I really enjoyed this episode of the podcast and it is my favorite so far this year.
However, it seems like this Substack is becoming repetitive in that what is on the podcast is then put as a transcript in the newsletter. Unfortunately for me, this is not what I am looking for— the original essays seem to have all but disappeared and those were really what I had subscribed for. If those are gone, I guess I might be following them.
I agree, and I might offer the following suggestion to Derek. Use the Substack to write a reflection on the conversation in the podcast. That way the Substack can have "new" content while still building off the excellent topic selection of the podcast.
I am also unlikely to stay subscribed to a substack that is just a transcript of a podcast.
1. Loved the episode of the podcast. Feels like it aligns quite closely with the Oliver Burkeman episodes, and those books have been revelations to me.
2. There are times, not just on this episode, or this topic, or whatever that I feel like I’m listening to really smart, caring people talk about encountering the real world that so many people live in and are ground down by, but they don’t have the language to express it.
Anyone that has worked in sales or at a call center or Target, or any midlevel marketing scheme knows that “metrics” come in from far away places and that inevitably those metrics become more important to the process than delivering the goals that should be in place - like good customer service.
Metrics are terribly important but they are almost always the moment in which the purpose is lost and the goal - the immediate outcome - becomes dominant over the purpose.
3. I believe that most of this discussion highlights what I believe is the main problem in the world of 2026 - that we have a valuation crisis.
People get distracted and think we have an “affordability” crisis. But below the level of affordability is valuation, and our tendency to misunderstand exactly how value is stored and passed on.
The issue is that we have created a world in which the goal is always creating money and there is no purpose. The “purpose” of productivity is… it’s the sustainability of human life. I’m open to other alternatives but, to me, it seems like the reason we care about productivity is because, just like poverty, it gives us insight into how people are doing.
So the purpose of “productivity” is sustaining human life; the “purpose” of measuring “poverty” is to make sure that “productivity” is being used efficiently and ethically to sustain human life. And the goal of generating value is to minimize poverty; but that goal overwhelms everything and we generate money without any purpose. The purpose and the goal become disconnected.
Which is what happens every single day in every single call center in America when some person with wealth (which is seen as prestige) creates a new metric that will surely turn things around - not to fulfill our purpose (enabling human life and doing so ethically) but to reach our goal - making money.
3. People who have always lived with “money” - in a sense, those who have never had to worry about the foundational questions of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - are only now being subjected to the “tyranny of metrics” (another great book!) that many, many people have been living with for centuries. The amazing part is that many of those people are CHOOSING to live with that tyranny - as mentioned in the episode! If the purpose of social media is to increase your connections to people in your life, how does measuring any of that indicate how you feel? Of course it doesn’t, and the conversation touches on this in this episode.
4. “Abundance” and “Stuck” (good books I read last year, even when I disagree with them) are both missing the “purpose” and the “goal” argument. People don’t move as much now because their needs are met where they are and because the value of the crap they have in their garage is valued by individual’s as greater than the cost of dealing with the crap + the unknown of moving. (The unknowns of moving relate to productivity, social interaction, sunk costs of leaving a place, etc.)
It was easier to move in the 19th century because you didn’t assume your neighbors would even be alive. You didn’t have a 66” TV that might break. You didn’t have your basic physical needs met in such a way that the risk of NOT LEAVING made sense.
And I agree that we need more affordable housing. I agree that we need to understand how new technology works and to use it on a planet-wide level. Why are we not doing that? My answer would be that it’s no one’s goal. Because everyone’s goal is preserving value, preserving the status quo TO MAKE MONEY.
And finally: the status quo isn’t horrible. The status quo has produced a world in which there are now 8 billion people living on this planet. My fear is that the disruption ethic spreading through the tech world and the rise of right-wing populism is a rejection of the idea that there should be 8 billion people on the planet. What if that impacts… the “future!”?
Assuming we know that answer means saying we know which of those 8 billion are going to be the keys to changing the future. I know that I do not know in the slightest who is going to change the world. I’m afraid that some are willing to sacrifice others on a large scale for probabilistic reasoning; but the fact that we even exist should be a rejection of that argument.
Our goal - making money - has overwhelmed our purpose - maintaining human life. How can we do more for our purpose today?
And to be the guy, today, that responds to his own comment:
This conversation is a great example of why we cannot sacrifice our purpose of providing a better world for our goal of winning elections. Because inevitably when those two things are separated, the goal will always win out over the purpose.
We can think about that as we consider the Kansas law on transgender drivers licenses while also remembering how we held Kansas up when they rejected an abortion law in 2022.
We cannot protect anyone without purpose. This is always where Nietzche fails; not because we shouldn’t be more original but because we must have a system in which everyone gets to be an individual. There must be some sort of shared purpose with individual goals.
Thank you for this transcript. A fascinating dialogue, and one which made me more confident in my view that one of the most significant blind spots in our society today is the hold metrics have on our day-to-day lives.
There are two points I wanted to add into this conversation, as this is one that will likely extend into the upcoming decade:
1. In addition to your HRV anecdote, there are other similar examples where the conflict between a metric and a goal isn't nearly as obvious. Take sleep. I'm one of the biggest proponents of getting a good night's sleep, and struggle to function with anything less than 7 hours. That has meant I have often made the (unconscious) decision in the past to leave events early, or not even go to them, because of the impact it can have on my health. This is undoubtedly true for maximising sleep and health! But it obscures all the potential social experiences you could have gained, friendships gained or strengthened, that aren't as neatly trackable, and that may well be worth the sacrifice in sleep. Such a decision is both living through metrics, but importantly, is also the misguided assumption that we can neatly isolate different domains of our life, such as one (sleep/health) does not really impact the other (social/fun).
2. C. Thi Nguyen talks about value capturing being the big idea. It is not just that value capture takes over, but that value capture itself becomes a proxy for the actual thing. For example, heart rate is a proxy for health, Snapchat streaks a proxy of friendship, books read a proxy of our knowledge. We all know deep down that our lives are much too complicated to simplify into a series of numbers, yet we do so because not only is it easy, but perhaps convenient to create a sense of our identity.
Separately, this year I'm attempting to remove as much digital tracking as possible in my personal life (except for book tracking on Goodreads, sorry!) and trying to do things for the sake of doing them rather than to make number go up. It's a fun little project that I would recommend anyone try, even for a few weeks, to see how it feels and whether your relationship with numbers change at the end of the day.
Game design is itself a microcosm of what you're discussing here. Designers need to deal with a paradox of player behavior: players will tend to focus on strategies that make them win, not on strategies that make them have fun. But then they'll judge the game based on how much fun they had.
This is a problem if your scoring system doesn't line up well with what's actually enjoyable about the game. Often games will push players in a direction that they don't particularly enjoy and they'll end up disliking the game, even if they would have had a great time if they'd been playing it a bit differently. So one of the designer's job is to tweak the scoring and incentive systems so that they guide players into having fun, since most players won't actually search for fun themselves.
Zooming out, we're all essentially the game designers for our own lives. Life has a broader purpose than just having fun, but the structure is the same. So we have to carefully set our incentives such that following those incentives actually leads to fulfillment. And metrics are both one of the most useful and one of the most dangerous ways to create incentives.
For years I maintained a daily log — initially to track headache occurrence — that ballooned into an attempt to objectively measure if I had a “good day.” Did I get my steps? Did I my calorie goal? Did I avoid caffeine? Did I write? Did I talk to a friend? The data indicated I had a fairly negative life in the metrics.
In 2024, I stopped keeping the log and I feel way happier. Maybe i was always happy and the metrics told a false story. I appreciated this conversation.
Also Nguyen’s book on Games as an Art is an AWESOME book if you like philosophy and gaming. It was wonderful to read something really engaged with the medium on a higher level.
I happened to read James C Scott's "Three Cheers for Anarchy" a few months ago, and it included a similar criticism of metrics (in the book's case, devoted mostly to citation counts for evaluating academics). It made some of the points that came up in this transcript: metrics that have rewards at the end of them will guide people's behavior, and they may end up incentivizing unintended behavior in a way that makes both the institution and its participants worse off.
But I think it's good to keep in mind what metrics replace. It's often some form of idiosyncratic human judgment with its own flaws, biases, and (maybe most importantly), opacity. There may be beautiful and humane aspects to that idiosyncracy, but it does introduce its own unfairness. Is it better to have your application rejected because you didn't meet some transparent metric, or because a stranger didn't like you?
Also it is why I got rid of my Iwatch, I hated the damn thing after awhile, I hated being monitored and paying attention to the monitoring and trying to achieve more with the activities I just wanted to enjoy.
I really enjoyed this episode of the podcast and it is my favorite so far this year.
However, it seems like this Substack is becoming repetitive in that what is on the podcast is then put as a transcript in the newsletter. Unfortunately for me, this is not what I am looking for— the original essays seem to have all but disappeared and those were really what I had subscribed for. If those are gone, I guess I might be following them.
I agree, and I might offer the following suggestion to Derek. Use the Substack to write a reflection on the conversation in the podcast. That way the Substack can have "new" content while still building off the excellent topic selection of the podcast.
I am also unlikely to stay subscribed to a substack that is just a transcript of a podcast.
So many, many thoughts…
1. Loved the episode of the podcast. Feels like it aligns quite closely with the Oliver Burkeman episodes, and those books have been revelations to me.
2. There are times, not just on this episode, or this topic, or whatever that I feel like I’m listening to really smart, caring people talk about encountering the real world that so many people live in and are ground down by, but they don’t have the language to express it.
Anyone that has worked in sales or at a call center or Target, or any midlevel marketing scheme knows that “metrics” come in from far away places and that inevitably those metrics become more important to the process than delivering the goals that should be in place - like good customer service.
Metrics are terribly important but they are almost always the moment in which the purpose is lost and the goal - the immediate outcome - becomes dominant over the purpose.
3. I believe that most of this discussion highlights what I believe is the main problem in the world of 2026 - that we have a valuation crisis.
People get distracted and think we have an “affordability” crisis. But below the level of affordability is valuation, and our tendency to misunderstand exactly how value is stored and passed on.
The issue is that we have created a world in which the goal is always creating money and there is no purpose. The “purpose” of productivity is… it’s the sustainability of human life. I’m open to other alternatives but, to me, it seems like the reason we care about productivity is because, just like poverty, it gives us insight into how people are doing.
So the purpose of “productivity” is sustaining human life; the “purpose” of measuring “poverty” is to make sure that “productivity” is being used efficiently and ethically to sustain human life. And the goal of generating value is to minimize poverty; but that goal overwhelms everything and we generate money without any purpose. The purpose and the goal become disconnected.
Which is what happens every single day in every single call center in America when some person with wealth (which is seen as prestige) creates a new metric that will surely turn things around - not to fulfill our purpose (enabling human life and doing so ethically) but to reach our goal - making money.
3. People who have always lived with “money” - in a sense, those who have never had to worry about the foundational questions of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - are only now being subjected to the “tyranny of metrics” (another great book!) that many, many people have been living with for centuries. The amazing part is that many of those people are CHOOSING to live with that tyranny - as mentioned in the episode! If the purpose of social media is to increase your connections to people in your life, how does measuring any of that indicate how you feel? Of course it doesn’t, and the conversation touches on this in this episode.
4. “Abundance” and “Stuck” (good books I read last year, even when I disagree with them) are both missing the “purpose” and the “goal” argument. People don’t move as much now because their needs are met where they are and because the value of the crap they have in their garage is valued by individual’s as greater than the cost of dealing with the crap + the unknown of moving. (The unknowns of moving relate to productivity, social interaction, sunk costs of leaving a place, etc.)
It was easier to move in the 19th century because you didn’t assume your neighbors would even be alive. You didn’t have a 66” TV that might break. You didn’t have your basic physical needs met in such a way that the risk of NOT LEAVING made sense.
And I agree that we need more affordable housing. I agree that we need to understand how new technology works and to use it on a planet-wide level. Why are we not doing that? My answer would be that it’s no one’s goal. Because everyone’s goal is preserving value, preserving the status quo TO MAKE MONEY.
And finally: the status quo isn’t horrible. The status quo has produced a world in which there are now 8 billion people living on this planet. My fear is that the disruption ethic spreading through the tech world and the rise of right-wing populism is a rejection of the idea that there should be 8 billion people on the planet. What if that impacts… the “future!”?
Assuming we know that answer means saying we know which of those 8 billion are going to be the keys to changing the future. I know that I do not know in the slightest who is going to change the world. I’m afraid that some are willing to sacrifice others on a large scale for probabilistic reasoning; but the fact that we even exist should be a rejection of that argument.
Our goal - making money - has overwhelmed our purpose - maintaining human life. How can we do more for our purpose today?
And to be the guy, today, that responds to his own comment:
This conversation is a great example of why we cannot sacrifice our purpose of providing a better world for our goal of winning elections. Because inevitably when those two things are separated, the goal will always win out over the purpose.
We can think about that as we consider the Kansas law on transgender drivers licenses while also remembering how we held Kansas up when they rejected an abortion law in 2022.
We cannot protect anyone without purpose. This is always where Nietzche fails; not because we shouldn’t be more original but because we must have a system in which everyone gets to be an individual. There must be some sort of shared purpose with individual goals.
Thank you for this transcript. A fascinating dialogue, and one which made me more confident in my view that one of the most significant blind spots in our society today is the hold metrics have on our day-to-day lives.
There are two points I wanted to add into this conversation, as this is one that will likely extend into the upcoming decade:
1. In addition to your HRV anecdote, there are other similar examples where the conflict between a metric and a goal isn't nearly as obvious. Take sleep. I'm one of the biggest proponents of getting a good night's sleep, and struggle to function with anything less than 7 hours. That has meant I have often made the (unconscious) decision in the past to leave events early, or not even go to them, because of the impact it can have on my health. This is undoubtedly true for maximising sleep and health! But it obscures all the potential social experiences you could have gained, friendships gained or strengthened, that aren't as neatly trackable, and that may well be worth the sacrifice in sleep. Such a decision is both living through metrics, but importantly, is also the misguided assumption that we can neatly isolate different domains of our life, such as one (sleep/health) does not really impact the other (social/fun).
2. C. Thi Nguyen talks about value capturing being the big idea. It is not just that value capture takes over, but that value capture itself becomes a proxy for the actual thing. For example, heart rate is a proxy for health, Snapchat streaks a proxy of friendship, books read a proxy of our knowledge. We all know deep down that our lives are much too complicated to simplify into a series of numbers, yet we do so because not only is it easy, but perhaps convenient to create a sense of our identity.
Separately, this year I'm attempting to remove as much digital tracking as possible in my personal life (except for book tracking on Goodreads, sorry!) and trying to do things for the sake of doing them rather than to make number go up. It's a fun little project that I would recommend anyone try, even for a few weeks, to see how it feels and whether your relationship with numbers change at the end of the day.
Game design is itself a microcosm of what you're discussing here. Designers need to deal with a paradox of player behavior: players will tend to focus on strategies that make them win, not on strategies that make them have fun. But then they'll judge the game based on how much fun they had.
This is a problem if your scoring system doesn't line up well with what's actually enjoyable about the game. Often games will push players in a direction that they don't particularly enjoy and they'll end up disliking the game, even if they would have had a great time if they'd been playing it a bit differently. So one of the designer's job is to tweak the scoring and incentive systems so that they guide players into having fun, since most players won't actually search for fun themselves.
Zooming out, we're all essentially the game designers for our own lives. Life has a broader purpose than just having fun, but the structure is the same. So we have to carefully set our incentives such that following those incentives actually leads to fulfillment. And metrics are both one of the most useful and one of the most dangerous ways to create incentives.
For years I maintained a daily log — initially to track headache occurrence — that ballooned into an attempt to objectively measure if I had a “good day.” Did I get my steps? Did I my calorie goal? Did I avoid caffeine? Did I write? Did I talk to a friend? The data indicated I had a fairly negative life in the metrics.
In 2024, I stopped keeping the log and I feel way happier. Maybe i was always happy and the metrics told a false story. I appreciated this conversation.
Also Nguyen’s book on Games as an Art is an AWESOME book if you like philosophy and gaming. It was wonderful to read something really engaged with the medium on a higher level.
I happened to read James C Scott's "Three Cheers for Anarchy" a few months ago, and it included a similar criticism of metrics (in the book's case, devoted mostly to citation counts for evaluating academics). It made some of the points that came up in this transcript: metrics that have rewards at the end of them will guide people's behavior, and they may end up incentivizing unintended behavior in a way that makes both the institution and its participants worse off.
But I think it's good to keep in mind what metrics replace. It's often some form of idiosyncratic human judgment with its own flaws, biases, and (maybe most importantly), opacity. There may be beautiful and humane aspects to that idiosyncracy, but it does introduce its own unfairness. Is it better to have your application rejected because you didn't meet some transparent metric, or because a stranger didn't like you?
This is fascinating. Thank you.
Also it is why I got rid of my Iwatch, I hated the damn thing after awhile, I hated being monitored and paying attention to the monitoring and trying to achieve more with the activities I just wanted to enjoy.