What is agency — and how can you get more of it?
My interview with Cate Hall about her new book, "You Can Just Do Things."
“Agency” is one of those terms — see also “priors,” etc. — that I associate with “Silicon Valley rationalist types” and more broadly with the community that I call the River in my book. It’s perhaps slightly more intimidating than it needs to be. But it also captures something that there isn’t exactly any good synonym for. Here’s how I define “agency” in On the Edge1:
Agency [is] … being empowered to make robust, well-informed decisions, knowing which factors are inside one’s control. [...] The term refers not merely to having options but good options where the costs and benefits are transparent, don’t require overcoming an undue amount of friction, and don’t risk entrapping you in an addictive spiral.
Cate Hall, the author of the excellent Substack Useful Fictions, has what is undoubtedly a better definition:
Agency [is] … the entirely learnable capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life really offers.
I met Cate while playing a low-stakes tournament during the 2021 World Series of Poker, and it turns out we have a lot in common. Like me, Hall quit a corporate-track job to play poker — indeed, with far more success than I had, at one point becoming the #1 ranked female player in the world. She’s since had a number of other adventures, including being the CEO of the Astera Institute and a co-founder of Alvea, as well as being the author of an outstanding new book, You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life, which I spoke with her about on Thursday.
Both the poker life and the writer’s life offer a tremendous amount of ostensible freedom. You don’t have a boss, and you don’t necessarily have a lot of structure unless you impose it on yourself.2 There very much are consequences to a lack of productive effort — in some ways, in fact, they’re more direct consequences than when you’re working for a corporate paycheck3. But you mostly bear those consequences yourself. These are careers for highly agentic, self-motivated people, in other words.
I introduced “agency” in On the Edge in the context of an extended discussion about the proliferation of gambling. As a liberal with libertarian tendencies, you might say I have a prior against imposing limits on people’s choices. For instance, although I think ubiquitous sports betting is probably net-harmful for society, that doesn’t mean I think it should be banned. (Slot machines? That’s another question.) At the same time, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying “nobody has to gamble unless they want to, so all you’re doing is giving people more options.” Both brick-and-mortar and especially online casinos use all sorts of manipulative techniques to get you to gamble more, and it can require a lot of self-discipline to avoid these traps.
Social media algorithms, and algorithms in general, literally use some of the same techniques, establishing powerful defaults that can be hard to escape from. These are likely to become even more coercive in the age of AI, mining data on each user’s revealed preferences — essentially, pushing exactly the right buttons so they keep pushing buttons and increasing revenue and “time on site.” I think there’s far too much of a tendency in Silicon Valley to entrust decisions to AI — or to the billionaires who run the labs — on behalf of the rest of us.
What Hall’s definition captures that mine misses, however, is that agency is very much a learnable skill: few of us come out of the womb as fully realized, high-agency people. She has discovered this the hard way, including a multi-year drug addiction that she said “utterly wrecked [her] life.”
You Can Just Do Things is a brave book, both because of Hall’s honesty and because it breaks through certain taboos. Why do so many of us (raises hand) allow ourselves to become entrapped in dissatisfying professional relationships, for example? I’m not necessarily a believer in “radical transparency4,” but there are lots of times when more honest communication would allow us to get more of what we want out of life, while possibly making the other party better off as well, and we avoid it out of risk-aversion or fear of failure. This can also extend to friendships and even romantic relationships.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows below.5
Nate Silver: I’m here with Cate Hall, who I met playing poker a few years ago. I think Cate and I have a fair bit in common — we probably would have run into each other one way or another. Cate has a great new book out called You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life, co-authored with Sasha Chapin.
Cate, I want to ask you how you came to write this book, but first I want to define the term “agency.” It’s a term I like. It’s a term people in the broader — I don’t know if I want to use the word “rationalist” — community use a lot. I know you define it in your newsletter, Useful Fictions, which is a great Substack, by the way. What does it mean, exactly?
Cate Hall: Good question. It’s kind of like a Rorschach test, because everybody has a slightly different definition. The one I use most often is the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook. So it’s a combination of observational capacity and then courage in acting on those degrees of freedom.
Nate: I like the courage part. This is a very courageous book. Would it be insulting to call it a self-help book?
Cate: No.
Nate: It’s kind of a self-help book for high-agency people, for a certain type of person who maybe has a lot of degrees of freedom in their life. I really liked it. But it’s a brave book, and a vulnerable one. How did you come to write it?
Cate: I’ve thought quite a bit, from a personal-journey perspective, about human agency over the last five years. Five and a half years ago I was really deep in drug addiction, and my life had totally fallen apart. I was broke. I felt like I was unemployable. Relationships had withered away. A lot of the content in the book, though it’s definitely not a book about addiction, comes from the experience of recovering and rebuilding my life. I put in a lot of cycles thinking about how to become a more effective person starting from a place of being really stuck.
The book actually came about as the result of the very first Substack article I ever posted, which I wrote at my husband Sasha Chapin’s suggestion. I dashed off an article about how to be more agentic, with a few tips, and the reaction was really strong. I got a ton of Substack followers. I had two book editors reach out and ask if I was interested in writing a book about it. And I was like, “Oh, okay. I guess this is a topic people really want to hear about. I guess I’ll write a book about it.” Working with Sasha on it was incredibly fun, and also incredibly necessary from the perspective of actually getting the book done.
Nate: I’ve never co-authored a book. Well, I guess I have in the old Baseball Prospectus days, for OG fans. My partner works on the Substack, and that creates interesting dynamics. One thing you talk about in the book that maybe I’m not the best practitioner of is hyper-honest communication. Does that go into the relationship, too?
Cate: Yeah, absolutely. Writing the book together was way more fun than I thought it was going to be. I kind of expected bad things to happen, because a lot of people report that when they try to do creative projects with their significant other. But I think we’re each well suited for very different parts of the writing and editing process, so it was actually pretty seamless, and we managed to not drive each other too insane along the way. We have a very honest relationship. We’re good at surfacing disagreements before they become lingering resentments.
Quitting law for poker
Nate: A book is a super high-agency thing to do. You start out literally with a blank page — or in your case, a blog post. The deadline is too far off. You talk in the book and in the newsletter about the importance of rapid feedback. In poker you get feedback after every hand. It’s very noisy, but you get it. With a book, you [didn’t] get that feedback until this week, when it’s in the hands of readers and reviewers.
I skipped over some of your biography […] you went to Yale Law School, right? And you were in Washington — am I making that up?
Cate: No, that’s right. I practiced in Washington for a while.
Nate: On a track to be one of these people who go [argue] before the Supreme Court one day. And then you quit to play poker — which has parallels. I quit my first job to play poker.
Cate: I was about 30 years old and a lawyer in D.C. at the time. I was in the process of discovering that I really didn’t want to be a lawyer around the same time that gambling became legal in the D.C. area. I picked up poker as a fun hobby, and then fell in love with it, and it slowly started eating more and more of my time. For some months before I officially told my law firm I was leaving, I was sneaking away to play poker a little too much. I remember my mother was very concerned that I had a gambling addiction, and I was like, “No, I’m just unhappy as a lawyer and I have a hobby that I like.”
But at some point it seemed like the law firm thing was going super well, in the sense that my career was advancing. I had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment where I was like, “Oh, I need to get out of here, or I’m going to be stuck forever.” So I told my firm I was leaving shortly after bonuses were announced one year, which they always love. And everybody was like, “Okay, well, you’re obviously having a midlife crisis. Why don’t you take a year off and then come back?” I considered doing that, but I was completely in love with poker from the moment I started playing it, so I never seriously considered it.
Nate: And you had a lot of success. You were very high in the GPI — Global Poker Index — rankings at some point. I think you were the number one ranked female player in the world. Was poker one of those things that was as exciting as you expected it to be, or did it become a burden once it was your career?
Cate: I only played professionally for about three years, which is probably a good amount of time to play professionally without getting totally jaded. It definitely becomes less fun when you’re playing for a living than when you’re playing recreationally. Unless you’ve been a stockbroker, it’s hard to convey how demoralizing it is to show up at work and lose money day after day. You go on these streaks where it’s just brutal, especially if you’re a tournament poker player. And you start to feel like there’s no escape from the poker community, and the dynamics at the poker table.
Nate: I don’t think people realize, in the typical tournament, about 10 to 15 percent of players cash. If you’re good, you might cash more. But the real skill is being able to run very deep, and not just get these “min-cashes,” as we call them. There aren’t a ton of other fields where you fail 88 percent of the time. Even if you enter 200 tournaments a year and you’re a good player, you’re still going to have a losing year almost half the time.6 That’s just the math of the distribution, with the prize money concentrated at the top. What positive and negative habits does that lifestyle teach people?
Cate: It is such a head trip. Part of it is the fact that you can lose money a lot of the time. But there’s an additional psychological element, which is that if you play tournament poker — which is primarily what I did — something disappointing is always happening unless you win the tournament. You always have this very sad, numbing, terrible feeling at the end of the day or the tournament. I don’t feel like human psychology is well suited for that kind of environment. If you go super deep in a tournament and make back three or four times your buy-in, you’ve been sitting there playing for often multiple days, there’s a huge pile of money at the top, and you just feel like shit most of the time. You’re not thinking, “Oh, I made four times my money.”
I don’t know if there’s a useful thing to learn from that, besides maybe a bunch of different dissociation strategies. I do think there are habits of thinking you pick up in poker that are useful for other parts of life. I got a lot in terms of learning how to think probabilistically, to think in terms of expected value, learning how to be comfortable with failure, more experimentation and more doing stuff publicly. But I wouldn’t recommend adopting the psychological disposition of a poker player, because it tends to be sort of warped and mangled by the specificities of the profession.
Is addiction the opposite of agency?
Nate: There is a lot of compulsive behavior in the community — sometimes gambling, sometimes substance abuse, sometimes personality quirks. But the feeling of running deep in a tournament is really fun. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever experienced, and it makes up for all the constant pain and struggle a little bit. So how did you fall out of poker? Is this the point at which you developed addiction issues?
Cate: Yes. I had long been a psychonaut experimenter with drugs, and at some point I had this really intense spiritual experience — basically the first spiritual experience of my life — on drugs, and it became my complete obsession overnight. Replicating that, chasing that feeling. As obsessive as I had been about poker, I became about seeking that thing. At the time I stopped playing, I was still the top-ranked female poker player in the world, and I basically just left and almost never played again.
Nate: I think I played against you at the World Series in 2021 — it was you and me in some $250 H.O.R.S.E. tournament. Is it as simple as saying that addiction is the opposite of agency, or is it not quite that simple?
Cate: I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it, and I use that frame sometimes. If you think about agency as the capacity to unlock additional degrees of freedom, addiction is really the opposite of that. One of the things I talk about in a TED Talk I did is that when I would go out every morning to buy drugs and come home, I’d see people walking around doing totally normal things, and I felt incredible resentment toward those people because of the degrees of freedom they had — to just be out walking on the street, going to lunch with a friend. It was so far from what I felt I had the capacity to do at the time. Addiction does seem like stripping away everything else in service of mashing this one button over and over again, and that feels like the opposite of agency to me.
Nate: How did you get out of that spiral?
Cate: The real answer is that rehab was really important, and I was so resistant to rehab. For the first year and a half of my addiction, I wasn’t trying to recover. For the last two years of my addiction, I was trying to recover. I was doing all of the 12-step programs, and a bunch of stuff other than going to rehab, but I kept getting a month sober and then relapsing, and having a terrible relapse for months at a time. Having the really sustained timeout — the 60-day timeout from life that rehab required — was necessary for me to recover. Until that point, I had this idea that if I went to rehab, things would fall apart in some way that they hadn’t already, which is very classic addict thinking. But eventually I did it, and I really recommend it to anybody who’s having trouble recovering.
Nate: This is a kind of double-edged sword. People are very good, especially smart people, at rationalizing, and that can be rationalizing negative behavioral pathways.
Cate: Absolutely.
Does everyone actually want agency?
Nate: What if you’re just, quote-unquote, genetically super high agency? That’s one critique I’d have of the book: for a lot of people, it’s great to have every door be open. One of the important things you talk about is increasing your surface area for luck. It seems cheesy, but you go out and don’t just sit in your apartment, and you have conversations and meet people and explore the world. When I think about the friendships I’ve developed, a lot of them, it wasn’t like I planned, “I’m going to go make a new friend.” Usually it was like, I didn’t want to go to this stupid fucking event, and you go anyway, and you meet somebody. It’s more spontaneous than planned. But do all people want choice and agency?
Cate: I don’t know if everybody wants that. So the question is, to what extent do people differ in their capacity for this, maybe in addition to the desirability of it. Is that fair to say?
Nate: Yeah. I know people who are kind of paralyzed by choice, is the cliché. Same with the donkey who [is stuck between] two [pools] of water and they wind up staying in the middle. I think some people find the amount of choice kind of overwhelming, potentially.
Cate: I don’t know exactly what accounts for this, but experientially, the feeling of having more agency doesn’t feel like having an overwhelming amount of choice. You can think in terms of knowing what you want, and then knowing what to do about that, and I think about agency as more the latter than the first one.
There is an element of agency that’s about seeing choices you have that you might not otherwise recognize. But I think you can be really high agency in many senses and still not have a great idea of where to direct that agency, because actually knowing what you want in life is sort of a pre-agentic behavior. I know people who are really good at picking the actions that will get them the real-world result they want, but not at thinking about what they care about. I’m not actually sure that agency is super helpful when it comes to discriminating, at a basic level, between the different things you could choose to do with your life, or different options. So you may need an additional book for that.
Nate: It’s interesting in the debates about large language models. They have a more explicit utility function or loss function than people do. Sometimes when I wake up, Cate, I don’t know what the fuck to do. You wind up doing things that are firm and tangible. Having a Substack requires a lot of agency, or comfort with that. I can’t get fired, really, unless I’m more stupid than usual on Twitter. But you have a very direct linear relationship between the amount of work you do and the number of subscribers you get. In some ways, it’s a little bit crippling. Back when I worked for ABC News, I would take as long as possible at the World Series of Poker, because I had no incentive-based compensation, and I thought they were going to kill FiveThirtyEight, which they did. So I was like, “Fuck you.” Now it’s money out of my pocket every time I’m not writing a newsletter or doing something to promote the newsletter.
Cate: This is a very poker player way of thinking, too. One of the traps poker players fall into is that for every moment you’re spending on leisure activities, it’s really easy to figure out the exact hourly rate you’re sacrificing by not being at the table, and so people get into weird psychological loops about this.
Nate: When I was playing online poker — back then the games were really easy to beat, at least in my opinion — it was kind of like having an ATM. A high-variance ATM, where on average you withdraw $200 an hour. Sometimes, oops, you lost $10,000. Sometimes you gain $15,000.
This is one of the tensions you’re exploring in the book: how explicit [to be] or not to make [behavioral choices]. One thing people would be better off being explicit about is thinking about things that save you time or save you money. I remember I was traveling to Europe with my partner, and we had forgotten to bring the European plug adapters, and I said, I know it’s overpriced, but I’m going to buy chargers at the airport. I’m sure they’re marked up by 15 euros, but otherwise you have to find some little electronics store in the center of the city, and your credit card doesn’t work. But just taking the time to like give yourself the luxury of convenience. On the other hand, if you’re totally maximizing for everything, it feels like you wind up being quite miserable. And some things feel icky to be more explicit about.
You give a lot of concrete advice in the book about situations in the workplace, and to some extent situations involving friendships and relationships, where people are not very good at communicating things explicitly — especially men. I don’t think I’ve gotten in a real fight with a friend in a long time, but maybe I should. Maybe friendships drift apart, and maybe I should be getting into more arguments with my friends. What’s the barrier to communicating more explicitly and effectively? There are lots of examples in the book. I remember one about having a friend who always brings along a third friend, and you’re like, that’s a little bit weird. How do you broach those conversations?
Cate: This is one of the pieces of advice in the book that I’ve found most personally transformative: instead of having a feeling internally, just sharing it in a lot more circumstances. It feels extremely not allowed at first to just make a bunch of subterranean dynamics explicit, but once you start getting in the habit of it, it feels so liberating. Things I do at work all the time are just checking in with people: “I feel like you might be feeling a bit frustrated. I can imagine these reasons for it. Is that the case?” In other social circumstances, sometimes it’s, “I feel like maybe we have this awkward dynamic behind the scenes. Do you want to talk about that?”
It’s really interesting to think about why people never do this. The way I frame it in the book is “movie logic,” because in movies you see characters doing things where you’re just like, why don’t you just have a fucking conversation about what is happening here, instead of taking self-harming actions? And I wonder if it is a little bit downstream of movies, where in movies you need that for dramatic effect, but people download their ideas about the types of conversations that it’s okay to have from movies or entertainment. So I encourage people not to try to build dramatic tension in their own lives, but to just simplify things by making dynamics as explicit as possible.
Nate: I feel like there could be movies that end after 15 minutes. A couple rents an Airbnb and it looks like it’s haunted, and they’re just like, “I got a weird vibe about this place,” and they get a different Airbnb across town, and the movie ends.
Cate: One of the examples we use in the book is La La Land, where the whole blow-up of this great relationship could have been avoided if they’d just had one conversation where she said, “I want to see more of you,” and he said, “Great, I want to be on tour so that I can provide for us. How should we balance those competing considerations?” But then it’s not a very good movie, and it doesn’t win an Oscar.
Acting your way into right thinking
Nate: Is it fear of failure? That sounds very basic on the one hand, but one thing about being an entrepreneur, about being a poker player, about quitting your Supreme Court–track job to play poker, is that clearly you’re not afraid of failure, Cate. But how can other people learn that skill?
Cate: I used to absolutely suck at this. Part of the reason I became a lawyer without actually caring about being a lawyer was that it never required me to feel rejection or failure. It was super easy to be good at it. It was super easy to get into a good law school because of the type of brain that I have. And I more or less implicitly never wanted to be in a position of failure. I remember having this feeling up through my 20s that if I wasn’t literally the best at something, not only was it not worth doing, but life was measurably worse and maybe not worth living. I had a really extreme view of failure. For myself, addiction was pretty helpful for getting me over this, because I started failing a lot, and I sort of reset my expectations for what a successful life looks like.
There are some intellectual tricks in the book for thinking about failure. One that I’ve found persuasive is this concept that if you’re not putting yourself in a position to fail, you’re necessarily capping your total returns in life, because you’re not doing the things that are lower probability but higher consequence. But I think this is one of many areas where you have two ways of looking at an issue. One is, I will be able to think my way into acting better — I’m going to have the right set of thoughts about failure, and then failure won’t hurt anymore. The other is acting your way into right thinking, and a lot of the book is about acting your way into right thinking. It’s going to be unpleasant, but it’s a lot less unpleasant than you think, and the more you do it, the less unpleasant it feels. I’ve gone from a person who actually kind of wanted to die when I failed at things to just, “That’s fine, next thing,” over the course of my life. And it feels pretty learnable.
Nate: One thing you learn from poker — actually, one of the worst habits I probably have as a poker player — is that I will take actions that remove decisions later on. So classically, you might go all in, because then the hand’s over. When, in principle, if you’re a skilled poker player, you should want decisions that complicate things, where you have sub-decisions further down the line, where you have more options and more opportunity to press your skill. But people don’t seem to like that.
On your blog, you define agency as the entirely learnable capacity to see and act on degrees of freedom. But the learnable part — people might not realize that. People think, “Oh, I’m introverted,” or “I have impostor syndrome.” How do you persuade someone that they can get better at this stuff?
Cate: Hopefully part of the answer is the book. Identity is one of the things that keeps us kind of stuck in life. Having an identity is useful for a lot of things that you might want to do. But people also develop limiting identities: “Well, I’m not a charismatic person,” or “I’m not a confident person, I’m an introvert.” And they start to think about those things as immutable characteristics, as opposed to things primarily composed of learnable sub-behaviors.
Charisma is an example that I use in the book. People think about themselves or other people as being naturally charismatic or not, and it is true that there is natural variation in terms of how charismatic you are by default. But a lot of the things that signal charisma, that get interpreted as charisma, are actually learnable sub-behaviors: the way that you interact with somebody physically, the types of things that you think to talk to them about […] I think agency is an example of this, where when you break it down into more learnable sub-behaviors and small mental shifts, it becomes quite transmissible.
I happened to osmose a number of agentic habits from my environment over the course of the last decade. I think there are other life circumstances — like the desperation caused by addiction — that sort of prompt you to see new degrees of freedom. But that’s kind of the reason that I wrote the book. So please read the book.
Spiky agency in the Bay Area
Nate: You live in Berkeley, or Oakland, something like that?
Cate: The Bay.
Nate: How do you think about the typical California AI-rationalist-adjacent person? Are they high agency? You go to something like the Manifest conference and people are certainly on their own wavelength — kind of eccentric, kind of [a] hippie vibe, and there’s a lot of talk about agency. Are these people agentic? Because there’s also a lot of groupthink.
Cate: I think that’s true in a lot of subcommunities, right? Are you familiar with David Chapman’s “geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths” idea, about the different stages of development of a subcommunity?
It’s basically that the people who start a new subcommunity are generally free thinkers. They have their own ideas that differ from those of society. But the longer that subcommunity persists, the more people who are doing following behavior and not thinking about things from first principles get into it. It’s just kind of part of the life cycle of any community: it starts with the people who are wild and less constrained by what has been done before, and then it moves in the direction of conformity.
On the whole, rationalists and EAs are very high agency. I have found the same thing to be true of them that is true of most people generally, which is that people tend to be selectively agentic. People can be super high agency in certain areas where their self-identity allows it. I was professionally agentic, and agentic in the sense of noticing problems in the world and wanting to do something about them, long before I became agentic in the sense of figuring out who I wanted to be in an interpersonal sense, and how I wanted to relate to my romantic partners and especially my husband. And that’s a very common profile in the Bay Area: super high agency in certain domains and then lower agency when it comes to addressing some of the things that feel more like identity. “I am an introvert.” “I am” — you know, whatever, you pick your adjectives. Spiky.
Nate: I met for dinner with a startup founder recently. Really, really young guy, very smart guy. I’m sure he’ll be very accomplished one day. And he’s like, “I realized that I’m really smart, but I was very socially awkward, and I realized that was my big barrier to success.” And for a nerdy startup founder who now has, I think, probably above-average social skills, it doesn’t seem fake or contrived in the way it can a little bit sometimes from Bay Area people.
But something you said earlier kind of resonated with me, which is not letting yourself get pinned down to any one identity. You have a wider range of different types of people you’re interacting with, you get better at code-switching, and you’re kind of hedging your bets a little bit more. Agency and optionality, having lots of good choices, are very closely related. That’s hard for people, though. You’re a CEO and a co-founder and a poker player and an attorney and an author and a Substacker. You saw colleagues who were going to have some house in Maryland or Virginia, and they win some award one day, and then they’re 65 and retiring and thinking, “Man, my life sucked.” Why do people feel the need to stay typecast, or why can’t they break out of it?
Cate: I think it is one of the key stages of personal development, and it is one that probably many or most people never get to. There’s another way of thinking about personal development that my husband is a super big fan of, which is [the] Kegan stages. A lot of self-help and coaching is aimed at one particular transition in the Kegan typology, which is going from stage three, where your sense of self and of what is good is environmentally determined, to one where you are sort of choosing that for yourself. And I think it’s a minority of adults that are able to attain that.
It is still a little bit of a mystery to me why it happens for some people and not others. Certainly, the more constraints you take into your life, in the sense of sets of expectations you have adopted, the harder it gets. The classic thing is that once you are married and have kids, it becomes a lot harder for people to consider changing their whole identity around. There are good reasons why they don’t want to do that, so I think that’s a constraint. If you can do it when you’re young, that’s helpful. But it’s strange and tragic to me that it does not happen for more people, and I really hope that part of what the book does is prompt a few more people to have that kind of self-discovery — that maybe the way that they have arranged their life already is not the way that they want to have it forever.
Nate: One other thing that you talked about that was a profound insight is that sometimes when you’re at the beginning of a new relationship — maybe more often a work relationship — people become afraid of confrontations that define the scope of the relationship. Whereas for me, if you’re unable to resolve a small conflict early on, inevitably you’re not going to be able to resolve the bigger conflict later, when there’s a lot more wear on the tires in two years, three years. So not being conflict-avoidant actually saves you trouble down the road.7
Cate: Massively. Yeah, I think that’s massively true, and I’ve certainly found it to be the case for me. I know that my default tendency is not to raise stuff as early as possible, and instead to allow resentment to accumulate over some period of time until it becomes a much bigger deal. And a lot of maturity for me has been learning to have slightly uncomfortable conversations at a much earlier point in time, so you don’t end up putting yourself and the other person in a much worse situation further down the line.
Nate: Do you find that a lot of people would also want this? With friendships, there’s this thing where you silently reciprocate. Let’s say both you and your friend [secretly don’t feel] like hanging out. Sometimes you’re like, we’d probably both be better off if we just spent the night in. Or the reverse: I’m really bored, we hung out last night, but I’d really like to catch up, so maybe we’ll go hang out again today. Why do people find it hard to communicate these things? Or do most people think you’re weird if you’re that explicit about things that maybe [most people wouldn’t] talk about directly?
Cate: Having written a book about agency and addressed some of the topics that I have, I feel like I should have a better theory of why the human default is the way that it is, and I don’t. I do know that when I am honest in situations like that, by and large the response that I get from people is relief at the honesty. And I know that there is some selection effect — I end up selecting for close relationships with people who want that and value that — so perhaps my vantage point is no longer representative, and actually most people will hate it if you’re honest with them. But I kind of would be surprised if that’s the case. I live in the Bay Area. I don’t know what normal people like.
Nate: Selection effects are very powerful. The choices you make create path dependencies, and those are very important, and I think people are sometimes reluctant to open other doors. But some constraints are helpful, right? Like, the first thing that I’m going to do every morning is go work out or go run, and if I don’t do that, then my whole day is ruined. It seems like sometimes people need these absolutes, where it’s [harder for them] to say, “Okay, eight out of 10 days I’ll run in the morning, but sometimes it’s not practical.” Sometimes the routines are helpful. Or do you see that as a substitute for more sophisticated forms of agency?
Cate: Yes, it is sometimes good to have standards and routines for yourself. Having forcing functions, where you constrain your freedom in limited and sort of pre-committed ways for the greater good of some goal that you care about, is in general really good. And the question is just about how you scope those commitments so that you are adhering to them and they’re having the desired effect. We use the metaphor of tying yourself to the mast in the book, which is very timely because The Odyssey came out this week. I think that is good for routines, and I think it can be good for relationships. My relationship with my husband is phenomenal, and probably also would not exist at all if we hadn’t gotten married pretty soon after we got together. The first year and a half of marriage that we had was pretty difficult, and without the forcing function of having already made a commitment to each other, that probably would have driven us apart.
AI and the disappearance of friction
Nate: Can we talk a little bit about agency and AI?
Cate: Yeah, totally.
Nate: In my book, I kind of hypothesize that AI might be helpful for hyper-agentic people, but deprive a large majority of the world’s population of agency. When you hear Sam or Dario or people like that talk, do you think they put enough value on people’s agency, or do you think that’s a blind spot, potentially?
Cate: I think it’s a really hard question. I agree with your overall take that AI will, on the scale of individual humans, be either quite bad or quite good for agency, and that won’t be uniform across humans generally. I have found that AI gives me the capacity to do a ton of things that I would not be able to do otherwise, and it has freed me up to experiment with a lot of things professionally that I otherwise would not have.
But if you take anything from the example of recommender algorithms, it should probably be that technologies that are designed to eliminate friction in service of giving you a particular experience can be really agency-destroying. And I am worried about moving into a way of relating to technology where we are shaving as much friction off of the human experience as possible, and what that will do to people’s sense of an internal locus of control, or actual ability to affect the world. I hope that it ends up being good for human agency, but I am skeptical, for I think the same reasons that you are.
Nate: Yeah, friction can be underrated. Despite recent events related to Taco Bell, I kind of actually like Taco Bell. If there were a Taco Bell in my apartment, like there is in some of the Taco Bell commercials, I’d probably gain 30 pounds overnight, just because having some barrier matters. You see this in a more serious way with gambling addiction and sports betting. The physical act of going to a place and standing in line at a sportsbook and placing a wager and getting maybe the slightly judgmental look from a ticket writer — there’s no hard barrier there, but in practice, that’s a lot harder than downloading an app and pressing a button. You’d say people just have more choices now, but it’s a little bit complicated with any type of addictive behavior.
Cate: I think the gambling analogy captures some aspect of it. With sports betting, it’s probably not the feeling of having earned the sports bet that makes the friction the good thing. But there is an aspect of that in a lot of aspects of life, where actually the feeling of overcoming barriers is where a ton of the value in the human experience lives. I think you will hear this all the time from people who have recovered from addiction, but you also hear it from other people. I’m deeply skeptical of the ability of humans to have really good, meaningful lives if you eliminate all opportunities to feel like you are overcoming some barrier in the world. And obviously that has limitations — I don’t think that all suffering is inherently good because you have an opportunity to recover from it — but having a perfectly smooth experience also does not seem to produce human flourishing.
Nate: That’s the problem with all these utopias, whether it’s a socialist utopia or a post-AGI singularity utopia. I want fucking conflict. I want to have to fight for things. I don’t want some Holodeck-type thing where I can have whatever I want. That seems like it would be almost depressing in a way. I think utopias profoundly misunderstand human nature.
Cate: It’s really hard to write utopias for that reason.
Nate: How do you feel about the notion of revealed preference, which is another slightly nerdy, rationalist-adjacent term? Let’s say I’m the kind of person who’s going to start working out. If you go weeks and weeks and weeks and you’re paying the gym membership and not working out, on some level, is that your revealed preference? How should we weigh the fact that what people think they should do, and what people say they’re going to do, and the way they actually behave are different?
Cate: I get a lot of shit from my husband for my views about revealed preference. I am not a fan of revealed preference as a concept, simply because I am intimately familiar with the ways that you can really, really want one thing and do something else instead. And chalking everything up to revealed preference obscures a lot of useful information about what is going on underneath the surface. There really is a difference between somebody who is trying to recover from addiction and is wanting that, and somebody who’s just excited to keep using. I do get pushback from my husband on this, and I think I’ve made more of a bugbear of this in the past than I am ready to stand by now.
My current way of thinking about things is that all of the difficulty goes away if you stop expecting yourself to be a single unitary entity that has one set of desires that is carried through you at every level. And instead, what we are is some sort of parliament of sub-personalities that have different holds on us at different times. It’s kind of like a negotiation between the desires of different parts of us, but not a unitary self.
Nate: Yeah, it can be kind of lazy in a way. A lot of people become aware of the concept of revealed preference, and [they might be like] yeah, my revealed preference is to stay out playing poker [all night] at the Bellagio the night before I play the Main Event. Just because you do that every year doesn’t mean it’s a good habit.
Cate: Yeah, and it doesn’t mean that you really want it in all of the relevant senses.
Nate: That’s what’s weird about it, too. Typically when I go to Vegas, I’ll usually have some night early on where I stay up too late playing cash games, and it kind of fucks up my schedule for a couple of days. And the funny thing is, I kind of know I’m going to do it. In poker, the game usually gets better later at night, so it’s harder to quit. If you’re down money you want to keep playing, and if you’re up money you’re having fun and don’t want to quit either. It’s sort of weird how, without commitment devices, people [track] into their future less rational self … maybe revealed preference is overrated.
Where should you start?
Nate: Cate, this is like an Oprah question, but if someone wants to become more agentic, what are two or three things they can start doing today?
Cate: My number one piece of advice is one that nobody ever wants to hear: I really recommend having an anonymous feedback box, where you tell everybody you know that you’re doing it, you put it on social media. I think that a lot of what keeps us stuck in life is failing to get accurate information about ourselves from the world, and having an anonymous feedback box has been totally transformative for me.
People don’t want to do it because they don’t want to hear mean things about themselves. But even for somebody who’s a little bit publicly visible and has people who don’t like them, the proportion of stuff that I get that is intentionally mean is very, very small. There is a lot of stuff that is like, “I don’t know if you realize that you do this, I don’t think you intend it, but —” useful pieces of feedback on my management style. And I feel like I’m in a much better place today than I would be without it. I recently updated my sense of personal style and developed a wardrobe because of a piece of anonymous feedback that I got a few months ago. So that’s my number one thing.
Nate: That sounds terrifying to me. Maybe it’s because I do get a lot of unrequested feedback.
Cate: People are so mean to you just to your face. How much worse could it be?
Nate: They’re not, really. I’ve only had maybe once in my life, a negative interaction in person. Most people are cowards … behind keyboards. One time at the 2016 Democratic convention, some Bernie guy got up in my face.
Can you tell who the person is who’s giving you anonymous feedback, or does that not really matter?
Cate: I try not to fixate on it, and people are generally pretty careful to frame things in ways where it’s hard to know.
Nate: As the world becomes more comfortable, does that make people less agentic?
Cate: As it becomes more comfortable?
Nate: Yeah, because you can kind of just go with the flow, and now things are better, usually. You have better medicine, you live longer, the food’s better. I don’t know if the housing stock is better. But you can kind of just be more of a bot and not think as much. If you look at the history, people were miserable for most of human existence. There’s this false nostalgia for, oh, I wish I lived in the time of Homer. People were pretty fucking miserable for the most part.8 So is it easy just to tune out and not be agentic?
Cate: I think this is kind of the concern with AI, which is that things just become really easy in ways that are not ultimately productive for self-development. I do think there’s a difference between being active and being agentic. The bull case for human agency in an era of advancing technology is basically that less of your time and attention is consumed getting your basic needs met. Basic can just be shelter and food, but it can also be whatever standard of living you want to have. Maybe that requires less and less effort from individual people. And what happens when you free up that time, what you do with it, is kind of up to you. You can think about it as an invitation to greater agency, because the default is just boredom and stasis, but it also creates an opportunity for action in a bunch of directions that you might not otherwise have.
Nate: I do think it’s worth stating that being healthy and able-bodied, not being actively discriminated against in whichever society that you’re part of — I’m not, like, super woke, but there is some element of privilege in having a lot of agency, right?
Cate: I think that’s true, and I’m hesitant to speak for other people. I do think one of the nice things about agency is that for most people, in most circumstances, there is an opportunity to develop more of it, and it can be useful no matter what your situation is. It’s kind of just a generally useful skill set. It doesn’t require you having a super-genius IQ or a lot of connections. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that can constrain it, there absolutely are, but I think there is more room for malleability in different sets of circumstances than people maybe naturally think there is.
Nate: Are there things that you think a woman reader might get out of the book, or a [male] reader, that the other gender wouldn’t? Because, to stereotype a little bit, agency feels very male-coded.
Cate: Yeah.
Nate: What would you say to women who are reading this book in particular?
Cate: So I thought about this, because the PR firm that I hired was really excited about pitching me for a bunch of women’s shows about how women can be more agentic. And I thought about, is there an actual angle here for women in particular? Is there a different message for them that I would want to give? And I think my answer is just, not really. I think it’s true that agency is more male-coded. It’s also more dark-triad-coded than baseline-human-coded. And the core desire that I have in writing the book is exposing these skills of agency to a greater range of people who can benefit from them. I don’t know if the average woman will take more than the average man from it as a result of that, but I think it’s a pretty thoroughly all-purpose book.
Nate: Is there anything else you want me to ask, or want to ask me, or any other plugs for the book? Which I really do recommend — I read it twice, in galleys and again yesterday prepping for this. It really is a book that isn’t easily pigeonholed.
Cate: The only other plug that I would give for it is that we tried to be absolutely ruthless when it came to prioritizing the reader’s time. We started with an 80,000-word manuscript. We worked it down to a 50,000-word manuscript. It’s something that can be read by most people in a long afternoon, and I’ve been getting reviews from people who read it in one sitting. So it is short. There are no wasted words. It’s written for a Substack audience in particular. I personally do not buy a lot of self-help books, for multiple reasons, including that they are time-wasters. But I would encourage you, even if you don’t think about yourself as a self-help person, to consider buying the book and giving it a shot.
Nate: This is to say, “self-help” isn’t a bad word. But this book, I think, will appeal to people who would never be caught dead buying a self-help book.
Cate: Personal development is what we call it.
Nate: There we go. That’s the euphemism. Thanks so much, Cate.
This is cobbled together from a couple of different passages in On the Edge.
Although, for Silver Bulletin, having a lot of our coverage being oriented around elections, major sporting events and breaking news does impose some structure.
For me anyway, in periods where I’m coasting through, this tends to show up in the readership and ultimately the subscriber numbers.
In fact, I think ambiguity is often an essential communication strategy, but that’s a subject for a different newsletter.
We originally taped this as Substack Live, but I recently moved and I obviously don’t have the IT setup in the new place quite right given the sometimes choppy video and audio. Some of you seem to like these transcripts better anyway. Thanks to Eli for vetting and improving the AI transcript.
There are some elaborate simulations of this in On the Edge.
My apologies for the slightly confusing double-negative here. I’m very much not a fan of “playing games” in any sort of negotiation. I do think, however, clearly articulating what you want and what factors are non-negotiable can help you to avoid becoming entrapped in unhappy situations.
I’d recommend Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War for some extremely vivid descriptions of how much everyday life sucked until about 75 years ago.