Mentioned 5 times on 1 show. Most recently heard 24/10/2026.
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“to change from being an optimist to a pessimist. And part of the reason for wanting to talk about the book agency is I'd like people to read about this as well. Here's something I've done with 40,000 drill sergeants in the United States Army.”
“What's the relationship between optimism and agency? Agency, your new obsession, this is a new book. How is it different from optimism? How have you come to conceptualize that? Yeah, so for me, agency has three components, and optimism is the second one.”
“and imagine that if there's a large range of goals that I can accomplish. And the reason that expanded view of agency, beyond just optimism, matters, is at the heart of the new book, and that's human history. And when does human innovation occur?”
“comes across cultures and across time and place. so uh what uh the book agency is about it takes the human condition from hunter-gatherers through agriculture through homer uh uh through the greeks through the middle ages, through the reformation and the renaissance, and through modern times, and asks the question, when do human beings flourish and when do they stagnate?”
“And let me give you two examples of this. I've been working on this book of agency for seven years. It's been a lot of work. Chapter eight is about China. So I had looked at the West and found that the more agentic people were, the more progress there was.”