Derek Thompson

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.

So independently and authentically, we were all assholes, but we would pretend to kindness for the sake of heaven.

He said it'd be far better if we just behaved like our actual, true, instinctive, agentic selves.

And he despised external forces of morality and invited people to reject those traditions and get in touch with their own instincts.

He called them the Dionysian impulses.

And

you know, create a life and a system of values that was true to us and not just true to whatever system enforced itself on us.

And in a way, although Nietzsche is famous for criticizing systems and not being particularly clear about what we should do instead, I take a lot of Nietzsche as essentially being a lot of weird poetry that sums up as get in touch with your instincts again.

Don't be who Christianity wants you to be.