Devon Eriksen on Education, Agency, and What Makes Us Human

Introduction to the Conversation

This discussion features Devon Eriksen, a writer and social media commentator known for his sharp insights on education, agency, and human potential, as well as author of the science fiction novel Theft of Fire. The conversation explores how to future-proof oneself in the age of AI, the flaws of the modern education system, the primacy of agency over intelligence, and how to find direction and build resilience in life.

Critiquing Modern Education

The Root Cause of Educational Failure

Eriksen begins by addressing a viral response he made to Yuval Noah Harari's claim that nobody knows what to teach children because nobody knows what skills will be relevant in 20 years. Eriksen argues this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what education actually is.

The core problem with modern education, he explains, is that a third party pays for it. Whoever pays for something becomes the customer, and the customer is who gets served. When government funds education through taxation, grants, or loan programs, it is the government—not the student—that effectively decides the curriculum, regardless of which school a student attends. This means education is designed to make people useful to those funding it, not necessarily useful to themselves.

Training vs. True Education

Eriksen draws a distinction rooted in Cicero's writings on education, contrasting true education with mere training:

Training prepares someone for a specific task, historically the kind of instruction given to slaves in Rome, who were essentially "human machines" destined for one function.
Education, by contrast, was historically reserved for free citizens who needed to be adaptable, since no one could predict everything a free person might need to do in life.

Because it's impossible to teach someone everything they might ever need to know, the real purpose of education should be teaching people how to learn—not performing a specific task, but acquiring the skill of self-directed learning itself. Modern Western education fails at this because those designing curricula are primarily interested in producing useful workers for the interests they actually serve.

The Seven Liberal Arts for the Modern World

Eriksen proposes an updated framework for essential skills:

Logic – deriving truth from known facts
Statistics – understanding the implications of data
Rhetoric – persuasion tactics and sparring
Research – gathering information on unknown subjects
Practical psychology – discerning the true motives of others
Investment – managing and growing existing assets
Agency – making decisions about what to pursue and proactively acting on them

Agency: The Key Differentiator for Success

Why Intelligence Alone Isn't Enough

Eriksen argues that agency, not raw intelligence, is the rarest and most decisive factor separating highly successful people from everyone else. Using Elon Musk as an example, he notes that while Musk is clearly intelligent, there are thousands of people with equally high IQs who never achieve comparable results—many stuck in academia producing work with little real-world impact.

Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient. It's a narrow analytical capacity that helps you reason about the world, but reasoning alone doesn't provide feedback from reality. Success requires:

Forming a hypothesis or plan
Testing it in the real world
Failing, often repeatedly
Refining the approach based on what was learned
Trying again

Defining Agency

Agency is the tendency to initiate action combined with the belief that you will eventually succeed. This belief makes people willing to take risks and resilient in the face of failure. Since worthwhile achievements are, by definition, things nobody has fully solved before, the first attempts will inevitably fail—no matter how intelligent the person is. Persisting through this failure requires believing that "this problem is too hard for me to solve right now, but if I keep at it, I will learn how to solve it."

Crucially, agency is teachable, unlike raw IQ, which is largely biologically fixed. This makes it the most important trait for parents to cultivate in their children.

Redefining Intelligence and Effectiveness

When discussing whether "intelligence" might be better understood as a broader capacity—like perspective or the ability to construct and integrate stories—Eriksen reframes the real question as: what makes an effective human being? He agrees that IQ alone is insufficient, pointing out that society regularly produces people with extraordinarily high IQs who never accomplish anything notable, precisely because raw analytical power isn't coupled with the other components of getting things done.

The Three Types of Problems

Eriksen offers a framework for understanding agency through the lens of problem difficulty:

Easy problems – Tasks you can already do with your current knowledge, skills, and resources (e.g., buying milk at a store).
Impossible problems – Tasks where no meaningful path exists between your current capabilities and the goal (e.g., eating a bicycle, digging to the earth's core).
Hard problems – Tasks you cannot do right now, but can learn to do through sustained effort.

Agency, in this framework, is belief in the existence of hard problems—the conviction that a middle category exists between "already easy" and "truly impossible."

How School Undermines Agency

Government schooling, Eriksen argues, actively erodes children's capacity to believe in hard problems. Success in school is defined as avoiding mistakes (getting an "A" by answering correctly), training children to see success as failure-avoidance. But in reality, success lies on the other side of substantial failure. Since children spend nearly as many waking hours in school as with their parents, this conditioning deeply shapes their psychology—making even high-IQ children risk-averse and crippling their potential for future achievement.

Practical Steps to Rebuild Agency

For those who have already gone through this system, Eriksen suggests:

Self-reflection: Notice patterns of risk-aversion and fear of pursuing desired goals.
Understand that belief in your ability to succeed is like a muscle—it must be trained gradually, not forced all at once.
Set achievable, incremental goals: Choose things you can't yet do but can accomplish in structured steps.
Use weightlifting as a model: Progressive overload in the gym builds not just physical strength but the psychological belief that consistent effort leads to improvement.
Give yourself permission to suck: Avoid shame about the gap between your current abilities and your goals. A little shame can motivate, but too much causes avoidance of the very tasks needed for growth.

Learning as a Moving Target

Returning to Harari's original claim about not knowing what to teach for an unknowable future, Eriksen argues that the further into the future you try to plan, the harder it becomes to get things right. You can reasonably predict what you need to learn in the next two months, less certainly in the next two years, and not at all in the next twenty years.

The solution isn't better upfront planning—it's building a feedback loop: start moving, learn as you go, and adjust continuously. This applies to any pursuit, whether becoming a content creator, writing a successful book, or building a business. Nobody achieves major success perfectly on the first attempt; the key is the willingness to get started, fail, and learn iteratively—which is precisely what agency provides.

A plan, Eriksen notes, is essentially "a list of things that don't happen," but that's not a failure—it simply means you must revise the plan as you go. Success comes from running a continuous feedback loop, adjusting your approach until you eventually hit the moving target of your goal.

What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI

Addressing fears about artificial intelligence, Eriksen contends that current AI systems are fundamentally task-specific tools—capable of playing chess or generating images better than most humans, but not replicating the core defining trait of humanity: the ability to look at one's environment, recognize what needs to be learned, and then go learn and do it. This executive function—observing the world, synthesizing it into a coherent story, and deciding what to pursue—remains uniquely human. Just as machines that could lift more than humans didn't make humans obsolete during the Industrial Revolution, task-specific AI systems don't threaten the essential human capacity for self-directed learning and adaptive action.

Artificial Stupidity vs. Real Intelligence

Eriksen introduces a provocative term—artificial stupidity—to describe current AI systems. He illustrates this with an example from his novel, where robotic bodyguards are trained on a single narrow task ("protect this person") and repeatedly act counterproductively because they cannot grasp broader context. A human character is able to outwit these machines despite lacking their speed, strength, or processing power, simply because he understands the full situational context and can adapt appropriately.

Drawing a parallel to ego-development theory, Eriksen argues that developmental stages shouldn't be seen as levels you move through but as tools added to a toolbox. Even someone at the highest level of psychological development will revert to a primitive fight-or-flight response if physically threatened (e.g., held underwater)—and this isn't regression, but appropriately selecting the right tool for the situation. Real intelligence lies in the capacity to choose which tool fits the context; artificial stupidity is being locked into only the tools you were trained with, unable to recognize when your whole paradigm no longer applies.

Eriksen suggests that AI research has inadvertently revealed natural stupidity: many humans function like chatbots, operating only within narrow, trained parameters—either due to lack of innate ability or, more often, because of how they were educated. He argues society has built an education system that turns humans into single-purpose tools, then feels threatened when computers can replicate those same narrow functions. But humans didn't evolve to be single-purpose tools—they evolved to be generalist navigators of a changing environment. The antidote to AI anxiety is reclaiming that adaptive capacity and taking personal responsibility for deciding what to learn and pursue, rather than looking to institutions or leaders for direction.

The Human Advantage: Executive Function

Eriksen acknowledges that a truly sentient AI might theoretically be possible in principle—since simulating a human brain at the atomic level would, in theory, replicate its functioning ("there's nothing magical about meat"). However, current AI systems are narrow processing tools, not full replacements for human executive function. What makes a human genuinely valuable isn't a specific skill but the capacity to:

Decide what you want and what your goals are
Determine how to achieve those goals with available tools
Recognize when existing tools are insufficient and create new ones

People who define themselves narrowly by a single skill (e.g., "I am an artist") become vulnerable and threatened when a tool like AI art generation replicates that skill—because they've reduced themselves to the level of a tool rather than remaining the entity that directs tools toward goals.

Beware of Self-Limiting Identities

Political and Ideological Labels as Tools, Not Goals

Eriksen describes his own worldview as broadly anarcho-capitalist, but cautions against letting any label—political, professional, or otherwise—become a fixed identity. He notes the common phenomenon of libertarians declaring other libertarians "not real libertarians" when they deviate from doctrinal purity (e.g., supporting a ban on seed oils). His point: political philosophies exist to serve human goals like freedom and quality of life; they are means, not ends. When people begin serving the ideology rather than using it as a tool, they've lost sight of its purpose.

He extends this idea to true freedom itself, noting that unlimited freedom isn't always what makes people genuinely free—sometimes protective limitations (like restricting harmful substances people can't fully evaluate) serve freedom better than absolute permissiveness.

The Danger of Fixed Identity Labels

Any self-descriptor—"I am an artist," "I am an author," "I am male," "I am a Republican"—can become a self-limiting belief if held too rigidly. Eriksen gives a personal example: writing his novel's sequel requires adopting a female point-of-view character, meaning he must set aside his male perspective as a "tool" and pick up a different mental model to serve his actual goal of telling the story well.

This matters because self-limiting identities are one of the biggest threats to agency. If your sense of worth is tied entirely to being "a great artist," you become threatened both by anything that can out-perform you at art and by attempting anything outside that identity, since deviation seems to threaten your very sense of self.

Goals as Tools, Not Endpoints

Eriksen reinforces that even long-term ideological goals (like making government obsolete) are best understood as evolving projects rather than fixed destinations. Society recently solved decentralized money without government, but hasn't yet solved decentralized criminal justice—these are hard problems still awaiting the invention of new tools, and it's fine not to know the answer yet, as long as one keeps working toward it.

Finding Fulfillment When Skills Become Obsolete

Addressing the fear that a lifelong passion (like being an artist) might become irrelevant due to technological change (like AI), Eriksen offers two levels of response:

The Simple Answer

No one is obligated to do only one thing for their entire life. Goals and passions naturally evolve, and abandoning or shifting a goal isn't failure—it's part of growth. Even if AI surpasses your artistic skill, you retain everything you learned about learning itself, about pursuing ambition, and about the creative process, which can be redirected toward new pursuits (including using AI tools).

The Deeper Answer

The more important question is: what did you actually want from that goal in the first place? Was it to vent a creative impulse, entertain people, express your inner world, gain fame, or earn money? Once you identify the underlying desire, you can often find other paths to fulfilling it even if your original specific skill becomes obsolete.

Personal Example: From Software Engineer to Novelist

Eriksen shares his own journey as an illustration. Despite being recognized as a highly skilled software engineer, he constantly clashed with employers because he built long-term, foundational systems (like cryptography toolkits) while they wanted short-term feature releases. He eventually realized his employers didn't trust him because he served his own creative vision rather than their immediate demands—and that his real motivation was never "being a software engineer" but satisfying a creative impulse: imagining something no one had imagined before and making it real.

Recognizing this, he retired early from software engineering to write science fiction, which he found deeply satisfying—and which has since expanded into political commentary and philosophical writing. The throughline in all of it is the same: taking something out of his imagination and showing it to people.

Why Fiction and Stories Matter

Eriksen strongly pushes back against the attitude—common among "hacker grindset" personalities—that fiction is frivolous and only technical or philosophical non-fiction has value. He argues:

Stories are the DNA of societies—they shape collective imagination and culture.
Major real-world innovators (he speculates Elon Musk was influenced by science fiction writers like Heinlein, Niven, and others) are often driven by stories imagined decades earlier, which they then strive to make real.
Nearly every technological leap of the 20th century was imagined in science fiction before it became reality.
Science fiction lets society pre-process how it feels about future technologies—true AI, genetic engineering, post-humanism—before they arrive, laying psychological and ethical groundwork ahead of time.
Stories engage the deeper, narrative-based parts of the brain that actually drive human thought and motivation. As Eriksen puts it, "intelligence is stories, consciousness is stories," meaning narratives shape human cognition and action in ways dry technical manuals cannot.

He notes that innovators who achieve dramatic feats (like reusable rockets caught by mechanical arms) rarely credit philosophers like Marcus Aurelius or Nietzsche as their inspiration—more often, it's speculative fiction like Ringworld that fired their imagination first.

The Cultural Vacuum Left by Abandoning Fiction

Eriksen addresses why he understands his host's disinterest in modern fiction: bookstores are largely devoid of stories that appeal to a confident, agentic, high-testosterone masculine archetype. He traces this gap to a self-defeating attitude among conservatives and pro-Western-civilization advocates who came to view art and storytelling as frivolous or effeminate ("art is for sissies"), largely because artists were often stereotyped as countercultural. By ceding the entire cultural battlefield of fiction and art to opposing ideologies, these groups guaranteed their own long-term loss in the broader culture war.

Children Absorb Whatever Stories Are Available

Children inherently seek out stories; if a culture doesn't provide fiction reflecting its own values, children will simply absorb the values embedded in whatever fiction is available—likely from opposing worldviews.
Eriksen recounts being frustrated watching a commentator boast about not reading fiction, mocking storytelling as childish, while simultaneously lamenting the loss of the culture war—missing the obvious connection between the two.
Any political or cultural philosophy without a coupled artistic aesthetic is doomed to fail, because it cannot propagate itself across generations.
The absence of fiction that models healthy, robust masculinity has real consequences: it contributes to a generation of high-anxiety, low-agency young men who feel uncomfortable in their own identity, sometimes leading them toward existential re-inventions of the self, including extreme identity shifts. Eriksen attributes this cultural failure partly to Generation X standing by and partly to the choices boomers made about neglecting this cultural scaffolding.

Why Eriksen Wrote Theft of Fire

Writing fiction is a psychologically vulnerable act—like dredging a bucket through the depths of one's subconscious and pouring the contents onto the table for others to see. The story reflects who the author truly is.
His guiding responsibility while writing wasn't to advocate a specific political message, but to be clear and interesting, so the story would resonate and entertain rather than merely preach.
He identifies a widespread hunger for fiction that isn't post-apocalyptic despair or an outlet for identity politics discourse, but stories with the older science-fiction spirit: humanity confidently expanding outward and solving big problems, rather than wallowing in unfairness.

Property Rights, Ownership, and the Trap of Selling Time

Ownership as the Foundation of Civilization

Property (or investment) rights are the bedrock of civilization: value is created only when people invest time and effort transforming raw materials (like turning sticks into spear points), and civilization requires that this invested effort be protected from theft.
Any political philosophy that undermines property rights—Eriksen cites communism specifically—is fundamentally anti-civilizational.

The Problem With Selling Time Instead of Owning Outcomes

Many people default to selling their time (i.e., traditional employment) because it feels safe—someone else bears the burden of figuring out how to monetize their labor.
However, time doesn't scale: no matter how much money you earn, you can't buy more hours to sell. This creates a ceiling on income and traps people in dependency.
By contrast, owning something you create—a book, a business, valuable content—allows for exponential growth, since you can sell the same creation repeatedly or leverage the attention it generates (e.g., sponsorships).
This isn't a "bug" of capitalism that some people get paid a lot for producing something of low apparent effort; it's a feature—capitalism rewards figuring out how to generate high value with efficient use of time, which is exactly what society should want more of.
Eriksen stresses that everyday necessary labor is still valuable and needed, but many people with immense creative or entrepreneurial potential remain stuck in low-return, time-selling roles because they were raised to be fearful of risk. He speculates about the tragic, invisible loss to civilization when people with Elon Musk–level potential are raised into timidity instead.

Self-Limiting Beliefs About Money and Success

Money-Related Identity Traps

Eriksen connects unhealthy relationships with money back to the earlier theme of self-limiting identity beliefs:

People who feel they'll never be wealthy often construct beliefs that protect their self-esteem rather than beliefs that help them progress—for example, assuming wealthy people must be corrupt, merely lucky, or born privileged.
These beliefs shield a person's current identity from discomfort but simultaneously block any real effort toward growth, since energy goes into defending self-image rather than pursuing external goals.
True progress requires giving yourself permission to be bad at something at first—whether that's running a struggling business or, as Eriksen shares from personal experience, earning less as a first-year professional author than he did as a software engineer. Shame about not yet succeeding prevents the growth needed to eventually succeed.

Money as a Measure of Care, Not Corruption

Eriksen reframes money as fundamentally "a measure of fucks given"—a token that signals how much people value something.
Wanting to reject money is, functionally, saying you don't want people to care about what you do. Assuming wealthy people are evil implies that only evil people receive care and attention, which is nonsensical.
Earning money (through honest means) is a signal that a person has correctly identified what other people want and delivered it—it's not inherently selfish, but rather responsive to real demand.
Critics who complain that others "shouldn't" profit from a particular product or work are, in effect, demanding that everyone conform to the critic's own priorities rather than respecting others' free choices about what they value and spend money on—an outlook Eriksen calls fundamentally anti-libertarian and anti-human.

Building an Audience vs. Being a "Content Creator"

Rejecting the Term "Content Creator"

Eriksen dislikes the label "content creator" because it centers on the output (content) rather than the actual underlying business asset: an audience.
Simply producing content, even content nobody sees or values (like a painting you burn), doesn't accomplish anything meaningful.

What an Audience Really Is

A true audience isn't just a follower count—Eriksen contrasts a large cat-picture account (where followers care about the cats, not the poster) with authentic audience-building, where people specifically trust the individual behind the work.
The core of an audience is trust: people who will invest their time (reading a 400-page book, watching a 45-minute video) because past experience has taught them the creator reliably delivers value.
Building this trust requires genuine trustworthiness—acting with integrity and prioritizing the audience's interests, since audiences can detect when someone is being self-serving, dishonest, or derivatively riding others' successful ideas.
Part of building trust involves giving away free value so people can sample the quality of the work before committing further trust (time, money, attention) to the creator.

The Real Product of a Content Creator Is Trust, Not Output

Eriksen elaborates on why he pays for content he values: it's a way of voting for more of what he cares about to exist. He contrasts this with a common mistake among indie fiction authors who complain about lack of success while their entire online presence consists of repetitive self-promotion ("buy my book") rather than demonstrations of value.

If your business is built on the internet, your actual product is yourself—your ability to be interesting, informative, and entertaining enough that people walk away feeling their time was well spent.
There is no shortcut or formula (like taking pictures of food at cafes) that substitutes for genuinely offering value; audiences can tell when something is hollow and won't invest in it.
Real audience-building means giving people free proof of your ability to entertain or inform before asking them to pay, not complaining that sales aren't materializing while offering nothing of substance.

Agency and Owning the Relationship With Your Audience

Social media should be treated as media—a tool to draw attention to what you've built—without surrendering control of that creation to a publisher, label, or other gatekeeper who would take a large cut.
This approach allows a single person to function like an independent media company, cultivating an audience that connects with them personally rather than through a corporate intermediary.

Why Eriksen Rejected Traditional Publishing

How Publishing Used to Work—and Why It Broke

Twentieth-century publishers functioned essentially as venture capitalists: they financed expensive offset print runs, gave advances, and enabled new writers to sustain a career while recouping costs from breakout successes. This was a legitimate, mutually beneficial system.
Two forces broke this model: the rise of the internet (which eliminated the need for expensive print financing) and the ideological capture of publishing by a homogenous cultural/political class centered in Manhattan.
As publishing houses consolidated and became more socially interconnected, they shifted from filtering books for quality to filtering for ideological alignment, abandoning their original gatekeeping function for readers.
This caused advances to shrink, promotional budgets for new authors to disappear, and publishers to abandon their "mid-list" authors—despite the mid-list serving as the incubator for future best-selling talent. Once publishers stopped serving readers, they stopped serving authors too.

Encounters With Publishing Gatekeepers

When Eriksen argued at a science fiction convention that publishing houses offer no real value to new authors, an editor from a major house reacted furiously, revealing how personally threatened industry insiders felt by this critique.
A particularly telling moment came when an acquisitions editor dismissed a sample of Theft of Fire after reading only a few sentences, objecting to its first-person present-tense narration without understanding that this was a deliberate technical craft choice. Eriksen realized the editor was trapped by a self-limiting identity belief ("I am an editor with 20 years of experience") that made him unable to consider new approaches—"you repeated the same mistakes for 20 years and called it experience."
This experience confirmed that many industry gatekeepers weren't evaluating quality or market potential with any special insight beyond what an author could determine directly from real audience feedback.

Choosing Independence Over "Permission"

After proving he could sell books independently, publishers came calling with deals—but these offered no meaningful benefit beyond giving away a share of earnings. One offer included a mere $5,000 advance in exchange for audiobook rights.
Instead, Eriksen crowdfunded the audiobook production himself via Kickstarter, raising $43,000 and hiring three professional actors for major roles, producing a high-quality, fully realized audio production.
This reinforced his central belief: you don't need permission to create. Many aspiring authors, doubting their own work's value, hand over the majority of their earnings to publishers merely for validation ("a pat on the head").

Advice to Aspiring Authors

Fear is universal and persistent, even after achieving success—everyone doubts whether their work truly has value beyond polite feedback from friends and family.
The only real way to discover a work's value is to attempt to sell it directly to the public. If the work has genuine merit, word-of-mouth recommendation will build gradually but reliably.
This market-based validation is far more meaningful than approval from a publishing acquisitions editor, since such gatekeepers don't possess any special insight into what will actually resonate with readers.
Ultimately, whether your work is "good enough" isn't your decision to make—it's the audience's. The author's job is simply to have the courage to give people that choice.

Closing Notes on Current and Upcoming Projects

The audiobook of Theft of Fire has completed recording with a full cast bringing real acting and dramatic production values reminiscent of 1930s radio plays, moving beyond the simple "books on tape" tradition. Sound engineering delays (partly due to personal circumstances, including his wife's cancer) mean release is expected in the first quarter of the following year.
The sequel, part of a planned four-book series, is targeted for spring of the following year, with some delays due to life circumstances.
Eriksen hints at a possible additional collaborative project involving the same voice actors from the audiobook, though details remain unconfirmed.
He closes by emphasizing that his consistent effort toward high quality—whether in a single tweet or a full audiobook production—stems from a commitment to integrity: never trying to fake success or coast on image, but always assuming the audience is intelligent and deserving of real value, because attracting smart, discerning people ultimately builds a more sustainable and rewarding audience.