C. Thi Nguyen is having a moment right now, with his new book The Score, published on January 13, 2026, earning big reviews for showing how metrics and rankings hijack our values. Hearing him unpack that thesis on Dwarkesh’s show, which shapes how AI insiders think, is perfectly timed.
The AI world is currently obsessed with leaderboards and benchmarks, and there are fresh controversies about gaming evaluations and the spiraling costs of testing reasoning models, exactly the kind of value capture Nguyen warns about. If you care about how incentives are steering AI and science today, this conversation could not be more urgent.
Nguyen’s research on epistemic bubbles and echo chambers also maps onto today’s fractured information ecosystem, as new work highlights how ideas fail to diffuse across online networks. Putting him in front of Dwarkesh’s audience means pressing tech and policy leaders to redesign the systems that steer our attention, our trust, and our goals right now.
Back this nomination today so more people hear it and act.
