Ryan Sean Adams

It's like a choose your own adventure.

There's like an A and a B. One is a cynical, sad one.

And the other has a bit more hope, measure of hope.

I preferred the second.

I preferred the Measure of Hope version.

I think that the second reflects a bit more agency maybe in the individual than the first ending.

Why did you write two different endings to your book?

This whole thing, I feel like very much as I was reading the score, I saw sort of the trade-offs, a landscape of trade-offs, right?

The pros and the cons of

scoring systems and gamification of everything.

Some of the pros are, wow, we've really scaled out society, haven't we?

I mean, nation states bring all of these and bureaucracies bring all of these improvements to our net welfare overall and look at the GDP growth and look at post-enlightenment, everything, it's all fantastic.

And then also this acknowledgement of the costs of that score, the one-dimensionalization, almost the feeling that we're all part of this machine and the loss of purpose, the loss of hope.

But it is a trade-off, right?

I'm not sure that I'd want it, you know, I'm not sure I'd want to go back to 400 years ago before the metrification of the world and the way things are.

But anyway, why two endings to the book?

Why are you of two minds on this whole scoring system?

That's great.

And the way to get out of this metrification, of course, is at the local level, right?

You promote this idea of value federalism, right?