Show Notes
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 possible Auth0: Secure access for everyone. But not just anyone. Brex: The banking solution for startups. — Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/how-to-be-agentic-in-the-age-of-ai-cate-hall — Timestamps (00:00) Introduction to Cate Hall (03:56) Cate’s role as CEO of Astera (04:52) Cate’s poker career and focus on live reading (07:02) The intuitive ‘people radar’ Cate has in identifying exceptional talent (11:16) Status dynamics in conversations (16:13) The parallel between poker and startup evolution (19:18) The German wave in poker and game theory (24:22) Cate’s legal career and Supreme Court experience (27:05) The difference between ambition and agency (29:13) How LSD helped Cate discover her agency (31:26) Leaving poker and dealing with mental health issues (34:26) The founding story of Alvea (38:14) The founding story of Astera (43:15) Cate’s journey into AI risk (45:50) The concept of a “soft takeover” and how AI might hollow out human experience (49:46) The overwhelming challenge of addressing AI risk (51:20) Astera’s approach to steering technology development (53:15) Astera’s investment in Last Energy (54:20) How philanthropy and investing work together at Astera (57:22) Practical ways to increase personal agency (1:07:20) Final meditations — Follow Cate Hall X: https://x.com/catehall LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cate-hall-9a81a35/ Newsletter: https://usefulfictions.substack.com/ — Resources and episode mentions
—Books— • Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296/ • Impro: https://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/0878301178 • Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies: https://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0198739834/ • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/
—People— • Jed McCaleb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jed-mccaleb-4052a4/ • Charlie Carrel on X: https://x.com/charlie_carrel • Seemay Chou on X: https://x.com/seemaychou • Ben Kuhn on X: https://x.com/benkuhn
Episode resources continued at: https://www.generalist.com/p/how-to-be-agentic-in-the-age-of-ai-cate-hall — Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
More from The Generalist
Pete Florence and I began by agreeing that his company has an excellent name. Generalist builds AI for robots, including models that can begin learning a new task from a single demonstration. We talked about dexterity, the strange business of gathering physical experience for a machine, and what we might build if robots could do much more of the work. — Every timestamp 00:00 Intro 02:24 GEN-1.5 and one-shot learning 08:55 What makes a task difficult 10:53 Dexterity in robotics 14:53 Matt Mason’s definition of a hand 17:34 Giving robots a sense of touch 20:30 Growing up in a family of technologists and scientists 22:46 What drew Pete into robotics 27:38 Generalist’s founding thesis and what sets it apart 32:17 Protecting simplicity 35:01 How Generalist’s data collection has evolved 35:30 Generalist’s scaling philosophy 39:53 Generalist’s build-versus-buy philosophy 42:15 Balancing general intelligence with commercial deployment 44:24 Why Pete is betting on dexterity 47:33 The durability of the robotics application layer 49:09 Open-weight robotics models and data flywheels 50:52 Geopolitics, safety, and alignment 52:42 The parallels between teaching humans and robots 1:00:05 The timeline for robotics progress and adoption 1:03:37 Book recommendations — Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/i/220756708/transcript — Pete’s complete reading list The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership: https://www.amazon.com/Score-Takes-Care-Itself-Philosophy/dp/1591843472 Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization: https://www.amazon.com/Wooden-Leadership-Create-Winning-Organization/dp/0071453393 — Other resources Generalist: https://generalistai.com GEN-1.5: https://generalistai.com/blog/gen-1.5 Proprioception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception Cutaneous receptor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaneous_receptor Fukushima nuclear accident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident The bitter lesson: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson.pdf GEN-1: https://generalistai.com/blog/gen-1 — Where to find Pete Florence LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peteflorence X: https://x.com/peteflorence Website: https://www.peteflorence.com — Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa, and a co-founder of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and Future of Life Institute. For more than fifteen years, he has been among the most consistent voices arguing that advanced AI poses an extinction-level risk to humanity.
Liam Fedus and Dogus Cubuk are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Periodic Labs, a startup building “synthesis superintelligence.” In practice, that means an AI system that closes the loop between hypothesis, experiment, and learning.
Scott Morton is the founder and CEO of Revel, a software platform for testing and controlling complex hardware systems. Before founding the company in 2024, Scott spent nearly a decade at SpaceX building control software for Falcon 9 and Starship. That experience helped him recognize a broader problem: while rockets, nuclear systems, supersonic aircraft, and other advanced machines have grown increasingly sophisticated, the software used to test and control them is often fragmented and decades old. Revel was created to close that gap. The company has raised $180 million, was reportedly valued at just over $1 billion, and counts Impulse Space and Radiant Nuclear among its customers. Its platform scales from small benchtop tests to industrial systems with hundreds of thousands of telemetry channels. Revel has also created its own programming language, RevelCode, designed to combine performance and accessibility with the runtime safety required for high-stakes physical systems.
Farooq Malik is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a financial infrastructure company powered by stablecoins. Growing up in an immigrant family, Farooq saw firsthand the friction involved in moving money across borders. Alongside co-founder Charles Yoo-Naut, Farooq spent years building infrastructure before stablecoins became mainstream, betting that tokenized money would eventually become a foundational layer of the global financial system. Today, Rain powers card issuance, payments, and other financial products built on stablecoin rails, helping companies move money faster and operate across markets.