Playing the Right Games: Why Scores Quietly Replace Meaning | C. Thi Nguyen

CT Wen is a philosopher of games. He is the author of a new book called The Score, How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game. Ti, welcome to Bankless. Hello. I have no idea what I'm doing here. I was gonna ask you this in the preshow, but, you know, I'm I maybe we should ask it here. Like Do do you know what's do you know what's amazing? I I enjoyed your book so much, and I've enjoyed some of your previous writings because, so much of what you talk about on Bankless, which people think of Bankless as a crypto podcast. But what is crypto? It is finance. It is money. What is money? What is finance? It is a game. So much of crypto takes place on another game engine that we call social media, Twitter, X. It's all games all the way down. And so this is why I feel like there's so much to learn from you, actually, Tee. Excellent. I then you do not have the wrong person. I'm not walking into the wrong room. No. This will be a lot of fun. I wanna talk to you about games and and social scalability and all of the interrelated things. But, actually, may maybe the place to start, give this some salience for bankless listeners, is the way you start your book. There's a story in the first chapter of your book about someone that I personally identified with and maybe some bankless listeners might identify with as well. This is a student. She's an overachiever. She's obsessed with her body mass index, her GPA. She's the child of immigrants. She her parents pushed her to get four point o's through school. She's a competitive golfer trying to get in the most highly ranked prestigious university. Basically, life gave her a set of these scoring systems, and she was trying to optimize for a high score throughout all of the systems that she was engaged in. And what snapped her out of it? The idea that you promote that these things are games, many of these systems that she's engaged in, the rankings, the metrics, if she could step back and get some distance from them, if she could start asking questions about these systems rather than just accepting them, She changed her phone background to this constant reminder, is this the game you really want to be playing? I really enjoyed that because it's a question I think that has some ceilings for everyone listening. Is this the game you really want to be playing? Why is that an important question to you, T? So, God, there's so many there's so many ways to talk about this. Maybe the most important thing for me, and this applies both to games, to real games and to games, game like systems outside, is the idea that we have a significant choice in the games we play. We can pick the games we play, we can …