"Is this the game you want to be playing?"

EPISODE 328: Our New Year's Resolution.

When I was thinking about goals for 2026, I caught myself thinking how a “content creator” is supposed to: about more views and more clicks and more subscribers. And this felt, upon further reflection, bad.

Which was partly because the PTFO staff and I take enormous pride in using human editorial judgement to report stories that other people aren’t talking about (and that our subjects often don’t want us to uncover).

But I still found myself strategizing to win somebody else’s game.

And so this is why I chose to start this year with the eminent C. Thi Nguyen, an author and philosophy professor from the University of Utah, whose perspective on the new year goes beyond The Cell Phone, even as The Cell Phone is commonly identified as the trend which ails us.

Thi thinks more deeply than anyone else in America about scoring systems: whether it’s video games, or rankings of colleges, or YouTube.

A scoring system, Thi writes, is not merely an instruction manual for how to win a game. It’s not merely how money — which we need — gets distributed.

It’s something way bigger, that’s been hiding in plain sight.

A REPRESENTATIVE STRING OF YOUTUBE COMMENTS:

Happy New Year,

Pablo