Derek Thompson

You can... What do you mean by that?

I mean... For the folks out there who don't know poker.

No, we've not talked about Hobbes, no.

I want to offer what I suspect is a shallow interpretation of what you think people should do with this and with your book, and then I want you to deepen it.

I think there's an easy sort of tweetable summary of what should individuals do that's something like play the games you want to play, be aware of and protective of the games that play you without your permission,

And similarly, with metrics,

It's okay to outsource to metrics that which is inessential to you.

If you go to Wirecutter to look up like what's the best coffee mug that heats itself, that's not exactly like outsourcing your soul to a machine.

That's probably just a good way to get a good coffee mug.

But make sure that you protect from the hegemony of metrics, that which is core to you, to your soul, to your art.

How would you deepen that as a summary of the takeaways for your book?

No, it connects to the thought bubble that I just had, which might be the last and somewhat insane place to take this conversation.

But I'm going to attempt something potentially ruinous here and attempt to talk about philosophy with an actual philosopher because I think only took one philosophy class in his freshman year.

Do you consider yourself a fan of Nietzsche?

All right.

So you don't mention Nietzsche in your book, The Score.

But reading it, I hope you take this the right way, I kind of thought of you as like a kinder, softer, less authoritarian Nietzsche.

Because one thing that Nietzsche did, and from my limited reading of Nietzsche, he did many, many things.

Yeah.

One thing that he did is he rejected the teachings of Judeo-Christianity because he thought it offered a system of values that kept us from our instincts, that essentially it, for example, made us be kind, not for the sake of kindness, but for the sake of getting into heaven.