Great, so we'll get started. Annie Duke has devoted her life to the study of decision-making under pressure. During her career as a professional poker player, she won over $4 million in tournaments, earned a World Series of Poker Bracelet, and has the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions, and the NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship. She's retired from poker since 2012. She is now a corporate speaker and a consultant on decision strategy. Merging her poker expertise and her graduate level research in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she has authored five books as a co-founder of HowEyesSci.org, Surgeon the Board of Afterschool All-Stars, and is a trustee of the Franklin Institute. She's also won a televised championship in Rock Paper Scissors. I think I won like $10,000. I'd say high stakes, yeah. Mama 4, and she lives outside Philadelphia, so let's welcome her to Google.
So Annie, you want to start with what inspired you to write this book? Oh, that's a very broad question. So I used to joke, the joke that I used to make was for most of my professional career, I spent my life taking advantage of people who made decisions that weren't so good. So maybe I should spend some of my life trying to help people make better decisions. So that's kind of the cheeky answer. But I think that what actually really inspired me to write the book was that I started off my life in academics. I was at the University of Pennsylvania. I was studying cognitive science, which is really, of course, a study of the way that our brains interact with the environment.
How do we process information as it comes in? I was getting my PhD in that, you know, had a National Science Foundation Fellowship, and I was on my way to become a professor. And right at the end of that journey, I actually got sick. I ended up with a stomach problem that landed me in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and I ended up missing the job market for that year, because it's seasonal. So I had to take time off just to recuperate, and I was going to go back out on the market the next year, and I ended up in that year. That's when I took this, what felt like this very big left turn into poker.
So I started playing poker, and about eight years into it, I got asked by actually a retreat of options traders, if I could come speak to them, about the way that poker might inform their decision making and how they handle risk. And it was this moment where I realized, you know, oh gosh, I thought I took this really huge left turn out of academics, but I didn't. I landed in just a really amazing natural laboratory to study how do we make decisions under conditions of uncertainty when the outcomes of those decisions are not very well connected to the quality of the decision making itself. It's just a very noisy environment.
And how are you pulling the signal out, and how are you learning under those circumstances? And the answer is not so well, really. And it was this moment of kind of revelation for me as I was thinking, like, what am I going to say to this group of people? Because it was this kind of moment where it all came together for me where I said, you know, it's really interesting because I was taught in graduate school that learning occurs under conditions where you have lots and lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions. And as I'm going to go talk to these people, what I realize is, poker is the ultimate lots and lots of feedback tied closely in time.
I mean, within 30 seconds of time to decisions and actions. And yet what I saw was that learning was not occurring very well. And so it was that moment of wanting to square those two things together. And after that first talk, I just went along, you know, I was like, oh, and I started building this second career and speaking to audiences about how poker is a kind of a really great platform and framework for kind of understanding not only what are the problems in decision-making, but how can we kind of solve for them?
And I sort of feel like from 2002, I was just workshopping this material and that I was finding this incredible joy in sharing these ideas with people in a way that felt really different to me than poker. And poker, I'm thinking about these ideas in a way that's very zero-sum, right? I'm going to win. You're going to lose. You're going to win. And, you know, when I started doing this in 2002, I started growing that business and it started to become a much bigger part of my life actually than the poker was.
And it just felt in this really nice way like I was adding water sort of back into the ocean. And, you know, this book sort of came out of that whole journey that I took. So can we talk about what prevents people from making good decisions? Oh, that's because that's that. Do we want to narrow that down at all? What prevents people from making good decisions? I think it's a collision of a couple of problems. I think that the first piece is uncertainty. And uncertainty comes from two places. It comes from hidden information. So this is where we can see how poker might be a really good way to look at decision-making. The first place it comes from is hidden information. So, in poker, the cards are faced down. Guess what? In life as well. There's very often a lot of information asymmetry, right? And there's lots of stuff that we can't know and there's lots of things that we don't know. So that's the first place that uncertainty comes from.
But even if we did have perfect information, say for example, about a coin, and we know that heads or tails, it's going to flip 50% of the time, we also have the intervention of luck, which is the other form of uncertainty. So even if I know everything I need to know about the coin, so there's no hidden information about the coin. And it doesn't mean I can predict whether it will flip heads or tails on the next try. I can say something over 10,000 tries. I can tell you how it's going to work out over time. But most of what we're doing is actually sort of these one trial scenarios, and particularly as we're trying to make decisions and learn from the outcomes of our decisions, we're not very good aggregators. We're not sitting back. Well, first of all, most of the decisions we make, we couldn't get 10,000 trials even so. And even if we could, the data is kind of coming in one at a time as we're out sort of in the field, making our own decisions.
And so we're sort of encoding everything one at a time. We're not sitting back and saying, let me not make any decisions until I have lots and lots of data. And in fact, that would be impractical because like, for example, you would never say get married to somebody like that, right? Because you'd have to get so many trials in order to know that you were sure. So it's not practical to do anyway. So the first piece, the first problem is that there's all this uncertainty. And then the second problem is that nature, the way that our brains have built, has given us a lot of rope to sort of hang ourselves with the uncertainty. And we can sort of go back to sort of the beginning, which is what are the types of errors that evolution built us to make?
Because so there are type 1 errors and type 2 errors. Type 1 errors are false positives and type 2 errors are false negatives. And we're really, really built for false positives. We connect things together. We think they're causal. We think they go together much more often than they actually do. So we're big at patterns. We love things to be connected together. So, and that causes a problem. So that's sort of problem number one. And we can think about that in the sense of, which is worth, if you're on the savanna and you hear rustling, among the reeds, is it, are you going to wait and say, oh, let me try to figure out if there's actually a lion here or you're going to run away, right? So obviously we're going to run away. So that's number one.
Number two is we're built for tribes. So there was a lot of advantage for us surviving if we came together in groups and we had tribes. And so that causes a problem as well for decision making because it causes these problems in the way that we process information from things that are outside of our tribe. So that's kind of the number two problem. And then the number three problem is, is really, I talk about this a lot in the book, is that we aren't really built to disconfirm the things that we already believe. We're very much built to affirm our priors. And so when you think about the uncertainty and the way that we sort of interpret information as it comes in, there's so much uncertainty in the data that we're getting, that it gives us the room to just process the world in a way to make us feel right about the things that we already believe.
And when you have that collusion between that, the false positive problem and then the tribal problem on top of that, like things really fall apart. Now your book, you're talking about the beliefs people have about showing the right information of people and somehow they will get them to see things correctly. Can you talk more about that too? Sure. So I think that this is part of the problem is that we have these ways that we process information.
So here, an example that I talk about in my book is something called motivated reasoning. So I think you've all probably heard about confirmation bias. So motivated reasoning is a larger problem than confirmation bias. So in confirmation bias, we have some sort of prior belief and we'll notice stuff that confirms the belief and we just kind of won't notice things that disconfirm the belief. Motivated reasoning is, let's think about this as an umbrella problem of which confirmation bias is part, which is that we actually are motivated to confirm the beliefs we have and that drives our information processing.
So that means that not only will we process and will we sort of notice stuff that confirms us and not notice things that disconfirm us, but also when confronted with information that disconfirms us, we work very, very hard to discredit it. And when confronted with information that confirms us, we actually don't put any effort into the discrediting at all. So we don't really vet it very hard. So you guys can probably feel that, right? When I read an article that say politically agrees with me, I'm like, wow, that's a really smart article. And when it disagrees with me political, I am like, that, you know, they're looking at the study and the N is too small and they weren't looking at this data and they were asking the wrong questions and the person isn't reliable anyway and they forgot all this other stuff and they're totally biased.
You know, it's weird because I just don't go through that process with the things that agree with me, strange. Okay, so not only that, then we have this other issue, which is that when we're in a tribe, part of what a tribe gives you is kind of forth, it gives you a sense of belongingness, a sense of distinctiveness, right? So you belong to a tribe, you're distinct from other tribes in some way where you process that as being superior. It gives you the idea of what's moral and what's not is also included in the tribe, but then it also gives you something really important for this talk today, which is called epistemic closure, meaning that the tribe is telling you what knowledge is true and trustworthy and what is not.
So I think that a lot of times what we sort of think, and this is where we understand this, the motivated reasoning with the collision of the tribal problem, what we sort of think is, oh, if other people just had the information, we'd all be fine because then we'd all sort of believe the same things, right? So if we were all working with the exact same information, we'd all be good. But that's assuming that we live in something that we're all living in epistemic bubbles versus echo chambers. So let me just explain what the difference is. An epistemic bubble is you have information and you don't have other information, period.
So if you're in an epistemic bubble where you just haven't gotten the information, then if you get exposed to the information, you incorporate it and you're all good. But epistemic bubbles are pretty rare. What we mostly live in is echo chambers. So echo chambers are, it doesn't matter whether we have the information or not, people outside the group are not trusted sources. So if you get information that disagrees with you that's coming from someone outside the group, it's not trusted anyway. And you can see how you can use that in order to accomplish the goals of motivated reasoning.
So when you're now confronted with information that disagrees with you, the way that you actually, one of the ways you discredit it is to talk about the trustworthiness of the source. So what we want to be really careful about is we want to try to apply, as we're trying to imagine, and I talk about this in the book, as we're trying to vet information that comes in, we want to apply a particular norm called universalism, which is separating the person who's delivering the news from whether the news itself is correct or not.
So the way I put it in the book is it doesn't really matter whether it's, you know, Copernicus or Mussolini or your mom who tells you that the earth is round. The fact of the roundness of the earth is independent of those sources. So, you know, in order to actually be good universalists, it's usually pretty good as you're sort of having these reactions to information to try to imagine it absent of the source or to try to imagine it being delivered from a source that you actually trust.
And that actually helps you to vet the information independently of the source, which we're really, really, really bad at, and it's part of this problem of echo chambers. So you're talking about systems of how we can overcome that and looking at decisions in terms of bets. Could you talk about that? Sure, yeah. So, you know, the book is called Thinking in Bets. And the premise is that if we were more explicit in imagining or in actually just making clear that every decision that we make is a bet, that we would actually be better off and it would create a lot more open mindedness. And why is it? Well, first of all, let me try to convince you guys that every decision is a bet.
So that's the first step. So I actually, I'll tell a story that I tell in here, which is kind of a fun story, I think. I named John Hennegan, a really, really, really great poker player known to have a lot of gamble. And in the 90s, when he was in his 20s, he was really, if you were to think about sort of what is, if you imagine the stereotype of a poker player in 1995, like John Hennegan would be the guy. Like he was, you know, he never saw the sun. He was only playing at night. He was like a total accident junkie. Like when he was finished at the poker table, he just wanted to gamble more. Like he was really, he was very good, but he really liked a lot of action.
So he was sitting at a poker table one day and a discussion broke out about state capitals and people were like quizzing each other on state capitals. So Des Moines comes up. And John Hennegan actually announces that the table is they're discussing Des Moines. Oh, I could totally live in Des Moines. And Des Moines obviously, reputation is kind of sleepy. Maybe if you were to think about sort of what's the antithesis of Las Vegas, maybe you would think of Des Moines as an example. So the players at the table were like, oh, come on. Like there's no way you could live in Des Moines. But Hennegan actually at that time in his life was sort of thinking like, oh, you know, I never see the sun. And so maybe it will be really nice to go and sort of like detox from Vegas a little bit.
And then he also had another thing in mind, which is that poker player's gamble on golf a lot. And I could actually really spend some time on golf without the distraction of the actual poker. So they negotiate a bet. So at the table, they negotiate a bet that John Hennegan's going to move to Las Vegas for 30 days, I mean, to Des Moines rather. For 30 days, they add a little bit of a diabolical condition, which is the hotel that he's on is only one street and there's only one restaurant on the street. And there's like no bars. There's no nightlife. There's nothing.
He's confined to the one street when he moves there for the 30 days. And then, in fact, there is a specific golf course he's allowed to go to to practice golf during the day. So they settle on 30 days and the bet is set for $30,000. So if he can stay in Las Vegas for 30 days, he wins $30,000. If he can't stay there and he has to come back from Des Moines, then he's going to lose $30,000. So literally, the next day, he moves to Des Moines. So two days later, he calls up the group. And he says, hey, I'm in Des Moines. I've obviously completely up and moved to Des Moines. Clearly, I'm good to go. I'm going to stay here.
So if you'd like to settle, you guys can pay me $15,000 and I'll come home and I'll save you the misery of losing the whole 30. Yeah, that was the group's reaction. So they were like, no, we're good, John. Why don't you stay there? So a week later, John Hennigan had moved back from Des Moines. He was living in Las Vegas and he had paid the group $15,000 for the privilege. So I tell this story because it sounds like, oh my gosh, these crazy poker players making this bet on where John was going to move. But if you think about it, it's really no different than any decision that you've ever made.
I mean, your decision to come and work at Google, right? You have other opportunities. You're thinking about what's John has to think about, am I going to like Des Moines? He doesn't know because he hasn't lived there before, right? The money that I'm going to make if I win this bet, is it going to be better than the money that I'm going to make if I stay in Las Vegas? And if I'm actually taking less money, is that okay? Because I'm creating different types of opportunities for myself. Like, I'm going to feel like I live a healthier life for that month and that's worth making less money.
Or I'm going to work on my golf game and that's going to have payoffs, which would be sort of the same as I'm thinking about taking a job in Des Moines. And I have to think about how is Des Moines going to compare to the place that I live now? I don't know. I've never lived there. Am I going to like it versus any other place that I might possibly move? Is the salary good enough for me to feel like I'm willing to take that risk in terms of going and moving there? What are the opportunities for advancement? What are the kinds of money that, you know, could I make in the future?
And when you choose to move to Des Moines or relocate or take the job at Google, you're obviously foregoing all other possibilities available to you. You can only make the one decision, which was true for John Hennigan as well. So basically, Hennigan had a certain set of beliefs about whether or not he would like to moan, whether or not it would be worth it to him. And when he made the choice, he was foregoing all other choices, including staying in Las Vegas and staying with the status quo or moving any other place where he might maybe detox or go detox from the nightlife or go and practice his golf or whatever it might be.
And there was a whole set of possible futures that could occur from that, one where he stayed in Des Moines for 30 days and loved it, one where he loved Des Moines so much he never moved back, one where he met the love of his life in Des Moines. One where he calls up after two days and says, hey, I want to settle. And the thing is that you don't know, you're making an estimation of what the probability of each of those futures might be, and you're deciding that whatever you have to invest—and it doesn't have to be money, it can be your health, your happiness, your time, whatever it might be, usually it's all of the above—whatever you're investing in the decision that you actually go with, that that's going to hurt all you to the best set of possible futures is compared to any other decision that you might make.
So the poker players really just make that explicit. And that's really what you're doing when your betting is you're making it explicit that a decision is a bet informed by your beliefs on a set of possible futures that you might be hurtling yourself too. So once we kind of understand that frame, I think that it actually can help us overcome some of these problems that we have with decision making. And I'll show you a really simple example. So here's something that's been in the news a lot lately because I hear it every single day on the news.
The Democrats are going to take the house in the fall. So okay, so let's say that you said to me, the Democrats are going to win the house in the fall. And let's say that my response was, do you want to bet on that? So think for yourselves, what does that do to you? It causes you to retreat from a place of certainty into a place of probabilistic thinking, right? Because now what you start to think is, okay, well, wait, why do I think that? Ooh, there's a lot of time between now and November. There's a lot of things that could happen, right? Like Trump could solve North Korea. I don't know, that might change things, right?
We don't know. You know, there's all sorts of other things that might happen, which Trump is somewhat unpredictable. There are things that could happen with the Democrats. There's, you know, I mean, the number of things that can intervene on the luck side between now and six months from now is pretty large, right? And so you'll start to think about that. It brings, it bubbles that uncertainty up to the four. And then you also start to think like, well, have I been reading opinions that disappear and disagree with that?
Like what is the person who's challenging me to the bet, know, or think that I haven't thought of or that I don't know? I have to start thinking about why might I be wrong here before I'm willing to actually put that kind of skin into the game, right? And so essentially what this element of, let me think about my decisions explicitly as bets does, is it forces you into more probabilistic thinking, into more the recognizing of these two forms of uncertainty that I don't ever have perfect information for pretty much anything, right? We just don't.
And that the future is always uncertain, that no matter how well I think about the future, how much I predict the future, even if the only bad outcome can occur one percent of the time, it can still happen. So I need to think about that as sort of announcing these things with certainty. Once you start to bubble up the uncertainty in any decision that you make, it causes you to be much more open-minded. Because now what happens is that you're thinking about, well, if I can only think about, if my beliefs are probabilistic and my predictions about the future are probabilistic, then I need to be information hungry.
Because what I need to do is start refining my beliefs and refining my predictions, because I actually have to bet on these things with things like my time and things like my money and things like my health and these limited resources that I have. And if I can only make one decision at a time, I bet I'm thinking about this probabilistically, I better start really working to try to refine all of this stuff.
And how am I going to do that? Well, it's going to cause me to be open-minded in particular to why I'm wrong, open-minded to opinions and beliefs that disagree with me, because I already know why I'm right. That's how I got to a place of certainty in the first place. So once I start backing off of that, I've got to start thinking about, again, what is the other person know that I don't know? And I think that that's why it's such a good frame for trying to solve for some of these problems.
So you make the bet and it doesn't work out for you. What should your next steps be on how to analyze what happened? So you make the bet and it doesn't work out for you. Right. And so what should your next steps be? So that's a very good question. So it's actually one of the big problems is that once you have a result, it really distorts your ability to go back in and analyze the decision process, it's a problem called resulting.
So another story from the book that I'll give to sort of illustrate this problem and then we can talk about solutions for this. So do you guys remember the 2015 Super Bowl Seahawks versus Patriots? Yeah. So you're in the right area to remember that, right? So I mean, so, okay, so it's the last play of the Super Bowl. The Seahawks are on the one yard line, 26 seconds left. The second down, they have one time out and they're down by four.
So this is obviously a really important decision that's going on here because if they score, the Patriots are unlikely to have enough time to be able to march back down the field and score again. So if they can get a touchdown here, this probably even be the game winner, which would be a really big deal because the Patriots like never lose the Super Bowl until they shear and I'm from Philly. But I'm just saying I was pretty excited about that.
So, okay, so what does Pete Carroll do here? He's got a running back on his team named Marshal Lynch, amazing short yardage running back. Everybody's expecting him to hand it off to Marshal Lynch and instead he calls pass play. Russell Wilson passes the ball and the ball is intercepted pretty famously. And boom, done. Malcolm Butler intercepts the ball, the game is over. The in game calling from Chris Collins' worth is pretty brutal on this decision.
You know, Pete Carroll, that I can't even believe this call, this is such a horrible call. And the next day I have to say that most of the pundits did not disagree. There seem to be an argument among the major outlets about whether it's the worst call in Super Bowl history, which was most of them. But USA Today actually said it was the worst call in football history period. So that seems to be where the disagreement lay.
So this is a really good example of resulting. So we know what the result was horrible, right? I mean, the result was one of the worst results in Super Bowl history. We can agree with on that. But that does not mean that it was one of the worst decisions in Super Bowl history. And I think to just declare that Pete Carroll hadn't put any thought into it. I mean, this is Pete Carroll. He's in the Super Bowl for a reason. You know, I thought was pretty spectacular.
So like, I'll just ask you guys to do the thought experiments. So we can see what the problem is. What do you do once you have the result? Imagine that Pete Carroll passes that ball. And the ball is caught for a touchdown in the end zone. Just take a moment to think about that. Now, how does that decision feel now? Brilliant. But how it turns out on that one outcome shouldn't actually affect the way that we think about the decision, right?
I mean, that's like saying if I flip a coin and you call heads and it lands heads that was a brilliant decision. But if it lands tails, that was a really dumb decision. Like, one outcome tells us nothing. So you can feel it. You can feel that the result acts like a gravity well. And you can't climb out of it to look at whether the decision process was good or not. It's really hard.
Now, just to not leave you with a cliffhanger, just so you know the probability of an interception in that spot depends on how many seasons you aggregate across. But it's probably somewhere hovering around one or two percent. So here they declared this like the worst decision ever and like a one percenter hit, basically. So I don't think that should really save very much about whether the quality of that decision was any good.
Also, by the way, for anybody who understands options theory, remember they only had one time out. So if a very usual event, I think it's about 40% of the time that the ball just is incomplete there, what happens to ball stops and guess what they have time for to running place? So if they hand the ball off to Marshal Lynch, they're going to run so much time out that they're only going to be able to get two plays off even with being able to call the time out. So they're only going to get to two plays. If they pass the ball and it's dropped, they actually get three plays, including those two running plays that everybody wanted them to run in the first place. So it's a somewhat free option. It costs you about, you know, this interception rate of about 1%. For a more detailed analysis, Benjamin Morris on 538 has a great one. Highly recommend you go read it.
But so this is where we can see like that once we know the outcome, once we know whether it's good or bad, it's incredibly hard for us not to then retrofit the decision quality to the outcome. So the answer is unless you've got, unless you're running a Monte Carlo, which we can't for most things, what do we do once an outcome has occurred in terms of how do we move forward? It's like ignore the outcome as much as possible. It's actually the weird answer to that. And I understand it's counterintuitive, but it's kind of the only way to move forward is like, okay, it was one outcome. I got to think about the decision in absence of that.
And if you want, we can talk about strategies for doing that. But that'd be great. Because you mentioned Phil Ivy, as inside of looking at every situation, look at the skill aspect of it, what can I control, what can I improve. And then you have Helmuth who I guess is, quote, is I would be the best poker player of all time if it wasn't for luck. Yes. So maybe we can talk about that spectrum and stress. Sure. So there's only two things that determine the way our lives turn out. Luck and the quality of our decisions. So we can't really control the luck element. So we should try to get down and focus on the quality of the decision.
So you mentioned Phil Ivy, I think it's a really good example part of the way to do this. So he, I tell a story about, he won a really huge tournament against really an all-star final table. Phil Ivy is one of the best poker players in history. And he actually went to dinner with my brother, and he spent the whole time talking about all the mistakes that he had made. So obviously he's got an interesting cognitive style. Probably one that's partly responsible for how good he is. But he gives us actually a clue of how to handle these kinds of situations. So there's a variety of different, what we're trying to do is get to a point where we can all be Phil Ivy.
It's very hard to do. It's very hard to sort of take our great outcomes and look for mistakes. It's very hard to take our bad outcomes actually and look for mistakes as well. We kind of want to pawn that off onto luck. So what I really talk about in the book is that the way into this is actually to try to separate outcomes from decision quality as much as possible. So how can we do that? There's a variety of ways we can do that. Let's talk with sort of strategy number one. All of this is done much better in a group, by the way. So I'm part of that reason is because of this kind of gravity well that we end up down in.
This is the way our brains work. It's very hard for us to parse this apart, but other people can see our bias much better than we can see it in ourselves. I mean, you can spot bias thinking a mile away, right? So like get some people in a group with you who will spot your bias and you'll spot their bias. And then here are some things that you can do with that group. Thing number one is when possible deconstruct decisions before outcomes have occurred. So that's really, really good to do and memorialize it. So now as you're thinking about the decision and what the outcomes might be, you can write down what you think all the possible outcomes are.
So we can think about this in terms of the peak care example and there's like, okay, maybe the ball will be caught, maybe the ball will be dropped, maybe we'll be intercepted, you try to assign some sort of probability to each of those possible scenarios. You think about what the extra things you're getting out of it. So what are the pay off in that case I'm getting to running plays anyway? So now what happens is that when the ball gets intercepted, you're not overreacting to it because you've actually thought about this in advance and you can actually point and say, well, there's the interception scenario. We thought about that when we thought about the decision and it happens 1% of the time.
So let's not overreact to that and like go now change our decision, the way that we decide in the future to not call that play again because it's already up there. So like a trial lawyer can deconstruct their trial strategy before they get a verdict. So that's like one thing you can do. When possible, do as much of the work before you get the outcome. That's really good. Now in poker, that's actually like literally impossible because you get the outcome in like 30 seconds. So there's not a lot of work you can do in that 30 seconds and you certainly can't go off to a group and say can we work out the decision tree and then I'll come back to the table and actually make my decision. So you can't do that.
So in that case, what you can do is when you go and you work with whatever your true seeking group is that you've sort of formed together, the people that you deconstruct decisions with. Only describe the hand or the question or the decision up to the point that you need help and no further. So like an example I could give from poker would be okay, I've got a hand. Let's say I have King Queen and I open the pot for a raise and this other guy re-raises and he's very aggressive and he actually raises a lot and so I was trying to decide, you know, should I fold or maybe I should re-raise him. What do you think?
So notice I don't, I know how the hand turned out. I know how the person responded. I know I would give a lot more detail than that leaving up to that but I know exactly what happened. But if I'm asking you, I'm not telling you because our own bias, these problems are infectious. So once I tell you the way it turned out, like let's say that I told you so I decided to re-raise and you then moved all in on me, you're going to now make a story make sense and you're going to now tell me about the decision in a way that's going to make the fact that that particular result happened make sense because that's just the way our minds like to work.
So I'm just going to leave it out and I'm only going to tell you to the point that I have a decision. So that's one thing I can do. Another thing I can do is to one person, I can tell you it worked out well and to another person I can tell them it worked out poorly. So I can change the story's end. I think that's a really interesting exercise to do because you will be amazed at how different the analyses you get, what the advice looks like from the person you tell that it ended well versus the person that you tell it ended poorly.
And I think that then you can sort of look at those two things and kind of work to merge them together in order to get some fidelity and your ability to actually understand what the decision quality is. So that's like another way that you can sort of not infect people. And you can do this in a variety of ways, not just with outcomes but with your own beliefs. So like here's a really simple, so there's a simple problem which is like if you allow people to talk to each other, they sort of try to come to consensus and make beliefs make sense and you're infecting everybody with your beliefs.
So like here's an example, let's say that you have four people who have interviewed somebody that you're thinking about hiring. Don't let them talk to each other, make them give you their opinions right down their opinions separately. Because once they talk to each other, they're, there's all this that you've literally infected. It's like a virus. Another thing is like let's say that you're now in front of everybody and you've gotten the advice from people. And now you want to start talking in the room about the advice. Do not say who you think should be hired because that'll ruin the whole thing.
Right? So like keep, keep your own beliefs to yourself when you're trying to get advice from other people. And this is a simple like in everyday life, I read an article on politics. When, if I'm asking you what your opinion of the article is, I should not say what my belief about that is. Because then I've ruined the whole thing. So I think that that's really what you should do with it is kind of like unless you've got a large enough end, which is rare, you should kind of leave it out.
Where do, where do outcomes help you? Well, you know, obviously throughout your life as you kind of get them in, they might be prompts for you to go in and say, well, maybe I should look at the decision quality. But it should be both in the case of whether you want or loss, it should be a prompt to go in and look at the decision quality. And when you go in and look at the decision quality and you go want to talk to other people about it, you're going to do better because you've been prompted by the outcome to leave the outcome out as you're going to actually improve the decision quality.
It's a little counterintuitive. Now, there's some situations where just sitting out and not making the decision makes sense because you mentioned that most poker players, like 80% of the hands they don't make any actions on is like 20 to the play. Yeah, so, so in poker, one of the biggest mistakes that people make is actually playing way too many hands. And you always need to think about when you're actually going to enter into something you need to be selective.
So I want to talk about sort of both sides of this puzzle. One is that just doing stuff isn't enough. I mean, you think a lot of times people are just throwing a lot of spaghetti against the wall, but you should actually think about each strand and make sure you're getting a payoff for the strand. So the fact is, yes, if you throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall, some of that will pay off and some of it won't. But like, and I think that people look at that and they look at, for example, VCs and they think what that's what their strategy is, that they're just sort of like playing every hand and then some of them pay off.
And when they pay off, they're really happy, but that's not true. They are spreading their bets across a large basket, but they're actually vetting each of the bets that they're making to make sure that they, given what they know, they think that the payoff is going to be big enough. So that's similar to what a poker player does. So that's number one. But then number two that I think is really important to think about is that don't take that to the point of thinking that somehow making a decision is substantively different from not making a decision, because they're both decisions. So you have whatever the status quo is.
And when you're going along and just kind of going with the status quo, trust me, you're making a decision every single time you do that. So I think that when we're trying to sort of think about doing these scenario plans and imagining what the future might look like, we only think about it in terms of decisions that we think are new. We're somehow we're changing course, but not changing course is a decision in and of itself. So you should be taking time frequently to look at what the status quo is, to look at what you're doing, the strategies that you've always just kind of been applying, and do the exact same kind of analysis on that as if it were a new decision.
So let me give you like a super simple example, so like the simplest example ever. You're in a grocery store and there's like six lanes open and you're Einstein at this moment. Like you're literally doing some kind of quantum physics analysis about which line you're supposed to get into. You're laughing because you know it's true. So it's like you're looking for the lady with the coupons and the cashier that looks maybe like, you know, oh, he seems a little slower, he's newer, he's a trainee, or the person who has 17,000 things in their cart versus whatever. I mean, it's like literally like you are completely calculating the stuff out.
Okay, so now, so because that's a new decision, right? So you're like calculating out all the scenarios, trying to figure out like, which is going to give me the best future because you're now investing your time, right? So this is like, this is very clearly a bet. You're betting on a line. And you think that the U that results from choosing whatever line it is that you go to is going to save time over the U that results from whatever other line you might choose.
So that's like your, and that's what most bets are. You're not betting against other people. You're betting against other versions of yourself, right? Like Annie that chooses line A versus Annie that chooses line B or like I'm in the restaurant. Annie that chooses the chicken or Annie that chooses the fish or whatever. So Annie that chooses Des Moines versus Annie that chooses Las Vegas. Okay, so now you choose a line and you get in the line and the line turns out to be slow. What do you do? Not you stay in the line. You don't move. But it's a new decision.
Like once you figure out the line is slow, switch. But you don't because you know why? Because you're worried about like now if I switch, what if that line, my line starts moving faster? I'll feel like I made a mistake. But at any moment it's the same decision. So if you treat the status quo as if like that's not a decision in another self. What happens is you actually end up not changing course enough. So this actually we can go back to the Pete Carroll example to think about this.
Let's do the other thought experiment where Pete Carroll just doesn't change his grocery line. Right? So he hands it off to Marshawn Lynch. Right? That was the expected play. That's the status quo play. And let's say he doesn't score. What do you think the headlines look like the next day? Knowing Lynch's good. You know, like literally nobody's like, oh, he's the worst coach in Super Bowl history because he handed off to Marshawn Lynch and he didn't score. Why? Because people aren't viewing that as a decision. Right? Like that's just the status quo. We already have consensus around that. Clearly if he doesn't win, then it's not the decision quality. Now we can firmly stick it in the luck bucket because nobody's questioning the status quo.
So now I must be something that's outside of his control. So included in luck would be, for example, the quality of the defensive line of New England would be included in luck. Luck is anything that you yourself don't control. Okay? So and that's because like, all right, he chose his grocery line. Like he's not switching. So the reason why Pete Carroll got so demolished in that decision is because he switched grocery lines. But he was right to do that. Like that's how progress gets made.
Mm-hmm. And I find our daily lives too sometimes. After a result happens, we'll look at the person made a decision and then we'll say to ourselves, well, if it went their way, then odds are, it's luck. But if it would have failed, it's like, you know, it's mostly due to their like, incompetencies or whatnot. Do we, is there mechanisms where we can be more like cognizant of that when we fall into that mode that you talked about?
Yeah. So I, so I've talked about this particular thing resulting, which is where we like really tightly connect outcomes and decisions. So, but there's two ways that we do this. One is like, we're looking at someone from afar like Pete Carroll. Okay? So he's not in our reference group, right? Like we don't compare ourselves to him. And so in that case, we just look like bad outcome means bad decision, good outcome means good decision. So it's interesting because we do a pattern for ourselves. It's a little bit different.
So if anybody's read like thinking fast and slow from Daniel Coniman, you'll remember from this from this that we're really trying to drive a positive narrative of our lives, right? We want to think that we're good actors and we're smart and so on and so forth. So obviously, this goes in the motor rate of reasoning category. Like if we have a bad outcome for ourselves, if I lose a hand at poker, that doesn't really drive with this positive self narrative, at least not in the moment. Okay?
So then what do we do? Now remember, we've got this noise in the system, right? We've got the hidden information in luck. When I have a bad, when I lose a hand at poker, it's because of luck. When I win a hand at poker, it's because I'm a genius. That's called self-serving bias. I feel it's pretty self-explanatory name for that particular bias. And we do this in all areas of our lives when someone gets a promotion. It's bad luck for us. It's not like we didn't do the work or we didn't, obviously we deserved it. It was just like bad luck. It wasn't in our control.
Actually car accidents are an interesting place to look. Over 90% of two car accidents are reported as the other person's fault. This is a pretty good one. I think it's 37% I think of single car accidents as reported as not the person's fault. I don't know. You go figure that one out. That's how strong this bias is. Now what's interesting is, but the number of decisions that we make in our lives is obviously much less than the number of decisions we're able to observe in other people.
Let's assume that we're crappy for ourselves, but it doesn't matter. Then we get to feel good about ourselves, but we're really good at analyzing everybody else's decisions. But the problem is as soon as someone's in our reference group, as soon as someone that we feel like we're comparing ourselves to and sort of figure out what our self-worth is. Because we don't do that. Our happiness doesn't derive an absence of the way that we compare to other people.
Now what we do is the reverse pattern. When they do something good, it's because they got lucky. And when they do something bad, it's because they're a really bad decision maker. So when they win a hand of poker, it's because they got lucky. And when they lose a hand of poker, it's because they're a bad decision maker. Now you can kind of see actually if you think about poker, which is zero sum, how these two problems might have emerged, right? Because looking at a zero sum game like poker, you can see how that pattern happens.
So if I'm trying to offload my bad results to luck, and I lose a hand specifically to you, I can't say that you won the hand because of skill. That doesn't work. So I have to say that you lost the hand because of luck. Because I'm trying to put my bad, you know, I'm trying to say it's bad luck for me. So therefore it must be good luck for you. And if I win a hand because of a lot of skill, rather, I can't say that you lost because of luck. It doesn't jive. It's just that, you know, so we sort of treat everything like it's zero sum, like when we shouldn't. But you can see how that happens when I specifically think I'm referring to you, when you're in my reference group, right?
So again, like how do we solve for this? Well, I'm going to go back to that group idea. Form a really, really good decision group that has different values. So there's different ways that we can derive good feelings from ourselves, right? So our natural tendency is to try to offload it in the moment so that we don't have to have a negative update to our self image. And we don't ever miss out on a positive update to our self image, right? Because if I say that I won because I got lucky, I don't get that positive update. And if I say that I lost because of something I did, I don't get that positive update.
And that's the natural way that we're like getting our pellets, like we're pressing a lever in a Skinner box. Is that that's where our pellets are coming from. But very early in my poker career, I went up to somebody named Eric Sidel, who's an amazing poker player. He's won over $38 million in his career. So he's really, really good. I had met him when I was actually 16, and I didn't start playing poker professionally until I was 26. So he was just like a buddy of mine. And then all of a sudden, I'm 26, and now he's a professional peer. So I remember I was in a tournament, I got knocked out, you know, and obviously something unlucky happened to me, clearly.
And I went up to Eric Sidel, and I went to go, what's called moaning. I went to go complain to him about, I can't believe this, I had such bad luck. I had this hand, the normal. And he actually laid this out for me. How do we solve for this in like the most beautiful way? It's going to sound kind of brutal, but I'm so thankful for it. So why are you telling me this? Like you think I'm not losing myself? Like why are you offloading your negative emotions onto me? I don't need that. If you really lost because of bad luck, there's nothing to be learned from it.
So I would like you to not offload your emotional distress onto me. Thank you very much. However, if you have a question, if there's something that you're trying to ask me about strategy, I'm all ears. So let's think about what he did there. He said, if you're not focusing on accuracy, I don't care. What does that mean, this focus on accuracy? Let's think about the division between the distinction between reasoning to be accurate and reasoning to be right. Reasoning to be right is I just want my priors to be right. So I'm just going to reason to prove that I'm right all the time.
Reasoning to be accurate, that's funny that I said right, right after that. Reasoning to be accurate is I'm trying to construct the most accurate model of the objective truth. And if you think about who's going to win in a bet, the person who's reasoning to be right versus the person who's reason to be accurate, that's why when I say to you, do you want a bet? It takes you out of the right mode, right into the accurate mode, because everybody understands, like, if I'm going to bet on it, I better be reasoning to be accurate.
So he told me, you have to be reasoning to be accurate. What you're doing right now is reasoning to be right. You're sad. You lost. It's not your fault. Blah, blah, blah. That doesn't help anybody. But if you have a question, if you want to know whether you accurately play the hand, let's talk about it. So he told me that I have to think about accuracy if I'm talking to him. He told me he was going to be held, hold me accountable to that, because he did in that moment. He was holding me accountable to the way I was thinking.
And he said you're going to have to be open to maybe things aren't the way that you want them to be. So I was going to have to be open to diverse opinions and other people's perspectives. So let's take those three things as a great group charter, right? You have to have a focus on accuracy, a commitment to accuracy. You have to hold each other accountable to these things. And you have to be open to diverse viewpoints. That seems like a pretty good charter.
And what's really wonderful about what Eric did for me in that moment, we remain friends, because I was thankful for this. I was a little upset in the moment, but I got over it. I saw the value eventually. But what he did for me was two things. One is, now I understood that when I went and talked to him, he was going to mentor me. He was going to teach me how to play. So when I had hand questions, I could actually deconstruct them with him. And that was going to be super helpful for me. So that was a little bit of the help. But the big help he gave me was when I went back and played on my own. So when you're playing poker, it's all on your own. I was processing what was happening at the table differently. So I'm not processing, oh, I got unlucky, oh, I'm so smart. Oh, I got unlucky, oh, I'm so smart. Because that's not good material for me to go back to Eric with.
And I know later on he's going to hold me accountable. And if I want to have a really good discussion with him, I have to come to him with good material. So now it changes the way that I'm viewing what's happening at the table in the moment. So that I'm looking for mistakes. I'm looking for questions. I'm looking for other people where other people might be out playing me, where they might be winning because they're better than I am. And I'm going to go tell him, and now this is what happens. This is so great. Two great things happen from that. Thing number one, I go back to him and I say, you know what? I think I really butchered the hand. I think I really made a mistake. And he gives me a pellet. So he wasn't giving me pellets for pressing the luck. I just got unlucky lever. He's giving me pellets for that. I think I made a mistake lever.
So that's really great. So now that becomes part of my self-narrative. Eric's side-out wants to talk to me. He thinks I'm smart. So I'm getting those. I'm not like I practice mindfulness, but I don't think I'm ever achieving like on the mountain and to bat, not worried about what the world thinks of me. I'm trying, but I'm not going to get there. So Eric's side-out is giving me that. He's helping me to think better by giving me the right kind of pellet. That's number one. And then number two, again, back to the, I'm trying to be a monk on top of a mountain and to bat. I'm really trying hard for that, that ultimate mindfulness practice, but I'm kind of failing at it. But I'm working on it. I'm trying. I'm practicing it.
But in the meantime, if we go back to that tribalism and how does our tribe feel distinct from others, think about what it did for me when I walked up to Eric in my group and I was saying, I really think I made a mistake. But when I'm walking down the hall of the poker room, I'm hearing all these people go, can you believe how unlucky? I got, yeah, I got so unlucky too. Yeah, oh, that guy's an idiot. Dada, da, da, da. And that's what those tribes are, how they're talking to each other. So I got my distinctiveness in the mix too. So it's like I got my cake and I got to eat it too, which was kind of good. And then in the meantime, I'm doing a mindfulness practice and trying not to worry about any of that. But until I can't, until I get there, I get to reinforce all of these good changes and cognitive style through what the group is giving me.
So I want to ask you one more question before I go to the audience. It seems like what you're talking about is not just applicable to the poker world. No, for sure. Yeah, I see the investment world. I see family, things like that. Where have you seen these skills kind of like spill over for you in your life? Oh my gosh, everywhere. So I want to say two things. One is these skills have definitely spilled over in all areas of my life and I'm terrible at them. So the thing is, the way that we process information is so built in that your goal is really to be a little bit better at it. And if you're a little bit better at it, it's going to compound over time. It's going to really make a difference in your overall decision quality and the quality of the outcomes that you eventually have.
So I still mess up all the time. Trust me, bad things have to me. I go, can blue that also and lucky. It's just that I catch myself hopefully more often and hopefully a little bit faster than I otherwise would. But I know I'm still missing a lot of those. I mean, I'm still biased. So that's number one. But number two in terms of areas in my life, like everywhere. So in the way that I parent my children and the way that I talk to my partner and the way that the process of writing this book, where you have to be like you're working with an editor and you have to not sort of like push off what they're saying because you feel so much ownership over the words and you know better than they do. It's like trying to have open mindedness and really use the editor and your agent and so and so forth is like that kind of true seeking group that you're trying to come up with the best representation of your ideas. That's not necessarily all the ideas of how you think it should be presented. That you have to be open minded to that.
You know, just like I say, like in terms of the way that I talk to my kids and I guide my kids, like every teenager that has raised comes back. And so I can't believe I did so bad on the test because the teacher was mean and they gave me things that they didn't even teach in class and it was really hard and you can ask anybody. Right? So like how are you talking to somebody about that and saying, well with kids, it's you don't want to be challenging them in the same way but you say, okay, that's, I'm sorry about that. So what are you going to do about that? In the future, how do you think you're going to solve for that? So really trying to get them to understand like what are the things that are under your control and what aren't. So not in an aerosol del way, but trying to say like, okay, how can you do better? Like how can you make it so that maybe you should go talk to the teacher before the next test if you know they might put things on the test that they didn't teach?
So like that, you know, not so much disagreeing with them because they're not adults, but trying to get them to focus more on those things that are in their control. But also just in terms of like when I was writing the book, I was thinking like, okay, it's going to be a certain amount of time that I'm going to have to invest. What, you know, am I going to get, what am I going to get in return? What does the future look like? Like I thought about the book could be a total flop. I have to think about that in advance and is that going to feel okay for me? Is it going to be worthwhile to have written the book even if nobody ever reads it? So it's like really kind of everywhere.
And then, you know, really recognizing, the other thing is I'm a big believer in Ulysses contracts because I really understand that as much as you. Sorry, I'm a Ulysses contractor. I'm going to be good. Sorry. You're right, I'm assuming. So Ulysses contract is thinking in advance about places where you know you're going to be really biased and it's going to be hard to overcome this in order to kind of prevent yourself from acting irrationally. So we don't always have a group of other people around us to help us, but you can actually form a different kind of group, which is a group of the past versions of you and the future versions of you to all kind of come to help gather and help the present version of you.
So the classic example is from Greek literature. Odysseus was, you know, sailing along and he knew who was going to come to the island of the sirens. And the sirens were these beautiful nymphs that sang on the shore and the song was so irresistible to the ears of any man that they would steer their ship toward the shore. The shore was a rocky shell that would break the ship apart, sudden death. So Ulysses, which is the Roman name for Odysseus, knew this and asked his crew to tie his hands to the mast of the ship. So this is a really good example of forming a group that's different versions of you.
So Odysseus said future Odysseus is really going to have a problem because future Odysseus is going to stare toward the shore. So I'm going to tie future Odysseus's hands to stop him from doing that. So I think there's all sorts of places where you can recognize that you might need help in the future. Like a simple example would be take a ride sharing service to a bar. That's a way to tie your hands. For me, with exercising, I sign up for classes in advance so that I've got my schedule worked out and I feel that I have a commitment to that. I only have certain kinds of foods in the house. These are all examples of Ulysses contracts.
And I'm a huge fan of those. And I apply those across my whole life, including actually in writing the book, which was instead of ever letting my editor set the deadline for me because that is more like someone telling me what to do which doesn't feel like a contract. I set all my own deadlines. So I would tell her what day. I actually would usually give her three days in a confidence interval around each one. Because obviously, because I wrote this book. So it would be with it. But there would be a week that I would know that I had to turn it in. And I would say Monday, it's 60% on Monday, and 80% on Tuesday, and I'm 98% on Friday. So by setting that myself, I was creating a contract. And then I held to the deadline, and I actually got the book in early because I was applying Ulysses contracts. So I really do practice what I preach in the book. I think it's an excellent concept. And I'm just realizing, oh my god, I didn't see that.
Because I was writing a letter to someone and I was making a reference to the sirens in their song. So that's excellent. Do we have any audience questions? Sure. Let's start here, because you were my poker opponent. And then I'll move across the line. Yeah, it's great to have you here. My wife is a big family. Oh, thank you. A couple from China, just noticed your career part is very interesting from academia, then poker player. Now you change the other causes. So what kind of a, you talk about decision making, right? Just for your life, based on your life experience, what kind of bad or big those kind of, when you make those decisions, what you did, it's naturally come to that decision, or sometimes you really think about the during block some time and, oh, OK, I need to change.
Yeah, that's basically. Hi. So that's an interesting question. So yeah, I mean, I have taken a lot of turns. And I actually think that my life is a good example of really understanding kind of this luck versus decision quality. So I would say that the two big careers that I've had have come out of something happens that's either sort of, on the face of it looks lucky or unlucky, but it's definitely an intervention of luck. And then I just say, OK, here I am. Now let me think about where I'm going to go from here. So it's not sort of sitting and wallowing in the sort of luck element of it, but just thinking, OK, I'm here now. So now, all right, that's done. I've got to sort of figure out where to go from here.
So the first one would be this illness that landed me in the hospital for two weeks. I still sometimes struggle with it, but I've got, it was very out of control at that time, and now I've got it under control, so it doesn't intervene in my life in the same way anymore. But this was when I was really struggling with the stomach issue. I land in the hospital for two weeks. This seems like an incredibly unlucky thing that's happened to me. And I say, OK, I need money. What am I going to do? I don't have my fellowship anymore. It turns out that when you leave graduate school and take time off, the National Science Foundation doesn't still give you money. So all right, I got to figure out what I'm going to do, and that's when I started playing poker.
And then when I was playing poker, I discovered, OK, like I'm pretty good at it, and I really enjoy it. And it seemed like this really cool collision of what I was studying in academics and real life. And so at that point, I said, OK, I'm just going to delay graduate school, and this is what I did. Once I started playing poker, I didn't necessarily think there was something else I was going to do. Then I got asked to give this talk in 2002. It was great. And I still didn't think, and that was a matter of luck, because Eric Sidel actually got asked to give the talk, not me. And he hates public speaking. So he referred me. They said nothing to do with me. I wasn't seeking it out. This was not a decision I made.
I get offered the talk. I say yes. I give it. And I'm still thinking, oh, that was fun, except that the people that I gave the talk to started referring me out, at which point I said, OK, now I've got a choice. Maybe I could do this as well, which I did. And there's been all sorts of, there's other points in my life. I almost became an options trader a little while after that. But then poker got on TV, and I thought that's kind of interesting. Maybe I'll try that. And I think that because I think probabilistically, I end up I'm just less likely to stick with the status quo. I'm more likely to say, OK, it's a new decision. Do I want to switch grocery lines?
And so I think that's sort of how I end up looking like kind of here or here or here. It's just, OK, luck brings you to certain places. And I'm perfectly fine saying, here's the status quo. And here's this new thing that I can do. What can I do? And maybe I can do them both at the same time. I think I tend to be more open-minded maybe to that because that's the thing that poker really teaches you. It's like the best-laid plans, right? You still lose the hand. And so it forces you to think probabilistically. You have to be thinking this way or you will not succeed. And I think naturally it spreads out.
Here is the actual funniest example that I can give you of how poker players just really think this way. So when I went to go on my first date with the absolute love of my life, my brother and brother-in-law who both knew the person I was going on the first date with immediately set a market. So they started bidding. We'd never been on a date. We had been friends for a long time, but we'd never been on a date. So they start bidding.
And my brother-in-law ended up buying 23. So somebody said to me, aren't you offended that they started making a market? And I was like, no. I just can't believe my brother-in-law bought 23. We'd never been on a date. So I think that that shows you it's just this way of thinking about the world just sort of attaching numbers to it. And that's why I think that I sort of, I hope that answers your question.
So our next question is online. You've talked about the feeling like an imposter or outsider at some poker tables. What are some of the ways the ideas in your book can help address the imposter syndrome sensation or counteract overconfidence? Yeah, that's actually really good. So I think the overconfidence piece is a little bit easier to deal with, because I think that if you have a really good decision group, they're going to check your overconfidence. So that's going to be part of the conversation all the time is, are you feeling overconfident?
Imposter syndrome, it's a hard one. I mean, I feel it all the time. I feel it about this book. I feel it when I get up and give talks. It's like, why am I even opening my mouth? And I think that, again, it's like get other people to talk to you. Because what they can do is they can often see things more clearly. So I've actually had conversations where I said, oh, I just feel like this. I can't believe it. I'm such an imposter. I don't know what I'm talking about.
And people will say, people keep hiring you for speeches. They'll actually go through it. They refer you out. People are buying your book. And having other people to kind of look at you in a more objective way to get you out of your own head, I think I really feel like that's the way to do it. And then what happens is it's like, I highly recommend everybody read the power of habit. Because it really shows you how to change your habits. But not just the habits of going to the gym, like your habits of mind and the way you think.
And what ends up is, remember I said, when I had that conversation with Eric Sidel, now when I went to the table, I was thinking about what Eric Sidel might say later. And so when you have a really good decision group that's checking your bias, whether it's overconfidence or underconfidence or imposter syndrome, the group gets in your head in a really good way so that then when I'm sort of on my own and I'm like, trust me, when I leave this room and I'm in the car, I'm going to think about what a bad talk I gave.
So maybe I did. I don't know. I guess. I was just so now I'm in my head. OK, so anyway. When I do that, hopefully I have a group of people that I can offload that too. And they can offload things like that to me. And hopefully they're talking to me. I mean, not physically, but I'm sort of running that conversation. Because that's really what happened at the poker table was, if I was processing the world in a way that was irrational, I would run the conversation with Eric or my brother or John Henigan or whoever might be later where they were telling me, oh, come on.
And that would help me when I was kind of on my own. So I think it's about what are the rewards you're getting and how are people around you helping to sort of shape those habits of mind. And I think that's really the best way. Because I think it's just the thing is, I think it's so hard to do on your own. I just think we all really need help with this.
And I think another mistake we make is we think, well, if I know about it, if I know about Imposter Syndrome or I know about overconfidence and I'm really smart, problem solved. I think the book that you mentioned, people who have the highest IQ scores are the ones you're most susceptible to. Yeah, so being, actually being high IQ correlates positively with motivated reasoning. So it, right. And you can think why that is, right? It's like, how do you slice and dice the info?
Like, if you're cognitively agile, you're going to be able to slice and dice a story that sounds a lot more convincing to yourself and to others about why everything you believe is true and why every prediction you ever have is 100%. So yeah, so I'm smart and I know about this now is not necessarily a solution. And like I say, I'm telling you, I'm going to walk away from this and think about what a bad job I did. I don't want you guys to think that you practice these things and somehow it's ever solved. It's not. It's just, do I catch myself doing it more often? Do I do it less? And just doing it less and catching it more often is huge. So instead of like braiding yourself for all the times that you screw up, it's like you get to celebrate that I did it one fewer times. It's such a more self-compassionate way to live. And I'm really, I'm trying to get there.
But yeah, so I think you had a question, yeah. Oh, sorry, we're supposed to end. I'm sorry. I didn't want to. No, we're good. Keep going. We're OK. Yeah. OK. So for a question, what's your strategy for rock paper scissors? Oh. Sure. Sure. Short answer is throw scissors. So just kind of understand. So most people throw rock first. And then most people kind of know you throw rock. So what happens is, well, it depends. If you're against somebody who is a total newbie, so you know they're going to throw rock, then you should just throw paper. But if you're against somebody who you think is a little bit smarter than that, they're going to throw paper on you. So you do a pretty good job throwing scissors. Thank you. And if they're really good, they throw scissors in Utah, so it's not a big deal.
One of the things that you said at the beginning of the talk, like really stuck with me about like talking about your opinions in terms of bets and challenging that. How do you do that when something isn't quite as quantifiable as like the number of representatives in the house in November? Sure. So everything can be quantified. The chances that you, because everything is probabilistic, like the chances that you meet the love of your life tomorrow, or that the person that you stay with, you'll still be with in 10 years, or whether you're going to like the dish that you order at a restaurant, or literally everything is quantifiable.
Now, do we have enough data to get to flipping heads or tails where we know we know 50% of the time that you're going to flip heads? No. Is there some objective probability for anything short? Do we have access to it? Absolutely not. But we can sort of come up with a range. Now, so what people will say to me is often, well, it's not really quantifiable. Well, of course it is. There's more unknown information. It's harder to get to. We don't have as much data. So what I tell them is, look, let's say that I were to ask you some question about, well, what do you think the chances are that this belief that you have is true? And the best you could do is somewhere between 20 and 80%.
That's a really wide market. But you know what? It's not as wide as 0 to 100. At least you're trying. That's the thing. So even if you say, I don't know, I can narrow it down to between 20 and 80%. That's not a failure. That's a success. Because you're trying. And then what that does is because you say, well, OK, it's 20 and 80%. Man, I'd really like to try to refine that. You'll now start to go ask people. Like you're going to go start asking for information. Whereas if you just sort of leave it as like whatever, you don't actually ever try to get better at it.
So now maybe you go and you start researching. And you know what? I make a joke. And literally every single talk that I give, I say what this does for you is it makes you take out and look at Google. You guys will be very happy. But literally, it's a joke in every talk that I give. It makes you want to Google things. So but it makes you want to Google things. So now you start googling. And maybe you say, OK, now I'm narrowed down. That's between 72% and, right? So like that's what happens. You know, now it's 72, 28. So and now you're a little bit narrower than 80, 20. And that's all we're trying to do.
But if we don't think about things probabilistically, if we don't recognize that what's going to happen in the future is probabilistic, that we can't guarantee it. We are not playing chess. If I play better than you, it does not mean I win. Not in life, only in chess, right? That if we don't do that, then we're going to be really surprised when a bad outcome happens. We're going to overreact to it. We're going to start changing strategy when we shouldn't. We're going to reinforce strategies that we shouldn't. We're going to always be reacting instead of planning ahead, instead of being proactive. Because we're not understanding that, well, other things would happen than the thing that we think. You know?
So I think just try. Like because literally everything's quantifiable. Where were you at on Black Friday in 2011? And what are your thoughts on regulating online poker? Oh, OK. That's an interesting question. So where was I actually, I remember this. I was in my bedroom, and I got a call. You should open up the internet, and you should look. So Black Friday is the DOJ came in down and shut down all of online poker. It was a very bad day for poker. Everybody was really mad. It was really hard. Like in a lot of ways, the poker community hasn't recovered from it.
So it was kind of interesting. Because I played in the 90s when in poker money was not raining down from the sky. You know, there was a very small group of people who were playing, and they need sometimes have someone who came in and would play. And you know, it was really like, you were, it was called grinding. And then online poker happened with the closing of poker on TV, and the poker economy just boomed. I mean, I mean, boomed. It was really like just money raining down from the sky. And then the DOJ on Black Friday, now it all contracts.
And that was really hard. I think it was less hard for the people who had been playing in the 90s, because I think we sort of saw the luck in what had happened during the 2000s a little bit more. But it's like whenever anything goes through like a big recession, and I would call it a depression, it's painful. Like it's super, super, super, super painful. You know, in terms of whether there should be regulation, somewhat small government, but I'm also, you know, I like people to have protections. So I did testify in front of Congress twice about regulation, and I tend to be more on the sort of free, freer side of that discussion, you know, that you should let adults choose what they want to do, and then obviously make sure that there isn't fraud occurring, right?
So you should always have protections against fraud. Excellent. What resonated with me, you, questioning a status quo, yeah? And I think it's great because it gives you a lot of opportunity to see your options in life all the time, and so just going what you have. But also I have the feeling it's a risky business, you know? You can like invest a lot of time in always questioning your status quo, and instead of focusing on what you're doing and like trusting your decisions you made in the past.
And like how do you find the balance, you know? And you seem to have been going good places with it. So do you set yourself, you know, mind stores, oh, I'm questioning where I'm at in life next month from now, or do you like two minutes later when you're on the wrong line? I mean, you know, how much time do you invest in that? It's just a bet too. I think there's a couple things. I think certainly from a business standpoint, we always go, you know, there's always strategic planning sessions, and I think that when we do that, it's always around like what's the new decision, and what doesn't get included in there is, well, what about sticking with what we're doing?
So I think that we tend to get involved in strategic planning decisions generally when there's something wrong, and you should actually set a calendar for, all right, let's start thinking about what are our goals, regardless of whether we think something is wrong, because maybe there's a better way to do it. And actually working backwards is, so something called backcasting in premortems is the best way to do that. So imagine what your goal is. Think about that you've actually reached it. This is a backcast. And then think about how you got to the, how you actually did it.
So it's three years from now, and we accomplished X. How did we do that? But then also a premortem is, it's three years from now, and we failed, you know, how did that happen? And I think that allows you to see the landscape a little bit better. What I would say in terms of, you know, are you doing it too much or are you doing it too little? There's two things that I want to say about that. One is that I certainly don't think that every decision that you're ever supposed to be made is supposed to be done as a deliberative process. If you did that, I wouldn't be able to get from here to there.
Right? So a lot of stuff that's happening is certainly more gut and it's more in the moment. And I think that that's totally fine, as long as you hold your intuition accountable to a deliberative process at some point. So when somebody says to you, well, why did you do what you did? Your answer should never be because my gut told me to. And then when they say, okay, that's great, but why? It shouldn't be because I told you because my gut told me to. If you can't teach it to another person, there's a problem.
So that being said, I think intuition can be very good as long as you're checking it occasionally. But in terms of whether you should have a schedule, I think once you start thinking about the world more probabilistically, you're naturally examining those things. And it's happening relatively automatically and you do end up sticking with the status quo a lot. It's just that you're sort of seeing these opportunities over on the side more.
Now what's interesting is that when you do that, you don't just overreact and like, just because things aren't going well right now, you're actually less likely, I think, to change course. Because I think that a lot of our changing course is a reaction to the way that the status quo is now. It's a reaction to having a bad outcome. And a lot of not changing courses that we just happen to have good outcomes.
So I think that what happens is that when you start thinking in this way more probabilistically, even if you have good outcomes, you're always sort of working with your decision group of like, well, is there a better way? That doesn't necessarily mean you do it. It just means it's in your head. So that you're more likely to sort of see the opportunity when it comes your way. But what's more important is you're less likely to overreact to a bad outcome happening where you actually change course too much.
And I would actually say that interestingly enough that that second problem is what the bigger problem is. It's not so much that if you think this way, you're going to be going left, right, left, right, right. It's that you're not going to be just going left because bad things are happening all the time. You're going to be setting back into a more deliberative place on those things. It's actually going to either cause you to make sort of incremental changes that are going to be really good.
It's going to cause you to be able to anticipate or think about paradigm shifts for yourself a little bit better. And I think it's going to actually give you a smoother ride, much more so than a less smooth ride. And I don't know. See now, now you might go and say, no, she should actually get into that limo. Does that answer your question?
I mean, was it not to hear you on the other side? Because you were pushing a lot of them. So I'd like to hear that too. Yeah, no, I'm all forced out of quo. Yeah. You see the success and you want to always question your decision to make yesterday.
Well, yeah, so I think it's like, again, it has to do, right, it has to do with separating those those that don't pack yourself. I sort of say, don't get so down on yourself for your bad outcomes and don't pack yourself on the back so hard for your good ones. So here's a really great way, actually, to implement within your own life. It's like, once a week, have your team get together, think of each person presents the best success that they had that week.
And everybody talks about they have to offer up the five things that they did wrong along the way to that success. So it's not about changing course. It's more about refining, about always trying to do a little bit better. And I think that when you have that goal in mind, I think you do a lot better. Because otherwise, what makes us make these big left turns? I mean, I've got a couple in my life.
But what makes us make these big left turns, I think, is when we're reacting to the way that things are, we're just reacting. So when you're trying to separate those two things out and always be trying to focus on process, now what happens is you're less likely to be making these like 90 degree changes, I think.
I have an online question. What is your approach to the mental game of poker when running bad, when our emotions can potentially influence our thought process? Can you compare that to the advice offered by Jared Tender and his popular mental game of poker books? OK, so I haven't read those books. So I can't make the comparison. But I can answer the first part of the question.
OK, so there's something in poker called tilt. Tilt is when our emotions get lit up, that shuts our frontal cortex down. And we start making really bad decisions. So I say about poker has this really interesting quality of your exchanging chips every single hand. And so it's letting you see that there's risk in every single decision. So that's the good thing. The bad thing is it's allowing you to get caught in the path.
So if you think about it, I mean, obviously, what we'd really like is to think of ourselves as like a Berkshire Hathaway stock. We want a general upward trend to our happiness stock over our lifetime. And if you look at Berkshire Hathaway from the moment of its inception, it has that general upward trend. And it looks like a pretty nice little ride. But if you look at it on a given day, it might have a sharp downturn.
And in poker, because you've got this exchange happening all the time, you end up doing what's called ticker watching. And you can really see those downswinks. And you can really steal those upswinks. And so you start getting yanked around in this kind of like path dependent, you're very path dependent in terms of where your emotions are. And this is generally a problem in life, right?
So as an example, like let's say that you're on the side of the road, and you have a flat tire, and it's raining, and it's really cold, and you don't have a jack. And you call triple A, and you know they take forever. And so you're just cursing your life, right? Like you're just thinking, like, I have the unhappiest life. I can't even imagine it. Why do these things always happen to me? Do you think it matters if you got a promotion three days before? Are you like, now hold on a second. Let me actually take the average of my happiness over the last three days. No. It's like literally what happened three days ago doesn't matter. You're only, you're really deep down in that moment.
So this actually gives us a clue to how we deal with this, and it's part of how poker players deal with it. So if I were to say to you, OK, let's say that you had that flat tire a year ago, do you think that that would have affected your happiness one bit over the course of the last year, that one incident? I actually, to tell you the truth, I actually think it would. I think it would uptick. I think it would cause enough tick in your happiness, because it's a really good cocktail party story.
Interesting articles that I've seen, a lot of kind of current events, and thinking about it, in terms of resulting, or hindsight bias, or self-serving bias, or motivated reasoning, or whatever it might be, to really kind of look at how what are things that are happening out in the world that can help us to try to figure out how to be better decision makers. So like this week, for example, I talked a little bit about the NFL draft and decision making around the NFL draft. I also talked about a really interesting study that was done on inducing intellectual humility in high school students and how that actually increases their ability to learn, to really get that into that sort of mode of I'm not sure.
So that was in there I talked about something from Near I All on the Peak End Rule, and how you can hack that in order to make your memories better, and your experiences better, at least your memory of your experiences better. So that, and then I'll also talk about things in that, not in this particular one, but like last week, I think I talk about current events, things that are happening on politics, and that kind of thing. So hopefully people will subscribe to the newsletter. You can actually find archives of the newsletter on antiduke.com, so you don't have to buy it until you actually test the product so you can go see what I've done.
And when are you starting your podcast? I think you do a great job doing that. Well, I appreciate that. So I'm not, so I've had that suggestion. I'm thinking about it. I'm right now because of the launch of the book, I'm doing a lot of podcasts. And so I'm kind of enjoying that at the moment. I've done some really, really fun ones. And actually, it's exposed me to a bunch of podcasts that I didn't know about.
So that's been actually super fun, is that I'm getting to find out about some podcasts that I wasn't personally aware of. I love podcasts, because I think, I mean, some of them are obviously like, you know, your 15-minute deals, but the ones that are more like this, where you get to go, you get to do a deep dive, and then what I find that's so amazing about them is that I rarely come from a way from a podcast where I haven't learned something. I mean, I'm always not just one thing either, like, so much, where you get to sit and talk to somebody who's obviously really smart and really engaged, and see what their perspective on your product is.
It's so cool. And it's just like such gratitude for how it changed, like you come in and you're like, well, this is my work product. And then you come away going, oh my gosh, what a cool, like, I didn't think of that. And I was so challenged, and that makes me think about it in a different way, and oh, this relates to this in a way that I hadn't thought before. So I'm just enjoying that process right now, and then we'll see what, I don't know, we'll see what the future holds in terms of anything else.
Excellent. Well, if you haven't already grabbed her book, it's called Thinking and Betz, making smart decisions when you don't have all the facts. If we can give her a please, a huge round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.