Derek Thompson

Tell me about rock climbing.

So with rock climbing, you fall in love with an activity.

you find a metric that at first seems to push you toward becoming a more advanced rock climber, but ultimately that metric becomes the single thing that you focus on.

It takes over your life.

It plunges you into a depression over the activity that you initially fell in love with.

And then ultimately you find some kind of synthesis.

You say, I'm going to find a way to adhere to my own values, but also live with this metric that exists.

Tell me, how is your professional life, being a philosopher, like rock climbing?

These two stories are the two stories that begin your book, The Score.

And the reason why I find the story of your relationship with rock climbing and your career and philosophy so interesting is that I think when most people think about metrics ruling our lives, maybe we think about sports and Moneyball.

Maybe we think, in my profession of media, about clicks or unique viewers.

Maybe people who are accountants or in data analytics are thinking about their own KPIs that rule their life.

I think not so many people, certainly outside of rock climbing and philosophy, would think that the cult of metrics has grown so much that it has even metastasized into those domains.

But this shows just how pervasive this culture of measuring things has become.

It has crept into every nook and cranny, it seems, of modern life.

So I want to get into the history of how everything in our life became metricified.

Right.

or measured, I suppose, is the actual English word.

But first, why don't we use this opportunity for you to simply tell people two things.

First, the explicit thesis of your book, the score.