I think there are many times when you're encountering an external circumstance. If you approach it as if this is taking my agency, you're essentially throwing yourself under the wheels.

Whereas if you think, "Oh, here's how I can use this to transform my agency, to extend and enhance my agency in various ways," then it becomes much better.

One of the core parts that I read in that is you talk about agency as a sense, an internal kind of aesthetic experience of agency. I think one of the things I picked up from fairly early in my childhood was realizing that old catechism that's pretty good, which is, "You know, the strength to change the things I can, the tolerance to live with the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference."

I came to love that catechism later because I had early got to that sense of that's how you should navigate the world.

Wow, how'd you do that? Maybe it's like playing a lot of board games. I mean, it's just kind of like it's kind of a sense of, "Hey, these things are under your control, and these things are not under your control."

You have a couple of specific ways of thinking about that that I think are really interesting. I want to make this really concrete though. Maybe I'm a product manager, I'm a designer, whatever. How does this change how I think about and orient to AI over the next couple of years? Arm me with some more practical, concrete ways to instantiate this compass in how I approach my life.

Reed, welcome to the show! It's great to be here and great to be doing this in person.

Yeah, I love that. It just makes it a much different experience to be face to face. We're actually very close to each other.

Exactly. Well, and actually even philosophically.

Yeah, definitely. I'm excited to have you for a number of reasons, but one of the big ones is you have a new book coming out. By the time this is out, it may be out. It's called "Super Agency."

I read it, and I actually really liked it. It's part of my, like, professionally I have to say that, but also I really— but it happens to be true.

Yeah, it happens to be true. The reason I like it is I think you're writing it in response to the prevalent fear of AI and maybe AGI socially.

I think you're examining this moment and saying if we want to understand what to do in this moment and how things might play out, a good way to do that is to look at history and look at other historical technology changes to see how we reacted and whether we were wrong or not.

You go much further than that in the book, but I want to start there because I love that history angle. I think we forget how many of the things that we're familiar with now used to be really, really scary.

I wonder if you could go into some of those so we can understand it a little more.

Well, it goes all the way back to the written word with Socrates. Although there are some different scholarly interpretations of the Socratic remarks or the challenges.

So why don't we start with the printing press? Great.

When the printing press was introduced, a lot of the public dialogue was very similar to the dialogue we have around artificial intelligence.

This will lead to the collapse of our trust in human cognition. It'll lead to widespread misinformation. It will lead to the collapse of the solidity of our knowledge and society and what we're doing.

Who knows what people are going to do with this technology that could really erode things? On one hand, here we are, many centuries later, obviously deeply indebted to the printing press.

We can't have science without the printing press because you can't get to that spread of information. You can't have widespread literacy and education. You can't have the progress of knowledge, middle-class institutions, universities, etc.

All of which, well, universities existed before the printing press, but getting to the many universities of vigor and strength required the printing press.

Now, all of that shows that it's great despite all the fear. Now, that being said, the other thing to track with the printing press is there was nearly a century of religious war.

So we, as human beings, when we get to these new technologies, the transition periods of what we get in can be very challenging.

But that's, you know, to some degree, that's an opportunity, not just a notion of fear because it's like the world is what we make it. So let's make this transition much better than the earlier transitions.

Do you think that because one of the overriding points in your book is these kinds of transitions, we have some amount of control over them, but we don't have total control?

We can get more into all the nuances of what that means, but I'm curious about, do you think we can prevent, you know, like let's say we went back to the printing press days?

Is there something we could have said to Martin Luther to be like, "Hey, like this schism thing in the Reformation, like it's great to have a personal relationship with God, but maybe cool it a little bit on some of this stuff because it's going to lead to a lot of war?"

Or is that sort of inevitable?

Well, I think it depends on where your society and culture is at the time. It's unclear that even if Martin Luther had said, "Let's do this gradually and have a set of discussions," that the reigning Catholic Church would have tolerated that and allowed it.

I think he did. I think he was trying to go within the system for a long time before he did the door-pounding thing.

Exactly. So it's unclear. But one of the things we hope in having built great global institutions post-World War II, having learned from the massive amount of tragedy that happens when you get in that kind of amount of conflict.

By the way, of course, we have various technologies, not the least of which is printed books, to remind us of our histories and to learn it.

Maybe we can do this one much better, and that's part of the reason for doing the book, for doing podcasts, and other things to say, "Hey, if we actually steer the right way, we can minimize the transition difficulties."

I don't think there'll be zero transition. I think that's a pipe dream, and one should have that expectation.

But we can actually get through the transition much cleaner and much more compassionately and humanely than we have done in earlier transitions and get to the amazing benefits that is always the other side of these massive new technology leaps.

That makes sense. I think one of the places to go from there is it's the book to me is not just a history book; it's also a little bit of a book about psychology in a certain way because you have a theory of why we are typically very afraid of new technology that runs through all new technological advancements.

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that.

So, you know, part of our fundamental concept of our place in the world and our dignity, our meaning, etc., comes down to a notion of agency.

It's both agency as individuals and agency as groups and agency as societies. Most often, and you know, back to the earlier referred printing press, what people experience the new technology as is reducing the agency for, you know, kind of key people who are leaders in society, heads of institutions, participants in institutions, the institutions themselves.

They react because they go, "Oh, this is going to be a change in agency, therefore reduction, and therefore bad, therefore destructive to society."

The actual path that happens is, yes, agency changes. Some things that you had agency in before, you no longer have agency in.

But when you begin to look at agency, it's not just a set of external factors; it's internal factors. It's how do you approach it?

For example, let's use a very modern example that people can think about. Is it a loss of agency to be driven in Uber or a gain of agency to be driven in Uber?

Obviously, you're like, "Oh my God, my hands aren't on the steering wheel, and who knows what this random human being is doing?"

Then you're like, "Oh my God, it's an enormous loss of agency."

Yet, of course, hundreds of millions of people are doing it because they realize it's a gain of agency.

It's, "I can not have a car and get somewhere. I can have gone, 'Ooh, I drank too much; I'm going to get home this way much more safely,' etc., etc."

So it's a question of how we approach it and how we experience and how we choose our own agency.

That doesn't mean it's completely separate from external effects, but it's a combination of that internal and external where it's really appropriate.

What happens as we first encounter technology? Like, I remember arguing at Davos with people about, "Are smartphones these kind of humanity-reducing, you know, kind of like almost cybernetic control of human beings?"

You know, never argue with people at Davos; that's mistake number one.

You're making me think about "The Princess Bride," right? Your first mistake.

And then, obviously, part of the reason why we have billions of people with them is because, in fact, it's a massive increase in agency.

As a matter of fact, it quickly gets to, you know, kind of the thesis of the book of super agency: what happens when millions of people get all elevated in their agency with a new technology, and then all of a sudden we collectively get super agency, both as individuals and as societies?

Yeah, I think one of the core parts that I read in that that I want to pull out is you talk about agency, but then you talk about it as a sense, which I read as like an internal kind of aesthetic experience of agency.

Most people, when they think about agency, think it's all external.

But it's quite clear to me that that aesthetic component is a huge part of it.

I think a lot of the questions about human agency reflect almost like a lack of faith in our ability to change and adapt, and then also a lack of understanding of how that aesthetic sense arises and how you can bring it to any experience.

To some degree, the history of literature is about people in pretty dire circumstances feeling like they have some agency.

This is not to say that external conditions don't matter, but a lot of it is internally driven.

I'm curious how you got there. What influenced that? How did you start to think about this?

Well, some of it may be philosophical background, and the highlighting of the aesthetic is also very interesting.

I think maybe when I was writing, I was also thinking of like Dan Dennett's intentional stance.

It's a stance that we have towards the world, like a mental stance, a worldview, and obviously there's an aesthetic stance too.

So I think that's a great highlight.

I think part of it is that, you know, it's like using the Uber example and using the smartphone example.

I think that there are many times when, when you're encountering an external circumstance, including, of course, technologies, if you approach it as, "This is taking my agency," then you're essentially throwing yourself under the wheels.

Whereas if you go, "Oh, here's how I can use this to transform my agency, to extend and enhance my agency in various ways," then it becomes much better.

For example, think about just driving down the highway. You go, "Hey, I'm in this car; I have an ability to slow down, speed up, drive, etc."

Well, there are a lot of other cars on the road too. If you say, "Oh my God, my agency is taken away because these other cars are slowing down or potential hazards, etc., etc.," well then you're never going to get on the road, right?

I think that points to, like, agency is to some degree a way of looking at the world and where you put your attention.

If you push your attention to, "Oh my God, all these other cars," of course that sense of agency is going to go down.

If you push your attention somewhere else, that sense of agency is going to go up.

Again, it's not only your attention; there are external things.

But to some degree, there's some sense of control.

I'm curious for you, how do you notice your personal sense of agency fluctuating day to day in your life?

Have there been periods where you haven't felt this connection with a sense of agency? How has that played out for you?

Great question. You know, it's interesting because I think one of the things I picked up from fairly early in my childhood was realizing that kind of that old catechism that's pretty good, which is, "You know, the something like the strength to change the things I can, the tolerance to live with the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Yeah, it's like the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer thing.

Yes, exactly. I think it comes from a Christian Catholic catechism, and I paraphrased it.

Did you grow up Catholic?

No, no, no, no. Just it wasn't so much that as much as I'd adopted that.

I came to love that catechism later because I had early got to that sense of that's how you should navigate the world.

Wow, how'd you do that?

I think it just maybe it's like playing a lot of board games.

I mean, it's kind of like it's kind of a sense of, "Hey, these things are under your control, and you can affect them, and then you can affect that outcome."

And these things are not under your control, and overly tearing your hair out about the things that are out of your control is not helpful to you or to anyone else.

Right? So you go, you know, like the fact that there's suffering in the world.

If you go, "Oh my God, there's suffering in the world," then of course you're going to get crushed.

There's going to be suffering in the world. You should, of course, always feel for people suffering.

But the fact that there are children dying around the world today, it's really, really sad.

We should try to do things about it, but we're not going to stop all of it today.

It's an ongoing process.

So there are things out of your control, and then there are things in your control.

Of course, that's where your ability to navigate it comes in.

It's kind of like whether it's, you know, maybe it's kind of simple, like who you're friends with when you're in school.

You go, "Oh, you know, do you have friends that you treasure?"

And then that's really great.

Maybe there are other people that you wanted to be friends with who weren't as interested in you.

That's fine too, but kind of navigating that within kind of child circumstances, I think, is where I started.

From there, I think that the, that became kind of how I approached each new challenge that I was getting.

Part of how, like, I think I got a sense of good strategy in life and strategy for me, strategy for what I did in school, strategy for what I did with the company, strategy for what I do with investing, all came from this kind of figure out what the nature of the game is and what are the things that are within your ability to change.

Then accepting the things that you can't while changing some really interesting things.

It sounds like that came from board games. What board games were you talking about?

Well, so a whole set. Some, and there's less board games, Dungeons and Dragons, so I was doing that, which there seems to have been some resurgence on, which is cool.

But also what probably most people don't track these days, these Avalon Hill board games, I did a bunch of them, and then a variety of others.

One of the things about it being multiple is that you're learning all of them.

Actually, one of the things that people frequently say, I know I did play chess and I did play go.

I wasn't as attracted to those games because part of the thing with when you're playing like the Avalon Hill board games or also like Starfleet Battles was another one I did.

By having some randomness with dice rolls, it actually more closely approximated the kinds of circumstances we encounter in life.

Because life is not like chess; life is not like go.

It is not deterministic that way. There are uncertainty variables that you have to play into, and an epistemic uncertainty sometimes that you have to play into.

Both go and chess have no epistemic uncertainty, and so adopting your strategies to those was really important.

I think those are the initial mindsets.

That makes sense. I think there's this meme in tech right now about being high agency, like high agency people, which I think is great.

It's good to be high agency, but I think we tend to think of agency as always good.

Generally, if you want to be, like, generally, I think it's good to have agency.

But for example, in the example you gave of there's suffering, if you think of yourself as high agency and have a high locus of control for things that are totally out of your control, it's actually a pretty miserable way to live.

Yes, and it definitely doesn't make you more effective.

There's a, like, I think what you're saying is there's a certain range of things within which you want to be high agency and have an internal locus of control.

Then there's also a whole set of other experiences in life that are important that are about completely giving up control and recognizing control.

Those are some of the most meaningful experiences that people have, like transcendent experiences.

I'm curious what that sparks in you.

Well, I mean, I think the obvious ones are in friendship, romantic relationships, and other things.

Part of what you're doing is essentially giving yourself over to not being in complete control of how a relationship's playing out.

Those are obviously some of the places where, as we learn and become, you know, kind of wiser, more compassionate, more evolved people, that's actually, in fact, I think one of the really central things.

It's also, by the way, sometimes people encounter that playing in team sports of various sorts.

There are team sports themselves; there's also, of course, team sports within companies in terms of how companies operate.

The shared controls, the shared agency become, I think, really key.

Obviously, some people find that within a religious experience too.

How has that worked for you as an investor?

Obviously, because you're investing in companies, you care about the outcome deeply, but also you don't want to be too in control in a lot of ways.

There are a lot of trade-offs to control.

How's that worked for you?

Well, I think one of the things that—so start with something kind of enormously simple and pragmatic here.

One of the questions that I ask myself on an investment is, "Would I do this investment and walk away and say, 'Call me in five years?'"

Because almost like call it 98% of good investments, you will accurately have that sense.

Not to say you wouldn't try to help and work with them because, well, like part of it is you think as an investor, you know, I can spend maybe if I'm spending a lot of time on investment, I might be able to spend four hours a week on the investment.

Because as an investor, I have a portfolio of investments; I've got other things I'm doing.

The person I'm investing in, she or he, you know, the CEO, the founders, you know, how they may all play out, they're in this presumably 80-plus hours a week, maybe 100-plus hours a week.

If they're not capable of carrying the game themselves, it's almost for sure you've made a bad investment.

Now, sometimes the exception is where you go, "Oh, what I really need to do is help them get this one deal or help them hire this one person or help them with this one strategy element, and then everything else will be fine."

Then that's okay, and I will sometimes do that investment.

But one of the mistakes that investors frequently make is they go, "Well, you know, they'll tell themselves that they're more important than they are in the judgment."

Then they'll get too much involved in it, and they'll actually be messing it up.

Yeah, because of iatrogenic investing.

Yes, because truly if you think your four hours is more important than the person's 80 to 100 hours, like you probably invested in the wrong person.

Yeah, or you have an ego problem.

Yes, yes, or both probably.

Yeah, so I think one of the things that came to me as part of this book is you're tracking agency as this psychological experience, an intentional stance, and aesthetic stance.

One of the things that seems to affect our sense of agency is how we approach uncertainty.

The more we kind of grind against uncertainty to try to eliminate it, the lower our agency is because you can't eliminate it.

The more you work with uncertainty and have that sort of stance of like surfing through it, the better things go.

That's the appropriate stance for dealing with new technologies.

The thing that, of course, for me, like the thing that I'm thinking about is, well, I think our default stance in the West to uncertainty is to try to eliminate it.

You can read that in the history of philosophy, which is like, you know, Socrates and Plato to Descartes trying to make knowledge that is clear and explicit as epis.

It's the same thing in science, right? You want to boil things down into fundamental laws so you can predict things in advance.

Laws that are explicit.

Religion, I think, is also in a lot of ways about dealing with uncertainty by trying to eliminate it.

Maybe the world of the senses is totally uncertain, but there is a world to come that is totally certain and is definitely going to happen and will be amazing.

Not to denigrate any of those things because I think those outlooks are actually quite useful in certain circumstances.

But in particular, when it comes to technology, that way of thinking about things can lead to trouble.

I'm curious if you have the same reading or how you would respond to that.

Well, I think it's definitely the case that we—and I think there's the generalization, which, you know, is kind of a very broad brush, almost Jackson Pollock, you know, quick description of the stuff.

But I do think that the notion that we as human beings try to delude ourselves to over degrees of certainty.

We don't, for example, realize that every time we drive somewhere on the highway, we are taking a certain amount of risk.

We're taking a risk about our own competence; we're taking a risk on our vehicle; we're taking a risk on weather conditions; we're taking a risk on other folks.

Of course, once again, just like agency, if you dwell on all that, maybe you'd never get into a car.

But then you would never go anywhere, right?

And never be able to benefit from, you know, significant portions of modern society.

Part of it is to think about how do we live in a heuristic of managing uncertainty and managing various forms of uncertainty?

There's a form of uncertainty about, well, how does the world actually play out?

There's uncertainty about our epistemology and how we know the world, and then there's uncertainty about how the system comes together.

It's one of the things that's really central to entrepreneurship because any entrepreneur who persuades themselves that they guaranteed success in what they're doing is massively deluding themselves.

Right? Which maybe sometimes is necessary to work really hard in order to do something.

But you know, there's always like encountering and navigating a world of risk is actually, in fact, very important.

I think part of—and actually, I think that it's a true line of where frequently philosophy, you know, kind of like the Western philosophy, actually we should probably add this too.

Frequently, it's overly trying to get to like human nature is X.

Like, you know, frequently they'll say human nature is selfishness, and you're like, "Well, there's a lot of different ways in which human beings are self-oriented."

But there's a diversity of them, and sometimes you say, "Well, when this person's really committed to their family or really committed to their society, well, that's just the way they're expressing their selfishness."

Well, but that's not exactly what you mean by the word selfish.

So there's a whole bunch of different self-orientation, and that spread is actually really important.

The same thing is true for understanding uncertainty.

Of course, that's part of the reason why we're still struggling to resolve, you know, Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Einstein himself was like, "Quantum mechanics can't be right because God does not play dice with the universe."

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really another example of how aesthetic sensibilities guide what we see and guide our decision-making in supposedly really rational, truth-oriented endeavors.

That's why I think I'm sort of keying on this aesthetic sense because I think when we talk about dealing with uncertainty, there's a way in which you can try to eliminate it.

You can try to manage it, which is sort of still like we'd rather we didn't—we weren't uncertain.

Then there's a way of like sort of playing with uncertainty, and like you use the phrase like bloomers, like sort of using that to flourish, which I think in a lot of ways is a way to look at life.

I think that perspective, going back to the aesthetic sense, is often embodied in entrepreneurs and artists who are often guided by an aesthetic sense.

I think those two outlooks, where you're like, "Yeah, I want to face the blank page," or "I want to change how people see the world, how the world works," even though I know it's highly uncertain, seems to me somewhat core to working with technology.

Well, I completely agree.

Actually, one of the things that's interesting about the arc that you're highlighting in your, call it philosophical aesthetic reading of super agency is the actual ties between my first book, "The Startup Review," and this.

Because "The Startup Review," in part, was trying to give advice you give to entrepreneurs but to individuals for their lives.

Part of it was like multiple of the chapters are navigating environments of uncertainty because that's what entrepreneurs must do, and must do it intelligently, and preserve their sense of agency while doing it.

Exactly. It's an interesting—I hadn't quite realized between book one and book six that there was kind of an arc from it.

I do think that part of the thing in surfing is a very good metaphor to say how do you embrace uncertainty in a way that you're taking agency and that you are leveraging it to having a better life, to working better, to making decisions better, to creating better, right, in terms of the artist side.

And many things, but artists especially, and then leveraging that to a feature, not a bug.

Yeah, totally. I think the wave metaphor is really interesting to me because you can try to stand in front of a wave and stop it, or you can surf it.

In surfing, you're working with the dynamic context, so it's not like you're not totally in control, but you are in control within that sphere, which is sort of what you're going for.

Which I think gets to your point about the way our stance toward uncertainty is what guides whether or not we feel agency.

You have a couple of specific ways of thinking about that that I think are really interesting.

One of the dichotomies you bring up is like some people try to make a real blueprint or a plan or a specific theory about the future.

But you use the metaphor of a compass or you say cognitive GPS.

Another term, which I don't think is in the book but I think is really related, is wayfinding.

You have a sense of the direction you're going, but you're pretty open to the details.

I'd love for you to talk about that.

Exactly right. Part of the thing, whether or not almost everything, if you're making too concrete of a plan—and like you earlier, we were kind of talking a little bit about Sun Tzu and "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."

Plans that are rigid break fast and uselessly.

You can make flexible plans, but one of the most easy ways to make a flexible plan is to have, you know, kind of a compass.

The compass might be like, for example, "Well, I need to hike from here to here," and there might be multiple trails.

Sometimes one of them is washed out and everything else.

Well, you can get from there to there, and maybe there's no trails if you have compass map information as a way of doing it.

You're adjusting your plan as you go and as you discover what the terrain and the conditions look like.

It's a good metaphor for also a wide variety of things because as you think about, for example, well, we're making decisions about like what jobs we might take, what careers we might take, where we might go on a holiday, what we might be doing, you know, Friday night.

All of those are informational space questions, and again, a compass is a good way to do that.

So that you think about what is an AI chatbot helping you with?

It's almost like it's a compass helping you with these informational decisions, hence informational GPS.

It's resilient. If you suddenly discover something really changes, the world isn't as you expected, the world changed, you change.

You're like, "Well, I thought I was in the mood for watching a movie, but I'd actually rather just like to have a quiet conversation with my friend."

Well, oh hey, there's a cafe down the street. Let's go.

That we discovered from, you know, the compass.

Part of, you know, what in writing the book, as you know from having read "Super Agency," it's part of the reason for doing the book, for doing podcasts, and other things to say, "Hey, if we actually steer the right way, we can minimize the transition difficulties."

I don't think there'll be zero transition.

I think that's a pipe dream, and one should have that expectation.