You’ve been taught success comes from careful planning, learning the ropes, and earning one promotion at a time. But what about the people who seem to skip all that? We all know a few rare individuals who never stop moving, taking wild risks, and collecting public failures, yet somehow always seem to land on top. Cate Hall is one of those maddening, inspiring people. She left an elite legal career just before making partner to gamble for a living — and became the world’s top-ranked female poker player. A drug addiction left her broke and brain-damaged, but a year after emerging from it, she co-founded a biotech startup that set a clinical trial speed record. Not long after, she took the helm of one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations. Why don’t the rules apply to her? What if they don’t apply to you either? In You Can Just Do Things , Cate Hall argues that the so-called “rules” of success aren’t rules at all — they’re productivity guidelines for low-agency people. Hall shows readers how to live with agency and take control of your future: Increase your surface area for luck Take every shortcut available Build “forcing functions” that ensure commitment Use your deepest insecurities as fuel for growth Are you ready to cross the cringe minefield? To show up where you don’t belong, apply for jobs you’re not qualified for, call people who aren’t expecting it, and risk looking foolish in front of others? Every time you think, “Somebody should do this,” that somebody can be you. An uncomfortable psychological journey and a toolkit for bold living, You Can Just Do Things reveals how to stop waiting and start building the life you want.

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Nate Silver Predicts a ‘Momentous’ Midterm

Oct. 27, 2026 View episode →

“If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era,” Nate Silver told me. The midterms are a week away, and it looks entirely possible that Democrats will win not just the House, but also the Senate. Democrats are polling competitively deep into red territory – Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Kansas – states that Trump won in 2024 by double digits. But Democrats have been burned by big polling misses before. So can we really trust what the polls are telling us? And what stories have emerged in the data that we might see play out on election night? Silver is an internationally famous elections nerd, one of the people who made election forecasting a core part of American political discourse. He edits The Silver Bulletin on Substack, co-hosts the podcast “Still Counting” and is the author, most recently, of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.”

Books recommended:

• 📕  The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon
• 📘  You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life by Cate Hall, Sasha Chapin
• 📗  The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez

Oct. 27, 2026

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