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best interest. From KQED. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Is this the game you really want to be playing? It's a question you may have asked yourself, while so-called winning at something or amassing points, yet not enjoying it. Say, hitting your sales numbers or increasing your social media follower counts or even earning high grades. That question is also the title of the first chapter of philosopher C.T. Nguyen's new book,

The Score, which looks at how scoring systems or metrics can diminish our experiences and change what we seek and value.

Nguyen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, a former Los Angeles Times food writer,

a fly fisherman, yo-yoist, and rock climber, among many other things, welcome to ForumT.

Hello, thank you. So you love rock climbing. So tell me what you love about it.

Rock climbing, I mean, when I started rock climbing, I thought, I kind of thought I would hate it.

I thought it would be like this like bro thing of like just screaming and being muslily.

And I just did it because someone told me I should try it.

And I was like, sure, whatever.

And I found out it was it was logic puzzles.

It was logic puzzles and yoga. And it was, it was, it was logic puzzles. It was logic puzzles in yoga. And it was,

I mean, it was specifically that in order to climb well, you couldn't just muscle it out. The very specific rules of climbing forced you to be delicate and forced you to be elegant. And I'm not.

And that experience, the intensity and the demandingness of climbing, like, forced me to actually, I mean, this is going to sound like the most,

the most hippie thing ever, but it forced me to actually live in my body. Oh, I get that. That makes sense. Then you learn that rock climbing had difficulty scores.

And at first that was motivating, right? But then it wasn't. What happened? I mean, it's really

interesting. So when I started rock climbing, I think rock climbing has an extremely clear

scoring system. And that scoring system is based on community consensus difficulty rankings.

And you're kind of told when you show up like you want to go up the difficulty ranking.

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