)

And it's great because it has, like, it has the authority. The authority. And it does what cookbooks are good for. It shows you the expertise. It lets you imitate them. But then it doesn't tell you what you have to do. It tells you, look, here's the version that makes the salmon super crispy, and here's the version that makes it super. And then you get to try them both and find out what you like and also learn how you can move between them. And the two endings of the book are supposed to be that. And like, I don't want to tell people. Like, it would be really ironic if I wrote a book about agency and exploration and ended it telling what people. People what they should think. So I want, like, the inner joke is that it's just supposed to be my own version of the Jacques and Julia cook at home. Like, here's a happy ending and a sad ending you choose. I'm not going to tell you.

Ryan Sean Adams (81:08)

That's great. And the way to get out of this metrification, of course, is at the local level, right? You promote this idea of value federalism, right, where you can make decisions in your own life, irrespective of what the system is telling you and what the metrics that the system wants to support. And I think that's the best way to adjust moving forward. T. This has been great. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey, I have just one last question because I mentioned it so many times here in your book. Why do you not like the game Civilization, the computer game? You said it makes you miserable. It's one of my favorite games.

C. Thi Nguyen (81:38)

I mean, this is. This is. This is the hope. This is the whole point of the book, right? Civilization makes some people miserable and some people happy, and that's okay. And that means you can play it and I don't have to. For Civilization for me is like 15 turns of interesting decisions and then a time lost nausea of micro optimizations. I do not, I just don't like. I, I like Civilization is something that I feel like I just lose months to. And there are other games. I mean rock climbing I've been playing, I mean super Smash with my kids is like way richer for me than Civilization. And I think the key point of the book is I guess the dumbest possible message. If you like civilization, play Civilization. If you don't, don't.

Ryan Sean Adams (82:31)

That's right.

C. Thi Nguyen (82:32)

Play better games for it. If the game sucks for you.

David Hoffman (82:34)

Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams (82:35)

Make the games you're playing better. That's the message to you. Thank you so much for joining us.

C. Thi Nguyen (82:39)

Thank you.

Ryan Sean Adams (82:40)

Vagalization. Got to let you know, of course games are risky. Crypto is just another one of those.

David Hoffman (82:45)

Games are riskier.

Ryan Sean Adams (82:47)

That's right. Play the right games, kids. But we're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.