From the Vault | A Chat With Annie Duke (Part 2)
This episode of Books for Men features an edition of "From the Vault." It’s the second great chat I had on my previous pod, It's Not What It Seems, with Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets, How to Decide, and most recently, Quit. Listen for more! (Original publish date: 10/14/18.)
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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So I'm not going to waste too much time here on an introduction since this is part two to last week's part one. What I did want to remind you though, is that this is not a continuous conversation. So these two conversations that I had with Annie were recorded two months apart, and this is a From the Vault episode. So this was five years ago, which is pretty hard to believe. However, I don't think that you should treat it as dated content because as you will find in both part one and part two, what we discuss is extremely evergreen. And I think that not only will you be entertained, but I think it could help you, especially if you have a big decision looming in your life.
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I can't recommend her book enough Thinking in Bets: How to Make Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. It's easily one of my top five non-fiction books. So I'm really just happy to make it a focal point in the month of July for this podcast. So in part one, we talk a little bit about open-mindedness and the power of open-mindedness and why you should be open-minded, as well as give a general overview of Annie's decision-making philosophy, which is one that I definitely ascribe to. So if you haven't already, you might want to go back and check out that conversation. If not, don't worry. Since these conversations were recorded individually, they can be listened to out of order. However, you might find it more convenient to go first. Listen to that original part or that original episode. This conversation talks a little bit about pressure-filled decisions, and how to battle stereotypes, and really just goes deeper into everything that we discussed in part one.
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Now with that being said, I should remind you that Annie does have a new book out called Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. And it's a book that I highly recommend as a great pairing with the book that's in question today, Thinking in Bets as well as her follow-up to that, How to Decide. So just some food for thought. And lastly, since there's not going to be an ending to this episode, I did just want to remind you that for more information, you could always visit BooksforMen.org, where you can get full transcripts for every episode, as well as sign up for the newsletter, which is a monthly roundup of all the episodes complete with full book and author information, all the best quotes and newsletter only book recommendations. If you enjoyed today's episode, please remember to share it with a family member or a friend, or anybody who you think might like it, because word of mouth is everything when you're trying to spread awareness.
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And I know I always say it, I probably sound like a broken record right now with this podcast. Specifically, it's to inspire more men to read. And so, I need your help to do that. If you want to double down on that support, the best way to do so is just rating, reviewing, liking, following, subscribing, all of that good stuff on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on, because doing so will help more people find the show. So now without further ado, here is a conversation that I had with Annie Duke on my previous podcast, It's Not What It Seems, centered around her book, Thinking in Bets: How to Make Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts.
Douglas Vigliotti
Annie Duke, welcome back to the show.
Annie Duke (00:03:47)
I'm so excited. Like my second, my second shot at it. Let me see if I can improve.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:03:53)
I think you deserve a medal. You're the first two-time guest on the podcast.
Annie Duke (00:03:59)
Oh, really? That's like a freaking Superbowl ring.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:04:02)
I couldn't pick a better one, honestly. So thank you for agreeing to put up with me for another hour. I appreciate it. So we ended our last chat and there was still so much to talk about and I uncovered a talk that you actually gave…I feel like I always surprise you with the first part.
Annie Duke (00:04:24)
Oh no, this could be bad.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:04:26)
No, no, no. It was a great story. So, it was a talk you gave about your 2010 World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions experience. Do you remember it?
Annie Duke (00:04:36)
Yes. But it, so it wasn't really like a talk the way that I think about a talk. You found my Moth story.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:04:42)
Your Moth story. Yeah, exactly.
Annie Duke (00:04:46)
So, look at you, detective.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:04:48)
There were so many things honestly that I could unpack from that story. I thought it was a great story.
Annie Duke (00:04:54)
Well, thanks.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:04:54)
But there was one that I really wanted to ask you about. It has to do with this macro concept of exposure, right? So, you alluded to it, you alluded to it being the f one of first times ESPN was going to be using the whole card cam. Which meant your cards would be exposed to the world. And this was adding an enormous amount of pressure into your decision-making, specifically in the context of one hand. But I would assume throughout the whole tournament that was the case. And you even say something to the tune of, it was pressured for the world to find out that you didn't deserve to be there. So, it was adding this enormous amount of pressure. And feel free to fill in the gaps in the story to add more context, but just in a metaphorical sense, I think people hide to avoid exposing themselves to the pressure of making important life decisions. So, my question is, do you think this element of pressure actually enables better decision-making?
Annie Duke (00:05:56)
So, my mind is going in a lot of different directions.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:06:00)
We can unpack, we can take our time and unpack this.
Annie Duke (00:06:01)
Yeah, let's unpack it. So first of all, let's, let me set it up for people so they understand what's going on here. So, poker prior to like 2003 really didn't have any television presence at all. And the reason why it really didn't have any television presence is that people had tried to show poker before, but poker when you can't see the whole cards that people's hidden hands is incredibly boring to watch. And there was an innovation right in 2002, 2003, where they figured out how to make it so that the audience could actually see the player’s whole cards, their hands, which all of a sudden made the game super fascinating to watch. But you know, one of the things that I obviously talk about in Thinking in Bets is this idea that in poker there's all this hidden information. Cards are hidden from view. You're trying to make decisions where you're navigating both the luck element and the fact that cards to come aren't under your control, but also this hidden information element that you're trying to guess at other people's cards.
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So, what's kind of interesting about what, what happens in this situation? So now all of a sudden we've all been playing in situations where our cards are private and we're sort of making poker decisions in this natural way, understanding that we're guessing at what the other players' whole cards are. And then all of a sudden in this moment of time now there are little lipstick cameras. Tiny little cameras the size of a lipstick tube are on the side of the table where your cards are now exposed to the world. And this actually is really problematic from a standpoint of resulting. So we had talked in the last podcast about resulting, which is the tendency of people to take the quality of the outcome and use that to derive the quality of the result. And now these lipstick cameras make this resulting problem huge. All the poker players feel like they're Pete Carroll getting yelled at for an interception because of course the audience is watching a hand and they know what the other player has. So if you make a bad choice, given what the other player's whole cards are, but only given what the other players' whole cards are, the audience is now going to judge you as a bad player because they can't sort of like get into your head that you don't actually know that the other player is holding those cards.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:08:19)
Yeah. It exposes you. I mean you're totally exposed.
Annie Duke (00:08:23)
Yeah, totally. So it's this, it's this weird situation where you could be making a total totally reasonable decision based on the fact that you don't know what the other player's holding, but that decision could actually look really ridiculous to the audience who does know what the player has. So this is now like, it adds this whole kind of weird meta layer to your thinking. So I got invited in 2004 to participate in something called the Tournament of Champions. So ESPN and Harrah’s, which hosts the World Series of Poker, decided to invite, I'm going to say quote on quote the 10 best players in the world. So I would say more like the 10 most well-known players in the world are probably what they were choosing. But they, they said the 10 best players in the world. And so I was at that table, I was the only woman at that table.
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And the reason why I make this distinction between the best players and the most well-known players is that I in particular got quite a lot of heat that I didn't deserve to be at that table. That I wasn't one of the best players. And the only reason why I was at the table was that I was a woman and that's the only reason why I got chosen for it. So now I've got these two kinds of things going on, right? Like all these people are saying she doesn't deserve to be there. She's only there because she's a woman. And then also I'm now going to play where people can see my whole cards and they can see the whole cards of other people and they may use that to confirm the idea that I don't belong there. Yeah. So, this, this puts like a whole bunch of pressure on my decision making because I'm sort of in the situation where I feel like, obviously I can't know what the other player has, but if it turns out that I guess wrong, I mean I feel like it's going to happen.
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People are going to go, you see, she's terrible. She didn't deserve to be there. I can't believe she got invited to that tournament. So the story that you're referring to, this Moth story is about a particular hand where kind of all of this comes to a head where I have to decide whether I'm going to put all of my chips in the pot and whether I put all my chips in the pot really depends on the kind of what I feel like my opponent has in this situation. And I find myself having a hard time thinking about the hand independent of this fear that the audience is going to result on me. That the audience is like, if I happen to be wrong and if I call and the player has a much better hand that the audience is going to be like, see she's a terrible player and if I fold and he happens to have a worse hand than me, that they're going to be like, see she's such a terrible player. And that this is really at this moment completely interfering with my ability to think through this hand. Because I have like all these meta thoughts going,
Douglas Vigliotti (00:11:09)
It's like a magnification of hindsight bias.
Annie Duke (00:11:11)
Actually, I wouldn't say it's a magnification of hindsight bias on my part. I'm actually like, this is such a great coincidence that you ask this question because this is a particular problem that I'm actually really deep and thought about and I'm just starting to do like a lot of writing on this topic. So, I'm not worried about my own hindsight bias. I'm not worried here about what I should have known or what could have been, I've been playing poker by this point for 10 years. Like I'm used to him having something different than I thought that didn't work out. Like I personally am pretty good with hindsight bias in this. I've had a lot of training to not get too caught up in what the actual result is and to sit there and say, well that was inevitable, or I should have known that, or whatever. I'm much more concerned here about the audience resulting, right? I'm much more concerned about the audience being the Seahawks fans pointing fingers at Pete Carroll, and saying, you're an idiot. You're the worst coach that ever was. Or in my case, like, you're such a terrible poker player. What were you doing at the Tournament of Champions? Like, champions my butt, right? So, it's actually a different problem. I'm not worried about my own reaction to what I do. I'm worried about the people who are observing like the observe reaction.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:12:27)
Are you worried about your, how it's going to affect your belief and what you can do moving forward and your capabilities moving forward?
Annie Duke (00:12:34)
You know, it's hard for me to say because it’s so…
Douglas Vigliotti (00:12:36)
Yeah, it's so far removed.
Annie Duke (00:12:37)
It's so far removed. I mean, I don't think at the moment that I was concerned about that, I think I was really just concerned about, well, if I happen to make a choice that looks really bad here because people can see my whole cards and my opponent's whole cards. Greg Raymer was who I was against. That it's just going to be like a firestorm of I told you so. You know, that's hard for me and it's really upsetting and so I'm like very worried about the criticism that might come my way.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:13:08)
Yeah. I mean, I think that's hard would be hard for anybody.
Annie Duke (00:13:11)
Yeah, because the thing is that for me personally, like whether the result worked out well, like I knew it was a really hard decision and it was a decision that I was going to be picking apart and asking about anyway. And so after that hand occurred, we happened to have a dinner break and I had an hour. So of course I don't know what he had Yeah. In, in this moment. I find out later as you know. But I don't know what he had. I don't know whether I made the best decision and for people to want to, so this is what happened. I had two tens. Greg Raymer now puts all of his chips in the pot, which now puts my whole tournament at risk. Because in order for me to continue to play the hand, I have to put all my chips in the pot.
(00:13:45)
So I'm only supposed to fold there if he's got jacks, queens, kings, or aces. Yeah. Cause those are the hands that are really way better than mine. Yep. If he's got like an ace in a queen or an ace in a king or a king and a queen or like two nines or something like that, it would be like a real, real big disaster for me to fold. So given the particulars of the situation, what I was trying to decide was what his range of hands were. I didn't think that he had queens there and I didn't think he had jacks there. I thought he had kings or queens. And then my decision was could he also have ace-king? If he could also have ace-king, then the mathematics would've worked out for me to continue to play. Yeah. So this is, this is the problem that I have. And of course, I don't have access to his cards and so I'm trying to decide whether ace-king is a hand that he has there, given the way that the hand has played. Again, because I know that he could have kings and he could have aces. What I'm concerned about is whether could he also have ace-king? Because if he can also have ace-king, I have to play.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:14:43)
Then you play.
Annie Duke (00:14:44)
So yeah. So I think about the hand, and I think about it for a really, really, really long time. And I happen to see a physical movement that he did that I had seen before him that made me eliminate ace-king as a possibility. And I then fold my hand. But if he does have ace king or you know, if he's bluffing or whatever, I'm going to to the audience, I'm going to look really stupid. So anyway, so we finished the hand, of course, I don't get to see his cards because I just fold and we go off for an hour-long dinner break. And so the reason why I think that I was a little bit more objective, although I'm not sure that I was, was because I actually called up Eric Seidel, who's mentioned in the book as one of my mentors.
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And I actually talked through the hand with him during that hour. So I wasn't waiting to get the result to try to talk about the strategy. I mean this is actually living the philosophy of my book, right? I’m just trying to work through like what I saw and what my thoughts were and what the action was and why I was sort of putting him in that range and sort of like confirming mathematically that if he did have ace-king, I was supposed to call and asking Eric if he thinks it was ridiculous that I took ace king out of his range. And that's sort of what I was trying to sort of work through. But, so I was trying to sort of separate this other stuff, you know, the other audience stuff from my thinking process. But, you know, it was really hard and I was really kind of like second-guessing myself.
(00:16:06)
Now I came back obviously and won that tournament, but Greg Ramer did tell me, I actually ironically ended up knocking him out, but, and when he got knocked out he came over and he told me he had kings. So, you know, I mean it turned out well I stand by the decision because I really think that I really had faith in the thing that I saw from him. But to tell you the truth, I still don't know whether that was right. Like, I still don't know whether it was crazy for me to eliminate ace-king from the hands that he could have. I don't know if that was me overthinking it. I don't know.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:16:37)
Just to kind of circle back a little bit back to the original question, which was do you think this element of pressure actually enabled you to make a better decision? And the reason why I ask that is because I think we often hide as people take this out away from poker and, and apply this to life, we hide from exposing ourselves to tough decisions or life changes. And sometimes I'm assuming that adding that element of exposure actually creates better concentration or an ability to actually make a better decision. And that's kind of why I asked the question because I kind of see that not only in my own life, but I see that in other people's lives as well.
Annie Duke (00:17:20)
Yeah. So I think it was very bad for my decision-making. And here's the reason why, like, I mean obviously this is a situation where like I'm, I'm kind of forced into this spot to choose with this sort of exposure that goes along with it and the fact that I think that people are going to judge me on information that I don't have. Yeah. Right. As if, as if somehow I should have known it. And it made it very difficult for me just to think through the hand in the absence of this worry that, that people were going to treat me like Pete Carroll. Right? Like that people were going to result on me. And I think that generally, this is a really big problem and I think it in particular, like it's a really big leadership problem. Yeah. That I think it's very hard when you're in a leadership position not to have results trigger looks into the process, right?
(00:18:08)
Like results trigger postmortems. And the issue is that that that in itself is okay because you, you kind of want to have, you know, you want to have triggers for going in and sort of reevaluating the decision process and trying to figure out how you could improve the decision process. But the problem is not that a result might trigger you to go in and, and look at it, it's that only a particular type of result goes in and triggers you to look at it, which is a bad result. And when that happens, it doesn't matter how much you say to the people who are working with you like, oh, I really care about process. Like I don't so much care about the outcome. I care that you made a good decision and I trust that good results will come from that over time. Because if the only thing that triggers a postmortem is that the patient is dead, right?
(00:18:51)
Is that like the patient isn't doing well like you had a bad result, then what you're communicating through that, that action through that process is that you actually care about the quality of the result because what's making you go in and question somebody's decision is only when they lose basically. So this I think is a really huge problem and I think that I experienced it in a very big way in this, in this particular tournament because it really interfered with my decision-making. So let me explain sort of how it interferes. Yeah. If you indulge me, I want to go back to the whole Pete Carroll play for a second because I want to give you another thought experiment. So the last time that we talked Yep. The question that I asked you was this. So Pete Carroll passes the ball in the last 26 seconds of the Superbowl against the Patriots.
(00:19:32)
Obviously, that's a super unexpected play. And what happens of course is Malcolm Butler intercepts the ball and that's a gay member and everybody thinks this is the worst decision, the worst call in Super Bowl history. And then the thought experiment that we talked about the last time was, well what if the ball had been caught? What if it had been a good outcome? And of course, we were both like, oh yeah, of course, if it had been a good outcome, he would've gotten more of the Doug Peterson treatment. Would the Philly special and been have would've called him a genius? So now I'm going to ask you a different thought experiment though. Okay, let's go. All right. The Seahawks are on the one-yard line of the Patriots with 26 seconds left. It's fourth down. And everybody expects that Pete Carroll's going to have Russell Wilson hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch. And that's exactly what he does. He hands the ball off to Marshawn Lynch. Marshawn Lynch tries to get through the defensive line of the Patriots and he fails the Seahawks call a timeout, they go back, they line up again, they call another run play, and they hand it off to Marshawn Lynch again. And Marshawn Lynch again just fails to score. And that's the end of the game and it's a close game and the Patriots win. So what do you think the headlines are the next day when that happens?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:20:40)
It can only be one of two things. I mean, it could only be either knowing the media, it's probably going to spin a negative narrative and talk about the failure on Marshawn Lynch's part to get through the line.
Annie Duke (00:20:53)
That's really interesting. Okay. Or what else, that's good. So that’s good. But what else?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:20:57)
Or if it was in Boston somewhere, they might spin it as how the Patriots came up and made a big play when they needed to and stopped the best running back, you know, so it would be something Yeah. For a positive spin depending on…I would say that, that that headline would be changed depending on where you are.
Annie Duke (00:21:14)
Okay, great. So here's my question. Did either of those mention Pete Carroll?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:21:19)
Neither?
Annie Duke (00:21:20)
That's weird, right?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:21:21)
Neither. Right. That's funny.
Annie Duke (00:21:26)
In the other case, it wasn't like Russell Wilson is such a terrible quarterback, right? That it was on Pete Carroll that he called that play notice that what happens when Pete Carroll calls the play that everybody expects the play that has consensus when they lose, and nobody mentions his name.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:21:41)
That's funny. That’s right. That's. Okay. That was a good one. I like that.
Annie Duke (00:21:49)
So now we're getting somewhere. So now we're starting to get into my problem at this table. Right? So let's talk about that. So, Pete Carroll's no dummy, right? Like human beings aren't dummies.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:22:00)
Totally.
Annie Duke (00:22:01)
He knows that if he calls a play that there isn't consensus around that everybody's going to yell at him if he fails, right? Yeah. And he also knows that if he, if he calls the play that there is consensus around that nobody will yell at him when he fails. Right? He knows both of those things. Now that tells you something about how incredibly special Pete Carroll is because Pete Carroll is still called to play.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:22:24)
And he's also exposed to the world because the world's going to find out ultimately anyway because the play has to be called and he's got to make a decision one way or the other.
Annie Duke (00:22:31)
So here's my question for you. In that situation, what percentage of NFL coaches do you think would do what Pete Carroll did?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:22:39)
Throw the ball?
Annie Duke (00:22:39)
Yeah. When they know that if it fails, they're going to get screamed at, but they're not going to get yelled at by anybody if they hand it off.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:22:45)
I don't think a lot.
Annie Duke (00:22:46)
Right. That's what makes Pete Carroll so great. So most people are not Pete Carroll. Most people actually are like, you know what, it might not be mathematically better, but I just really thank you very much to not get yelled at here because this is good enough. Right?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:23:01)
That would be a great article. The play that lost in the Super Bowl is what makes Pete Carroll great.
Annie Duke (00:23:06)
Right? Exactly.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:23:08)
And spinning that narrative. It's true to show how that actually indicates greatness, not fault, right?
Annie Duke (00:23:14)
This is actually what I'm writing about now. This is what I'm working on. So we've got the foundation laid for talking about this now I'm so excited. So now let's think about this from like a leadership standpoint. Yep. Right? So okay, you're in a leadership role and you're saying to people, I'm process-oriented, I really care about the quality of your decisions. I don't so, so much care about results. But it's really weird because every time you have like a meeting where you're doing, you're trying to trigger something about looking at decisions, it's always triggered because something bad happens. Yeah. Right? It's like, it's like you're a trial lawyer and you lose the case or you're a salesperson and you don't make the sale or you sell it. You know, you close the deal less than you thought.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:24:02)
Now it's a reason now, now it's lifting up every stone and figuring out what's happening here because something negative happened. Totally. Right?
Annie Duke (00:24:07)
So now the people are like holy crap, I don't care what's coming out of that person's mouth. I know what that person means. Like I know what that person actually thinks. And that person actually thinks that there's a problem when there's bad outcomes, right? There's a problem when I lose, there's a problem when I lose the Super Bowl. More pressure that makes right Now. So what does that mean that they're going to do, they're going to make decisions that are anticipating the fact that if there's a bad outcome, all of a sudden there's going to be a review. So what kind of decisions are they going to make? Ones that they can justify in a way that allows kind of uncertainty, the things that are not in their control, whatever it might be to bubble up. So I'll give you the super simplest example ever. If we think about the Pete Carroll thing, what's happening is that when he takes a choice that people aren't expecting, people don't allow for luck as an explanation.
(00:25:03)
They put it on his shoulders, on the skill shoulders. When he hands it off to Marshawn Lynch, as far as Pete Carroll is concerned, they allow luck to be the explanation because luck is anything that is in Pets Carroll's control. And he can't control Marshawn Lynch, nor can he control the Patriots defensive line and I think you're exactly right that they're the ones who then either get the credit or the blame. None of that is in Pete Carroll's control. So that's luck from Pete Carroll's perspective. So notice that when they sort of go down this consensus route, Pete Carroll now gets to have uncertainty work in his favor, right? To sort of offload responsibility.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:25:37)
Yeah, yeah.
Annie Duke (00:25:38)
So super simple example, right? So you don't have Waze. So let's ignore the fact that Waze exists.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:25:44)
I never use Waze.
Annie Duke (00:25:45)
Okay, good. So you and your friend are going to a movie and you must be there by seven, okay? So you're traveling along and you go your usual route, the way that you always go to the movies, and like there's a ton of traffic because there was like an accident on the road and the traffic is so bad that you don't make it to the movie, right? Like you guys are sad, but do you think your friend's yelling at you for that?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:26:08)
It depends on what friend it is. No, no, no, no. Obviously not. No, no, no.
Annie Duke (00:26:14)
It’s like, ah, that was bad luck, dude. Right?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:26:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Annie Duke (00:26:16)
Yeah. Okay, so now let's say that you guys are going and you're like, I know a shortcut, I've got a shortcut. This is going to get us there way faster. So you head on the shortcut and there's like horrible traffic. Same thing, like there was some accident that's being cleared off the road and there was like ridiculous traffic on your shortcut and it's so bad that you missed the movie. So now what's happening?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:26:40)
Now I'm getting drilled. You shouldn't of went that way. You should of …What were you thinking?
Annie Duke (00:26:46)
Yeah, of course. Well, but in either case it's like you had no control over the traffic. It's not your fault that there was traffic, like there was an accident on the road. Neither nothing you can do. So, now what is that going to discourage you from doing?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:26:57)
Taking shortcuts.
Annie Duke (00:26:58)
Taking shortcuts. So this is where we can see that you get in this defensive crouch. Where what we'd ideally want, is people that we're working with, that are on our team to be making decisions that are really in the long-term best interest of the company or the project that we're working on or whatever it's right. We'd really like that, we'd like them to be aligned with the long-term goals. But if it's the case that they know that if there's a bad outcome that we're going to start digging down into the decision process, they're going to, in a very rational way make decisions that if there's a bad outcome, they have some reasonable explanation that it wasn't their fault. So what that means is that they're going to be running run plays when mathematically, yeah, it's better to run a pass play because the pass play is less well understood.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:27:48)
I think people probably see this more often than they're willing to admit. And I think people probably make that decision to metaphorically do the run play more than they're willing to admit.
Annie Duke (00:27:58)
Exactly. Right. But they’re rational to do it. This is the thing that I want to make clear is if the person who you're reporting to is going to blame you when you make a decision that has a bad outcome, but it's not one that they understand very well or that they're going to be able to see that it was really kind of due to luck elements or that it was like a pretty good choice and they're just going to point fingers at you because there wasn't like a consensus around the decision, then you're right to choose the less good but consensus decision because you're going to get fired otherwise. So this is the problem from a leadership perspective, right? Is that the people who are working on your team, if that's the way you behave as a leader, are going to be rational to choose the less profitable choice? If they think that they're less likely to get fired, that's on you. That's the way you're behaving, right? You're creating that decision for those people.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:28:56)
So just really quick before it kind of begs the question for me. Have you thought through what a leader would be able to do, from either an action standpoint to indicate to their team or the people that they're leading that they actually want them to make these statistically better decisions as opposed to taking the safe route just to cover their own ass, for lack of better terminology?
Annie Duke (00:29:18)
No, it is, it's a CYA thing for sure. Yes, I have thought about that. So it's kind of like the way that I would think about what you're ideally trying to do is get people to think the way that I thought about poker, which is regardless of whether it turns out that Greg Raymer has kings, or whether he has ace-king that you see whatever I did, and you say, well given that you didn't know what his cards were, that was a reasonable thing for you to do. So ideally you want to be communicating that this is the way you think.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:29:51)
Yeah.
Annie Duke (00:29:52)
So how would you do that?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:29:53)
Be very explicit.
Annie Duke (00:29:54)
Yes. Be very explicit and back up what you say explicitly with your actions. So don't fire Pete Carroll, right? Like don't scream at a GM, don't yell at Pete Carroll for that decision just because it didn't work out well. But there's actually a broader thing that you can do that's actually really helpful, which is to not have the quality of an outcome be the thing that triggers a review of the process or review of the decisions. Instead have the fact that the outcome was in some way unexpected. So let me give you an example. Like, let's say that you're a real estate investor, right? And you invest in a house and the appraisal comes in way under what you expected. So that probably triggers a review.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:30:41)
Yeah.
Annie Duke (00:30:42)
But what do you think happens when you invest in a house and then the appraisal comes in way more than expected? Do it again? Does that trigger review?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:30:52)
No, just do it again. We'll leave you alone.
Annie Duke (00:30:54)
So smart.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:30:55)
Exactly.
Annie Duke (00:30:56)
Oh, we're so smart. That's so great. But let's think about that because that's actually really interesting, right? Because if it comes in way higher than expected, that's actually problematic for your, for your future investments, right? So what we're trying to do is figure out what are quality investments. You're going to have a high, a good return. So if you are willing to invest in it at what you thought was going to be the lower appraisal, and it turned out that you may or may not be because it may just be like some weird event occurred that caused the appraisal to come in high, but it may be that you actually missed something and here you were off by 20% on the appraisal and you'd like to know that because as you go to examine future investments, you'd like to change your model to understand that those appraisals might come in higher, which actually opens up more investment opportunities to you, right? So if you don't go in and actually review the decision making and the model that you were using in order to estimate the appraisal, when it comes unexpectedly high, you're, you're actually going to affect your ability to find opportunities to invest in, in the future. Because you're not actually going to go look and say, well, was my model correct and this was just kind of at the tail, or was there something fundamental that I missed that made me underestimate so badly? But nobody does that, right? Everybody's like, ah, I'm so smart.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:32:11)
I think what it really comes down to is if that's what you're encouraging or if inside your organization or whatever the situation is, if that's what you're trying to encourage your team to do, it's having a system in place to constantly improve that process, right? That decision-making process, good, bad, indifferent, what you're doing and, and it doesn't, you know, it doesn't surprise me that you're making your decisions a focus, right? You're, you're, you're making it a focus point to say, we're going to evaluate how we make decisions, good, bad, or indifferent. And it's a process that then goes into whatever that process is or whatever system that is that you put in place to evaluate these decisions on a consistent basis. You use a good one in the book Thinking in Bets and it's something obviously that you've, you've done for your entire career, which is evaluating whether it's more skill or more luck, right?
Annie Duke (00:32:59)
Exactly. So it's not that we don't want to have triggers for going and looking at the decision process, right? Like, we certainly want to have things that trigger us to go and look at them because we don't want them to become stale. We don't want it to become like, well this is the model we use.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:33:14)
We’ve gotta be open-minded. We've got to be open-minded.
Annie Duke (00:33:16)
Right. So, and this is how it, it's always been like, so, so you want things to trigger sort of going in and sort of getting your hands dirty, you know, examining the, the modeling that you're using to make decisions. But we want it to be sort of like an outcome, quality neutral as possible, right? We don't want it to just be like, oh, it was a bad thing. Let me go look and period end of the discussion instead, like for example in the appraisal thing, it would be better if the trigger was unexpectedness, it was unexpectedly low or unexpectedly high and we recognized that the unexpectedness is the problem.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:33:48)
Ah, so a deviation.
Annie Duke (00:33:50)
Right, yeah. Deviation from what the prediction was is the problem. Because if we're not getting that right, if we're not getting the predictions right, then that's actually obviously very detrimental to our ability, to invest in a smart way. So you want, my model was off to be the trigger, and then what does that do is it tells people that what I say is what I do. Like we want to not be this do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do thing. And if you say like, I'm process oriented and I don't really care about results, and then you, what you do is, oh, you had a really bad result, let's go talk about that and where you went wrong, then you're in this—do as I say, not as I do. I bet you didn't think you were going to get here from my moth story, but there you go.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:34:34)
No, no, no, no. And I love going down rabbit holes. So one of the things that I'm thinking about as you're, as you're saying this is how do you counteract the, this is the way we've always done it. This is the way the system is already set up. So there really is no incentive for me to do anything differently. Because I'm thinking about a conversation that I recently had with my, with my brother about education and specifically how you get teachers to teach in a different manner, right? Like to model something a little bit different than they've been doing, but the system is already constructed to provide grades and testing and everything that we're talking about here. There's no incentive for the other side to actually change what they're doing. Does that make sense?
Annie Duke (00:35:22)
Yeah. So I think that this is a really sticky problem, right? I mean we can go back to the NFL here. So we've had the analytics on fourth down for a very long time and we've known for a very long time that NFL coaches do not go for it on fourth down enough. We just know that.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:35:40)
Except for Belichick, who does it all the time. I bet you if you look at the numbers.
Annie Duke (00:35:43)
Well, even he doesn’t, right? But even he doesn't do it enough. Like even he doesn't do it as much as the math would tell you to. He is way better than most, don't get me wrong. Like he's really killing it with that. But for example, if you look at edge analytics, like they're telling you that if you're on your own one-yard line on fourth down, you should basically go for it no matter what. And there's good math behind that. When was the last time you saw a team do that on their own one-yard line? Like oh right. Never, never. And then, then the other thing is like in the NHL there's a lot of math around pulling the goalie and it turns out that mathematically speaking, the NHL team should be pulling the goalie way earlier than they ever do.
(00:36:23)
But like you don't see people do it even though the math is out there. And the reason why is that there, it's, when you look at what happened to Pete Carroll, where's the incentive, right? There isn't, I mean right? Look at Sam Hinkie, right? He ended up resigning from the Sixers. I mean, ultimately, obviously, the system worked, and his ideas worked, but he was gone before they actually realized it because nobody could stand it. People just couldn't stand it. So yeah, so I mean this is like a huge problem is when you're kind of a cog in a wheel and that machine when you're a cog in a machine and that machine is rewarding something different than what you want to do. And if you try to do it, you'll get blamed or fired or whatever. This is what I was saying is that if you want to keep your job, you're behaving completely rationally to say, I'm not going to do the thing that I think is going to, in the long run, be better.
(00:37:15)
I'm going to do the thing that I'm not going to get yelled at for. And I agree. I think in education, this is a really big problem. I mean, I have a foundation that I co-founded called How I Decide, and we're in education and we, we developed a bunch of programs that really evaluation on them is amazing. Like we have one program that improves test scores by between 10 and 15% depending on the subject. And it's just very hard to get people to implement it because it's like, it's new, and they're not getting rewarded for it necessarily, for the innovation. Right. So I think it's really on the people who really have skin in the game for, for how that company is going to do, like long term. Like it's on leadership to say, we really care. So when you look at education, where do you see a lot of the innovation coming from?
(00:38:04)
Well, you see it coming from private schools and charter schools. I think partly because it's more of a, like with charter schools it ends up being more of like a, a startup environment kind of thing. So there isn't as much of like, this is a way we do it and this is set, it's we're going to throw a lot of stuff against the wall and see what happens. And I think that that's actually a really good analogy because, in startups, I think one of the reasons why you don't see this problem, in the same way, is because there isn't a set way that you do things.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:38:31)
Yeah. No, you're testing and in its incremental improvement in testing almost every single day.
Annie Duke (00:38:36)
Right. So it's like, we're going to pass some balls and see what happens and we're kind of expecting that we're going to sort of, you know, some of it will work and some of it won't. And so we're, we're just going to try passing some balls here and it's all good. And so what you see from startups is like a whole bunch of cool stuff happening, a whole bunch of kind of like really trying to poke around at the way things have always been done and look at market opportunities and look at places where you can create more efficiency and so on and so forth.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:39:02)
Do you see any way that public education has the ability to do this?
Annie Duke (00:39:08)
Well, first of all, charters are public education. But you mean like, you mean non-charter public education?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:39:13)
Yeah. Like non-charter public education. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's any right or wrong answer. I just think it's an interesting thing to think about.
Annie Duke (00:39:19)
Yeah. So I feel like, I feel like where you get more innovation in the public education space is where a public school actually has a lot of competition around it. Right. So sadly it's not in the places you really need it. Like in urban districts, where you really need innovation. I think it's in places where the public school is sitting among a lot of private schools. Where the people, like if they don't like the public school, they're just going to send their kids somewhere else. And then I think you're much more likely to see sort of sort of pushing against things and a little bit more motivation to try to create change when you're the only school around. And that's where people are going to send their kids. I think that you can get into these kinds of problems.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:40:04)
Yeah, I totally agree. I think this is one of the major problems that, that we face right now societally.
Annie Duke (00:40:10)
Yeah, full circle. That's the problem that I was facing in the Tournament of Champions, right? Was that I'm sitting here and I'm trying to ignore the fact that I think I'm going to be resulted on. Right. Yeah. And I'm trying to just, so I'm trying to be a good employee here.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:40:25)
Yeah.
Annie Duke (00:40:26)
I'm trying to actually come up with what mathematically I think is the right play and not what I think is the safe play that's less likely to get criticized. And what's interesting here is that I think that I had had to overcome that a lot of people perceive female players to be more passive, to be more likely to fold in those situations. So probably, part of what I was trying to work through was resisting this desire to call just to show people that I wasn't weak.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:40:56)
Yeah. No, I think that leads perfectly to something that I wanted to ask you. So I can't believe that this conversation found its way there and it's that you've been a woman in a field traditionally filled with men, so I wanted to ask you what kind of advice you might be able to provide someone who's battling any kind of stereotype or getting boxed in.
Annie Duke (00:41:17)
Okay. So the first thing I want to say is like what I experience in poker is in some ways a very poor analogy for what other women experience in the workforce. And the reason why is that there was nobody who could hire or fire me or promote me.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:41:29)
Okay. Totally.
Annie Duke (00:41:29)
Or not promote me. So I do feel like it's different when other people can really make significant decisions about you, which is not the case in poker. So I just want to start with that, that I recognize that it is a different situation in some ways. There are very similar things in terms of sort of the way you're treated and the things that you butt up against, but there's this very significant way that what I was facing was different. So nobody's pressing down on you because they're discriminating against you or whatever. So, I just want to make that clear that I really feel for people who are butting up against this, where there are other people who have decision-making power over them, their gender or their race or whatever it might be as like, being used as part of the decision-making process for whether they're going to be able to advance.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:42:18)
Yeah, that's good.
Annie Duke (00:42:18)
Yeah. So let me just, let me just say that I haven't had to experience that thankfully. But that being said, I do think that I do have some things to offer. So I wasn't just like a woman in a male-dominated field. Like, let me explain how male-dominated it is. If you're playing in a live poker tournament, like the World Series of Poker, for example, generally about 3% of the field is female.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:42:40)
Dramatically.
Annie Duke (00:42:41)
It's more than male-dominated. Yeah. It's dramatically male-dominated. It's like the Senate, you know, 50 years ago. So, just like, it's bad. It was bad.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:42:54)
I can only imagine what … I can only … I mean, all right, never mind. Keep going. I could have gone off on a whole other tangent there, but let's stay focused there.
Annie Duke (00:43:04)
Yeah, here's the interesting thing is that there's lots and lots of ways, let me say this also, while there was this kind of good thing going on, which is there weren't people who had, who could like, choose not to promote me or not to gimme a raise or not to hire me, which was good. What it also meant there was kind of two things happening. One is there was no HR department. You know, and people make fun of HR departments, but it's kind of nice to be able to go and say, look, this person sexually propositioned me at the table. Could you do something?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:43:34)
Yeah.
Annie Duke (00:43:34)
So that's kind of nice. But then the other thing that I think is kind of interesting is that what went along with that also was this sense that you were there voluntarily, right? Like you're choosing to be in this situation. Yeah. So, therefore, you can choose to leave. And what that meant was that at the time I was playing, I think this is, this has improved certainly particularly I think in, in the more straight up like, you know, Las Vegas casino environment. It’s gotten better and, it did get better while I was playing. But so, you know, I started playing in like these little card rooms in Montana. And even when I first started playing in Las Vegas if somebody was mistreating me at a table, I would get sort of a shrug from the floor man. So the floor man's the person who's supposed to be kind of like watching over the game and making sure that everything's running smoothly and nobody's doing anything like this, whatever. And, you know, there aren't fights breaking out.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:44:23)
And his response is like, oh, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Like this shoulder-shrug look, you can leave.
Annie Duke (00:44:27)
Yeah, like you can choose to leave. And I actually had that happen as, as like 2011 that somebody said, well, you don't have to be here if you don't want to. Now that was much rarer by 2011, you know, I mean, but, but in the nineties when I first started playing, that would've been the normal response. Like, somebody like this actually happened, I lost, it happened more than once. But on this particular occasion, like I lost a pot to somebody, and they said, and there was a hotel across the street from where we were playing, he said, “You know, hey sweetie, if you want to go across the street to the hotel and put your legs in the air, I'll give you your money back.” And so, like, why isn't that guy getting expelled from the game?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:45:01)
That's crazy.
Annie Duke (00:45:03)
Yeah. You know, and so, and then it's this sort of shrugged from the floor man, and it was like, well, whatever, like, you don't have to be here if you don't like it, leave. So I set that up for the reason that people made it very clear that, and not everybody, but some of the people that I was playing with made it very clear that they didn't like a woman there. They didn't like losing to a woman. They sexualized me. They were very nasty to me. Another thing that happens in poker is that, in order for poker to be fun, for somebody to play, they need to be losing or winning an amount of money that matters to them. They can't be playing for peanuts. Peanuts are no fun. They have to be playing for real money. And so obviously when people are losing, when someone is losing real money, that gets them very emotionally hot. And you can imagine that for some men, losing that money to a woman is particularly, you know, they view it as emasculating. For some men now, and I just want to make clear, this is not the majority of men that you come across at the table. There were lots of men that were and are very good friends. Like I'm not smearing the whole male race, like the particular type of chauvinist that you come across.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:46:10)
Yeah. I don't want anyone to take this out of context either, you know, we're on the same page. I totally get it.
Annie Duke (00:46:15)
Yeah. So, because there, I mean there were so many Eric Seidels in the game, like, I just want to make that clear. Like, he's like, you're an opponent. Also by the way, where I started playing in Montana in particular, it might have been a little bit more like, you know, Marlboro Man type of man. But anyway, so the thing is that you're getting a lot of stuff hurled at you. You know, you're getting this sexualization happening, and then you're also just getting really horrible insults thrown at you. Like words that start with C, just because you happen to win a pot. In ways where like they lose a pot to a guy and they're not telling him that he's a bastard or something, you know, like it was very weird.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:46:54)
Yeah.
Annie Duke (00:46:55)
So now I have a decision. So this is where I would relate it to other people. This is where I would say, here's where I can offer some advice to people who are in this situation. I looked at this in kind of two ways. I said, okay, there's this overall kind of cultural issue that's happening to me because nobody's standing up and protecting me, right? Like, nobody's saying this isn't okay and we need to change the way that, that people are being treated at the table here. That this is voluntary. So I kind of understood that if I wanted to keep playing poker, I didn't have a lot of control over that. Any control that I did have over that was going to happen very slowly. Right? Like, I wasn't going to be able to create some kind of sea change. If I like protested by leaving the table or something that wasn't going to help move things forward, right? That was just going to make it so there were fewer women playing, which wasn't going to help the situation.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:47:48)
I think there are probably some people who might say that that would've been beneficial.
Annie Duke (00:47:52)
Well, how just fewer women at the table.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:47:53)
I tend to agree with you. I just think, I mean, protesting and whatnot is a big form of change.
Annie Duke (00:48:00)
I mean, I agree. But in this particular case, the protest would've benefited the people at the table. I would've left.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:48:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Annie Duke (00:48:07)
What I'm saying, like, and then I'm not allowed back in the casino with a sign and marching.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:48:11)
Yeah.
Annie Duke (00:48:13)
No, no, no. I agree with you. I myself have protested before. No, I think protest is an incredibly important use of speech. It would've been an ineffective use of my speech in this particular case. Okay, so I felt like I can do things, particularly as I get better known to try to sort of overall advance the culture in a positive way, which I did try to do. But at that moment, you know, when it's like, you know, 1994 and I'm in Montana, like there isn't any of that. So now what I said to myself was, I can't make the floor man do something. I can't make my opponents act in a certain way. So what I have to do is try to figure out what is it that I do have agency over and that's what I needed to focus on. So what I focused on was first of all my own play, and how I make sure that the fact that these people were clearly kind of emotionally unhinged at times because of interactions with me, how could I make that work for me? So that was number one. And part of making that work for me was having to let go of something that I think is very hard to let go of, which is when someone doesn't like us or when someone doesn't respect us, or when someone doesn't think we're smart or think we can play well or think we're good at our job, I think our initial instinct is to try to convince them otherwise.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:49:31)
Yeah.
Annie Duke (00:49:33)
To try to let them know like, I'm as smart as you are, I deserve your respect. You should like me. Stop disrespecting me. Like all that stuff,
Douglas Vigliotti (00:49:42)
It jades us and we get like, we get all defensive. Yeah, totally.
Annie Duke (00:49:46)
If you’re across the table negotiating with somebody, how does that help you? Actually, when you're negotiating with somebody, which is what poker is, it's better for you for them to be emotional when they're negotiating with you. It's better for them to be mad at you. It's better for them to not respect you, to not think you're smart, to underestimate you. Like all of those things are actually better for you.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:50:10)
It's almost an opportunity for poise at that point, right? Like you have this opportunity. To now to, to now remain poised and utilize the probabilistic play or what have you to your advantage. Because now this person is acting out in what I think George Lowenstein calls the hot-cold empathy gap where people do things in a hot state that they swear they would never do. But in this hot state, they do these things that are illogical. They're not rational, in any shape or form.
Annie Duke (00:50:38)
Yes, so what I tried to do in this situation was say, my job at this table is not for this person to like me. My job at this table is not for them to respect me. It's not for them to think I'm smart. It's not for them to stop underestimating me. In fact, all of those things work to my advantage. So I have to let that go because I would never be friends with this person. They're a jerk.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:50:58)
Yeah, totally.
Annie Duke (00:50:58)
Right. So like do I don't really care what they think about me because they're a jerk? Like what is their opinion matter to me? So instead what I'm going to try to do is figure out how to make that work for me because that is the thing that I have agency over. I have agency over the way that I react to it. I can't control them, but I can control the way that I'm reacting to what's happening at the table and try to remain, you know, calm and see this sort of clearly and not get emotional myself and not get sort of wrapped up in what's happening. And then what I can do is say, how can I strategically use that to my good? Yeah. Right. So if someone's underestimating me at the table because they think I'm not so bright and they think that they can push me around, well I can use that to my advantage to try to actually make more money against that person because they have that view of me.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:51:39)
I love that.
Annie Duke
And if I try to convince them otherwise that that doesn't work for me. So in situations where you're like across the table from someone where you're negotiating, where you're competing with somebody, it's like recognize, and this is true for women or men recognize, like when you're reacting to the emotional side of things of like wanting respect and wanting validation. You know, versus trying to figure out like strategically what's the best thing for me here? And you got to lose the idea that everybody's going to like you or everybody's going to respect you because that they're not.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:52:09)
Yeah.
Annie Duke (00:52:10)
Right? And that's okay.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:52:11)
I think that's a big internal battle. I mean, I battle that. I think a lot of people battle that.
Annie Duke (00:52:19)
Yeah, so do I. I don’t like when people don't like me, you know. I had to resist. But that was the thing is like, okay, what do I have agency over here? And you know what's interesting? Like I actually ended up using this as a lesson for my children as they were going, you know, through like playground bully kind of things. And they would come home to me and they'd be in tears and be like, you know, so-and-so is really mean to me. And they're so nasty. And they'd be crying and so upset. And I would say like, okay, oh sweetie, you know, I'm so sorry. And I would give them empathy about what they were feeling. And then after telling them that I feel for them, I'd just say like, let me ask you a question. Like, let's say that you had something that you were really struggling with, like a question, like a problem that you really needed to solve where you were really looking for advice.
(00:53:02)
Would you go to that kid? And ask for advice. And they would say, well no because they're nasty and they're mean and they're not nice. And so I wouldn't ask for their advice. And I said, so you're telling me that their opinion in that situation wouldn't matter? And they were like, yeah, they're, no, I don't want their opinion. It wouldn't matter to me ‘cause they're not nice. And I'd say then it shouldn't matter on the negative side either. Like you're telling me it doesn't matter to you. You wouldn't go to them for advice. So what, what if they don't like you? Why do you care? You just told me their opinion doesn't matter.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:53:32)
Yeah. I think that's great. You know, I think someone once told me, and I can't remember, or I read it somewhere, that anytime you're in this type of situation where you're feeling frustrated or you're emotionally hot so to speak, or you're angry and you have that opportunity for poise. A good strategy might be to take a step back and think about how your role model would handle this situation.
Annie Duke (00:53:55)
Well, that's perfect.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:53:57)
It's like a meta thing where you know you're like, oh, for you, how would Eric Seidel handle this situation? Like, how would he handle this? Like if it was because you're reframing the situation and enabling you or giving you a better chance to survive it, right? To be poised. I think this was a great way to wrap things up a little bit. So typically how I end the conversation and I want to be respectful of your time obviously. So typically how I end the conversation, you know is I ask three final questions, so I have a couple more rapid-fire questions.
Annie Duke (00:54:27)
Sure. I think I did poorly on the rapid-fire last time, but we'll see how I do this time.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:54:31)
Alright, so actually you know what, we'll do one that's pertinent to decision-making. Is there anything that you do to help battle decision fatigue?
Annie Duke (00:54:39)
Oh, huh, that's interesting. So one of the things that I try to do is construct the guidelines for my decisions in advance. So in that sense, it kind of reduces the number of decisions that you have to make.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:54:52)
Ah, yes.
Annie Duke (00:54:52)
An example would be, I have big guardrails around the decisions that I make around food, for example. So that when I'm in a restaurant I've already limited the choice by a lot. So I'm vegan, right?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:55:05)
I do that, too.
Annie Duke (00:55:07)
Takes a bunch of stuff off the table. But you can do that in different ways so that instead of saying I'm trying to eat healthier, which opens you up to having to make a new decision every time you're approaching food. Because that's not a decision I'm trying to eat healthier as a goal. It's not a decision. If it's dead, you say I don't eat bread as an example, then when you're presented with bread, you're not presented with a decision. So I think that's what I try to do is I try to anticipate the kinds of decisions that I'm going to make and try to kind of set up rules about those like Ulysses contracts for myself around the decisions that commonly come up. So it just reduces the number of decisions that I have to make. So I try to sort of avoid decision fatigue in advance.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:55:47)
Yeah, I love that. That's like, I think it’s Barry Schwartz who has this book The Paradox of Choice where he talks about less being more and how actually limited choices are actually better for I guess quality decisions.
Annie Duke (00:56:03)
And you have less regret then too. You have less buyer’s remorse.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:56:06)
Yeah, totally. Yeah. So what's one or maybe two things that you do every single day?
Annie Duke (00:56:13)
Sleep and eat.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:56:15)
Sleep and eat, okay?
Annie Duke (00:56:17)
No, I literally do every single day?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:56:19)
Yeah, like something that maybe like a routine or something that you do every single day.
Annie Duke (00:56:23)
I tell the people in my family I love them, more than once a day, but every single day.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:56:28)
That's admirable.
Annie Duke (00:56:29)
There's a reason for that, which is that first of all, my family wasn't an I love you family when I was growing up. So I think that I've been on the other end of that, not that they didn't love me, but you didn't hear it as much. But there was some point, I think it was like maybe, maybe like 15 or 20 years ago where I suddenly just had this kind of like thought one day, which was, I realized that for myself, I was very quick to tell somebody when I wasn't happy with them when they had done something that upset me or that I was mad about or whatever. But when I would have thoughts, I had of like, wow, that was really nice. I wouldn't necessarily say it, I wouldn't necessarily say it out loud. And when I had that epiphany, I decided I was going to make a commitment to myself to try to say the good thoughts that were going through my head as well as the bad things. And also maybe a little slower to say the bad things as well because it should be balanced. I just sort of felt like it should be balanced, and I should be more likely to just say like, hey thanks like I thought that was really great or I was just thinking about you today and I just think you're awesome, and whatever it is. And what came out of that was, was really saying, I love you every day to the people in my family.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:57:35)
That's awesome. So not to circle back, but I guess that kind of clues us into why you were thinking about the whole leadership problem on, you know, they only evaluate the decision after a bad result, right? So it's the same.
Annie Duke (00:57:47)
You know, I never actually related the two things together, but yes.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:57:51)
So yeah. Next question. Let's keep this rolling. What's the best purchase you've made in the last two weeks?
Annie Duke (00:57:59)
Well, this is hard for me. I want to, you know, I want to get it right. Oh, I'll tell you I found an amazing vegan cheese. So I've never been that big a fan of vegan cheeses. I think they have kind of a weird aftertaste, but I found a great vegan cheese. So I will consider that to be a total life changer for me.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:58:20)
Do you know what it was? We'll put it in the show notes.
Annie Duke (00:58:22)
Yeah. It's from a company called Miyokos and they make these cheese wheels so that you can actually put it on a platter because other people in my family aren't vegan. So when I'm doing like a cheese board and there's, you know, like cheddar and whatever, I've never been able to participate because I've never been able to find like a block cheese. Like I've found good like vegan shredded mozzarella's that you can throw into a pasta but not like a good block cheese that you can put on a cheese board. So what happened was a friend of mine, my friend TC, she brought a wheel of this to me like a while ago and then I started buying it. Now I can have cheese and this just happened.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:58:57)
This a major major breakthrough.
Annie Duke (00:59:00)
You have no idea because I like cheese, I just don't eat it. And so I, I'm so happy ‘cause now when other people are like having cheese, I can have cheese and crackers, too. And I'm very excited.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:59:08)
So does that actually make for tougher decisions now because now you've added this in, it's not a hard line with cheese anymore?
Annie Duke (00:59:13)
No, because it's vegan cheese. It's vegan cheese. So it totally fits within my decision process and it's like brings me joy, like I'm so happy.
Douglas Vigliotti (00:59:23)
I could imagine healthy living … I could probably go down a whole ‘nother rabbit hole with this about how that could relate to decisions. But we'll stay away from that. So this will be the final question. What's the one piece of advice that you hear given more often than it should be?
Annie Duke (00:59:37)
You make your own luck. I wish nobody would ever say that to anybody. I mean like you notice how fast I said that?
Douglas Vigliotti (00:59:46)
I love it.
Annie Duke (00:59:46)
You make your own luck. It drives me nuts. Like no, you don't make your own luck. You make your own decisions and that changes the probability of different outcomes so that you can reduce the number of poor outcomes that might occur. But it's literally by definition impossible to make your own luck. And if you tell people that, first of all, you're making them feel like somehow, it's their responsibility If things don't go well, which I think is unfair to them. And second of all, it's like some weird magical thinking of like, I have some control over the universe. And it's like, no you don't, you just have, you have control over your own decisions like make, you can make good decisions, you control your own decisions and try to make the decision that has the least chance of a bad outcome or the highest return for a low probability good outcome. It could be either one, right? And so you're not making your own luck. You're just like. For example, if I make an investment that's only going to win 10% of the time, but I'm investing $10 and I'm going to win like a million, I'm not making the luck when the 10% happens. I just made a decision that had a good return on investment. It just drives me nuts. You'll make your own luck. Yeah, no you don't.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:00:55)
So what would you…
Annie Duke (01:00:55)
Oh, here's another one. Trust your gut. What? Oh, that's literally a way to get out of having to ever explain a decision to another human being. Because you know what trust your gut, is a way for me, never be able to impart my wisdom and my experience and what I've learned so that you could repeat it so that you could actually do it as well. And if you come to me and you say, why did you do that? And the only reason that I can tell you is that my gut told me. So then I'm literally just getting out of having to answer you. Like I'm not taking responsibility for my own decision process. I think that your gut can be very good, but you have to be held responsible for holding it up to the light of a rational process. If you come ask me why I did something and I say, well it was a gut decision but like, here's why my gut was informing me to do this so that I can communicate it to you in a way that I can teach you to do it as well, then your gut was probably pretty good. But if I try to teach it to you and I can't, then I better go examine my gut. So trust your gut and you make your own luck. There you go. I gave you two.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:01:55)
Those are great.
Annie Duke (01:01:55)
I had to rant. I went on a rant.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:01:57)
I couldn't have picked a better way to end it. Anyone who relies on trusting their gut is basically defying the immense research that is conducted in the field of irrational human behavior.
Annie Duke (01:02:09)
Yes. And by the way, like I said, the thing is your gut can be really good because your gut is informed by your experiences. So it's just that you need a feedback loop, right? Like you need your gut to be actually informed by your experience, right? And if you separate off your gut as something magical, then you're not going to hold it up to sort of check in on it.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:02:32)
Did you ever read the book The Mind-Gut Connection?
Annie Duke (01:02:34)
I didn't. No.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:02:35)
That would be interesting for you to check out. It's by Emeran Mayer, he's a Ph.D. out of UCLA. It's about how your mind and your gut are connected.
Annie Duke (01:02:47)
Oh yeah, no I know, I know that research but I'm talking about like your instinct.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:02:52)
Your intuition, right?
Annie Duke (01:02:54)
Intuition, yeah. Your instinct. And the thing is like, I just want to be clear again, like intuition can be very dead on. But in the same sense of like, you should go in and you should check your process because you don't want it just to end up being the way that we've always done things. If you don't go in and demand that you can parse apart the reason why your intuition told you to do something, then it too will become stale and lead you very far astray. Here's a good example. Our intuition about the world was that the earth was flat. I'm just going to throw that out there. Thank God someone checked on that.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:03:26)
That's a great way to end this. I love it. We’ll let everybody stew on that for a little while. Annie, you always challenge me to think much, much deeper. So thank you.
Annie Duke (01:03:36)
Well, you too. And you gave me the surprise Moth story.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:03:39)
Oh yeah. I like surprises. That was a really good talk. It's going to be linked up in the notes. I hope everyone, everyone could check. So if the context you added to my horrible opening of what the story was then…
Annie Duke (01:03:51)
No, it wasn't bad.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:03:53)
No, okay, it was great. So thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure. And just for everyone else out there, if they want to hear part one, we did our first conversation too. So thank you for being a two-time guest. It's been amazing. And, thanks again.
Annie Duke (01:04:11)
All right. Thank you.
Douglas Vigliotti (01:04:12)
Absolutely.
