C. Thi Nguyen

And what they revealed was super interesting to me.

So, a lot of pickup artists, it turns out, don't compete for – you know the kinds of things they don't compete for.

They don't compete for good relationships.

We know the kinds of things they compete for.

Most number of numbers in a night.

Most number of sexual encounters in a night.

Fastest speed from meeting someone to sexual encounter.

And one of the things I read about, a sociologist named Eric Hendricks said that one of the things he found when he embedded in pickup artist culture to research them was a common refrain in pickup artist culture was that you had to stop caring about pleasure or happiness because these would just get in the way of scoring higher.

And I had thought that I would find out that pickup artists...

were evil, but at least enjoying themselves.

But it turns out that something much more insane and inhumane has happened, which is cutting out a connection to pleasure and happiness in order to score higher on a meter that's built around public accountability.

Okay, one more story.

One thing I found out about

from a philosopher of food, Megan Dean.

She does a lot of research about the philosophy of, about understanding things like food culture and anorexia.

And she told me about a line of research that showed that a lot of people who are coming back from anorexia, one of the biggest problems was if you tell someone who's been anorexic for a

They can't because they have forgotten how to hear the signal of being full because they've spent so much time oriented towards external calorie counts that they've lost contact with the internal sensation and the information of how satisfied they are or how full they are.

And I think this is my long-winded answer to say part of the thing that you're talking about is the idea that a rich, full value system comes from, in significant part, a dialogue with yourself where a lot of the content of that dialogue is listening to weird, subtle, quiet emotions, signals of boredom or interest and pleasure,

And something happens where we become so fixated on the accessible and clear external signal that we lose contact with a kind of rich emotional feedback system that might have let us steer better for those external measures.

Hello.