C. Thi Nguyen

So if you set up... I mean, the bureaucratic institutional world is so good at optimizing for anything you can measure.

And what I'm just trying to point out is that there's a cost and it's not that we should give up on institutions.

I mean, I...

Without large scale bureaucracy and large scale data collection, I would have died at age 11, right?

I'm an asthmatic with poor health.

Like I would be dead 40 times over without this stuff.

So I'm not saying go back.

I am saying, I mean, you picked up exactly what I'm saying.

I'm saying that the vast power of scale also comes with this

the seductive call to forget that there's anything else outside of what the institution can measure.

And I'm just trying to say like, no, there's a trade-off.

Know that there's other stuff that you've forgotten and know that sometimes it's okay to detach yourself.

And there's gotta be, what I'm hoping for is some middle ground where it can be like, yes to science, yes to increased GDP, maybe not yes to like defining our entire lives only in terms of our net worth.

Why?

Why two endings?

I mean, I'll give you a simple version.

There are times when I look at this and I'm like, this is shit.

This is terrible.

This is so depressing.

The world is so efficient in squeezing out everything good and human.