The Most Valuable Skill In The Modern World – George Mack

This is a long time coming, I think. Agency, since we've been talking, is the topic, the thing that we've both been obsessed with the most. So introduce people to it. What's high agency?

High agency is, in my opinion, the most under-discussed and most important idea in, let's say, the 21st century. It's one of those ideas that once you see it, you can't quite unsee it. It's- it's everywhere. But the problem with it is it's quite hard to define, and there's that, um, Justice Potter Stewart line of, around when he was trying to define pornography-

(laughs)

... when he was asked in a government inquiry, "Can you define pornography?"

(laughs)

And he came back with the ultimate reply of, "Well, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."

(laughs)

So in lieu of the episode today, I know you rent out all these beautiful studios. I wanted to be the first guest ever to bring some props-

You brought props?

... to kind of get people to experience high agency, and then we can define it with words.

All right, cool.

So first off is high agency in a meme.

Okay.

So as you can see here, you have person A and person B, and essentially, for the people that are listening, you have two people trapped on a desert island, identical people, but with two different fundamental frames of reality. One is using the wood to get help. The other is using the wood to kind of escape the island.

Mm-hmm.

And you kind of see this idea that two people with exact same fundamental realities, but a completely different, like low agency, uh, here, high agency here. So you see high agency in a meme there. Then, and this one was quite difficult to get printed in London without people asking questions, is high agency-

(laughs)

... high agency in a-

Oh.

... in a moment. So again, for the people listening, you have a series of Nazis saluting to Hitler in 1936, and you have this guy in red here, who's believed, there's debate who it is, but he's believed to be a guy called August Landmesser. Well, what I love about his story was he originally, like most people have this idea that when Nazi Germany comes around, that they're going to be the one that puts Anne Frank in their house and stands up. But realistically, we're way more likely to be these individuals here. And according to the story, um, August was part of the Nazi party, kind of went along with the larp because it kind of made sense, um, fell in love with a Jewish woman, and very much, okay, began to hit an agency test with reality. And you see all these Nazis saluting at once, and he's the one guy with his arms crossed. He ends up, um, getting punished for marrying a German woman, ends up in a concentration camp. She dies in the concentration camp. But there's just that beauty of every single person saluting-