Cate Hall on Taking More Chances And Other Ways to Increase Your Luck
Cate Hall has lived a life. She’s a former Supreme Court attorney, a onetime world number one poker player, former drug addict, a biotech founder, and now, the CEO of a multibillion-dollar foundation. She joins Doree and Elise to chat with her about the actionable steps to take more agency in our lives, tips from her new book You Can Just Do Things. She’ll explain why you should let people see you be bad at something, how to increase your “surface area for luck,” and why not all rules are meant to be followed.
Photo Credit: Mark Estefanos
___
Send us your microjoys! And please send us your questions for our resident dermatologist; Dr. Jenny Wang can answer your questions about skin procedures, general skin care, and products!
Mentioned in this Episode
To leave a voicemail or text for a future episode, reach them at 781-591-0390. You can also email the podcast at forever35podcast@gmail.com.
Visit forever35podcast.comfor links to everything they mention on the show or shopmyshelf.us/forever35.
Follow the podcast on Instagram (@Forever35Podcast) and join the Forever35 Patreon.
Sign up for the newsletter! Atforever35podcast.com/newsletter.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links.
Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated.
Doree Shafrir (00:10):
Hello, and welcome to Forever 35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.
Elise Hu (00:16):
And I'm Elise Hu, and we're two friends who like to talk a lot about serums.
Doree Shafrir (00:20):
And today we have Cate Hall, who, I mean, I think the best way to describe her is fascinating person.
Elise Hu (00:29):
Yeah. She's worn a lot of hats.
Doree Shafrir (00:31):
She's worn a lot of hats. She's lived a lot of lives, honestly. She went from being a corporate lawyer on the partner track, Yale Law graduate.
Elise Hu (00:42):
Supreme Court clerk, I think at one point.
Doree Shafrir (00:44):
Super legit to leaving that all behind, becoming a professional poker player, which is where I first learned of her because it coincided with when I became very interested in poker. And so I was like, who are the big female poker players? There's not a ton of them. And she was also very active on Twitter at the time. And so I followed her and she was a great Twitter follow. And then she kind of dropped off and the pandemic, I just lost track of her. Turns out she was addicted to drugs for three years. And she got sober and started working in tech and she wrote a couple books and her new book is called You Can Just Do Things. And it's all about how to take agency in your own life. I found it very timely for me personally. So yeah, I though her book was like, and it's very actionable.
(01:42):
She's a lot of exercises in the book of how to do things. And yeah, it's a good manual, I think, if you're at a place in your life where you feel kind of stuck. And she's just super smart and cool.
Elise Hu (01:58):
Yeah, she was very wise. It seemed like she was wise beyond her years. And she had some takeaways actually from the book. We kind of drilled into a few of the things in You Can Just Do Things. So I've pulled out some of those things and put them in our newsletter, which is out now on our Patreon, but also goes into your inboxes if you already subscribe. And that Cate conversation is coming up later. But here we are.
Doree Shafrir (02:26):
Here we are.
Elise Hu (02:27):
In August, and we're already winding down our summers here on the West Coast because school, kids are going back to school in Arizona and in California and Washington and Oregon. And it's wild. It's gone by so fast and in some ways it's dragged on. We've talked about the elasticity of time, but what are you looking forward to in the school year? What do you have coming up?
Doree Shafrir (02:59):
Well, Henry's starting a new school, so a lot of unknowns. I'm currently trying to negotiate with the school department about his bus stop because the one that was assigned to him is very far from our house and has a super early pickup. And I was like, "Are there any other options?" So trying to figure that out. There's just a lot of, I don't know, it feels like there's a lot of bureaucracy and setup that I'm trying to accomplish and navigate all of that in a new school and just new, everything is new. So trying to go into it with an open mind and curiosity and also be like, "Nothing is permanent. If this doesn't work for our child or our family, he can go to a different school." How
Elise Hu (03:56):
Is he feeling? Is he excited?
Doree Shafrir (03:58):
He seems neutral, honestly. He doesn't seem super anxious, but he also doesn't seem excited. It's sort of like he's accepted it. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I don't know. I think he so doesn't know what to expect that it's just like, how can he even fathom what it's going to be like? So I don't know. We'll see.
Elise Hu (04:26):
Issa has expressed, she is like, "I don't know about this transition to middle school. I'm scared to go to middle school. There's so many kids. Is Ava going to talk to me? Ava's probably not going to talk to me because she's going into sixth and Ava's going into eighth."
Doree Shafrir (04:41):
Yes. Ava's like big man on campus.
Elise Hu (04:43):
Exactly. And literally, physically.
Doree Shafrir (04:49):
She's very tall.
Elise Hu (04:53):
As she says, she height mogs me. She's like, "I'm high mogging everyone at school. I'm height mogging you." So yes, she mogs all. Oh my God. And of course Ava's going to talk to her sister. I know that she's going to be so excited to see her. And in fact, she's actually going to volunteer at her middle sister's sixth grade orientation. Oh my gosh. How cool. Yeah, I think it's really sweet. And so I think it's going to be chill. And Issa has so many friends, but Issa tends to be a little bit more anxious. And so she's just asking a lot of questions, but she doesn't start expressing all of this until very late at night right before she's going to bed, which is right before I want to be in bed. And so yes, yesterday she wanted to ask me a series of questions at nearly 10 o'clock and I was like, "Can we schedule a Zoom for this?" She's so cute though.
(05:52):
So yeah, I think she is the one who's most expresses the most trepidation about school. Ava's excited to be an eighth grader
Doree Shafrir (06:02):
Finally.
Elise Hu (06:03):
Yeah.
Doree Shafrir (06:03):
And
Elise Hu (06:04):
She's all about her back to school hall, which we talked about on the casual
Doree Shafrir (06:07):
Chat.
Elise Hu (06:08):
Yes. And then Luna is going to be on her own in elementary for the first
Doree Shafrir (06:13):
Time without sisters.
Elise Hu (06:14):
Ever since she's been in kindergarten, she's had a sister and so now she's the only one. And I think that that's actually an opportunity for her to shine and her personality is a little bit different too. So I think this is great for her to exercise more of her own personal agency, speaking of Cate Hall.
Doree Shafrir (06:31):
Yeah, totally.
Elise Hu (06:34):
Cate Hall writes about personal agency. And so we'll just bring it back to Cate Hall. And listeners, if you have micro joys, I just want to put out a call out. We have two call outs for y'all. One is love to hear your micro joys and how you're enjoying the summer or how you're trying to summer max before it all comes to an end at the unofficial end of summer, Labor Day. But then also my dermatologist, Dr. Jenny Wong, who has been on the show before, we are still soliciting questions from the Forever 35 listeners, questions for a dermatologist, any skincare stuff or skin product stuff or skin procedure stuff that you want to ask about, please email us at forever35podcast@gmail.com.
Doree Shafrir (07:24):
You can also call or text us at 781-591-0390 with your questions. You can also still send us general comments, questions, feedback, concerns, thoughts, conversation starters for our You Ask, We Answer episodes, which we are doing every other week now. So again, that's 781-591-0390.
Elise Hu (07:52):
Love a phone call.
Doree Shafrir (07:53):
Yeah, we love a phone call. And our email is forever35podcast@gmail.com.
Elise Hu (07:57):
My micro joy is actually phone calls. Oh,
Doree Shafrir (08:00):
Okay. And this
Elise Hu (08:02):
Is what made me think to do the shout out because I had an intern when I worked at NPR who worked, I think maybe she was only there for a semester. It wasn't that long of a time, but she was a really impressionable intern. And I just thought, I mean, this girl was more accomplished and more interesting than me, which was true of pretty much all of the fellows and interns at NPR. And her name was Emily and I just loved her. And we stayed in touch as she entered journalism. And we will go kind of a long time without catching up. And I think I hadn't spoken to her in maybe a year or two, but she reached out and she was like, "Could we do a phone catch up?"
(08:45):
And there was no particular agenda, but we did this phone catch up last Friday and I just found it to be so connective and supportive and warm. And we just talked about the stuff. She's going through some things with her family and some health stuff, and I shared what was going on here with me and my own family and my health stuff. And it just, I don't know, I just loved being on the phone because I think that it's so easy to send each other DMs on Instagram. And I do see my friends on Instagram and we connect that way. And I think it's great to be able to have these touch points in whatever format. But there was something just really rich and a little bit deeper and got below the surface just by talking on the phone for half an hour, just going on a little reverie in praise of the old-fashioned phone call and just reaching out to a friend and saying like, "Hey, can we do a call just a
Doree Shafrir (09:46):
Catch-up
Elise Hu (09:46):
Call?"
Doree Shafrir (09:47):
Yeah, I think that's such a good point. Well, Elise, before we get to Cate's official bio, I do just want to remind everyone that our website is forever35podcast.com. We have links there to everything we mention on the show. Our Instagram is @forever35podcast. Our Patreon is at patreon.com/forever35. I want to give a shout out to one of my oldest friends, Allison, who recently joined the Patreon. Thank you, Allison. Hope you're enjoying the casual chats and everything else. For $5 a month, you get those casual chats, which are now on video. You also get live casual chats every couple of months, access to our community chat on the Patreon app, and a lot more. And at $10 a month, you also get ad-free episodes and a shout-out on the podcast each and every month. So Allison, listen for your shout-out the next time we do that.
(10:46):
Yeah. You can shop our favorite products at shopmy.us/forever35. And now I will introduce Cate officially. Yes. Cate Hall is the author of You Can Just Do Things, which is out now. She writes about personal agency from the perspective of someone who learned it late in life to make it easier for you to learn it too. Everything she knows about agency comes from her personal experience. As a former Supreme Court attorney, number one ranked female poker player in the world, drug addict, biotech founder, and the CEO of a multi-billion dollar foundation in that order.
Elise Hu (11:24):
She's lived a lot of lives.
Doree Shafrir (11:25):
She's lived a lot of lives. We are going to take a short break and we will be right back with Cate.
Elise Hu (11:30):
We'll be right back.
Doree Shafrir (11:38):
Cate Hall, welcome to Forever 35. It's really nice to meet you.
Cate Hall (11:43):
So nice to meet you guys. Thank you so much for having me.
Doree Shafrir (11:45):
Yeah, of course. What is something that you do that you would consider self-care?
Cate Hall (11:51):
I have a lot of really lame answers to this. My core self-care is doing the entire New York Times game section religiously every night. I love that. I'm a big crossword puzzle person, but pips and connections have also become part of my daily routine. That's my big unwinding thing.
Doree Shafrir (12:15):
I love that. Do you play cross play also? Do you play their Scrabble ripoff?
Cate Hall (12:19):
I have not played it. I think I'm a little too competitive maybe for it.
Doree Shafrir (12:25):
Fair.
Cate Hall (12:27):
I've tried doing the crossword at the same time as my mom, who's also really into crosswords
Doree Shafrir (12:33):
And it always
Cate Hall (12:34):
Devolves pretty quickly.
Doree Shafrir (12:35):
Oh, okay. Maybe not fun.
Elise Hu (12:38):
It is a great way to stay connected to mom too. Are y'all in the same location or are you geographically -
Cate Hall (12:43):
No, no, no, no. She lives in Arizona. I'm in the Bay Area.
Elise Hu (12:44):
Yeah. So it's a great way to stay in constant communication with your moms.That's pretty awesome.
Doree Shafrir (12:51):
That's so fun. Cate, I started following you, I think right around the time that you became a professional poker player. Whoa. Yeah, on social media, because I had started playing poker and I was intrigued by women poker players. I was like, "Oh, this woman seems really cool." So I started following you on Twitter. Yeah. So I've been following you for a long time, but I didn't really know until I read your book about all the crazy stuff that had happened in the last few years. So before we get to our book, for our listener's sake, can you just walk us through your pretty wild career trajectory and then also about getting sober?
Cate Hall (13:31):
So I had a pretty traditional first three decades of my life. I went to law school and became a lawyer, and then had a bit of a quarter life crisis around age 31. And when I was sort of on the cusp of making partner at my law firm, decided that I really hated that idea, and so did my equivalent of joining the circus, which was to run away and become a professional poker player. Did that for three years. It went very well. I had a lot of fun doing it. And then I had the transition basically is I started getting really into various psychedelic substances for mind expansion purposes, had a radical spiritual experience in the course of using those drugs. And that was the door that opened and led to a lot of compulsive drug use, a lot of compulsive seeking of that. That was the end of my poker career almost overnight and led to about three and a half years of really intense drug addiction, which I emerged from five and a half years ago after many, many attempts to get sober, was finally successful.
(14:57):
And the book is, to some extent, the set of tools that I developed for climbing back out of that hole of being very low agency in my own life, really unable to operate in the world in a way that just wasn't using drugs constantly and sort of reascend some kind of spiritual ladder to the life that I have today, which is really fun, really fulfilling, full of great relationships.
Elise Hu (15:28):
Yeah. I mean, what a turnaround. So you've really been through it. To what do you credit the most for helping you find your way through?
Cate Hall (15:37):
The honest answer is grace. I think many addicts have the experience of trying for a really long time to get sober, it not working, feeling like they are unable to recover. And then for some reason, at some point, you just get it and you are able to take the actions necessary to get sober. I think in the popular imagination, this corresponds to a rock bottom, but in my experience, there are so many rock bottoms on the way down. You hit a lot of things and you're like, "Maybe this is the rock bottom. Nope, nope, nope." And so it is kind of a mystery to me even having recovered why it was that I was able to finally take this step to go to rehab, which was really what was necessary for me spending two months in an inpatient facility. But that was sort of the decisive action that kicked off this course of recovery.
(16:46):
And then it was just a slow process of participating in my own recovery, participating in recovery programs, and simultaneously trying to slowly rebuild a life. I think that I had pretty modest aspirations at the point at which I emerged from rehab. Certainly would not have anticipated anything like my current life, which is totally awesome. But there was this sort of series of steps that I needed to take in order to become employable again, become solvent again, all of those things. And a lot of what's in the book is just sort of the concrete things that helped me to do that.
Doree Shafrir (17:33):
So a lot of what you talk about is how people can stop feeling stuck and take that agency. So what is the very first thing you suggest someone do when they feel stuck in some aspect of their lives?
Cate Hall (17:49):
So I have this mindset that I discuss in the book called the crisis manager mindset, and there are a lot of different people who've hit upon essentially the same idea and just use different words for it. But the one that I came up with in addiction was sort of this alter ego that I had, which was somebody who was being parachuted into my life who was not responsible for whatever had come before. So it was just like, "Oh, you are in charge, you're the crisis manager in charge of figuring out how to clean up this wreckage of a life. What is the first step that you will take in order to do that?" And I think it can be really easy when you are stuck to focus on the fact of your stuckness, to focus on especially points of prior freedom where you're comparing yourself to how good your life used to be and how unlikely it is that you are going to be able to recapture the promise that you once had.
(18:55):
I think that kind of thinking is really, really common. And the idea with the crisis manager frame is just trying to sort of impose a cut in time in your life and say whatever came before you, this alter ego are not responsible for that. You are only responsible for taking the next best action that comes in the future. And I found that to be really helpful, actually really necessary for me to start putting steps and days together.
Elise Hu (19:30):
Yeah, I like that because it just seems like we all have this negativity bias and can be really hard on ourselves, right? So just freeing yourself from the past and any shame that we might feel about the past makes total sense.
Cate Hall (19:46):
I think one of the hardest things, one of the things that keeps people most stuck in life is this feeling of comparison, not just to people around us, but to our past selves. And that's for many people who are trying to recover from addiction, that is the really intractable thing, and that's kind of the final boss that they have to confront in order to recover.
Elise Hu (20:09):
Occasionally in our You Ask, We Answer episodes, like when we get mailbag from our listeners, we'll have questions about how to best support loved ones who are going through and fighting addiction or serious depression. How do you feel like your loved ones best supported you in a way that maybe could be prescriptive for the rest of us who have those people in our lives who are suffering with addiction?
Cate Hall (20:39):
I really wish that I had a good answer for this, but my entire experience has pointed to the fact that there isn't really a good answer to it. As difficult as it was to be in the position of somebody who is trying to recover from addiction, I think it was even harder for the people who loved me and who were totally powerless to do anything about it. I think that you can provide all the support in the world and it's great to do that when asked, but ultimately you cannot give somebody else the will to recover, and that is sort of the irreducible requirement of getting sober. And so I don't have great advice for people who are going through that. I mean, I think joining support programs for people who are in that position, following the advice of those support programs, I think it was great when my parents started drawing boundaries about the type of help they were willing to supply for me simply because it made things better on them, not because it was helpful to me because I was beyond help.
(21:53):
But yeah, unfortunately, I wish that I had a more helpful answer to that, but I just don't know if there is one.
Elise Hu (22:00):
No, I appreciate that. It's very honest.
Doree Shafrir (22:03):
I want to talk a little bit more about some of the strategies in the book, particularly this sort of broad idea of getting over the fear of rejection. You talk about the moat of embarrassment, because you define what the mode of embarrassment is and also talk about why rejection sensitivity in particular is so important when we're talking about agency.
Cate Hall (22:29):
So there's two closely related concepts. You have to have cute little names for everything when you're writing a book like this. There's the path of least embarrassment and then there's the moat of low status and they're overlapping concepts. So the moat of low status is basically like it is probably theoretically possible for you to become good at a lot of things if you put the effort into doing it. But often in order to really get better at something, you have to allow people to see you being bad at it because it's hard to improve in isolation, only working in theory instead of in practice. And so if you want to become a better dancer, theoretically, maybe you can set up a mirror in your room and watch a lot of YouTube videos, but at some point other people have to see you dance or you have to dance with other people.
(23:31):
And that fear, even if we think that it's temporary on some level, knowing that people will see us being bad at something on the way to becoming better at it is just really, really excruciating for most of us. And I think part of why this happens is it's easy to conjure up the feeling of being embarrassed by something because those memories are so salient for us. It's easy to remember the time that you were made fun of at the school dance for being a bad dancer that was from my life. And just how humiliating that was. There's no equivalent salient memory of gradually achieving competence or mastery at something. And so there's nothing on the other side of the scale. So I think it's really hard for us to actually envision the end state of being better at something and sort of enjoying that and really easy to imagine the displeasure and embarrassment of temporarily being bad at something in front of other people.
(24:49):
And that asymmetry keeps people from crossing this moat.
Doree Shafrir (24:55):
And what happens when we cross the moat?
Cate Hall (25:00):
Often we are genuinely embarrassed, but then it gets better. I think a big theme throughout this book is trying to disabuse people of the idea that if they think the right set of thoughts, they can cure the experience of embarrassment to avoid it altogether. So with failure, with rejection, with embarrassment, I think you can either try to think your way into a different type of acting in the world. If I just apply this one mental trick, then I won't feel scared of doing this thing anymore. And I think that almost never works. Or you can try to act your way into better thinking, which is you just do the thing anyway. You experience the embarrassment and experience the fact that it is actually not nearly as bad as it is in your imagination. Sometimes things are a little bit embarrassing, but you're now an adult.
(26:03):
Those feelings don't linger. You don't have to take them on board as a pointer of your own badness or inadequacy in some larger sense. It can be kind of confined. And I think that with habituation, you can really learn to not feel these things so deeply. And so getting practice, being embarrassed, getting rejected, getting practice with failing, I think is really one of the core messages of the book.
Elise Hu (26:36):
Yeah. It reminds me of one of the most popular TED Talks of all time, and it's this guy who basically spends a year trying to get rejected every single day in one way
Cate Hall (26:46):
Or the other. Yeah, he's in the book.
Elise Hu (26:47):
Oh okay. Okay.
(26:50):
I just remember his name was Ja, and it had such a lasting effect on me because I feel like. And I also read a book before my first child was born about babies and the genius of babies. And one idea that really stuck with me actually correlates with your work because it's about how often babies fail in a single day on their way to learning how to roll over, on their way to learning how to sit up, on their way to learning how to stand up, on their way to learning how to walk. And the reason why they have such tremendous growth is because of their willingness to fail as much as they do. And so for me, it sort of removed a lot of barriers in my own thinking about just perfection and trying to be good at things right away, or I only gravitated towards things that were easier for me and not towards things that were harder.
Cate Hall (27:43):
I had the same thing. I had this belief that not only was it important for me to be the best at something, but it was important for me to instantly be the best at something. There could be no learning curve whatsoever. And it's so silly to say it out loud, but it also exerted such a huge psychological effect on me for most of the first several decades of my life. It was just intolerable to me to think about being bad at something, let alone allowing other people to see that I was bad at something. And yeah, I mean that really limits your growth. The further you can get away from thinking that way, the more you can be back in this baby mindset where you're actually learning so quickly because you're constantly getting feedback from the world.
Elise Hu (28:39):
Okay, let's take a break and we will be right back.
Doree Shafrir (28:49):
How do you suggest people with ADHD who rejection sensitivity is kind of built into that diagnosis? Is there something that they should do differently or how can they kind of adapt what you are saying to help?
Cate Hall (29:09):
That's interesting. I didn't actually realize that rejection sensitivity was a particular part of that. Can you
Doree Shafrir (29:15):
Say just
Cate Hall (29:15):
A little bit more about that?
Doree Shafrir (29:17):
Yeah. I mean, people with ADHD have higher rejection sensitivity. So it can go so far as to they don't like to call people on the phone because they don't want to bother them. And just reaching out to people about even hanging out is really hard and that's on a social level. And then on a professional level, obviously applying for jobs or networking or anything like that, it's just very difficult. I mean, I'm not a clinician, so I can't really speak to why that is part of the diagnosis. It is part of ADHD.
Cate Hall (30:05):
That's so interesting. I've been diagnosed with ADHD and I also have a lot of the behaviors that you just described. Oh, interesting. I've never connected those things actually. But I mean, I can remember as recently as, let's call it eight years ago before my addiction really kicked off, not wanting to call room service at a hotel where I was staying because the idea of talking to somebody and placing an order was just crippling. So I would just avoid that. And a really intense fear of inconveniencing people in any way, because it was an opportunity for them to say no or to feel put out by me. So I guess with the background that these are really familiar dynamics from my perspective, I would say I think that the techniques will work too for people who have these things. It's kind of surreal to me now if I try to put myself back in the mindset of somebody who had that level of fear around everyday things to know the shape of my life now and just the fact that that doesn't enter into my mind.
(31:26):
And I think so much of that just comes from habituation.
Doree Shafrir (31:30):
Yeah.
Cate Hall (31:31):
Yeah. Like
Doree Shafrir (31:31):
Exposure therapy. Just getting rejected
Cate Hall (31:33):
A lot. Yeah. Just go for
Doree Shafrir (31:35):
It. And seeing that your life goes on.
Cate Hall (31:40):
Nothing happens. Yeah, that's a lot of it.
Doree Shafrir (31:44):
Yeah. My husband has ADHD and that has been a big theme throughout our relationship. And I think at first I wasn't super sympathetic to it because I was like, just call the pharmacy for your meds. Why is this. But it really was legitimately hard for him to do. And just a lot of the things that you're describing were really difficult. So yeah, I don't know. I was thinking of that when I was reading your book. It's
Cate Hall (32:16):
So interesting to me. I'd never connected those things.
Doree Shafrir (32:19):
Yeah. So maybe this will, I don't know, open up something else for you. Another thing that I wanted to touch on briefly is one of the things that you talk about is increasing your surface area for luck. I was just reminded of this talk I went to once when I was in journalism school by Bonnie Fuller, who was a major celebrity magazine editor in the ops and op teens. And her whole theme was about making your own luck. And at the time I was sort of like, okay, you're kind of full of shit. But now I'm kind of seeing how this mindset is kind of powerful. And so I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about this. How can you start to increase your surface area for luck and what does it do for you?
Cate Hall (33:07):
Yeah, I think this just comes from an observation that it's really hard. Steve Jobs had a quote that I like, which is, "You can't plan to meet the people who will change your life."
(33:21):
And I've found it to be the case that with most of the interesting things that I have done in my life, I can trace them back to encounters that were basically chance encounters. I just happened to have a conversation with somebody who shared an interest with me and something came out of that. That's how my last several jobs/companies have started. And so I think the idea here is basically for any given interaction that you have with somebody, there's some probably low chance that something will come out of that that will significantly change your life. And so you just want to give yourself a lot of chances to get lucky basically.
(34:04):
Take a lot of shots on goal is an analogy that people like. If you have a low percent chance of making the goal, but you take a lot of shots, sometimes they go in. And so increasing your surface area for luck is basically just creating opportunities to encounter a wider range of people and more of them. And I think there are all sorts of ways that you can go about this. A lot of them involve in-person stuff, but for those of us who are socially more reserved, I also think that just writing on the internet is a huge one. And a lot of interesting stuff that has happened in my life in the last few years is downstream of stuff that I've written on Substack.That's how I got my last job. It is how I'm in a position to work on the thing that I'm working on now, which is a new company.
(35:08):
It is something that works surprisingly well for people even when they're starting without a large following because it creates opportunities for people to self-filter according to whether they have something interesting to interact with you about. So yeah, it's just a matter of
(35:30):
Taking more shots on goal, having more shots to get lucky. Yeah.
Elise Hu (35:35):
Tell us a little bit about this company you're starting.
Cate Hall (35:38):
It is basically a financial and philanthropic services organization for people who have made money from AI. So a lot of people who work at the big AI companies have high philanthropic intent. They want to give away a lot of their lifetime wealth, and there's not a good mechanism to do that for esoteric reasons that have to do with how money moves through the system. So that's the core idea of it. Okay.
Elise Hu (36:16):
Okay.
Cate Hall (36:16):
Interesting. Very
Elise Hu (36:17):
Cool.
Cate Hall (36:17):
It's actually related to the last thing that I did, which has never before been the case in my life where I'm actually just building on prior experience or relevant expertise. Yeah.
Doree Shafrir (36:29):
Do you still play poker?
Cate Hall (36:33):
I basically never play. I'll play with friends every few months maybe, but in a $1, $2 game max. Actually, I had a little break from work when I left my last thing before I started this new thing, and I went and played a little tournament series at the local casino, and that was really fun. I have in the past suffered from the effect where if you used to be good at something and now you're no longer good at it, it sucks extra hard to do it because you can feel the gap between the two. But I think I've now crossed some threshold where that doesn't pain me so much anymore, and it's just a totally new thing. And I really enjoy playing poker from that perspective.
Doree Shafrir (37:30):
As someone who will never be a professional poker player, I don't know, it's very cool to me that you did it for even as long as you did.
Cate Hall (37:41):
Thank you. It was a great thing while it lasted and then it ran its course.
Doree Shafrir (37:49):
Well, I actually did want to hear a little bit about what you took from poker that you applied to the rest of your life. You have some examples in the book, but if you could just share.
Cate Hall (38:02):
Yeah. I mean, I think that there are a number of ways of thinking that I learned in poker, specific ways of viewing the world. So an example that comes up in the book is thinking in terms of expected value instead of a mindset where success is what matters. So to make this more concrete, if you play tournament poker, which is what I did, you lose almost always. 10 to 15% of the people who enter a tournament will make any money at all, and most of them will not make very much. And so your tournament life is long series of losses punctuated by occasional big wins that more than make up for the losses. And the question is, what kind of person wants to do this for a living? I think that's a good question regardless because it's a pretty hard way to make a living.
(39:08):
But thinking in terms of if I succeed at this thing, the payout will be big enough to make up for all of the losses. I think this is a type of thinking that generalizes to other areas of life and actually really influences the way that you can think about your career, for instance, or probably dating and lots of other things. It's come up in my later life in terms of doing funding work or philanthropy work. Writing a book is kind of a similar thing where most people who write books do not sell a lot of copies. They aren't very successful, but every once in a while somebody really breaks through with one. Funding companies is sort of the same thing. And so this mindset of as long as you are not actually risking everything, as long as you have some ammunition behind taking chances where you are likely to fail in any given situation, but where the successful event is really, really good, I think that's something I've been super willing to do in my life since poker that other people are maybe less willing to do just out in the general population.
Elise Hu (40:30):
So Cate Hall, before we let you go then, the book is called You Can Just Do Things. What do you hope readers and listeners will do after reading the book or hearing this conversation?
Cate Hall (40:41):
So I think about agency as something that comes much more naturally to some people than others. And something that I've observed in the world is that people who are say high and dark triad traits like narcissism or sociopathy
(41:01):
Tend to be more naturally agentic than other people. I think because they are not rule followers by their nature, they're just a lot less concerned about embarrassment or what other people will think. And so my book, The Dedication is to the Best to Lack Conviction from the second coming poem. And the goal is to extend the thinking behind agency to a wider group of people who are going to apply it in more pro-social ways. The whole last chapter of the book is examples of people who are exercising their agency to do incredible things in the world. And my hope is just that more people who are currently concerned with following rules maybe become a little bit more selective about which ones they're following and a little bit higher in terms of the variance and the agency they welcome into their lives.
Elise Hu (42:02):
Very cool. I love
Doree Shafrir (42:03):
That. Thank you, Cate.
Elise Hu (42:05):
Cate Hall, thank you. Yeah, thanks so much.
Doree Shafrir (42:07):
Just before we go, where can our listeners find you?
Cate Hall (42:11):
You can find me on Substack at usefulfictions is the best place to do it.
Doree Shafrir (42:16):
Okay, great. Great. Thank you. Cate was really great. I really liked her energy and just hearing about her life was really fascinating. So I hope you all enjoyed our conversation with her. We are now in the intention zone. Last week I was talking about my word count. I have been pretty good about it. There were a couple days where I wasn't able to do it, but I've been pretty good about it. So I'm feeling good about that. And then this week I'm just going to focus on getting Henry ready for school. We did some school supply shopping. We did not do a hall video, but we did do - Oh no. No, we didn't. We did some - But you can put
Elise Hu (43:03):
It on your TikTok.
Doree Shafrir (43:04):
Yes, you're right. I could. Got him all his school supplies and we got him a new desk at Ikea. We still have to put that together, but it has been acquired. So just getting him all set up.
Elise Hu (43:21):
Who's going to be doing the Ikea furniture assembly? Is it you or Matt? No, it's going
Doree Shafrir (43:26):
To be me.
Elise Hu (43:26):
Not you. Okay.
Doree Shafrir (43:28):
I mean, I'm actually not bad at putting together Ikea furniture, but I would prefer to not have to do it.
Elise Hu (43:35):
Right.
Doree Shafrir (43:36):
Okay. How about you?
Elise Hu (43:39):
So last week I was trying to get back into structure, just having some units of things that I did each week because I had been on vacation. And so I got back to two units of a class pass class of a Pilates class or a strength, like a lifting class, and then trying to do cardio at least once. So I did it. I've done it for the last two weeks and I don't know if I can keep it up, but I'm trying that. And then the other part of my structure was just to read a little bit each night because I totally go on these long reading binges on vacation,
Doree Shafrir (44:13):
But
Elise Hu (44:13):
Then I come home and I am not regular about it. I love it. I read most nights at some point during the day, but not in a structured way. So I'm trying to just give myself time first thing in the morning or before I go to bed to do that 10, 20 minutes. And then this week, and I don't know if maybe I've just gained weight on vacation or something, but a bunch of random. I'm feeling my body feel a little creaky and achy in different places. And so I'm going to work on, I don't know if I need to go to acupuncture or just do some foam rolling or some PT or I don't know, but I just want to work out some of these kinks because I don't want them to become problems later. But something is a little bit off and I think it's an alignment thing.
(45:01):
So I love my acupuncturist that I tried in the spring, so I'm going to go back to her.
Doree Shafrir (45:08):
All right. Sounds like a plan. All right everybody, thank you so much for listening. Forever 35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Shafrir and Elise Hu and produced and edited by Samee Junio. Sami Reed is our project manager and our network partners ACAST. Thanks everybody.
Elise Hu (45:23):
Talk to you next time.
Doree Shafrir (45:24):
Bye.