The Generalist

How to be Agentic in the Age of AI | Cate Hall (CEO of Astera)

48 snips
Sep 30, 2025
Cate Hall, CEO of Astera and former top-ranked poker player, dives into the intersection of agency and AI risk. She discusses how her poker strategies focused more on human behavior than math, highlighting the importance of reading people. Cate contrasts ambition with agency, arguing they are often conflated. She explores the idea of a 'soft takeover' by AI, where human meaning is gradually eroded. Additionally, she suggests a slowdown in AI development to establish crucial social technologies for navigating this complex future.
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ANECDOTE

From Autism To Live Poker Mastery

  • Cate Hall learned live poker by obsessively studying body language and table behavior during long sessions.
  • Her autism partly motivated a systematic, evidence-driven approach to reading people that became a competitive edge.
INSIGHT

Ambition And Agency Are Different

  • Ambition and agency are distinct: ambition drives goals while agency is the capacity to notice and act on options.
  • You can be highly ambitious without being agentic, and vice versa.
ANECDOTE

An LSD Moment Sparked Radical Change

  • Cate credits LSD with enabling an objective reassessment of her life and triggering an agentic break from law to poker.
  • She left law impulsively as an escape once she recognized misaligned trade-offs in her life.
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