← Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
How To Live An Intentional Life with Professor C Thi Nguyen #670
02:14:20
We’re living in a world that has become extraordinarily skilled at measuring success. But most of us never stop to question which standards really matter to us. Are you chasing success by someone else's definition, without even knowing it?
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- [00:03]
A
Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live. More as soon as I read CT Nguyen's book, the how to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game, I just knew I had to invite him onto my show. T is a philosopher at the University of Utah and his book is deeply thought provoking and probably one of my favourites from recent years. At its heart is the idea that many of the feelings of emptiness, frustration and unhappiness people experience, particularly in midlife, aren't actually to do with failure, but from succeeding at a game that was never theirs to begin with. To explain this, we talk about how large scale data tracking can capture and transform our own values without us even noticing. We delve into the topic of unmeasurables, things like joy, love, the quality of our relationships, our sense of meaning, those markers of health and happiness that we instinctively feel but can't objectively quantify. And we discuss what it is that makes our culture ignore them in favour of other things that are much easier to count and measure. T is also somewhat of an expert on play, whether through sport, board games or hobbies, and we discuss what these activities, often dismissed as trivial, can teach us about meaning and a well lived life. We also explore the difference between principles and algorithmic rules, a distinction that might change how you approach your health and your life more broadly. What I love about Thi's thinking is that he's not telling us to throw out all forms of measurement. He's much more nuanced than that. He's asking us to wake up to the difference between the scorecard we've inherited from the world around us and the one we would choose for ourselves. I am so excited to have this conversation. I can't tell you. Your new book, the Score is probably one of my favorite books that I've read for years. It is so, so thought provoking. One of the central cases you make in the book is that many of us experience problems in our lives because we're living by someone else's scorecard instead of our own. You call this value capture in the book, so I wonder if we could start there. Can you explain what it is?
- [02:57]
B
Okay, so value capture is any case where your values are rich or subtle or they're developing in that direction, and then you get put in a social setting or an institutional setting, or with the technology that presents you with a simplified, usually quantified version of your value, and then the simplified version takes Over. So like, I mean, I went on Twitter to connect to people and to find interesting information and to like have these fascinating conversations with people. And that started happening. And then I went viral, like low grade viral twice. And then I became just interested in upping my like counts and follower counts. And that became the kind of dominant core reasoning. I mean, I think a lot of people know that it's not good when your incentives are too simplified where like the world is giving you money or rewards to follow some kind of hyper simplified metric. But I think the thing I'm really interested in is the next stage of when that transfers to your soul. Like when the thing that you care about most becomes when your deepest value becomes expressed in terms of the metric. Because then I think you inherit the limitations of institutional data tracking. Right. Every limit we have about the kinds of numbers that are easy to collect in large scale bureaucracies suddenly starts to inhabit your way of thinking about the world, about navigating your own life.
- [04:30]
A
Yeah, there's this thing you talk about throughout the book, this idea that data is not neutral, the metrics themselves are not neutral. And where I've been thinking about this a lot is particularly because as we record this conversation, the Winter Olympics are going on. So yesterday evening with my kids, I was watching the snowboarding and it was the women's snowboarding final. The standard was off the charts. But what was really, really interesting is they're doing all these kinds of tricks and I'm thinking, well, how can you compare one snowboarder with another snowboarder? You can. And of course they've got certain metrics which they're using, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the totality of that person's skill or their flow or, or their interpretation of the slope. Do you know what I mean?
- [05:27]
B
Yes, exactly what you mean. And I think what's going on is that in many cases the drive for objectivity, and I mean something like really specific by objectivity, we have to spend like a lot of times talking what that term means, because a lot of people use that term kind of unreflectively or unthinkingly. I think the drive for objectivity often gets us to change the topic, to change the topic of what we're measuring and what we're trying to do. So I think sporting competitions are a really good place to think about this. So for me, one of the crucial things about a scoring system is that it makes explicit the standards that you're going to measure success by. And the reason it does so is often to get people onto the same page. So I started realizing this. The first book I wrote about games, I had this assumption, and that assumption was that every game had a scoring system. And I got there because I think so. I love a lot of games, but I particularly love board games. And when I was working on my first book on the nature of games, my primary model was a certain kind of board game. And in board games, board games tell you exactly what's going to count as points. The board games I play, they say, collect cows, that's worth two points. Collect sheep, each sheep is worth three points. So you know exactly what it'll measure and you know how to add them up together. And then I realized at some point that not every game has this kind of official scoring system. So skateboarding in its natural state is from. I need to not be a poser here. I am not a skateboarder. I do a bunch of other things. I climb, I play with yo yos, I don't skateboard. This is all secondhand knowledge. Skateboarding. There are a lot of goals and success conditions in skateboarding. You can skate to be athletically explosive. You can do incredibly hard tricks, or you can skate for flow, you can skate for style, you can skate for expressiveness. And if you're going to the skate park and competing, you can compete in lots of those dimensions. You can go with your friends, you can go skating and you can be, you can do it in two ways. One, you can just go skating and not have a pre specified goal and just do stuff. And it might just emerge that some of you are more stylish or cool or beautiful or explosive. Or you can even decide, you can decide that we're going to compete for the coolest trick, but you don't need to specify exactly the way that you're going to measure cool. And you can have different people. Like if 10 people go skating together and they come out with different beliefs about who did the best job. Like, I think you were the most flowing and elegant and somebody else thinks that it was me. I was the one that like did something really surprising and original. That's okay. Like you don't. There's no loss of value in that. That's. That's the thing that we did, the thing that we wanted to do. But then skateboarding moves to more official cases like ESPNX and the Olympics, and you start to generate this need to generate a single official verdict to pull out a winner. And what happens then usually is that the activity changes focus. So focus moves away from like Style or flow or beauty and focus moves towards height, number of flips. Right. Things that are more easily countable. And that kind of shift, I think, is emblematic of an entire social tendency that I think we're all caught up in the grips of. Oh, my God. Do you want to know the weird example that got cut from the book?
- [08:57]
A
Yeah. Let's see.
- [08:58]
B
Okay. This is an example I'm obsessed with. And some members of my publishing team thought it was too weird to put in the book, and I cut it out. But I think about it all the time.
- [09:13]
A
So think about this.
- [09:18]
B
While I was reading and I was researching this book, I stumbled across the literature from a bunch of anthropologists and sociologists that studied pickup artist culture.
- [09:27]
A
Okay.
- [09:28]
B
So, you know pickup artists, people that compete for sexual success. And I think it's kind of obvious, in a sense, because even the pickup artist culture term for a sexual encounter is scoring, right? And if you think about what they're competing for, number of phone numbers you get in a night, number of sexual encounters in a night, number speed, the fastest speed from meeting someone to a sexual encounter, and then it becomes kind of clear, like, what they don't compete for. They're not competing for happy relationships. I think that's pretty obvious. But one of the things I discovered when I was reading this stuff, the sociologist Eric Hendricks, who studied pickup artist culture for a while, said pickup artists don't even compete for pleasure. They're not even trying for pleasure. One of the things that you find is a common thread in pickup artist culture is that you're supposed to get beyond caring about pleasure because that will interfere in your quest for higher numbers and more victory. And I find this, like, incredibly emblematic and incredibly tragic because, I mean, I thought when I started reading about pickup artist culture that I would find out that pickup artists were evil and manipulative, but at least they were having fun and enjoying themselves. And I found out something else, which is they're not even enjoying themselves. They're miserable. Many of them are miserable in the quest for higher scores. And I think the examples are really revealing because why would you not compete for pleasure? It's because pleasure is not publicly countable. Like, there's no way to verify who had more pleasure. You make the claim, right? The things that pickup artists are competing for are precisely the things that are easy for everyone to objectively measure in the public setting and then adjudicate in an unquestionable way.
- [11:21]
A
I think it's a great example because the underlying principles within that example can actually be applied to pretty much everything in life. Our self worth, our happiness, our health. On an individual level. One thing I've realized over the past years and have spoken about with regularity on this podcast is this idea of measurables versus unmeasurables. And where this idea becomes really important to me is because I look around society and I see many, many people, particularly in the middle of life, you know, 30s, 40s, 50s, where they have done the things that they thought they were meant to do, yet they still feel lost, maybe depressed, unhappy. I mean, I spoke to Joshua Fields Milburn from the Minimalists a few weeks ago, and he's got that classic story where in his 30s, he had everything, the corporate job, the big house, a house full of loads and loads of stuff, but he wasn't happy. And there's many reasons for that. But I think a lot of the time it simply comes down to what is measurable versus what is unmeasurable. So in my life, I do have a lot of the societal ticks of success, the things that you can measure. But it was a few years ago I realized that stuff is probably not the totality of what makes me happy. It contributes. I think it would be naive for me to think that it didn't have any say at all. But I realized, particularly as I get older, that the gold in my life comes from the unmeasurables. Right? So the quality of the relationship I have with my wife, the quality of the relationship I have with my children, how much time I have each week to spend on my hobbies and my passions, but you can't easily measure that, even if I think about my marriage. Right. I could say to you, because there's this whole thing throughout the book about metrics, and you've got to be careful what metrics you use in life, because those metrics are shaping you whether you're aware of it or not. So I could give you a metric and say, hey, T, I've been married now for 18 years. And you go, oh, great, congratulations. Now, that metric doesn't even tell you that much. It tells you, yes, I've been with the same woman now for 18 years and we're married. But it doesn't tell you about the quality of my relationship, how close I am. Do you know what I mean? I don't maybe have a different take on it.
- [13:59]
B
Yeah, no, I have exactly the take. I just. There's a huge thing I want to say, but let me start by saying, while you're giving that example, I just noticed something maybe striking which is, I think people are really content to say the length of a marriage. Like that number obviously isn't the important thing, it's the quality of that marriage. And then let's go over another setting. It's often very hard in the medical setting, in the health setting to fight against measures of the length of a life. Right. Like, I think a lot of. I think one of the things we definitely need to talk about at some point today is lifespan as a primary health metric. And I think it's like, much more difficult for people to accept the view that there are things that you might want to trade off against longer lifespan. That. That measurable seizes too much public attention.
- [14:57]
A
Yeah, let's talk about it, because I think my audience would be super interested in this.
- [15:00]
B
I mean, here's one way to put it. I'm interested in cases in which the easy measurable auto wins a conversation. And I'm often not saying that. I'm not saying that the measurable thing is unimportant. So one of the key cases for me is lifespan. I mean, that's very easy to measure. And then you see these fights where lifespan wins against any other consideration. So consider trying to figure out national health policy and medical recommendations for eating saturated fats and eating rich cheeses. And you might say that, look, here's a clearly measurable correlation. You eat more of this, your lifespan goes down. Then there's stuff on the other side. There's deliciousness, there's culinary joy, there's tradition, there's like, just the pure, raw joy of a rich, properly cared for camembert. But if you try to bring those into a conversation with someone that's wielding the number that says like, but this will also make average lifespans go down. The other stuff loses, like, automatically. There's not even a. In most of the fights I watch in public health policy, that stuff can't even be put on the table. You sound kind of like a lunatic if you try to put stuff on the table. And I think the reason is you. Because there's not a clear way to measure it, obviously.
- [16:25]
A
I think this is a great example. Right? The things we bias in medicine are the things that we can measure. We can measure blood sugar, cholesterol, weight, blood pressure, and of course, these measurable things have value. But we can't measure joy, love, passion, the quality of your relationships. Right? But actually, if you look at the data, arguably the number one factor that will determine your health, happiness and longevity is the quality of your relationships. So this goes back to what I was saying before about the measurables versus the unmeasurables. I'm at the point of life T. Which is, I think, why this book has resonated so deeply with me, because I think about this stuff all the time. I think about on in my personal life. Wrong. And it's the unmeasurables that are gonna give you your happiness and your contentedness. I know that. I know that full well that it's the things I can't easily measure that give me that joy. But as a medical doctor, the same thing applies. Right. I put a video out on YouTube a few months ago that went. It went pretty viral, to be honest with you. And I was literally talking about this in medicine, saying how we don't measure, or we can't measure the things that I've just mentioned, or we can't measure your ability to forgive. Right. There's a lot of research showing a strong relationship between people who are unable to forgive and people who hold onto resentment with the development of a whole variety of different chronic diseases. Now, it's an association, it's a correlation, just to be really clear. But Fred Luskin, for example, a professor from Stanford, has shown that in a type people, if you can teach them how to forgive and let go, you can lower their blood pressure. Right? You can do that. He has documented that. But I can tell you, go to most doctors and they will not know this. I'm not having a go at them when I say that. But it comes down to metrics that we can easily measure and metrics that we can't. And so whether it's skateboarding, snowboarding in the Olympics, the picker passes. You mentioned the metric biases. You're immediately biased by the metric that you're looking at, aren't you?
- [18:47]
B
Yeah, I mean, okay, I completely agree. The only small pushback I want to give is there's a little part of me that is frustrated with attempting to put a cash value on forgiveness. I think even when you're saying, like, well, here's my justification for why it's important to be a forgiving person, that'll make your blood pressure go down, that's still, from the point of view that's like, this stuff only matters if we can tie it down to something measurable. And I wanna say, like, even that, even that claim has bought into the view where the only things that we are legitimately allowed to put into an official adult conversation are the things that have cash value.
- [19:28]
A
Yeah, I love it. And the message I get throughout this book Is that, you know, the fish who spent their whole life swimming in water doesn't know what water is. Right. I feel that's the case with many of us as humans, we're swimming in the sea of metrics that have been decided by someone else. And until you become aware, like, once you become aware, it's hard to go back. Cause I'm like, wait a minute, where did I get this idea from that I need to do this in order to be successful? Right. And me, probably part of me on this show, because people are tuning in because they want to improve their health and their lives. I being conditioned somewhat to have to justify when I talk about. I don't have to justify talking about blood pressure. People get that. But I sort of feel I've fallen into the trap that you're talking about for me to give forgiveness validity. Right, right. Because people who learn how to forgive when they previously couldn't, they'll just know how great that feels, how light and free you feel. Right. That should be enough in and of itself. But I feel I need to justify it through the lens. Oh, did you know that this professor at Stanford has done this study and he's shown.
- [20:44]
B
Exactly. I mean, I have my own version of this to confess. So, as you know, while I was writing this book, I became super into yo yo. I was studying other cases where some beautiful, delightful, weird activity had a competition scene and then suddenly changed. And so I started yo yoing. And I just found it wonderful and absorptive and playful. And just the sheer joy of the momentum of thing was wonderful. And this is a book justifying saying that that is enough. Right? That playfulness, that just the sheer rich joy of being an interesting doing is enough. And I. When I was at dinner parties and people would be like, oh, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm yo yoing. And they're like, why are you doing that? And I would say things like, well, it really relaxes me, so it helps me write more. And it de. Stresses me so I can write more. And I think even then, that's how deeply we've ingested the mindset, that in the middle of writing a book about how we should accept that play is the end of the line that this is the most important thing I found myself needing to justify. I mean, ironically, I found myself needing to justify my newfound love of a form of play by saying it helped me get back to work and write more pages in my book. Justifying the value of play.
- [22:05]
A
Yeah, we have to. We feel that we have to justify the unmeasurable because the unmeasurable doesn't have intrinsic value in and of itself, which is utter garbage.
- [22:16]
B
Okay, this is perfect because I think part of the theory I have about measurement is that what measurement is doing is just a pre made system of easy justification. It's no surprise this thing we're talking about, that's no surprise because what metrics are, are things designed to quickly and easily justify ourselves in public. And this is, I mean, so I think the thing that I've been on, and I'm super excited because I feel like you're touching the raw bleeding heart of the thing I care the most about. And it's the hardest to say. I mean, I think a lot of us know, oh, the measurement doesn't capture everything. There's more, there's more, we feel there's more. But I wanted to know why. So I had all these experiences over and over again where I would be pushing back against a form of some kind of easy measurement. So one of the origin stories of writing this book was a friend of mine, Adrian Currie, he's a philosopher of science. A bunch of years ago, before the current range of AI, he was like, t, I need you to come to this conference. It's a creativity and AI conference. And it was a bunch of computer scientists and philosophers who are making a first gen of creative art, making AI like way before the current gen. He was calling me in as a philosopher of art and I was like, I don't know anything about AI. He said, you have to come, you have to come. I need you here. So I show up and in this room and there are all these people building AI and they say they're optimizing for good art. And I finally carefully raise my hand from the back and I say, how are you measuring good art? How are you operationalizing it? What's your training data? And they said, well, we're just using the Netflix database on engagement hours. And I lost it. I cursed from the back of the room and I said, that is not good art. And then they said, well, show us another large scale accessible database with a better measure for good art and we'll use that instead. And I thought in that moment, there isn't one. And it's not an accident. I mean, I think a lot of the times when you point out a bad metric, you're like, this metric sucks, which we do all the time. People's response is, sure, okay, that's all right, but we'll just find a better metric. And I was Interested in whether there is a part of life that systematically defied metrics, that systematically defied datafication, that systematically defied measurement. And I think I found the answer. And the answer comes from a bunch of places. It comes to me mostly from a field called science and Technology studies, which is a field that starts in philosophy of science and then explodes an interdisciplinary field full of historians and anthropologists and sociologists. And the answer comes in a few places. But I think the first thing to put on the table, right where our conversation is, is an idea from Theodore Porter. So Theodore Porter is a historian of quantification culture. He has this book, Trust in Numbers, which is one of the matrix type veil rips from my eyes moments. So he's trying to understand why bureaucrats and politicians compulsively reach for quantified justification, even when we know that the metrics are bad, that they're not capturing what's really important. His answer is that there's two kinds of ways of knowing about the world, qualitative and quantitative. And they're good at different things. And the problem is when we compulsively reach for the quantitative, even when it's not the appropriate vehicle for knowing or thinking about the world. So he says, okay, qualitative justification. Qualitative communication using words is open ended and dynamic and rich and subtle and context sensitive. But it travels badly between people with different contexts because it requires a lot of shared background information. So my example, since I'm an academic, my example is always like when I write responses to my student papers. They're rich. We can use all the language from the particular class. I can move in multiple dimensions. I can compare their rigor to their creativity, to their subtle, to their originality, to their ethical thoughtfulness. And first of all, I don't have to push those into one measure. I can just be like, look, this is really creative, but your writing isn't as clear and I can just leave that there. And I can also use all the richness of our shared time together. We develop a lot of language together in the classroom. And I can use that sensibility about what makes a good argument or why thinking is worthwhile. But that, I mean, surely a someone from the business school is not going to understand all those terms and I'm not going to understand their evaluations of their students. And it won't aggregate. There's no way to quickly compress that stuff. For someone in human resources or hiring, right? A student who receives 1,000 of those evaluations, there's no fast way to digest that qualitative stuff. So the solution to this at the institutional level, says Porter, is to create quantified data. And what quantification is, says Porter, is the intentional creation of a context invariant chunk that we keep stable. So we specify something, we remove everything that requires a lot of high context to understand, and then we've made something that he says can travel. So, like a letter grade. I think letter grades are different in the UK and in the us but for us, A is great, B is medium, C is mediocre. And if everyone holds about that meaning, then the information can really travel. A's and B's can move anywhere, people understand what they mean, and they aggregate incredibly well because we've removed all this multidimensionality.
- [27:59]
A
Sorry to interrupt. Just to check. I've got this. So you're saying with your students, for example, that you teach one on one in your small groups, you have a variety of different ways to feedback to them? Yeah, there's multiple dimensions that you're looking at. Right. But the system requires you at the end of the course to give them a single metric, like an A, B, C, D, E. And the point of that metric is to travel. It's so that when they apply for a job, the person who's hiring them or interviewing them knows, oh, when they set that university course, they're an A student or they're a B student to give them an idea. Right. But of course, depending on what that job requires, it could be that a C student who wasn't particularly good at scientific rigor, but was exceptionally good at creativity, maybe they're the perfect person for that job, but the grade doesn't reflect that. And you had quite a funny story in the book where I think at one point you said to your students, I'm going to give you all A grades so you can take. You don't need to worry about that. Let's get into the real kind of meat of the topic. But that didn't work either, did it?
- [29:18]
B
Nope.
- [29:18]
A
Can you just tell that story? So, first of all, did I get you? Was my interpretation correct what you were trying to say? And then if you could just tell us that story. Today's episode is sponsored, by the way, the only meditation app with a single long term pathway. Now, if you've tried other meditation apps before, I am certain that the way will be the one that will finally help you develop a consistent practice. You see, one of the best things about it is that you are not going to get overwhelmed with different options. You simply open the app and do the next meditation, building up your practice step by step. After a few sessions you will feel as if you've got your own personal meditation teacher, who of course is the wonderful Henry Schucman who has appeared as a guest on this podcast on two separate occasions. One of my listeners who started using the Way following my recommendation contacted me to say I have tried so many meditation apps in the past but simply could not make any of them work for me in the long term. However, using the Way has been a complete revelation. I've been using it almost daily for the past three months now and it has had a transformative effect on my life. Now I personally have been using this app for over six months now and I absolutely love it. In fact, I love it so much that I have invested in the company to join them in their mission to get more people meditating around the world. For listeners of my podcast, the way is offering 30 free days to establish your own meditation practice. All you have to do is go to thewayapp.com livemore to get started. Today's episode is sponsored by Lingo by Abbott. As many of you know, when glucose is relatively stable, you feel better day to day with steadier energy, mood and focus. But over time, unstable and elevated glucose can impair your metabolic health and increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Globally, more than 760 million adults are estimated to have prediabetes and 6.3 million people in the UK are estimated to be living with prediabetes, many without symptoms or a diagnosis. Now the problem is that our healthcare system often waits until you get sick before taking action, when we should take a proactive approach to prevent problems before they start. Now, most of us don't have access to our own glucose data and therefore don't have clear feedback on how our everyday choices impact our glucose. That's where Lingo by Abbott comes in. Lingo is a biosensor and app that helps you see how foods, movement and lifestyle choices affect your glucose in real time so you can notice patterns and build healthier habits in the moment. With Lingo, you can get to know your glucose to build healthier habits for today and tomorrow. For listeners in the US and UK, Lingo by Abbott is offering an exclusive 10% off a four week plan. Just visit Halolingo.com live more for more information. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's hello lingo.com livemore.
- [33:12]
B
Yeah, I mean it was mostly correct, but I just want to caution against one thing so I think it's not just that I can rate my students on multiple dimensions and then grades collapse that to one dimension. It's that I can use language and terms that don't even exist on a spectrum. Like, not everything exists on a graded spectrum. Not everything exists on a ranked spectrum. The thing that I want to resist is thinking that what's behind we give someone an A, and that's a point on one ranking scale. But in reality, there's five ranked scales. It's not that it's like not all communication exists on a ranked scale. I mean, the thing that Porter's trying to say is that quantified data is a summarized chunk built to travel. And the way you make it ready to travel is you strip off everything that would give you a lot of friction when it moves between layers. And then you have this slimmed down, smooth thing that travels easily. And what gives people friction is things that require context. So it's not just multidimensionality. It's the richness of context required to interpret a particular communication in a particular context. That's what has to leave the thing. At one point, Porter says this remarkable thing, he says, because what information is is a particular way of understanding the world that's been sterilized to be readily understood by a distant stranger with no shared context. And one way to put the problem of value capture is that you're ruling yourself in terms that have been sterilized for consumption by distant strangers. You're ruling yourself limited only to the language that has had all context stripped out specifically so it can be quickly summarized and aggregated.
- [35:09]
A
It feels like this is happening more and more in the worlds where you almost have to fight so hard against a system to actually hold true to what it is you stand for. I mean, we've mentioned value capture, this rigid attachment to an external system of values. And you can kind of see that everywhere. You can see it in medicine, in healthcare, in the book you make the case. In journalism you can see it. I think you make a really nice case in law schools. I think we said law schools used to have different missions. They used to stand for different things. But when you sort of collapse it and go, well, what's the grade? Or what's that assessment? Then you've lost all that nuance. You're looking at just a ranking table of, you know, what percent of people get this grade and what percent go on to get a job at a top firm or whatever it might be, which is so unidimensional, isn't it?
- [36:08]
B
Yeah, but I Also want to push back because I think now I want to speak up for metrics because I actually think that makes the situation more horrifying. There's an easy position that tempts people, I think at this point, which is all metrics are bad. They're all information loss. Let's get rid of them. Let's be alive, rich people, constantly alive to the wonder. That doesn't work either, because we need metrics. I think this is the true pain, because. We need highly compressible, highly travelable, easily understood data chunks to organize ourselves at vast scale. I mean, this is how science works, right? Science works by the collection of data. Data works. Science at its best involves different people collecting into the same buckets so that they can amass mass piles of data and do analysis on that data. Right? And also, like we do need large scale. There are many contexts in which large scale information transfer and highly portable information is really valuable. So I think the college rankings example is a really good one because it shows us the tension between the two faces. So that example for me is a great example of value capture. So there's a really good study of what happened, what college rankings do to educational culture in a book called Engines of Anxiety. It's a book by Wendy Esplund and Michael Souder, who are a sociologist and they studied what happened when U.S. news World Report started ranking law schools. The first thing they say is that exactly what you noted. Right? So law schools before the rankings used to have many dimensions of, many dimensions of value. Like some were more interested in getting their students high paying corporate jobs. Some were more interested in social and community outreach missions, some were more interested in theoretical and legal scholarship and research work. And they would represent these things in qualitative ways. And the coming of the rankings imposed one particular judgment. Right. So the law school rankings are mostly based on incoming class gpa, incoming class LSAT score and outgoing class employment rate at the nine month mark. So that imposes a very rigid sense of value and it also narrows down on measurables. So one of the things that they say that I found really striking was that before the rankings, the process of figuring out a law school, which law school a student wanted to go to, would trigger a process of internal deliberation. A prospective law school student would ask themselves, what do I care about more? Theoretical work, corporate work, social justice work. And that value crossroads would lead them into a process of reflection about what they actually cared about. And the moment the rankings showed up, what they record is that students stop doing this they did the research, by the way, by looking at Internet archives of like forums of discussion between prospective law students. And they say that the moment the US News and World Report starts ranking law schools, students immediately take their goal to be to get into the best law school where best is just set by those rankings, so they stop value deliberating. This is the example that led me to really. So one of the formulations from the book, one of the things I end up saying is that the problem of value capture is that you're outsourcing your values and you're outsourcing your values to an external. You might be outsourcing your values to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Right. Whoever is setting the measure. In this case, you're outsourcing the value of your education to the U.S. news World Report. That sets the terms of measurement. Right, but, and here's the big but. The US News and World Report also had a good reason to do this. Yeah, the reason, their stated reason was that before them every school could talk about itself in glowing terms. Maybe its value mission was genuine or maybe it was bs. Maybe they were fulfilling or maybe they weren't. And if you were in the know, if you had the connections to people embedded in law culture, you could get the inside scoop. But they were trying to help people like me. I am an immigrant's kid, my parents know nothing about the landscape. And so what they were trying to do was making that information easily digested and accessible. And they were trying to digest a large number of considerations that you might take as important to make information accessible. To me, that's what portability is. Portability is accessibility. And so what you get is actually the big vision is that there's this massive trade off between making that information highly digestible and accessible so that everyone can have it, and simplifying it and removing dimensionality from it in order to make it accessible. And I think the really terrifying part for me in some sense, if it turned out that metrics were just evil, the mustache twiddling villain of the story, and we could just move beyond them, things would be, I can imagine, a utopia. But what Porter teaches me is something more painful, which is that there's a thing we need that we have to have, which we have to pay an enormous cost for. And that's like, that's an essential feature of our life together. That in order to communicate with each other at scale, we need these hyper simplified, highly portable things. And that is the glue that binds us together. And it's a Very costly glue.
- [41:57]
A
Yeah, I love it. And you know, I'm not trying to, like you say that metrics are either good or bad. It's just understanding what that metric is good for.
- [42:08]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [42:09]
A
Being aware of that and also understanding what it's not good for. So let's take the, I don't know, I guess schools, right? Not everyone gets to choose what school their children go to. I understand that, but I think with schools, I've come to the conclusion that it's not that there's no such thing as a good school. Of course there is. But for me, if you have the choice, it's more about what is the right school for my child. Right, right. It's subtly different, that the school can look great on paper. Oh, you know, people here, they get these grades and they go to this university or whatever it might be. Yeah, but is it the right school for the qualities that my child has? And again, as I say, not everyone has the choice, but it's an example that we can use. There's a couple of things you said there which I found interesting. Of course metrics have a value, but there's also that hidden cost you mentioned, Politicians. And I guess through the lens of health, when an election comes around, one of the big things in this country will be the National Health Service. And no doubt each party will choose the metrics that are most favorable to them. So they may choose, for example, how many people, when they come to the A and E or the er, get seen within four hours. Right. And have we made that better since the last party was in? No, but the problem is you can cheat that metric a million different ways. Right. You can just churn people in, give them one. Extreme is give them really poor care, but cheat the system so that actually no one waited for more than four hours. Right. So by the metric that you're getting told, oh, wow, this party came in and actually no one's having to wait more than four hours anymore. But what if the cost of that is that everyone's getting poor quality care? I mean, that's quite an extreme example, but I feel it's super relevant. The other thing you said, which I really want to talk to you about, is the scientific method. So, yeah, the scientific method wants to look at large data sets, large volumes of people to try and come up with conclusions. But a lot of science, by its very nature is reductive. And one thing I've learned over the course of my career t is, is
- [44:31]
B
that
- [44:34]
A
not one of my patients or very few of my Patients are average. Right. So the scientific data will generally try and tell you, on average, this is the best diet. On average, this is the right approach to take. But even if you look into those individual studies, you'd go, well, yeah, but not everyone thrived on that diet. You know, that was just the average. So this is the difference for me between population medicine and precision personalized medicine. Right. And so one of my favorite parts of the book was the chapter on mechanical value. So let me explain what mechanical value is, and then I want to talk about principles. Right. Because I really resonate with this section, which is one of the reasons why I thought I always have had these, I wouldn't say difficult conversations with my publisher over the years. Not difficult at all. But I've always said I can't prescribe people a plan because I don't know who they are. What I can write about are principles, not protocols. Right. This principle holds true, but you need to adapt that principle in the context of your life. So talk to me about mechanical values, then we can maybe talk about principles.
- [45:52]
B
Hold on. Before we do mechanical values, you said a bunch of stuff I really want to, but let's back up because we have to talk about mechanical values. But you said so much interesting stuff. So there are two things I really want to talk about in what you said. One thing to think is what are metrics good at picking up and what are they bad at picking up? And I think we already get a story from Porter. What they're good at picking up is things that are invariant between people, that everyone can detect, that don't take particular sensitivity or context to detect. This is why we aim at lifespan over happiness. And I want to notice something really important here. People talk like happiness or joy is intangible or impossible to track or like some evanescent magic. It's really obvious, you know when you're happy and you know when you're depressed, it's like one of the most obvious things in the world. It is radiantly at the forefront. And it actually, I think, takes a long process of socialization for us to be willing to ignore that stuff in favor of the measurable.
- [47:08]
A
Yeah.
- [47:08]
B
So what. What makes the measurable the measurable is not how loud it is. Right? Happiness is really loud. Despair is really loud. It's also not. I mean, people. One of the funny things is when I give the cheese example, for a long time, I'd talk about, like, length of life versus joy in food, and people would be like, well, you can't just, you know, you can't really weight those intangibles. And I would accept that language. And then I thought, wait, cheese is intangible? What is more tangible than eating a goddamn mouthful of brie? And what has. Right. What we've come to think is that word come to us so easily because we've replaced our sense of reality, we've replaced concrete things with what's easy to abstract.
- [47:57]
A
Yeah.
- [47:58]
B
So the thing that makes something countable is its kind of invariance across contexts and easy noticeability across contexts, which tells us exactly what metrics are bad at picking up, which is anything that is highly variable, highly context dependent, including, for example, your particular personality. I think your example is exactly right about picking which kid to go to which school. Because when we use a metric like the US like a college ranking, we are applying measures that have been put there because they are approximations of what everybody thinks. They've been de. Particularized.
- [48:38]
A
Yeah.
- [48:39]
B
Hayek famously said central policy can never target any particular person, it can only target the average person. Right. I think that's very close to what you're saying. So that's one big thing I was thinking from what you're saying. The other big thing is I think the idea that every metric is interested and I think this is a.
- [49:00]
A
What you mean interested?
- [49:01]
B
So this is an enormous thing I learned from a bunch of these scholars I'm talking about in science and technology studies. And. And one of the big views from that world is that people think that technologies and systems, like systems of representation, like metrics, they think they're neutral, they think they're objective, they think people tend to think that metrics are objective. And what the people from science and technology studies have taught me is that different technologies and different ways of representing the world are deeply value laden and deeply represent a specific perspective and a specific value system on the world. So the easiest example for me is to back away from data for a moment and think about maps. Right. There's a way in which a map just looks like here's the world. But every map is a selection procedure. Right. What maps do, not as an accident, but as an intrinsic part of their function is they leave out most of the world. A map that includes every detail in the world is useless. It's the world. What maps do is highlight certain things and delete other things. That highlighting is a choice. Right. It represents some interest and it deletes others.
- [50:15]
A
Okay. If I think about the map of the world, well, it's prioritizing borders of countries.
- [50:22]
B
Exactly.
- [50:22]
A
It's prioritizing big cities. It might prioritize high mountains, but yeah. And it kind of feeds this idea of metrics. Like all metrics do something, but they don't do other things.
- [50:36]
B
Yes, exactly. Dennis woods, who wrote the book the Power of Maps, has this moment that my students love where he says, like, why don't our maps show sound quality? And he says that most of the maps we have represent two major interests. They tell us where the property lines are and the political borders, and they tell us how to commute to places in cars. That's what they're really good at. And they don't tell us where the nice spots are that sound nice or feel nice that have rich ecosystems. Right. So I think it's really clear there to show that maps show an interest based on prior decision about what they've collected and what information is collected and displayed and which is hidden. And I think what I want to say is the same is true of metrics. It's not that they're lying, like maps are showing things that are real. It's that any data system already represents prior decisions about what's worth noticing and measuring. So Jeffrey Bowker and Susan Lee Starr have this incredible book that I think you should read called Sorting Things Out. And they talk about. They think one of the big roots of this is what's in the classificatory structure that underlies the data collection. So one of their core examples is they study the ICD10, the international manual that gives different codes to accidents and causes of death. And they point out that. So they look at the falls coding, and they point out for urban falls, there are separate distinct codes for fall from a balcony, fall from playground equipment, fall from hospital equipment, fall from a commode, fall down an escalator, fall. There are different codes for all of this. And for urban falls, there's fall from a cliff and fall other. And that's it. Right. That system has very high granularity for urban accidents and very low granularity for rural accidents. So, I mean, that system displays what it cares about and what it doesn't. I mean, here's another. This is an example that has been staring me in the face forever that I hadn't realized until like a week ago because we were talking about this with my students. Intelligence tests automatically. Our intelligence test right now, highly weight, logical, mathematical, and abstract skill. They don't rate emotional sensitivity at all. Right. Like, doesn't this reveal something about the values embedded in the system that the thing that we call an intelligence test that is measuring someone's intellectual capacity has nothing in it that tracks your ability to empathize or be aware of other people's emotions.
- [53:18]
A
Is it the. Is this a quote? Is it attributed to Einstein? If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you'll believe it's stupid or something to that degree, Right? Yeah.
- [53:29]
B
But let me level up that thought. A, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you'll think it's stupid. B, our intelligence tests are making one decision about how everyone should be judged and applying that univocally and unchangingly. So it's like taking that decision, a particular decision that rates one set of abilities very highly and very lowly, another very lowly, and then building that into the kind of background air of the data we swim in.
- [54:03]
A
Yeah, but this is why. Come up to the school system for a minute. Schools work really well for some kids and really poorly for other kids. Right. If you fit that model of what the modern schooling system, certainly I can talk about in the UK or in the us these sort of Western countries. You may thrive at school because your skill set is aligned with what they deem to be important. And we all know the cases of children who are supremely talented, but the school measurements of success don't suit them. So they leave school thinking they're stupid when it was never that they were stupid, it's just the wrong metric was used to assess them.
- [54:50]
B
Yeah. So there are two things to say. I think this is exactly right. The first thing to say is that so we have one of the big answers now. I think that we've been stumbling around for us and the answer isn't the metrics are bad. The answer is that every metric represents a specific set of interests and highlights a specific set of features and expresses a particular value system. So, for example, our intelligence measures express the value of logical and abstract thinking is important. Emotional, artistic thinking is unimportant. That's embedded in that system that. I'm not saying that's bad. The first thing is to say is you just have to be careful about the tools you're using. If you think they're just neutral representations of the world, if you forget that they represent specific interests and already represent a prior focus of attention. Maybe that's one way to put it. There are decisions about what to attend to and what's worth paying attention to and what's worth remembering and what's worth noticing built in to the infrastructure of our data collection systems. And they can be used well when you are aware of the biases and interest in each of your tools and you're willing to select the right tool for the job. But we forget that we just pick tools thinking they're true representations of a neutral world. And then all those, I mean, selections bleed into our decision system. So I think an example would be if you just walk around sorting people via the IQ test, then without even thinking about it, you're carrying that bias in favor of the logical and mathematical over the emotional into your decision making process. And then the second thing is the thing that you're talking about, so if we build the way that Bowker and Starr put it is that when a lot of these decisions enter, they say information infrastructure, they become background and they become naturalized. We start thinking that's the way things are. So instead of thinking, oh, we have this particular intelligence test that was built at a particular time in which we wanted to boost stem. And so we emphasize that. We think, no, this is the way the world is. Smart people are good at math, dumb people. If you're not good at math, you're dumb. And so that kind of, that's a subtle social process by which a particular set of values gets built into a large scale system. And then if we're not cautious of that, we can intake that and suddenly be guided by value decisions made by some other person for some distant reasons that we don't even know is guiding us anymore.
- [57:40]
A
And that's there's no question. To me, one of the major reasons so many people are struggling in their life and feel unhappy is because their values have been captured. And more importantly, they're not aware that their values have been captured. This is a theme t that keeps coming up on this show with regularity because it's something I'm so passionate about because I think for much of my life, my values were captured. You know, you shared in, in the book about, you know, being brought up in the US in a family of Asian immigrants. Well, I was brought up in the UK and my parents are immigrants from India. And so there's a certain trait that gets valued, which is academic excellence. And that is great, but it also can come at a cost. And for me, the cost was that I thought that my self worth as an individual was contingent on academic success. Pros and cons. Pros are you get a ton of academic success. Cons are you need that level of success to continue in order to feel good about yourself, which is highly problematic. But I would say the, for me, the kind of hopeful point about this is that once you understand this once you see through it, you're like, oh, wait a minute, where did these ideas and values come from? Are they the values by which I wanna live my life? If not, can I start to change them? I think you start to generate a snowball in the other direction. That's very much what I've done in my life. And I shared with you when you just popped into the house before we started recording that the trigger for me to start questioning everything was the death of my dad in 2013. Until that point, I didn't have time. I had no real reason to start questioning everything about my life. But that moment, for the first time, it got me to stop looking externally and to start looking internally. Right. And I think a lot of what we're talking about today and a lot of what your book is about is really that challenge and that sort of tension between external and internal. The metric is something that can be easily seen externally, but often what truly matters to us as individuals is what we can experience on the inside. I mean, life. I was telling my son last night over dinner, I was trying to explain to him the philosophies in your book, right? And it was quite hard for me to try and simplify it. But I said, hey, son, listen, you gotta understand that life is experience on the inside. And it's an early thought I have that I haven't quite finished my kind of processing off. But I really think most of life, or all of life on an individual level is how we experience it. And a lot of that cannot be seen by the outside. So by its very nature, external metrics, they may be useful, they may be helpful in some scenarios, but none of them, or very few of them, help tell you how you're experiencing the world, how you're experiencing those metrics. I don't know if you know rock climbing, you start the book talking about rock climbing. You also bring up yoga a couple of times throughout the book. And I kind of feel that those two examples really illustrate this point of external voice, internal. Can you just share, if you will share the story about rock climbing that you opened the book with? Today's episode is sponsored by Exhale Coffee, who are literally offering you a free bag of coffee. Now, if you know me, you'll know that I absolutely love my morning coffee. For me, it's about ritual, enjoyment and starting off each day with intention. A few years back, I switched to Exhale coffee. 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- [64:57]
B
Rock climbing is it's super interesting to me because again, it's one of these things that I think is expressive of my profoundly mixed relationship with scoring systems, because rock climbing saved my soul during graduate school and it did so via an explicit scoring system. So I was super depressed Started climbing. And the interesting thing about climbing for me was I got the value of it wrong. And I think this is an important ingredient in this whole story. The value of climbing is actually really subtle. So when I came into it, I came into it kind of in the frame of mind that we were talking about in the beginning. I was like, I need exercise. Exercise will help me lose weight and live longer. That's what exercise is for. I need to exercise. So I'm going to do some climbing. What climbing taught me over the years is that climbing is valuable for its own sake, that climbing is an ecstasy, that there is a beauty and a poetry to moving well. And I don't. I mean, I'm mediocre, but climbing taught me that there is something so extraordinary in being able to be so sensitive to your body that you can adjust your center of gravity over half an inch and just pull in a little bit more with the lower part of your core. And suddenly feet that were impossible to use become perfect to use. It taught me that there was a wonder to physical detail and precision for its own sake. And the way it did it was with a scoring system. Because, I mean, I used to hike a lot, but I checked out. When I hiked, I was just like, I'm just going to go up this thing, and I would go up the thing and I would be thinking about other things or like thinking about philosophy or talking to my friend, and I would tune out. Hiking was, in some sense, too easy to force me to pay attention to my body. And I also clambered over rocks kind of like casually, but again, I just took the easy road and climbing. Said the scoring system of climbing is difficulty based, and there are climbs that are rated for difficulty. And then the scoring system tells you to increase your difficulty level. And that scoring system actually got me to pay attention to my body, because the only way to get up to the next level was to pay more refined attention to my body. It also amplified my mental wanderings. So there's this great moment from one of my favorite yoga writers, Godfrey Devereaux, where he says the point of yoga is meditation. And it's a very good technique for meditating, he says, because I tried seated meditation and it never worked, because when my mind wandered, I wouldn't notice because my mind had wandered. But being in a hard yoga pose amplifies any mind wandering. Because if your mind wanders, you wobble, and that helps you notice. And climbing is even more extreme in this sense, because in climbing, if you're climbing a hard climb, and your mind wanders. You fall 10ft onto the pad, right? You cannot miss that. It's a very loud signal. And so that procedure, that scoring system and those constraints and the difficulty, it pushed me to, helped me find the beauty of movement. But also, after about six years of climbing, the difficulty system stopped working. Well for me. I mean, I, A, was never that athletic and B, became like an academic and a parent, and I didn't have enough time and it was just impossible for me to progress up the difficulty scale. And so for a while, it became very frustrating. What I ended up doing was changing how I conceived of the activity. I changed the scoring system and I made it mostly one about climbing elegantly. And there are two things to notice. One, I think this is one of my. I've had a lot of bad experience, unhealthy experiences with scoring systems, but this is the one or the ones I'm proudest of because I think I got the best relationship I could get with a scoring system, which is a. I heard what was in it. I heard. Because what we've been saying is that scoring systems and metrics have values that are fixed into them. And sometimes we've been talking about this as a bad thing, right? Like, oh, these are being imposed on me. But also you can learn from them. I think things like climbing activities like skateboarding. Each of these has its own values that you might not tune into. And the scoring system is so clear that it helps you tune into them so you can use them to find your way into new beautiful things that you had not experienced before. But then after a while, when I'd gotten the kind of brute area, when I was like, oh, I get this now, I was able to fine tune it to myself, I was able to tailor it to myself. I was able to adjust what I was trying to do to make it better for me. And I think one way to put it is that I think scoring systems and metrics are kind of off the rack values. But that's useful to have, right? But it's also useful to use as a starting point and depart from. And I think being able to learn from them, use their rigidity to get onto something, and then being able to depart from them and adjust them is a really valuable way to do it. And I think what's interesting about my climbing example was the original, the original scoring system was very external, this external difficulty score. But I needed that to be able to get onto it because I didn't have the value inside me. And once I did, I could kind of go off book and start aiming at something much subtler and more internal. I could guide myself with my own sense of elegance, but it took years of following the scoring system to get to be able to do that.
- [70:41]
A
Yeah, I love that, too. I really love that. And in my last book, which is called Make Change at Last, the first chapter is called Trust Yourself. And in that chapter, I make the case that we've outsourced our inner expertise to external experts. Right.
- [71:02]
B
Yep.
- [71:03]
A
And I see this in health so much. Right. Because I think one of the big reasons why people are so confused these days by all the conflicting information that exists online about health is a. Because there's a belief that there's one right way for everyone. So when two different experts are saying two different things, people are like, well, which expert should I believe? It's like, well, hold on a minute. Both experts might be right, but for different people. Right. So which one of those people are you? And so I think that's one aspect of it. I think the other aspect is that we've forgotten how to ask ourself about, you know, how am I experiencing this? Is this still working for me? Right. So that scoring system in rock climbing, from what I heard, it sounds as though it got you climbing, it got you pushing yourself. So you start to progress and really experience climbing in a slightly different way. But then after a while, you realize actually now the scoring system starts to become problematic. Right. So it helped me for a while, but now I'm better off experiencing climbing the way that I want to experience it. And, you know, I think about even the term non negotiables, like a very common thing that people like me will get asked when we go on other people's podcasts is, you know, what are your health non negotiables, Dr. Chatterjee. Right. And I will say I don't have any, because a non negotiable can work really well. If you are stuck in your life, if you're not doing anything proactive for your wellbeing and you're sitting around all day, you're not making progress, you have no forward momentum.
- [72:45]
B
Yeah.
- [72:45]
A
I think a non negotiable, you know, a few things that you commit to doing every single day without fail help to start moving you out of that space. But after a while, they can become a trap. They can, you know, run the risk of perfectionism and beating yourself up where you don't feel like you're worthy as a human because you didn't do the meditation that you said you were going to do. Right. So things work until they no longer work.
- [73:12]
B
So I think there's so many things I want to talk about. So the first thing is this is such a clear glimpse of what metrics are for and what they're not. So I'm going to push back a little against your thought about, well, there are these different experts that are good and you just have to choose the one that's good for you. Because the other thing we have to put in this space that there are also fake experts. A lot of the background for this book is actually one of the things I was most worried about was how non experts pick the right expert when they don't know anything in the field. And a lot of the best uses of metrics are exactly. They do what they say on the tin, they help you figure out who is completely a quack and they are best at sorting on that kind of broad, large scale.
- [74:04]
A
Right, Yeah. I actually agree if you're, if you're swimming in a sea of hundreds of thousands of experts now who are sharing information, of course some are going to have valuable information and some are not. But even within, I really think this does speak to the book. Right. And the ideas within it. Even within, well, credentialed experts who've been to the right university and done the right course, they don't always agree. Right. So just saying choose a world credential expert has an inbuilt problem within it, which is you're assuming that every expert interprets the data in the same way and has the same view, but the world doesn't work like that. And I often say to people, if you're waiting for a time when every single expert agrees, you're gonna be waiting a long time. So my approach with people is to say you need a balance. Right. I'm not saying ignore external experts like me, but also learn to ask yourself, does this approach vibe with me? Does it fit my lifestyle, my culture, how I want to live?
- [75:13]
B
Yeah. And I think the most important word you used was trust and especially self trust.
- [75:20]
A
Yeah. And isn't the risk with a lot of the metrics that are given to us from the outside that they, if we're not intentional about them, they start to erode our self trust because we no longer trust ourselves. We trust the metric.
- [75:35]
B
Exactly. So I think there was a moment where I saw this very clearly. I was in a wine shop and a gentleman came in, very well dressed, and he was like, I'd like to get to wines. I would prefer wines above 95 points. And the Wine shop owner was doing what they often do, which is try to talk you out of that and be like, no, it's really like, what are you going to have it with? What do you like? Like, what do you want that day? And the guy said, well, how am I supposed to know what I like? And I thought, what are you doing? What is the activity? Even here, if you're consuming a wine, unable to tell if you like it, being guided only by. I mean, it makes total sense to use an external score as maybe a starting point for what to buy, to find something that you might like.
- [76:27]
A
It's a balance.
- [76:28]
B
But I think what had happened to him is something that's happened to a lot of people in a galactic scale. Exactly what you're talking about. He had been so attentive to external signals that he had lost any ability to hear. I mean, I don't think it's even that quiet of voice. The voice of pleasure had gotten swamped in his brain. And I think this is exactly what happens. I think so. The philosopher Elijah Milgram, who is a major inspiration to me, one of his ideas is that there's no single correct value to have or goal to have for your life. Instead, you're trying to find an expression of a value or a goal that fits your personality in your context, in the place you're in. And the way you do that is you try on values and you see if they work for you. And the signal that they're working for you is that you're happy, you're engaged, you're flourishing. And the signal that they're not working for you is that you're miserable, you're bored. And I think what's happened to many of us is instead of modifying how we think of the target in the light of this quiet inner voice, we're ignoring the inner voice in favor of the loud metric. And by the way, we have a story about why that's so easy to do. It's because metrics are built to be easily comprehensible. That's Porter's story. They've been built for everyone to understand instantly and for everyone to be able to communicate to other people instantly. And I think one thing that's happened is that we have systematically become unwilling to listen or trust quiet inner signals, which makes us dependent on external sources to evaluate our life for us.
- [78:13]
A
And I think one of the reasons for that, in my experience, is because we don't spend that much time with ourselves anymore. We're constantly distracted. You know, we're consuming Stuff. And if you're constantly consuming stuff from the outside, no matter how good it is, you're probably less able to hear what's going on on the inside. So I believe, for a lot of people, and this has certainly been my experience, is that stuff where you, you know, doing things regularly in solitude, you know, whether it's a walk where you're not listening to something or you're drinking a cup of coffee in complete silence, you know, it allows you to start tuning into, oh, wait a minute, I'm, you know, something's going on here, something that my body's trying to tell me, something trying to make me aware. But instead of listening, we distract. So I think for some people at least, that has become an issue. I love what you said about values, because values are a kind of metric, right? But they're an internally generated metric as opposed to an externally generated one, which is why I think values are so powerful. I mean, you know, we haven't really spoken about games yet. You know, you start talking about games, and what's so beautiful about games is that you have these rules, and the rules of the game shape the behavior and shape what you care about. But actually, life's a game as well. And the rules of the game that are given to us shape what we think we should care about. So if we think we should care about money and promotions and status, we end up chasing that to find at 45, we're like, what the hell's happened to my life? Why do I feel unfulfilled? Because we've chased something that has been. Or we might have chased something that was given to us from the outside. But I think values are in many ways the polar opposite, but in a great way that we get to choose our values. We get to try out these values and see, how do I feel, as you said, when. When I'm acting in accordance with these values? How do I feel when I don't? And over time, perhaps we can tweak those values to kind of know who we are and live in harmony with that person. I mean, yesterday, Lindsey Von, the American downhill skier, Olympic champion, and she decided after, I think, five years out of the sport, to compete in the women's downhill. People are going, this is crazy. You know, she's been out the sport for five years, and then last year, sorry, last week, she ruptured her acl, her anterior cushion ligament on her left knee, yet was still deciding to compete. And since she crashed, my feed on X is just full of people either saying she is the Stupidest woman in the world for competing or people saying, what a brave athlete. And all I can think of is, how do any of us really know? Like, we don't know who she is, how she values her life. And she's put out a statement this morning saying that she has no regrets. She knows who she is, she knew the risks, but actually this is how she wants to live. And I thought there was something really powerful about that, which we can all I think, think about, which is, do we know our own values or have those values been given to us from the outside? And if they've been given to you from the outside, like they were for me for much of my life, can you start the process of trying to understand which ones you'd like to change? I mean, what's your take on that?
- [82:00]
B
I mean, metrics are prepackaged values. And one of the things that I find powerful about games is that they balance the explicitness of giving you a goal or a value with a freedom to modify it. I think they really exemplify, at their best, the mode of life you're trying to describe. Because this is. Okay, this is the most philosophical on high geek description of the most common activity. Here's what you do when you play a game. A game gives you a prepackaged target. It gives you a scoring system. You do it for a while and then you step back and you reflect and you ask yourself, was it fun? Was it a good time? Was it enriching? Was it, was it interesting? Was it an enjoyable social experience? And what you've actually done there is done a micro version of exactly. I think the thing that you think is beautiful, which is first you plunge yourself into this alternate scoring thing that specifies exactly what you do. You try it on, and then you step back and ask yourself from an example, ask yourself from an angle outside that scoring system in a way that I think is cued to listening to internal signals. Like just the basic question, was that fun? Was that interesting? Is it cue to be open to weird, hard to measure signals? And then you use that to make a decision about whether you want to play the game again, whether you want to play a different game, whether you want to modify that game. I think that it's dumb as it might sound. I think that a life with games exemplifies a freedom and agency with respect to your values and activities. What it is. And not every game is like this. You can be pushed into bad games. It's not automatic.
- [84:14]
A
Is it a bad game or is it a game that's just not suited to you.
- [84:18]
B
I mean, this is. I think mostly I'm talking about games that are not suited to you. There are probably some bad games. I think, like purpose built, addictive games are bad, but whatever. I think you're right. The thing that the social technology of games do when we experience them in the right context is they trigger reflection. And they trigger reflection by participating in and then stepping back from extremely explicit systems. They also let us leverage what's good about explicit systems. Right. The whole point of game rules and game goals is they capture kinds of activities. That's what rock climbing is like for me. A lot of my favorite board games and a lot of my favorite. I'm really interested in tabletop role playing games right now. Have a very interestingly strict rule set and a point system that gets you to leap into a particular kind of activity. So a lot of my favorite role playing games have scoring systems that tell you to do things like invent shared backstory or find tension in character drama. And having that as a quick, clear guide can help you find your way into new forms. Because the whole thing that we're generating here, the background thought, is that values are subtle. And I think I've just realized there's a slightly different alignment in the way you're talking about things and the way I'm talking about things. I think you are, to use my own, a little more purely existential in the old school, like Sartre style existentialism. The views you've been expressing are like your real values come from the inside, they're authentic to you. And the stuff from the outside is fake. And I don't think that. I actually think a lot of the most important values in life are very subtle and contained in the outside. I learned the beauty of jazz from other people. I learned the beauty of rap from other people. I learned the beauty of rock climbing from other people. Those values are embedded in external activities. I think for me, the most important thing is that what is really valuable is often quite subtle. And that subtlety is. Is driving both sides of this. The reason we want games and we want rules is because values are subtle and it takes a long time to be let into them. That's why it took me years exposed to the scoring system of rock climbing to see the beauty of movement. I needed that structure to get me over to see that subtlety. And it's also why metrics won't perfectly capture it explicitly. Right. That subtlety is also exactly why you will never be able to get a metric that Exactly. Captures a value. And I think the way that games do it is they don't try to get you there perfectly. They give you a shove in the right direction. And that's what they're the best for. Right. They're a shove in the general direction. And then you eventually get up and teeter on your own feet and find your way. But we need that help. We need both a combination of the assistance of external systems to help us find our way and then the willingness to trust ourselves to navigate and hear the inner voice to catch on to what's subtle. Yeah, but if we're stuck on the metric the entire time, we'll never start to hear the smaller signals that'll help us close in.
- [87:29]
A
Yeah, I'm not sure I necessarily think it's all internal and the external has no value. I think for me it's more. It's a combination of the two. We can, as you say, let's say with chats, like, I'm a huge music fan and, you know, music has done something to me on the inside for many, many years. Right. That, yeah, sure, we can try and quantify with scientific data and say that this is what happens in the brain, or we can just go, you know what, wanna hear that track? I feel absolutely fantastic. Right. Which should be good enough in and off itself. Right. But you need the external music to bring out that internal feeling. So I don't think any of these things are black or white. And you could say it's just internal or just external. I do very much believe that, you know, I'm interested in primarily health and happiness. And I do believe it's very hard for people to truly be healthy and happy in the long term if they haven't almost taken an internal inventory and figured out who they actually are. Now, they might need to experiment. They might need to make some mistakes, or I wouldn't even call them mistakes. You might need to experiment maybe with the wrong things to learn. Actually, you know what, when I behave like that, that's not really who I want to be. Right. You've got this thing in the book called the gap, the distance between what's measured and what actually matters. Right. And I talk about that as well through a different lens, which is whenever there's a gap between your internal values and your external actions, I believe that's where all of your problems start in life, because you create this kind of void within you, there's not true alignment. And I think the closer you get to having your external actions matching your internal values, I Think the happier you are, the more at peace you are, the less likely you are to engage in problematic behavior. So I do think we talk about similar things, but probably look at things slightly differently and we have a slightly different language for them. When you came into the house this morning, I was sharing with you how much I enjoy snooker and how in our front room we have a little table that sometimes I play with my kids, sometimes I'll play by myself, but I play for the inherent joy of playing. I can just be there by myself for 20 minutes and to the external eye, watching it could be the most boring thing in the world. But to me, I'm trying to put little different bits of spin on the ball. I'm trying to see where exactly can I leave the white ball at the end, can I get it to kick off a little bit more to the left when it hits the cushion? My wife would be watching that and she'd probably think, I don't wanna speak for her, but let's put it this way, it's not her thing, that's the best way to put it, right? And I think that's okay, right? Because I would argue that, okay, this is my bias, but I would say if you don't enjoy watching snooker, one of the reasons might be, is because you don't understand the game, if you really understood. And I played a lot of games and I will still say to play snooker well on a full size table, I think it's one of the most difficult games on the planet. I really do. It is exquisite, the skill these players have. And they are doing things with a cue ball that to the untrained eye, you have no idea. You just think, oh, they're just hitting balls. If you play, you're like, oh my God, the way they caress the cue ball. To come back to that position to make the next pot look easy is a thing of beauty. So a lot to unpack there. But I think when you came in, you said there were things you wanted to talk to me about about snooker and hobbies and what's so great about them.
- [91:34]
B
I think that story encapsulates so much about why I think games are so important to think about and understand and to cherish. And I think there's two levels in which games and your relationship to snooker for me are, are kind of the opposite of the metrics, despair that we've been talking about. So a lot of this came from me. So the book that you read is my second book, it's also my first popular book. My first book was an academic book about the nature of games and trying to understand what made games valuable. So actually the first book I wrote basically out of irritation, like that was my starting motive. I played games my entire life, sports, video games. And I had been teaching a course about philosophy of art and I wanted to do a case study about whether video games were art. So I read a bunch of things with my students and I got really frustrated because all of these people tried to defend video games by pointing out how they were like movies. Like, they had cool cut scenes, they had good graphics, they had good dialogue. And I was angry because I thought it left out the thing that was most important to me about games, which was like the action part, the part where you exercise skill and we're lost in your skill or absorbed in both, just pure skill or absorbed in interesting decisions or ecstatically rich choice spaces or just being hyper creative. I think one of the most interesting parts of games is indie tabletop role playing. And in there the rules get players to be emergently creative together and invent stories together. And I love all this stuff and it was missing, so I was trying to figure it out and I got. I mean the. It's funny because I feel like I'm telling everything in the reverse order from how it originally happened. There's this moment where I found this game designer I love, Rainer Knittia. He's a European board game designer. And he said in a lecture at the game developer conference, the most important thing in my game design toolbox is the scoring system because it tells the players what to care about, it sets their desires in the game. And I was so struck by this. What I ended up thinking was what a game does is it specifies desires and then it specifies limitations and abilities. It says, use this cue ball. You can't move the cue ball around with your hand. You got to use the stick, right? You can't move the ball with your hands and stalk it. You got to kick it, right? It does these things and then by doing so, it plunges you into a very specific kind of activity. It plunges you into the hyper calculating like little tiny deflections of movement. Or hyper calculating exactly what toe angle we'll be able to use a rock climbing hold. Or hyper calculating 15 moves ahead. In chess about like what all the possible logical moves and logical spaces.
- [94:48]
A
You need the rules to. You need the obstacles to inspire the creativity, don't you? Without the rules, it just wouldn't work.
- [94:58]
B
The definition. So Bernard Suits is a philosopher that has been one of the big inspirations for me. And he has this definition of games that I find incredibly useful. He says to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. And what this, I mean, that is brilliant, isn't it?
- [95:21]
A
You're creating obstacles so that you can experience the process of overcoming them and you know. Cause you don't need the obstacle, do you? Like, I think the example in the book is the marathon. You're like, you know, what is a road marathon? It's like, well, it's not the fastest place from A to B because you. Right, you wouldn't do it that way. But that only counts if you do it the way in which it's described by the organizers.
- [95:44]
B
Suits says. I mean, marathons are a great example. Suits says that. You can see from the structure. I mean, again, it's one of these things that's so obvious, it's just lurking under the surface. When you run a marathon, that's not the most efficient way to get to that point in space. Not only you're supposed to run, you're not supposed to take a taxi and you have to follow this course. You can't take the most direct route. A lot of the times the finish line and the start line are like two feet apart. You could have gotten there much faster. And what that teaches us, I mean, one way to put it, is that Suits is saying is that games are inefficiencies on purpose. We're limiting ourselves and we're taking the most efficient way to do things out of the picture. And then we're trying to be efficient within an unnecessary efficiency, which means that it must be that what we care about is not the outcome on its own. We care about doing it a particular way. So games exemplify, I mean, we all know the motto, the journey is the destination, process over outcome. Games rub that in our face. What they force us to admit is that the thing that's valuable is a process of doing, of choosing, of acting, of being skillful, of goofing off, that it's in the process. And I think this is the first thing to say is I think the world of metrics ignores processes because those are very hard to count. The beauty of the process is very hard to count. And the world of metrics is very good at picking up outcomes and products because those are easy to count. And games are this weird, beautiful paradox on the outside because in games we use hyper clear scoring systems to get at a very unclear, hard to measure, subtle ineffable thing, which is the beauty of doing.
- [97:36]
A
Yeah, the difference between goal and a purpose.
- [97:38]
B
Yeah, yeah. A lot of this I learned from a mentor of mine who casually commented one day, Barbara Herman professor she casually commented one day that we all had to remember the difference between a goal and a purpose. And I was like, what's that? And she said, well, if you have your friends over for cards, the goal is to win and the purpose is to have fun. And I was just like, oh my God, of course. Right. Like a lot of the times we have this goal and we pursue it intensely and you can't get the purpose without the goal. You can't have fun just by trying to have fun. You have fun by trying to win, but what you actually care about is not the goal. So the name I have for this in the philosophy of game stuff is I call it striving play.
- [98:23]
A
Yeah.
- [98:23]
B
Achievement play is where you try to win because you care about winning. And striving play is where you try to win just to have the process, but you need to try. So one way to put it is in normal life we take the means for the sake of the ends, and in striving play, we take the ends for the sake of the means.
- [98:43]
A
There's a couple of great examples in the book of this where I think it's your friend's 10 year old son, he's playing monopoly with his dad, your mate and your friend, the dad thought, oh yeah, I've lost, you know, but he was almost on the verge of losing for hours. Cause every time his son would distract him and just sneak a bit of money into his pile because he wanted, he didn't want the game to end, he wanted it to continue. And then the other example, which you know, we played a lot of chess as a family, although we haven't played as much recently. So this is a good reminder to get back into it. You say in chess that you want a long, intense game, but you only get there by trying to win as quickly as possible. I thought that's true whenever I'm playing with my kids. And if it is like this 45, 50 minute game, it's great. But you don't get that by trying to make it a 45, 50 minute game. You only get that by trying to win.
- [99:41]
B
Yeah, the most delicious thing, and I love that the most delicious thing in chess is a long drawn out struggle that's intense and perfect. But you only get that if both of you are trying to win as quickly as possible. There's a concept behind here That I think you would love the concept of a self effacing end. It's one of the deepest things I've learned from philosophy. So this is an idea from Aristotle. A self effacing end is an end that cannot be pursued directly. It's an end that to get to you have to pursue something else. So he.
- [100:09]
A
Oh, I love that.
- [100:09]
B
Yeah. So his. So I think for me the easiest example is flow state or relaxation. I climb to relax. Here's a thing you cannot do, relax by trying to relax. If you sit there and think relax, you'll fail. So I relax by trying to get to the top of a rock. And the best way to relax is to forget that you're trying to relax and just try to get to the top of the rock. A very clever example from philosophy is another self effacing end is the pleasures of love. It is very pleasurable to be in love with somebody. But you can't love somebody else for your own pleasure. That's not love. You won't get those pleasures. And Aristotle thought that happiness was a self effacing end. He thought you couldn't go out directly chasing happiness. He thought you had to chase scientific discovery, artistic achievement, helping people. That was the way to be happy. That happiness as a kind of goal was too nebulous to.
- [101:06]
A
It's the side effects.
- [101:07]
B
Yeah, it's what you really want, but it's a side effect of some other goal. So games are like a sneaky way to get at self effacing ends. And we kind of know like I can openly say I climb in order to relax, I fish in order to meditate. In general I can say that before I do it. But to get that effect when I'm doing it, I mostly have to forget that. I mostly have to just focus.
- [101:30]
A
Yeah. It gets me to really think about how captured we all are by metrics. And you know, I touched on it already, but sometimes I'll talk about the importance of hobbies and doing things that you love. Right. But what I'll usually say, right. To justify why would a medical doctor be talking to you about doing something that you love? I say that there is research data showing that people who regularly do things that they love are more resilient to stress. I mean, what's wrong with just doing something because you enjoy it? Nothing. But something has happened where I feel the need to say, oh yeah, yeah, but you know what, there are these benefits, right?
- [102:17]
B
Exactly.
- [102:17]
A
Are doing something you enjoy as if the benefit of just feeling good and being immersed in something isn't enough in enough itself.
- [102:23]
B
I mean, this is an Aristotle. How about this? The dumbest, stupidest question is, well, what's happiness for? What do you get out of it? And the answer is no, it's happiness. It's what we want. And I feel like a lot of medical science has become, well, we need to justify happiness because it'll help us make more money. And you're like, no, you've got it the wrong way around. I think, okay, two things that are really important. Bernard Suits at the end of this book, the Grasshopper, he has an argument. His argument is imagine Utopia. Imagine something where we've solved all our practical problems through technology. What would we do in Utopia? We would play games or we would be bored out of our skulls. So it must be that games are the meaning of life. They give this argument and people laugh. But what he's. He's actually Soot was an Aristotle scholar and he's just representing the Aristotelian idea that the meaning of life comes in human activity, not in human outcomes. That the meaning of life lies in exercising capacities, doing things, doing things interestingly. And that outcomes are just the thing that either helps us, focus us so that we can have these capacities, or they're the kind of instrumental background resources we need to support us so we can get to the doing. Right. So I mean, I think Suits thinks that games just make that clear and obvious. But I think there's something else that's really interesting. What you said, I totally see there's a philosophical position from which doctors should not really talk about what's meaningful. They should just talk about these affairs of health. And so there's a part in. I hang out with a lot of medical ethicists and one of the things they say is the problem has been when medicine tells people what the meaning or value of life is, that should be up to the person. That should be an autonomous decision for the person. Medicine, objective medicine, should stand back and just tell people about what will help you survive so that you can make your own choices about what's meaningful. So that makes perfect sense to me once again, so long as we accept that health here is a resource that's useful on the way to the other thing that's meaningful. But then what it looks like is because of the value capture, we've forgotten about the meaning part because it's so variable and subtle and we've just hyper focused on what are supposed to be the instrumental resources. Money is useful to do other stuff. Health is useful to do other stuff. Because some aspects of that are highly countable. We've forgotten that it was supposed to be on the way to something else and taken it as the end to itself. Just because it's so easy to publicly count.
- [105:09]
A
Yeah. I have realized over the last few years that one of the things I care the most about for myself and for the world is kindness. And I articulated this publicly last summer at the end of my Sydney show when someone asked me, if you could prescribe one pill to everyone on the planet, what would it be? And I thought about it and I said it would be a compassion pill. And I explained why. And one of the things I said was that on the face of. Seems as though what I do with this podcast or with my books or with my live talks or whatever it might be is that on the face, it seems that what I'm about is health and happiness. And it is, but I don't think it's necessarily for health and happiness as the end goal. I'm like, why does it matter that you're healthy? Right. Well, a. It's up to you to decide if it does matter to you. But I think if you're healthier and happier, you're more likely to be a kind, compassionate human being. Like, I really do believe that. I think a lot of the time when people don't behave well with other people or they're reactive or they're fighting people online, it's cause they're triggered, they're stressed, they're busy, they don't feel good in themselves, and therefore that permeates to the people around them. So I actually believe that. I think what this show is about really is about trying to create a more compassionate world. Because when you understand yourself better, when you do the things that are going to give you energy and vitality, I think most people, maybe not everyone, but most people are going to behave in a much more compassionate way. You're itching to say stuff. Yeah. So, you know, feel free.
- [107:13]
B
Okay. Okay. We're both experts of a sort. You're an expert in health, I'm an expert in philosophy to the extent that matters to anyone. And I think when people look to us, they want certain kinds of advice about what to do and what they're looking for us. And what it seems we might want to provide is a definitive answer of what meaning is or what it's for, what happiness is, what health is, what the meaning of life is. And maybe what we should do is refrain. Because, I mean, I think this is close to what you were saying before. Sometimes I think the real. I don't have a good argument for this, but what my gut cries out to say is the real problem of metrics as values is they're dead. They can't change. They're prefixed. Their stability and rigidity is one of the core problems. And maybe what it is to be alive, being a fully alive being, is you're constantly renegotiating what's valuable and meaningful for you. You're constantly alive to questioning the terms and resetting them. And maybe what we should not do here is say, here's the meaning of life. Be compassionate. Here's the meaning of like. Instead, what we should try to be is midwives to the process. Right? Like to set. I mean, I think about this a lot in my classroom. I think there's. One conception of what I'm trying to do is I'm going to teach you philosophy, I'm going to teach you correct answers, and another conception of what you're doing. And this was. This is actually. I'm stealing this, by the way, from Socrates. Socrates thought he was a mid. He actually used the term I'm a midwife to other people's ideas and conceptions. What you can think of yourself as doing is being like, oh, no. I want you to be constantly alive and renegotiating and thinking and changing your mind. And I want to trigger that process. So maybe one thing we can do is refuse to give the answer of what it's for.
- [109:20]
A
But I would say that's what this show has always done. Right? I never have told anyone what to do on this show, ever. In fact, I won't give people prescriptive advice. What I think this podcast is about is sharing ideas. And if someone listening to it thinks that might be useful for me and chooses to then bring it into their life, great. But I'm not trying to tell you what to do. That's up to you. You're an autonomous individual who's got every right to live life in the way that you want to, as long as you're not harming other people. Right? And when I say that my goal is to try and create, or do my small part to help create a more compassionate world, that's purely coming from me. I'm not putting that on someone else. That they may listen to this conversation because they want to understand the world better, they may listen to this podcast because they want to lose weight. They can take from these conversations what they will. I can also go in with my intention, and I think both things can be True.
- [110:23]
B
Okay.
- [110:23]
A
Do you see what I'm saying?
- [110:24]
B
Yeah. Can I try? I think what you're doing is incredibly interesting and radical. And I think. Let me try to describe my understanding of what your understanding of what you're doing is in philosophy terms, it's kind of close to a journey I've been through. So I spent a lot of time intellectually worried about authoritarianism, worried about dictating people, worried about people's loss of autonomy, and I'll teach this stuff in the classroom. And then I realized that I'd grown up in a style of teaching philosophy that was deeply hypocritical, because I was doing that by telling my students exactly what to think and giving them a clear grading system that told them exactly how they were supposed to learn. And I was dictating to them about the importance of not being a dictator. And that's hypocritical. And I think one thing you might think is the goal of medicine. I sound like this is so Aristotelian. The goal of medicine is to help people become better people and more fully people. And if you do that by presenting yourself as an expert and telling people to stop thinking about what they want out of life and simply to obey the clear measures of what health is, then you've undercut the process because you're undercutting their autonomy. And so I think it sounds to me like what you're aiming for is a kind of richer medical practice that tends to a healthy and free person. And part of that is about refraining from dictating specifics. And I see part of that's part of the relationship to metrics, because I think both of us are worried that metrics are a form of dictating value and procedure. And so there's something deeply paradoxical about trying to tend to people's like, alive well being by trying to kill the aliveness of the relationship to their lives.
- [112:09]
A
I really like the way you've articulated that. One thing I've never done in my career as a doctor is tell a patient that they must give up smoking.
- [112:19]
B
Right? Yep.
- [112:22]
A
What I have done on numerous occasions is if a patient came in to see me and ask my opinion, I would tell them what I thought smoking was doing to them and the impact it was having on their health. If at the end of that conversation I was confident that that patient fully understood what I said. And they then said, hey, doc, I've heard you. I get it, I understand the risks. But I get so much enjoyment out of smoking that I'm prepared To put up with those risks, I'll be like, okay, I never thought my role as a doctor was to go, no, no, no. You know, it's not. You. You must do this. Right? And actually, I would argue that. Not that this was the goal, but I would. I can think of many occasions where that same person, because I didn't try and tell them what to do, they'd often come back a few months later, go, hey, doc, you know what? A few months ago, we had that chat about smoking. I actually think I'm ready to start reducing or trying to quit. Can you help me? And again, my reasoning behind that is I don't think any human being wants to be told what to do by anyone else, right? So if I can treat that patient with respect and give them autonomy and respect their autonomy, go. Okay, fine. You know, who am I to say that you should care? It's like your brie example, right? A doctor might go to you and say, hey, listen, I've done your blood tests. You need to stop eating brie, because I think it's gonna shorten your life, right? T may think I don't care. I don't feel my life would be worth living if for the next few decades, I can't eat any brie. I don't. You know what I'm. Do you know what I'm trying to get at?
- [114:14]
B
Okay.
- [114:15]
A
I mean, and I definitely want to acknowledge that I feel imposter syndrome. Talking to a philosophy professor about these kind of concepts.
- [114:23]
B
You are at the heart of it. I mean, one general feature of what I'm worried about is that we are trying to help people. And the methods we have of helping people have actually killed the most important thing about peopleness, which is freedom. And I think if you dictate to people endlessly what they're supposed to do in the name of their being better, and they come to have the posture of never thinking for themselves about what matters to them, then you have removed the most important magic ingredient in the name of optimization. I mean, I think this is one of the reasons I care so much about play. I think playfulness is our name for a particular kind of freedom. To be playful. So Maria Lagonda is one of my favorite philosophers, says that to be playful is to be able to move lightly between different rule worlds, to be able to dance between different conceptions of who you are and what you're supposed to be. I think one of the things I've come to believe the most deeply while writing this was the reason I love games Is that games are an encapsulation of something I really care about, which is how we can help each other to be free. Because games are a system where people make them and write them and give them to each other, but give them each other in a system that encourages people to move between them and discover what they want. Games are freeing because they let you play around with meaning making. And I think metrics, in the way that we are presented with them in institutions are anti free because they're presented as authoritative. They're presented as authoritative renditions of value. I think metrics are a way that we have. What's actually going on with metrics is a social system in which distant forces tell people what's meaningful and what they should pursue rather than giving them the structure that encourages them to figure out what matters to them. And I think games are one way to give that structure. And the thing you're describing sounds like you're reaching for a form of relating to patience that also is structurally designed to lift up their capacity to think for themselves and be free rather than to undermine it.
- [116:57]
A
Yeah. Who am I to say to another human being what they should care about? It's not my role. Whether I'm their doctor or not, it's not my role. You care about what you want to care about, but the question is, do you know what you care about? Right. Or is what you care about, has that been shaped by external metrics, that is by somebody else? There are a couple of things I wanted to. I mean, I could talk to you for hours. Honestly, the book is so freaking good. And it's, it's so. It will really have people thinking about their own lives, how they make decisions, where the, where their preferences and values have even come from in the first place. Earlier you were talking about games and these, these voluntary obstacles we put up in games so we can enjoy the process of overcoming them.
- [117:53]
B
Yeah.
- [117:53]
A
And we think about how that works in games, but perhaps it doesn't apply to wider life. But it could do. I think about the Jewish Sabbath, right? And I think about what a beautiful restriction that they're putting on their seven day week that then gives so much value, right? So by. On that seventh day between Friday sunset and Saturday evening, there are certain rules, you know, depending on how strictly, you know, you follow Judaism. Certain things that you can't do. You can't go in a car, you can't use a phone, you, you know, whatever it might be. And so the rule, the restriction for many families leads to real community bonding. A sacred Space once a week where they connect and they cook together and they play games together, right? But you need the kind of artificial restriction there to get the benefits. Whereas when we don't have that, we're free to do whatever we want seven days a week. But that freedom, the problem is, is that every day bleeds into another one, you know? So when I was a kid, probably the same as you with the same age, I remember the shops were closed on Sundays. You couldn't shop on Sundays, right? You had to plan beforehand, and Sundays were a family day and you would, I don't know, hang out with the family and dad would be doing the ironing and you might watch Formula one races together in the afternoon or whatever. Whereas today, in the capitalist culture that we live in, Sunday's no different from Monday, right? You can shop on Monday, you can go to. You can do what you want, you can email, you could do all those things, right? So there's something quite beautiful, I think, about games and these artificial restrictions that create the joy that we can apply to life. That was one thing I just wanted to comment on. And the other thing I really want to touch on if. If we can, maybe we can't go into mechanical values in detail, right? But in that chapter on mechanical values, you basically say that the more explicit and mechanical we make our goals and values, the easier it will be to coordinate. So it's the thing we've already touched on, that these values and metrics
- [120:20]
B
are
- [120:20]
A
great at coordinating with other people and communicating what we're doing to people, but we lose nuance when we do it. And you say there are three types of mechanical values, principles, models and algorithms. Let's forget models for the moment. But I really like this idea of comparing principles to algorithms. And I wonder if we can talk about it through the lens of cooking. And you basically talk about this idea that old school cookbooks are made up of principles, new school ones are more based on algorithms. I think it's such a beautiful analogy and I wonder if we could just talk about it.
- [121:01]
B
Yeah, let me go back and talk about what you just said at the top of that. And then I want to talk about mechanical values because you did something really wonderful. I think about constraints and I think games really teach us something incredible constraints. And it's why I care about them so much. You know, when I was starting to write about games, there's a common pushback where a lot of people think like, oh, games are just fake play, right? Because real play is totally free. It's totally unconstrained it's totally creative. Games just destroy that. They're like. They're prisons that pretend to be play. I don't think that's true. I think that when you're totally unrestricted, I mean, there's a reason why a lot of people think obstructions are good in creativity, why forms are good in poetry. And I was trying to understand this, and the best explanation I got from a yoga teacher, she said that when you let people be totally free, when you're not strict with your yoga poses, people just tend to repeat their bodily habits. And the strictness of yoga was a conduit to freedom because it forced you out of your habits and the strictness put you into a new posture and then you could reintegrate that. Right. So, I mean, one of my weirdest claims in my first book is that games are yoga for your soul because they force you into different postures of caring about things and different practical postures about the world. But they're freeing only if they're temporary. If you're not stuck like that, Yoga would not be freeing if you're in triangle pose forever. And a metric is not freeing if you have to care that way forever. Games are freeing precisely because they're strict, but temporary. And the reason I think they're so interesting is that games are constraints used for the sake of freedom, because we use them to move around, but because they're in a larger setting where we're not stuck in them, where they're temporary, then we can move past them. And that, I think, is the weird beauty of games. Okay, that was the first thing I would say. Mechanical values. So this is. I mean, I was. So. I will tell you, I was stuck on this book. There was a big chunk of time where I just could not explain what I thought was a central feature that I was looking at in metrics. And then I read this book by Lorraine Daston, who's a historian of science and one of the greatest thinkers alive. She has an earlier book you would love, in which she talks about how the idea of objectivity changes over time and how it mechanizes over time. Her new book, rules, is about different conceptions of rules. And she says there's this new conception that has come to become dominant in the culture. And that conception is of rules as hyper mechanical and hyper algorithmic. But she says that's actually really recent. An older dominant conception of a rule is what she calls a rule as a principle. So a principle is an abstract generalization that admits of exceptions. But you can't list all the exceptions. So my favorite example is one I learned from Creative Writing Workshop. Show, don't tell. Good general principle for writing. But people break it. Tolstoy broke it. You know, like all happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way. That's telling, not showing. But what Dassen says is the way that a principle works is when you understand the unstated heart of the idea which lies behind the rule, you'll know when to break it. And the core thought there is what a rule is how we life is so complicated that no explicit rule will ever capture everything. It can only point us in the general direction. And once we get onto the real idea that it's unstateable but true, we know when to break the rule, right? The rule is a pointer and not the full thing. Cue the old thought, when a finger is pointing to the moon, look at the moon, not the finger. The rule is the finger pointing to the deep thing behind it. So Daston says, but there's a newer conception of rule, which he calls an algorithmic rule. And an algorithmic rule is a rule that's designed to be followed exactly as written explicitly, with no exceptions, automatically. And then she says, I think the most interesting thing I've read in like 10 or 15 years. She says, people think that algorithmic rules arise with computing machines, but they actually arose about 100 years earlier in an attempt to cheapen labor by reducing large institutions dependence on particular experts with particular long backgrounds and sensitivities and being able to replace them with anybody. So one of the major examples of this for her, she says, in old school cooking. If you look at old school cookbooks, they actually don't look like what we're used to. They say things like, add enough flour and water until the dough feels nice and bubbly, and then knead it till it's stretchy, and then bake it until it makes a nice ringing sound when knocked. And you know what modern cookbooks are like. They say like two cups of flour, one cup of water, bake for 450 degrees. Hopefully it's clear that the first kind of recipe is a set of principles. It's a rough set of guidelines that point you in the direction and cue a kind of sensitive, responsive judgment. The new kind of recipe is a set of algorithms, and it can be applied. It's hyper accessible, but very inflexible and very insensitive because it's been written to be usable by everybody. And I think what Dastin teaches us is that A lot of the landscape we're looking for has been made to make people replaceable. Right. The driving force is the desire for workers to be fungible. So if McDonald's, if your restaurant has a cook that has a long cultivated sensibility and that cook wants to leave, it's really hard to replace them. If McDonald's has written a set of rules that are very precise and engineered the inputs such that those work, then they can fire anyone and replace them instantly. And one way to put it is that I think that metrics are algorithmic recipes for values. What they've done is change what we value away from something that requires sensitivity and context and replace it with something that anyone can track. And then if we fire that person and replace them on another, the tracking will continue uninterrupted and unchanged.
- [127:37]
A
Yeah, I love it. I love that comparison between old school cookbooks and new school cookbooks. And as you say in the book, it's not as if the new school cookbook is wrong and actually can be very useful. A bit like your rock climbing analogy, right, to get you started, right?
- [127:55]
B
I think that's exactly right.
- [127:56]
A
You get started, you learn how to cook from it, but then realize, well, when can you break these rules? You know, what happens when you're staying at an Airbnb with your mates and actually, you know, all the ingredients that you use at home are not available, or the oven is different and goes to a different temperature? Can you adapt? Well, clearly a very good chef will be able to adapt. Someone who's rigid to the rules is going to suddenly struggle. And why I wanted to talk about this is because principles is what I think a lot about in health. I think where we go wrong in health or where some people go wrong is where we too rigidly stick to rules. Rules can be helpful. A dietary prescription by some expert can be useful to get you started. But at some point, you gotta then start asking yourself, is this the right approach for me? Does this fit with my cultural values? Can I eat in this way? Would I be happy eating in this way for the next 10 years? Or whatever it might be? And I've always taught my patients principles as opposed to harsh rules, because once you understand the principle, you start to gain a degree of self mastery, you know, oh, you know, I can tweak this here, you know, And I think, for me, I think that's the ideal state to get to, is when you understand the core principles but know how to tweak them for yourself. And you know, the stuff with algorithms as a Sort of modern, mechanical value is something I think about a lot. You know, it is very common these days for podcasters to choose guests according to algorithms, right? YouTube is the prime platform for this, where there are certain guests that will perform on the YouTube algorithm, and a lot of podcast hosts know which those guests are, so we'll choose them. And I'm not judging anyone for doing that, just to be clear. But as your subtitle is, right, how to stop playing someone Else's game, right? The question you gotta ask yourself is, is that the game you want to play? Right? Because you could, for example, keep choosing guests that are going to blow up on the algorithm. So you win at the algorithmic game, you win at the game of views, but you may end up with a show that you hate, right? And I actually know full well that that is happening to certain people. Whereas I hope, by and large, what I try and do on this show is that I literally have one metric that determines if I invite a guest onto the show or not. And it's simply, am I really interested in this human being and do I want to spend two hours with them trying to explore their ideas? If the answer is yes, irrespective of an algorithm, I will invite them onto the show. If the answer is no, doesn't matter how good the press release is, how good I think the topic might be, I'm like, you know, I just don't think I'm gonna vibe with this person. I'm just not sure I'm interested. So it's curiosity that determines the guest choice. And I think long term, for me personally, I can't speak for anyone else. You know, eight years on from starting this show, I still love it more than ever. I feel like the luckiest guy on the planet that I get to invite people on. And because the show has such a big reach, they come to my studio, sit with me, and we get to explore ideas together. I'm like, how lucky am I that I get to do this job? But I believe that would change if I started to choose guests based on algorithms. And I really think that speaks to really one of the main themes in the score, which is, as you say, how to stop playing someone else's game. So the converse is, how do you start playing your own game? I kind of feel that's what the book is really teaching us through. You explore it through a variety of different ways, but ultimately, I think the book is a philosophy on how we can live an intentional life that we design for ourself.
- [132:23]
B
Yes, exactly. 100%.
- [132:29]
A
Final question t. For someone who's listening to this conversation right now and who thinks games are a waste of time, what would you say to them?
- [132:53]
B
What is your time for? Right. Like if a game has taken you to a point. I mean, I think not every game is for every person, but the magic of games is not just that they are these design processes, but that we get to dance and move between them, that we get to find. Like you said, snooker is for you. Rock climbing and fly fishing and weird role playing games are for me. And games have this magical opportunity. Games give us this magical opportunity for us to explore different facets of ourselves as acting, thinking, feeling, sensing beings and then find the one that is the most beautiful for us. I don't know a better description of what it is to be alive.
- [134:05]
A
Yeah. What is your time really for? I think that's a great question to finish this conversation on. See, I think the new book, the Score how to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game is a literal masterpiece. It is so good, I hope everyone goes out and gets a copy. I think once you read it, you will start to think about your life in a very different way. And ultimately, as I say, it's gonna help you live a more intentional life. Thank you for taking the time to write it, thank you for coming up to the studio and I hope to see you again soon. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free@drchatterjee.com now if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world covering all kinds of different topics. Happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the Episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.