Derek Thompson

What are you trying to tell people most explicitly?

But then maybe, and this is perhaps a dangerous exercise, but as someone who's written books, as someone who knows people who write books,

you're a thoughtful person, a literal philosopher, sometimes the message that we want people to take away from our books is not a message that we make explicit.

It's something that we hope to leave with people even if we don't make it like the very end of the very first section of the book.

So I would love for you to tell people,

What is the explicit message of this product?

And then what is the kind of underground river secret message that you're trying to leave people with to tell us what metrics are doing to us and to our world?

I'm hearing you say two things.

The first is that metrics are useful precisely because they

compress complicated information, right?

The concept of heart rate variability, or my resting heart rate the moment before I fall asleep, these are useful because they can help me live a healthier life.

Metrics compress information.

That's the first thing I'm hearing.

The second thing I'm hearing, though, is that metrics aren't just useful, sometimes they're catastrophically useful.

They're so useful that they pull our attention away from the

that was our value before the metric existed, and they pull us toward this new value that is created by the convenience of the metric.

So one thing that I want to do here, I'm sorry, maybe you want to jump in right there.

You should finish, but I'm excited.

What I want to do here is force you to make the case against metrics by my defense of metrics.

So I got into journalism by initially being an economics reporter.