C. Thi Nguyen

Think about a video game, right?

Like, what are you trying to do with a video?

You're trying to get to the end screen.

How do you know that it's a game, that you're playing it as a game?

Because there are all kinds of ways to get to the end screen that don't involve going through the game.

You could...

You could hack it, right?

You could hack the software.

You could pay somebody else to play the game for you.

Like none of these count because the point, maybe that's an easy example.

The point is to do it yourself.

And I suspect that there are some people for whom

Podcasting is not a game because they would do anything to make the number go up.

And I suspect for you, we could figure out all kinds of things that would count as cheating.

What if I told you that you could get more of an audience by doing an optimized AI simulation of you who would like pander perfectly via focus groups and we'd make your numbers go way up?

Or what if, I don't know, you were...

you wanted your social media account to go higher.

So you bought the social media company and instructed the programmers to, you know, an example out of nowhere, like to like rechange the coding to make your numbers go up, right?

I think if it weren't, right, it doesn't make sense.

If it weren't a game, you would take any means necessary.