How to be Agentic in the Age of AI (Cate Hall, CEO of Astera)
Cate Hall is the CEO of Astera, a private foundation focused on AI risk and frontier technology. Before leading Astera, Cate’s unconventional career path took her from practicing law (including work on Supreme Court briefs) to becoming the world’s top-ranked female poker player in 2016. After overcoming personal struggles with addiction, she co-founded Alvea, a biotech company developing shelf-stable vaccines for pandemic response, before joining Astera. In this conversation, Cate shares insights on human psychology, agency as a learnable skill, and why she believes AI’s biggest risk may be a “soft takeover” in which humans gradually lose independence and meaning.We explore:• How Cate’s approach to poker focused on reading people rather than pure game theory, and why this contrarian strategy worked• Why people who always try to “play” high status in conversations often have psychological issues• The critical difference between ambition and agency, and why they’re often confused• How LSD helped Cate break out of her career path and discover her own agency• Why Cate believes we need a slowdown in AI development to develop the social technologies to manage it• The challenge of maintaining meaning in human life as AI systems increasingly mediate our experiences• How Astera is using investment as a philanthropic tool to help steer frontier technology development—Thank you to the partners who make this possibleAuth0: Secure access for everyone.
- Uploaded
- Uploaded May 26, 2026
- Queried
- Queried 0 times
Speaker A: In 2016, you were the world's best female poker player. Speaker B: I played exclusively live poker. I was really focused on the aspects of the game that are about body language, demeanor. You have a lot of time at the table where you're just observing what people are doing in hands, and it was kind of this fertile ground for evidence collection and study. Speaker A: Can you really be ambitious without being agentic? Is that really possible? Speaker B: Ambition and agency can be almost totally decoupled. Like, you can have somebody who's highly ambitious but not agentic.
You can have somebody who's highly agentic but not ambitious. The two get conflated a lot. Speaker A: How did AI risk start to become something that you were concerned enough about that you really wanted to devote your time on? Speaker B: A lot of the things that provide meaning to human lives are slowly coming apart at the seams because of the way that humans interact with recommendation algorithms. All of the frictions of life slowly get eroded away in a way that just leaves us with this heavily dopamine-steered kind of smooth tunnel of an existence.
Speaker A: What are useful questions for us to ask ourselves? How do we start to surface useful information? Speaker B: It is the most challenging problem that humanity is currently facing, and it feels actually overwhelming to me, and I don't understand how we are going to make it through. Speaker A: Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. Speaker C: As the saying goes, the future is already here. Speaker A: Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. Speaker C: As the saying goes, the future is already here.
Want to learn more?
Ask a question