Clara Collier: In the spring of next year, you have a book coming out called You Can Just Do Things. It’s about agency. I'm interested in agency as a buzzword, as a concept, as a Silicon Valley cultural phenomenon, as a thing I can exercise in my life — maybe even as a thing I shouldn't exercise so much in my life. So, to start: How do you define agency? And why did you want to write a book about it?
Cate Hall: I define agency as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life offers. So it has two components: One is noticing degrees of freedom, the other is taking action on the basis of them.
I think agency is a hot topic right now for a lot of reasons, but I personally care about it because I have been through periods of my life that were characterized by very low agency, which made me miserable. I think that there is a pervasive belief — in tech and in the Bay Area, but also in the the world at large — that agency is an inherent trait. I think that is really wrong. So I'm interested in talking, at a practical level, about how agency can be cultivated to make it more accessible.
Clara: There’s an interesting cleavage between the way that you think and write about agency, and agency as a tech world buzzword. Why do you think this concept is so popular now?
Cate: I've wondered a lot about this. Certainly at least some part of it is that different ideas just become fads, but it's hard to understand why things take off when they do.
However, I suspect that some part of what is driving this interest is a concern that people have that they don't really know what their future looks like. They desire to control or lay claim to their future in a way they hope agency will provide.
The idea that intelligence is not what matters — because intelligence is becoming cheap — is growing. So there has to be something else that we can rely on, as humans, to supply a sense of control or meaning to life. Part of the enthusiasm about agency emerges from that perspective.
Clara: One thing in this space that I find concerning is the idea of “just do what high agency people are doing”. I think that leads to inauthenticity, where people pursue something that they think they should do just because it seems to be “high agency.”
Cate: That seems like a valid concern. I am interested in a flavor of agency that has to do with freedom above all else. There's one version of agency that is primarily concerned with personal freedom. There's another version that is primarily concerned with personal ambition — the version of agency that I hear more often in tech circles. I think that LARPing as a high-agency person by following the playbook of a tech founder seems unlikely to be a true exercise of agency, and therefore is unlikely to confer the benefits of “true agency:” a meaningful life that, upon reflection, you are happy to have lived.
Clara: I like the term reflection there. I have a kind of Rawlsian definition of agency: doing what you would do at reflective equilibrium.
Cate: I think that makes sense to me. There's the concept of coherent extrapolated volition: What would you do if you had more information? I've always liked that idea. If you were a better version of yourself, wiser and more knowledgeable, what would you actually want?
Jake Eaton: Maybe we can narrow this down more by talking about your own experiences, Cate, because I think you define agency orthogonal to how it’s sometimes used in the Bay. When you were younger, you graduated Yale Law, you held several high-status, high-performing jobs — you were a supreme court attorney and you clerked for a judge on the Second Circuit. I think most anyone reading your CV would think: This person has high agency. But you talk about these accomplishments as if they were done before you had any.
Cate: Yeah, I think this points to where agency and ambition actually diverge. It seems fairly clear, at least to me, that you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally.
You can also be highly successful and highly ambitious without being highly agentic. That looks like following a path with a certain kind of excellence and endurance that reliably leads to success, to accolades, to money. But you haven’t reflected on that path; it’s not a matter of you having decided, yes, this is the life path that I want to be on. And that is what characterized my life until around the age of 30.
Jake: Do you reject the use of the term NPC?
Cate: I really hate it. The one context in which I will not reject it outright is when somebody is using it to describe their own personal transformation. Otherwise, I have a very strong allergy to the term and find it morally repugnant. The idea that some people do not count because they are not thinking for themselves in the way that the speaker believes they should is, to me, really vile. I have a hard time even getting along with somebody who I know has used the term, I find it so offensive.
Jake: Yeah, our Slack is full of both of us ranting about everyone who uses it and how much we hate it too.
Clara: It's so horrible. I'm not against ambition. I like being around people who want to change the world. I like being around people who want to do unusual things. But the more time I spend in spaces that valorize these qualities, the more I tend to run into people who have this deeply dehumanizing view of others. How separable are these things?
Cate: My first instinct is that you're seeing some sort of selection effect, where sociopaths tend to do both. People who tend to view others in transactional terms are also people who are high agency, in the sense that they have never bothered to learn social scripts. They are very low in conscientiousness. And so, naturally, without any study, they are able to exude high-agency instincts. A large part of learning high agency is learning not to be so constrained in your view of the world and of what comprises possible action. The people who, for whatever reason, never learn those things in the first place are who we think of as naturally agentic — but they are also high in dark triad traits.
So this is a consistent concern that I also have: that it is probably the worst people that you can think of who are really high agency. Agency itself is not necessarily a good thing. It becomes a good thing as a toolkit, developed by people who are also high in conscientiousness, who want good things for the world, and who might otherwise be constrained by narrow perspectives on what counts as socially acceptable action.
Jake: What's your model for how someone actually gains agency? Where did it come from for you; what happened around age 30? My own experience, and that of others I’ve spoken with, is that you can read plenty about self-determination or self-actualization that simply doesn’t click, until, one day, it does. That experience feels to me much more like grace than something that can be deliberately chosen or affected.
Cate: I think that there are a few different types of situations which reliably prompt people towards this direction. The first one that I ever benefited from was LSD. Drug experiences can be really useful in extracting you from your ordinary environment and giving you a newfound perspective on how you’re living your life. I think if I had never tried LSD, I might plausibly still be a lawyer living in DC. So psychedelics in particular — maybe MDMA.
Another is something that I discuss in my TED Talk and in the book: desperation, or call it being in emergency mode. I was trying to escape from the very low-agency point of addiction. Sometimes life becomes unbearable, and that prompts you to take dramatic action. In addiction circles, this is called the gift of desperation. That can be a result of addiction, but it can also be a health scare, or any event that serves as a trigger to reevaluate how you are living.
The third category is exposure to high-agency people. You can osmose agency from your environment if you're exposed to the right kinds of people. I experienced this while at Alvea, my gig before Astera, where I was working with a couple of people who were radically high agency — total outliers in this sense. I saw how they operated in the world and how much they were willing to question. That was really instructive for me.
So psychedelics, desperation, exposure to high-agency people. I think those are the standard things. And then there is just grace. Sometimes people wake up one day and they're like, oh, I don't like the way that I'm living. And that happens. But it's less reliable for me.
Jake: From a predictive processing framework, it strikes me that a lot of what you're talking about is just finding some way to break your priors about what’s possible for yourself.
Cate: Totally.
Jake: How, then, does the book fit into the broader project of actually providing people with agency?
Cate: I guess I'm trying to provide a fourth pathway, which is: Somebody puts a book in front of you and gives you something to think about. Agency has a reputation for being an inherent trait, as opposed to something deliberately cultivated. I think that fairly describes how a lot of people pick up agency. If it's not inherent, then it can be a matter of luck — who they happen to meet, or life circumstances that call them to become higher agency.
But I think agency is something that can be deliberately cultivated by a lot more people. And the hope is that I'm able to describe a useful set of approaches to life that cause people to feel more free and able to do what they want to — as an alternative to taking acid or bumping into people, you know?
Clara: This is also something I've noticed in my own life. Moving to the Bay Area and ending up in a very particular community here was really instrumental in me deciding I could do things that had not been on my action menu before. On the other hand, it's always hard for me to tell. When am I doing something that is actually, again, high agency? And when is it something that my community considers valuable, or cool, or agentic?
Cate: Working in AI safety is a version of this too. There are certain scripts you can follow that seem radical from the perspective of somebody outside of the community, but within the community, they're just the way that things are done. It can be easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are doing something radical and creative as an expression of your own deep interests, when in fact you are doing what everybody around you is doing. This is not an indictment of AI safety, or anybody in particular.
Clara: I think Effective Altruist circles are an interesting example of this. An intrinsic part of the ethos is that you might not be best equipped to figure out what you should be doing, and you should just listen to what the community experts think is the right thing to do. So you get people who really just want to be told what to do.
Cate: I agree with that. I think it's catnip for particular temperaments. There is a large contingent of people who are very worried that they are morally bad — that most people are morally bad. Their solution to this — and mine too, for a long time — was to say, okay, somebody just tell me what to do so I can be good. That makes you really susceptible to groupthink.
Clara: What do you think about the relationship between agency and risk?
Cate: There definitely is a relationship. It's interesting: a lot of what I view as high agency involves taking a chance on something that is uncertain, instead of sticking with something certain. For example: Going to work at a startup instead of taking a corporate job, or deciding to break up with your partner of two years who you aren't enthusiastic about marrying, knowing there's a chance you won't meet anybody that you are more excited to date.
I think that there is an openness to risk and uncertainty that seems to go hand in hand with agency. Beyond that, there's probably a sociological overlap: many of the groups especially drawn to agency discourse right now also tend to be risk-loving for other reasons.
Fundamentally, I believe that most people take too few risks and limit their results in life because of that. Embracing some degree of risk is probably part and parcel of a high-agency mindset. But I haven't thought too much about how close the connection between the two is.
Jake: I have a couple of woo questions.
Cate: Nice.
Jake: Are there any Enneagram types that are more agentic than others?
Cate: Oh, I love that question. Okay, let's go through them. Nine and six? No. Five and four? No. Two? No. One is the iconoclast — that’s what I am. I think it can be consistent with high-agency behavior because there's a willingness to go against the grain. You see this mentality in a lot of Effective Altruists, and people are susceptible to all of the traps that go along with that.
Three is the achiever. It is probably the most typically high-agency mindset, and also what I would associate with the worst aspects of a high-agency mindset. It's people who are driven to succeed at all costs, who tend to shape themselves to succeed in whatever environment they're in.
Sevens are the enthusiast. I think these people can be almost incidentally high agency. They generate a lot of activity. They're creative, always going off in different directions. I know sevens that I’d consider high agency, but it's not necessarily a deep, inherent trait.
Eight is the second most stereotypical high-agency type, because it's people who want to be in control and drive what is happening.
I think there's definitely types that are more or less agentic, but I'd guess that you can find high-agency people across all of the types as well.
Jake: Enneagram does a better job allowing for growth; there's no type that will necessarily lock you into a specific level, but averages might differ.
Cate: I think that's right. The growth trajectory from low agency to high agency is also pretty obvious for some of the types. When I think about a four at low psychological health, I picture somebody who is incapacitated by a fear of risk, who is afraid of looking bad or stupid. They’d rather not try at all than risk failure. A more psychologically healthy four is going to be more adventurous, more willing to do things that look high agency, because they are less constrained by that fear of not being extraordinary.
Clara: This is all Greek to me.
Cate: I'm a huge Enneagram nerd. It’s funny because before I learned about the Enneagram, I thought it sounded stupid. But it’s turned out to be a potent tool for understanding myself and others, and for navigating work relationships. I highly recommend it.
Jake: You wrote this book with your husband, Sasha Chapin. I read through some of your writing and thought, this sounds like something Sasha might say. There was one post in particular where I thought, this sounds like a secular-ish version of Existential Kink, a book I know was influential for Sasha.
Cate: Oh, that's interesting.
Jake: I'd love to hear more about your writing relationship together, since Sasha also writes a lot about inner transformation, personal growth, and self-knowledge.
Cate: Sasha is a but for cause of the book on many levels. I never would have tried to write a book if it weren't for him. I never would have actually written it if it weren't for him. He has been the primary first drafter of almost everything, working from outlines that I've developed. Our writing process generally goes like this: I generate the core ideas, then come up with an outline. He will draft something. I then rewrite anywhere between 5% and 95% of it, depending on how much it lines up with what I actually believe.
A lot of what I have published on Substack are excerpts of the book, so most pieces have followed that process. There’s a lot of him in the pieces that have been on Substack.
He's also influenced my writing at a much deeper level, even on pieces he hasn’t worked on or edited.His attitude toward communication and writing has really benefited me, because in addition to being a great writer, he's also a writing coach. He has helped me overcome a lot of my neuroses about writing which has allowed me to write a lot more, and more effectively. Much of it has come down to getting over a desire to sound impressive in the writing, instead of being as straightforward as possible. That approach to writing has deeply infected me, even for subject matter that he’s never touched.
Jake: What's the relationship between romantic partnership and agency? When you're in a partnership with someone, you're constrained in many ways, at least on the surface. But partnership can also be highly enabling of agency — by allowing you to drop things, or to grow in other areas. I'm curious if you've thought much about that.
Cate: I think that really good relationships can help people develop agency, in part because they give people a lot more freedom to experiment. So, at different points in our relationship, both Sasha and I have benefited from the ability to have one partner who is the anchor — financial anchor, emotional anchor, or something else. That gives the other person more ability to roam and be less constrained.
For nine months I was really unsure what I was doing professionally, and I had the ability to let myself be aimless during that period. I have likewise supported Sasha through many explorations, like the perfume company that he started. To me, that is one of the coolest things about a relationship: You get to take turns enabling the other person to have a greater scope of freedom in life. That's really fun.
I also think that my relationship with Sasha has increased my personal freedom significantly. He’s helped me get smarter about a lot of emotional and psychological aspects of my life that I was not eager to examine or work on alone. Just having him around as a patient and wise interlocutor on a lot of things has been hugely beneficial.
Clara: This comes back to the idea we were talking about earlier —the self as a constraint and freedom as self knowledge, which is a very classical liberal conception of agency.
Cate: I agree.
Clara: So, to return for a moment — and if it sounds like I'm harping on, it's only because in our DOGE era, it's something I'm deeply, deeply preoccupied with. You said, when we were talking about Enneagram types, that the type classically highest in agency, the three, is also the type that is most drawn to the toxic kind of agency, the will to power. What advice would you give to those people? In particular, let's say someone is ambitious and power seeking, which, again, I don't view as necessarily a bad thing. I think these people often have the hardest time truly developing an idea of agency as freedom, because they are the most compelled to fit themselves into shapes that help them get what they want.
Cate: This is a question where I wish that I could tag in Sasha, because so much of his coaching relationships are about. A type of person that he often coaches is the three who is coming to terms with the fact that their life is not actually deeply satisfying. They're contending with that hollowness for the first time.
But I actually don't know what to say to somebody to make them want a life that differs from what they've been psychologically honed for. I don't think that's because there aren't good solutions — it's just because it's not the type of problem that I have confronted in my personal life.
Jake: This is why I like the concept of grace. There's this question of free will lurking here: At what point do you actually choose to pay attention to the agency discourse? You can see it a million times and not recognize that it is for you — until the day you suddenly come to a recognition that leads to transformation. But what actually brings someone to that place? It’s not like you can just choose it.
Cate: Yeah. Grace is a big part of addiction recovery, because you can be struggling for a long time and, by all accounts, really trying to get sober. That was my experience: I spent two and a half years trying to get sober before I finally did. At some point, something sinks in at a deeper level, and it's really hard to predict when that is going to happen. When you, for instance, take the step to commit yourself to an inpatient facility for some period of time. There is an unpredictable point at which that happens for many people.
Many people ask those who have recovered from a serious drug addiction what caused their recovery. From the outside, people want to pin it down — you decided to do X or Y, or this was the decisive causal factor. But from the inside, for most people it feels more like, nope. For some reason, I just heard it. When it was said to me for the 50th time, I heard it in a different way, and that sang through.
Jake: Do you think you could return to your younger self and change that trajectory earlier, based on everything you know now?
Cate: I think so. I mean, if I didn't think so, I probably wouldn't bother writing the book.
I think that some of my lack of agency early in life came from craving stability and not recognizing that. I didn't grow up in an environment where people did remarkable or interesting things. If there had been more people who did, who had, implicitly or explicitly, given me the message that I could do interesting things, I might have been more likely to do them. So I do think that even the core question of whether it is worth trying to be more authentic is something that you can get absorb from other people.
Jake: The book’s called You Can Just Do Things, a metonym of sorts that has loosely come to mean exercising agency. The phrase started on Twitter and has since escaped containment into the wider public, or, at least the wider Bay Area. I mean, I saw it on a billboard on the way to the airport the other day.
I'm curious to what extent you feel that the people who use that slogan live up to it. Is the Bay Area actually a place in which you can just do things? You've written about how there are a lot of cults here. Is constantly reiterating the idea that you can just do things an inauthentic way of convincing yourself that you're agentic? Do the people who use it actually succeed in doing things?
Cate: I have really mixed feelings about the title of my own book. I have agreed to it as the working title. My editor and Sasha are both big fans of it. My hesitations are mostly — “you can just do things” is a thing that you hear people say after they do antisocial things. Can I fully reclaim it? I don't know, but the level of familiarity people have with the phrase is probably good from a book sales perspective. And it's catchy. It's fun to say. But to your question: I think, in line with a lot of other things we've been saying, people here in the Bay are prone to groupthink. They can get on particular tracks that feel high agency but actually aren't.
But I think all of that said, the Bay Area is probably the highest-agency place in the world. It is where a lot of people who are trying to think for themselves and trying to do interesting things come.
And so I'm not down on the Bay Area in general. I think people here can think too highly of themselves. But that is the case for humans everywhere.
