Editor’s Notes: Former Supreme Court attorney and top-ranked poker player Cate Hall shares how she went from drug addiction and losing almost everything to leading a multibillion-dollar science and technology foundation. She argues that the real engine of a meaningful life is personal agency — the skill of spotting and using hidden options — and offers concrete tactics like “courting rejection” and seeking brutally honest feedback to expand your freedom, no matter how stuck you feel. (Aug 28, 2025)
TRANSCRIPT:
From Addiction to Agency
CATE HALL:
Five years ago, I was a prisoner in my own life. I was hopelessly addicted to drugs. Every morning I would get up, go buy drugs, and then spend the rest of the day using, barely conscious, until I passed out again at the end of the night. I spent months at a time like that. I don’t have a lot of memories from that time, but one thing I do remember very clearly is this incredible sense of awe and resentment I felt just watching normal people do normal things. I would see somebody meeting a friend for lunch, and it would seem inconceivable to me that anybody could be that free, that they could just decide what to do with an afternoon.
This talk isn’t about addiction per se, but I’m telling you this because I really need you to understand where I’m coming from, how trapped I was, before I tell you that my life is amazing now. I’m clean, first and foremost. I’m married to an incredible man, and we get to do all sorts of fun projects together. And I’m CEO of Astera Institute, a multi-billion dollar private foundation that’s pioneering a new approach to supporting innovative science and technology.
The Power of Personal Agency
What I do want to talk about today is how I got from point A to point B. What changed? It’s not that I got smarter, or that I started trying harder. I think what changed was even more fundamental. It was developing a sense of personal agency, which I think about as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom we actually have. It’s about being able to find the hidden doors in the walls of life.
I want to argue that when it comes to living a satisfying and meaningful life, agency is actually much more important than the things we usually think about as critical to success, like intelligence and hard work, both of which are next to useless if misapplied, and which are becoming less and less important as we increasingly outsource them to machines. I saw a quote recently from Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, that I really liked. He said, “Intelligence is on tap now, so agency is even more important.”
The Gift of Desperation
For all of the freedom that addiction took from me, I think it actually gave me an unnatural advantage when it came to cultivating agency. And that’s because, while agency has many mothers, one of them is certainly desperation. Addicts call this “the gift of desperation,” actually. The willingness to do whatever it takes to change your life. To embarrass yourself by standing up in front of a room full of strangers and saying, “My name is Kate and I’m a drug addict.” Or to lock yourself away for months. Or to take medications that will put you in the ER if you drink.
By the time I went to rehab, I definitely had the gift of desperation. I’d lost my job, most of my friends. For a time, I’d basically lost the ability to walk. And so when I left, I walked into a halfway house and a complete mess of a life. But in a way, I think that was actually good. Because I felt like I had nothing left to lose. And that made me fearless and hungry.
Saying Yes to Everything
I started saying yes to everything. Every connection someone was willing to make in hopes it might lead to something that would help me get back on my feet. I remember just going for volume. It didn’t matter if I could tell how something would benefit me. That’s how I ended up meeting most of the people I’ve worked with in the last four years.
Losing my sense of pride also helped me learn really fast. I had brain damage, which meant that I didn’t always understand things. And I couldn’t pretend that I did, either. So I got good at saying, “I don’t understand what you just said. Can you explain it to me?” In situations where before, I might have just nodded along. Side note, people love to explain things. The total win-win.
Now, I have great news, which is that you don’t need to ruin your life and then rebuild it in order to learn to be more authentic. I do think it helps to be some kind of desperate. But there’s always something to be desperate for.
I felt that during COVID, as friends and I watched low-income countries struggle with vaccinations because they lacked adequate cold chain storage. So we created a company that created a shelf-stable vaccine, and we let that desperation drive us into clinical trials in under six months, faster than any startup in history.
I felt another kind of desperation early on in my marriage, when it seemed like there was an invisible wall between the two of us. So in desperation, I learned how to resolve the emotional barriers that made it difficult for me to connect with people.
I don’t think agency is innate, but I do think most people learn it through sheer luck. If it’s not the luck of desperation, then maybe it’s just the luck of seeing somebody highly agentic operating up close. I also think, though, that it can be learned systematically and by many more people.
Tactics for Becoming More Agentic
I want to share some of the tactics I’ve learned for becoming more agentic.
First, assume everything is learnable.