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 · last 12 months

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

Appearances

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Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee · How To Live An Intentional Life with Professor C Thi Nguyen #670 · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

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 awards to follow some kind of hypersimplified 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.

Do you know what I mean?

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 time 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 uh i started realizing this so the first book i wrote about games i had this assumption um

And that assumption was that every game had a scoring system.

I got there because I think, so I love a lot of games, but I particularly love board games.

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