C. Thi Nguyen

speaker

3,183 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 7 Jul

C. Thi Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Two Percent with Michael Easter · #25: Why Numbers, Scores, and Metrics Make Life Worse | Thi Nguyen · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

and bmi and nutrition and doing well in her sport and just spiraling into misery and what she said she realized was she was stuck in bad games that she hadn't known were bad games and she hadn't realized she had a choice over

And so she said she programmed her phone.

I mean, she just changed the back screen, the background on her phone to always show her the same question, which is, is this the game you really want to be playing?

And I think that encapsulates the thing, this frame switch that I'm trying to think about, which is to treat these things the world is shoving at you.

Sometimes you can't

escape them entirely.

Like a student can't escape what GPA means to the rest of the world.

Right.

But there's still a huge amount of difference between being like, well, these grades are something the rest of the world cares about, but I have my own reasons for education.

I'm going to pursue it in my way versus all I'm just going to do is optimize for grades.

All I'm just going to do is optimize for, right?

BMI, likes, whatever.

Yeah, and I think, and the whole point is,

This is what Porter taught me, the portability theory of quantification, right?

That it's no accident that these numbers are what everyone will instantly recognize as success because that's what they're made to be.

They're made to be instantly accessible, instantly transportable, instantly comprehensible success measures.

I mean, one of, okay, this is definitely something I found out after the last time I talked to you.

I was telling some of this stuff to a political philosopher.

He was like, oh yeah, Hobbes thought a lot about this.

And then he told me something that blew my mind.

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