Annie Duke on Why We Judge Decisions by Results, Not Logic [From the Archive]

[00:00:01] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Presenting the Archive. Classic episodes that remain timeless. The raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up.

[00:00:26] In the first half hour, all you do is get blackjack. Just blackjack, blackjack, blackjack. You can't lose a hand. You end up up, say, $2,000. And it's just because everything went your way. But your friends are still playing, so you continue to play, and over the next hour and a half, you lose all but $100 back. You know, how are you feeling about that? Right, so you're feeling horrible even though you're up $100. Even though you're up $100. Now we can do the reverse.

[00:00:49] He had predicted Trump at 30 or 40% before the election. Now, after Trump won, everybody trashed Nate Silver. So there's this, an ugly thing happened, which happens on the internet often, which is that there was hate. Because someone seemed wrong and stupid, it gave people an excuse to hate him. But the point you make, which is very interesting, is that he might have been dead right the whole time in the sense that maybe there was a 30% chance that Trump would win.

[00:01:19] And okay, 30% is actually a fairly big number. Three out of 10 times, someone will win who has a 30% chance. I am so happy to have Annie Duke, one of the best poker players ever in the room on the podcast. How's it going, Annie? It's going pretty well.

[00:01:43] Now, you wrote this book, Thinking in Bets, Making Smart Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. Is that the subtitle? It is the subtitle. Yeah. Let's just call it Thinking in Bets. I think it's a lot easier. Yeah. Yes, it's a lot easier. And I always, I don't like how, I'm not blaming your publisher. I know Portfolio, they're great guys. I just don't like subtitles in general because I can never remember them. But they make you have them.

[00:02:07] Yeah, they make you have them because I think it does narrow it down for somebody who's just like browsing it in a bookstore. So I think that's, that's good. I, you know, I, Thinking in Bets was, you know, that was the title. So then we worked on the subtitle a whole bunch in terms of, well, okay, you know, how do we define this down? And I'll describe the book in a second. But I just want you to know, I've already made about three decisions today based on the principles in this book. Are you serious? Yeah, obviously nothing having to do with poker. Of course not.

[00:02:35] And your book is not, your book is just, poker is kind of an example. You have many other examples, but it's a whole philosophy about how to think and make decisions. So I feel like there's two aspects to this book that's really strong. One is how do you learn things that are very hard to learn? And one is how do you make decisions in situations that are much more complicated than you think? Which is pretty much every situation is more complicated than you think. Right.

[00:03:04] And by the way, you kind of differentiate poker from chess, but we'll get to that in a second. Yeah. Poker being a game with hidden information. So often the decisions have to be made without knowing all of what's going on. Right. And that's not to say, I mean, obviously there's some, there's some hidden information in chess, just not in terms of the pieces, right? So you can see the whole position on the board. I don't know, for example, what, what opening you might've been just studying as an example. So that would be hidden information in chess. So like a pregame thing.

[00:03:31] But you know, what's interesting though, what really made, I'll get to the kind of distinction between learning and decision-making in a second. And then we can, I want to start asking you questions. But with chess, there's this saying that reminds me of your book, only the good players are lucky. So like two people play, one person loses. And I see this all the time. I get this all the time. The person who loses says, oh, you were just lucky. And you talk about this concept a lot in your book, but it happens in everything.

[00:04:00] So for instance, one time, this is 20 years ago, I sold a business and I made a lot of money. And I thought, oh, I made all this money. I must be a genius. I sold an internet business at the peak of the internet boom. And I thought I must be a genius. And of course, I instantly like blew the money in every possible way, like millions of dollars. And then if I had somehow gone out of business, maybe during the bust, I would have thought, oh, I was just unlucky to start the business during a bust.

[00:04:30] And so those are the two flip sides of both learning and decision-making is that you can't always think you're a genius just because you win. And you can't always blame it on luck or other people when you lose. And yet that's this natural evolutionary behavior. That's exactly right. And I'll just go one step further and then we'll get to the questions. You could correct me if I'm wrong. I'm just kind of absorbing. No, I like the riff. This is really good.

[00:04:54] I think the hard part when you win something, let's say it's a game or you sell a business or, you know, I was just describing to you how I do. And many of my listeners know I'm spending this year doing a lot of stand-up comedy. You could have like a great set where everybody laughs and you think again, oh, I'm a really funny guy. I'm a good comedian. And you'll forget to kind of really examine where you might have gone wrong, even if everything seems great.

[00:05:24] So I was thinking about just last night, I was doing well. But now when I think about it after reading your book, I'm thinking, you know, I could have tightened up this one thing. They were laughing. Everyone was laughing. No one would suspect that I was having a problem, but I could have done a little better if I had done X, Y, and Z. And it's hard to learn when you win, I think. Like chess. When you lose a game of chess, you can look back and say, oh, I forgot my queen. I'm about to lose it. But when you win a game of chess, you kind of have to examine every move and figure out,

[00:05:54] well, I'm obviously not the best player in the world, so I must have made some mistakes somewhere. But it's hard to analyze. Maybe it wasn't necessarily a mistake, but there was just maybe a preferable line of play. Maybe you played a secondary line when there was actually a primary line that you could have gone that would have been slightly better. Yeah. Right? And we tend to not go, just like you were talking about with your comedy set last night, when we've won, we tend to not go back to examine, well, I know that I did well,

[00:06:23] but could I have done even better? Could I have tweaked it? Could I have maximized a little bit more than I actually did? I think it makes us feel like we're not sort of getting to, I don't know, bask in the glow of the good feeling from, look how well I did, and I'm such a great actor, and I'm so successful and smart and right. Yeah, well, and I think this is critical for learning, knowing when to recognize, okay, I can't let the ego get in the way here.

[00:06:50] I have to just focus on, it's a hot potato whether you win or lose. You can't hold on to either for too long. You can't hold on to the bad feelings of losing for too long, and you can't hold on to the good feelings of winning for too long. You have to focus on the learning so you can improve. And sometimes learning in these odd situations, learning even when you win, and again, I'm talking about winning not just in terms of games, but it could be business, relationships, sales, whatever. Learning from the good moments, I think is particularly difficult,

[00:07:19] and so you might learn more. Well, I absolutely agree. I love the example of the comedy set. Like, I was killing it, and then I thought today, well, maybe I should see if I could have killed it a little bit more. I think that that's incredibly hard for people, and I think part of it, something just struck me that you just said, which is like, well, you have to divorce yourself from the ego. And I think that what I would argue is, well, I think that we can kind of hold on to the ego, because I think, you know, feeling good about yourself isn't a bad thing. Really?

[00:07:58] Change what it is that makes you feel good about yourself. So I think that we're naturally born to your point of what makes us feel good about ourselves is, oh, that horrible thing that happened, that awful outcome, nothing to do with me. That was just bad luck. Oh, this wonderful thing that happened. I sold this company for a gazillion dollars. I'm clearly a genius. And we're kind of born to process the world in that way. Why did we evolve that way? Like, why did the humans who didn't think that way, why did they die off?

[00:08:27] Well, you know, it's always unclear when you're going back and you're sort of making up stories about evolution. So I just want to make that clear. But there seems to be a few things that work here. One is that we're really temporal discounters. And what temporal discounting means is that we will take a discount in the present in order to not have to sort of delay and wait for things in the future. So in this particular case where we're kind of offloading a bad feeling and onboarding a good feeling is because of us, it's actually kind of a good example of this temporal discounting,

[00:08:56] which is we're taking a good feeling now that might sacrifice us being able to have better results and better feelings later. We really kind of live in the moment. The evolutionary reason for that is that if you have food in front of you, you should eat it. I mean, evolution builds us to survive day to day. It's not really thinking about, I want you to survive year to year. That's a result of evolution. If I can get you to survive a day, then you're more likely to survive the next day, so on and so forth. But it builds it as a local rule.

[00:09:25] So we tend to be temporal discounters just like because we evolved that way. That's super interesting. I never thought of it that way. And you have some, you know, one thing we talked about was how you describe learning, whether you win or lose, and looking at learning in a slightly different way. But the other part of this book that's really important, I think, is the decision making, which is that, you know, fighting some of these evolutionary tendencies on decision making, and also coming to grips with the fact that the right decision might also probably not work out in the short term.

[00:09:56] But if you make this type of decision consistently in the long term, it could work or it will work out. And I think looking at probabilities in an interesting way with decision making, I think too many people want to say, only make decisions that they know the outcome will be good. When... When you can't. Right, you can't. And it might be better sometimes to make a decision where you know the outcome will be bad. But in the long run, if you make this type of decision, it'll work out for you. Well, I mean, as an example, if you lived your life by that philosophy of, I only want to know it would work out,

[00:10:24] you would only tell jokes that worked out in the past. You wouldn't really try new material because new material is actually very likely to fail, certainly on the first try. Right. And yet in the long run, you'll grow and you'll learn and maybe you'll have better material. I'll give you an example from the business world. Let's say it's your first business that you're building and someone comes along and offers you millions of dollars. So it'll change your life. And... But it's going to take six months to close the deal with all the legal and so on. What happens is this life-changing thing

[00:10:54] that's going to happen in six months, but you have to wait. And so every day that gets closer to that six months, the average person or maybe just me, but I would say the average person gets more and more anxious because we're not used to waiting for six months for some life-changing moment, like anything can happen. Right. So it's often a smart strategy for the buyer to say, hey, we could... Like three months in, hey, we can close right today if you just take half. And everybody will say yes because I can't handle that anxiety anymore. Well, so there's actually really good examples

[00:11:24] of this in real life, just these huge examples. So there was one where there was a military drawdown in the 90s. There were some budget problems and so they offered military personnel who had pensions if they wanted to draw down the pension. Oh, yeah. And so, right. So many people took it. I think they took about 40% of the value in order to just get it now. Don't quote me on 40% of the value. Look at my book where you can quote from the book on 40% of the value if that's what it says in there. I think that's what it says. But I think that's what it said. But we see this also in lotteries all the time.

[00:11:53] You know, somebody wins a lottery and you can either take it as an annuity or you can take a one-time payment. And when you take a one-time payment, you're taking a humongous discount on the money. So we're willing to take discounts in order to kind of just like get it now and get it over with all the time. Because then you have a great outcome. You made a decision. You get to bank it. And the outcome was, yeah, you have cash that you could put in the bank today. If you made the other decision, you have no money today. You still have to wait. Right.

[00:12:21] And there's uncertainty in that. And people don't like uncertainty. And that's kind of the crux of the decision-making part of the book. I kind of think there's like two halves to the book. There are. And also, I just want to say from a writing point of view, I just love how you interweave all the different stories. And your story, I think it's like really well written as opposed to kind of being a dry book about decision-making. Like it's entertaining. Well, I think that I had an advantage because this book actually was born out of over a decade of speaking

[00:12:50] in front of audiences on this topic. And as you know from doing stand-up comedy, you really don't want to deliver a dry speech to an audience, particularly, you know, non-academic audiences. I'm speaking in front of like executive groups and companies and things like that. And you've got to get up there for 45 minutes and be able to hold their attention. So I think that you learn through that because you're kind of working, you end up having a real conversation with the audience because you're seeing how they're responding to what you're saying. And I just started adding in kind of more and more color

[00:13:19] and making the speeches less and less dry and kind of filling in the gaps with stuff like, you know, Seinfeld or David Letterman examples or Princess Bride or P. Carol in the Super Bowl or whatever it might be because it just helps to hold their attention. And the more that you have their attention and the more that you can color it in with things that they're super familiar with, the better the conversation is, the more good you're doing and the more good they're getting from the conversation. So I really like that I got to basically workshop it with my audiences.

[00:13:49] And not only that, I guess through the public speaking, you also saw if you just told poker stories to illuminate your examples, that wouldn't work either because maybe only half the audience knows poker, maybe only one-tenth the audience knows poker at your level or, you know, much less than your level, but one-tenth could understand the terms you're saying. So... Right, exactly. And you can see like this book really, you never have had to have played a single hand of poker in order to understand this book. Poker kind of acts as a backdrop to fill in the examples.

[00:14:19] And then I've got all sorts of other examples from, you know, sales and legal examples. And like I just said, like the military drawdown or David Letterman or whatever it is. So poker's kind of providing a framework around which to think about uncertainty. But if you've never played a hand of poker and you don't even know the rules, you're not going to have a problem with this book at all. No, I agree. And like I said, even just today, I probably use... I probably was thinking about this book while making three different decisions. I love that. And I think one of them was on the learning side

[00:14:48] and two were on the decision-making side. Well, I want to hear the decision-making side. One involves some money, whether to wait or whether to negotiate against myself. And the other one involves a relationship. So that's... I can't say. Keep that private. Yeah. I wanted to start off a little bit though with your background. Sure. Because I'm also fascinated with like how, you know, you kind of learned how you learned throughout the years and you kind of get that

[00:15:18] into this book. But I'm fascinated by the topic of peak performance and essentially how to somewhat skip the so-called 10,000-hour rule or at least hack it a little bit. You know, so the 10,000-hour rule which is sort of not quite accurate but popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and Outliers says it takes 10,000 hours to reach your peak potential at something. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. So you're one of the best poker players in the world. You know, when you're playing you've been retired since 2012.

[00:15:47] You still play like in charity tournaments and stuff. In charity tournaments I do, yeah. So I roughly know how you started. You were getting your PhD at UPenn for some really stupid reason. You somehow moved to Montana. I can't figure that out really. Well, I'll explain that but go ahead. All right, go ahead. Explain that. No, no, keep going and then I'll explain it. And then, you know, your brother was already a professional poker player gave you some basic guidelines but then you kind of gradually over time became one of the best poker players around. You've won millions of dollars in tournaments

[00:16:17] and very successful at it. Yeah, so I mean I do think that there are really good hacks to the 10,000 hour rule and I think most of it has to do with how efficiently are you learning and how much are you relying on the experiences of other people and being open-minded to them. So I think that you can definitely borrow other people's 10,000 hours number one. That's a really key point. You can sort of take out a loan. What you're also saying is community is important. Community is incredibly important. And then the other thing like one thing I want to say about the 10,000 hour thing

[00:16:47] is that it doesn't matter how many hours I put into playing the violin I'm gonna suck. So you know it's kind of you know as you said it's a kind of a loose framework within which to think about how to gain expertise but I think that community can be really important for as long as you're open-minded to the expertise of the community it can really really really speed up your learning and I definitely had the benefit of that. I mean my learning curve in poker was very very fast mainly because my brother was already playing for 10 years and he had landed in this amazing group

[00:17:17] of incredible poker thinkers from New York including Eric Seidel, Dan Harrington, Jason Lester there were a bunch of these people and my brother was tightly knit into this community so he had Where are they all pleasures at the Mayfair? So what year because I was playing at the Mayfair every night including the night my first child was born in 1998 and 1999 probably a little before me. Yeah they were a little before you so he was playing at the Mayfair actually when I was in New York at Columbia so this would have been I

[00:17:46] think he moved to New York in 82 I came you know I was there a little bit after him so he would have been playing at the Mayfair probably about 82 to I don't know it was about 92 92 or so maybe even a little later maybe through 94 and then he moved to Las Vegas right around that time I think he moved to Las Vegas in 94 so I would say it was about 12 years where part of the time was in Mayfair I think then the game may have moved a little bit but it was mainly at the Mayfair so I got the benefit of being plugged in right these people

[00:18:16] had basically created their own learning pod and obviously they're incredibly smart people they had formed their own learning pod around poker and they've been doing this for a decade before I ever you know picked up a poker chip so I got plugged into that community and then they had particular kind of rules about how you communicated within that that forced you to either get out or have an open mind like those were kind of your two and you talk about forming those communities in this book which I think is very critical I really do think this is the most important way to hack

[00:18:46] the 10,000 hours if you're just around the best in the world and you're open minded and have rules for how to listen and communicate to them it's a huge win like you say you can borrow their 10,000 hours right and part of the thing I mean there's something that I say in there which is from Aldous Huxley actually to the point of the Gladwell stuff is that experience is certainly necessary for expertise but it's not sufficient so I can give you 10,000 hours of experience in something and you won't necessarily become an expert in order to

[00:19:16] become an expert you actually have to be a really good learner at whatever it is you have to learn about the feedback that you're getting right is your audience laughing or not what does that mean how do I figure out maybe it was a bad audience and they were in a bad mood or it's just not the right audience for the kind of jokes that I want or maybe my jokes were bad I don't know and you have to kind of sort through that kind of feedback and it's actually super hard it's super hard because for instance what you just said is interesting there's one dimension you could look at it was did they laugh or not but let's say they laughed there might

[00:19:46] be 10 different reasons why they laughed you kind of have to understand what's the right reason because it's it might that learning that could be really critical to how you do the next audience and you could also by the way theoretically be in front of an audience that doesn't laugh and it doesn't mean you're supposed to change your routine because it may not actually be the right audience for you so you don't know like I I don't know your comedy but I'm just guessing as an example that an audience that would really like Andrew Dice Clay would not be your audience probably not probably not so if you were in front of an audience

[00:20:15] where they were just huge Andrew Dice Clay fans and they didn't laugh that doesn't necessarily mean that you should go change something so there's all these different reasons why you could be getting the result and you have to sort through that in a way that actually pulls the signal out of the noise so that you know when am I supposed to go in and close the loop and actually change what I'm least and change my decision and without the emotion in there as well exactly and when am I supposed to just sort of say well this doesn't really have much to do with me it's a bad audience for me you could ask yourself do I want this

[00:20:45] to be my audience right that's a question you could ask yourself but you may end up saying no at which point well okay I'm just going to sort of shunt that off to luck I don't really care and this idea of how do you close that loop is really really hard and there are things you can do to be better at it on your own but this community hack as you put it is like it's so incredibly important to be able to actually get that to be done efficiently in a way that kind of gets yourself out of it you know community is an interesting thing because for instance you were able to enter this high-level poker community because your

[00:21:15] brother was already super lucky but like let's say you start off playing golf it's not like the next day you're going to start hanging out with professional golf players now sharing tips with them so entering into a good community is is a hack unto itself like that's difficult yeah so but I think that when you come into any community when you start doing anything you can look around for the people who seem to be kind of the most reasonable and open minded and you can do that by sort of seeing what their stance is

[00:21:45] toward the world or what their attitude toward the world is right so let's say for example that you're you're coming in to play golf and you're not just going to necessarily be hanging out with the best pros in the world to be fair I mean I was very lucky to be in that situation in poker you come into golf and now you know you're playing in some foursomes and you hear some people just complaining about the wind and they hit a divot and you know oh that's you talked while I was during my backswing and it's all these things that where they're just blaming things that have nothing

[00:22:14] to do with them maybe they get very emotional and they're like throwing their clubs which means that they have some issues with with just sort of keeping their emotions calm down which is really important but then you see somebody else who while a beginner like you is talking about oh I wonder like should I be adjusting my swing or you know they seem to be pretty calm and you see that kind of attitude and yes neither of you is particularly good at the game but you can see that you could probably come together and help each other get better because you're both focused on the same thing which is how can

[00:22:43] we pick the things that we actually have control over out of the feedback that we're getting well well I would say there's like three types of community there's the community of people a lot better than you there's the community of your of those types of people where they're your peers but they're striving in the same way you are and and they understand learning in the same way you do and and you're both able to to share and learn and then there are even people below not necessarily below but people you could teach so that it helps keeps helps you keep beginners mind and what you're doing and you

[00:23:13] see from their questions it reminds you of the fundamentals that you always have to keep track of so it's sort of this plus minus equal approach so I love the way that you describe that so I think that I was really lucky in my poker career to have all three obviously I entered into this you know community of experts right through my brother that was super lucky I clearly had peers when I was playing who seemed to be like-minded and I was trying to pick them out of the crowd so that I could work poker decisions with them as well and then eventually I started teaching poker and when I

[00:23:42] started teaching poker which wasn't until right around like 2004 what happened was really something incredibly interesting which is that my game massively changed when I started having to teach and the reason was that when you're trying to teach a concept to somebody else particularly somebody who is you know beginner to intermediate and you've decided that some some strategy that you have or some tactic that you use or some concept that you have of the game you can't actually coherently describe to another

[00:24:12] human being it's a really good sign that maybe what you're doing isn't the best thing or you might not understand it as well as you think you definitely don't understand it as well as you think and if you can't describe it you probably can't defend it and it reminds me of something from John Stuart Mill he's obviously a philosopher from the 1800s and he's very clear on this idea that you have to have the clash of ideas right you have to be able to defend yourself you have to be able to defend the truth against other people and that dissent is really really important and it will

[00:24:41] tend to moderate what you believe but he also says something else he says even if you think that your belief is a hundred percent true you are completely certain if you can't defend it against another person the truth is atrophied so I think about this in terms of there are certain truths that we we believe to be certain like the earth is round so that's all fine and good and you can go around with this belief that the earth is round I happen to also agree that that is certainly true but I also better be able to defend that belief against somebody who's a flat earther otherwise what is

[00:25:11] the point of the truth of the earth is round it's so funny because I can't defend it like right now I want to be able to defend it so I can say some things about I know some things about the horizon and how you view the horizon and and things that have to do with you know the way that the stars are and there's some things that I know about it but I'm not great with it but I do understand that if you ask me to go defend it to a flat earther I could find out a way to do that and I wouldn't just say to a flat earther you're dumb that's not true I would have to be able to have a

[00:25:41] rationale and be able to support my argument so that was true when I started teaching poker so now my community is community of people who are less experienced than I am and don't have the same level of expertise that I do and my game actually starts transforming at that point because what I realized was some of the things that I've been doing for a long time just kind of because the truth it atrophied because I just sort of thought well these things have worked and so far there must be true so it wasn't even though this gets into the weeds of poker a little bit what's an example of how your game changed at

[00:26:11] that point when you were teaching so I'll give an example of something that I realized that I couldn't really defend I realized that I was raising very often too early in the hand and the reason was that I would try to explain to somebody why that was a good idea like you bet and I raise for me to try to show you strength and it occurred to me and trying to explain this to somebody that as I was talking about this

[00:26:40] conversation you were having this again a little poker wonky but as I was talking about the this idea of you're having a conversation with someone as you're moving your chips around that it suddenly occurred to me as I was trying to explain this to a class full of people that I was having the wrong conversation because if my hand were really strong I would delay the play because I would try to reel you in and once I realized that I realized oh this thing I've been doing before where I just sort of naturally thought oh if I raise early clearly it will signal strength that actually I was

[00:27:10] signaling quite the opposite but it didn't really hit home for me until I tried to explain this to a group of individuals who are trying to learn poker from me and let me play just devil's advocate for a second again not to spend too much time on poker but let's take a guy like Gus handsome who will always raise to sort of show strength and get everyone out of the round he does it before the flop so I was getting wonky but I'm talking about like after the flop so the board is ace nine three and I'm trying to bluff you and

[00:27:39] you bet and I raise it's not actually a particularly defensible raise necessarily because if I had a very very strong hand I probably actually wouldn't raise there if somebody re-raised you right then you're out exactly and you're opening up yourself up to exactly that play I mean obviously this is getting wonky but but the point is that in trying to defend things that I sort of accepted as kind of gospel truth for things that were correct strategy and poker and trying to explain that to a community in other

[00:28:09] words I'm now having it's it's a way to have to vet my beliefs right because I've got this accountability to what I'm telling these students and I have to be able to explain it to them so I'm now accountable to my own beliefs in this really interesting way it actually changed the way I played and very soon after I was was teaching I actually like that's like later on then I win the tournament of champions and then you know I win my world series of I mean there was this big change that occurred in my game right around 2004 and it happens to be right as

[00:28:39] I started teaching poker so kind of pulling it back to the learning there's this meta learning concept which is build community but there's three types of communities and then there's really understanding what the purpose of those communities are correct so and that's a little more nuanced but like for instance with the community of experts you're not always going to understand everything they're doing but you have to be able to communicate somehow in an appropriate manner questions and situations and see how they respond to it and

[00:29:08] understand what they're saying and ask them questions if you didn't understand and you know it's like you have that you describe the conversation with Eric Seidel where you're talking about a hand and he said oh I had bad luck and he said I don't want to ever hear that again this is how you have to talk to me about a hand or I'm not interested yeah so they're they're basically giving you like a thought paradigm so the experts the experts in whatever you're doing understand for example what the important details are right so they they understand the kinds of details that you need

[00:29:37] to communicate so I assume in comedy it would be something like timing right you have to say something about the timing you have to say something about the joke that came before what the response to the joke that came before where you were going with it how many people were in the audience were you early in the night or late in the night who did you follow so what you're saying there is not just things to analyze but maybe you're dividing up a moment into like the component micro skills that need to be learned so right where you are in the

[00:30:06] night that is specifically a skill if you're first that's a different skill you need to learn and if you're last and if if let's say that let's say that you're trying to get advice from me if I could give you advice about comedy if you don't provide me with those details then I'm not going to give you advice of any fidelity because as an expert I need to know for example were you early in the night or late in the night but what you're saying is also you're you're like a meta expert so you're trying to you're you immediately are taking a skill and trying to break

[00:30:36] up into the micro skills so you could build a picture and understand and then use your kind of more general techniques of learning to break it down to be able to give advice right exactly so I would work with you to figure out so I'm saying I'm assuming that these kinds of things are really important we would create essentially a template of those kinds of details so now teaching sales for instance you might I would do the exact same thing right and now we've got a template of details so that whenever you're conveying whenever you're asking me for advice you're

[00:31:05] including all of these details so that I have the appropriate context within which to give you advice of high fidelity one of the reasons why that's really important and it's something that for example Eric Seidel my brother those people demanded of me was that I'd be able to tell them certain details about the hand what position was I in how much did I bet what were the chip stack sizes what had happened before what similar things to the kinds of things I was just trying to construct with you and I like how in the storytelling of the position the outcome is not so important no

[00:31:35] decision is learning how to make the best decision that's important exactly whether you win or lose the hand that's sort of a luck factor but it's because you might make decisions that are low probability to win but still the best decisions correct so as I'm trying to get advice from you I need to be working within this structure so that I can give you this context because if I'm if you don't demand that same context from me every time it's too easy for me to only give you the details that argue for the answer that I want and I may not even realize that I'm doing

[00:32:04] it right so as long as we have we've agreed to this the structure of the conversation the details that need to be shared and then hopefully we've also agreed to something else which is that I don't tell you the outcome because again once I tell you the outcome it's going to create this situation where we're probably reasoning to try to make that make sense within that so the way that I'll do it is I say I have a question I'm trying to figure out if I played this hand well I provide all of these details that we've agreed to that are essentially templated right

[00:32:33] so it's like this architecture to the discussion and then I describe the hand only up to the point where I have a question and no further and I don't tell you what happened after that it's like newspaper headlines like you know stock market went down yesterday because of oil fears they just make up the only know the only actual news is that the stock market went down but then they try to backfill it and oh there's oil fears or North Korea fears or whatever right and it's really bad because now when somebody reads that

[00:33:01] headline that you've now infected them with the conclusion that you've come to and so I'm now going to start reading the story infected with this conclusion that it's because of oil fears and I'm going to be noticing stuff that confirms that conclusion I'm not going to notice things that disconfirm it and now I'm probably going to infect other people with the same thing so I'm trying to in order to really be an efficient learner and really steal some of Eric Seidel's 10,000

[00:33:29] hours I want to quarantine off the things that might bias the advice that he gives me and I want to give him a structure to the conversation where the advice he gives me has high fidelity so let me ask like let's say certain types of decisions or skills he took four or five thousand of his 10,000 hours to learn do you really think without playing all the hands yourself you can learn to be almost as good at that skill as him take a quick break if you like

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[00:35:25] slash James so let me ask like let's say certain types of decisions or skills he took four or five thousand of his ten thousand hours to learn do you really think without playing all the hands yourself you can learn to be almost as good at that skill as him let's say some micro skill I think I think with practice I mean obviously

[00:35:54] there's a practice of learning with actually applying it at the table and practicing and going back so that I can say you know I was trying this and I'm not sure if this was exactly the right situation or because there's certainly nuance to everything that you do right I can you can be if we're sales people and I'm trying to teach you how to be really good at selling I can give you some really good strategies and some structure within which to think about how do you pitch and how do you close and those kinds of things but then you have to go apply them and come back and say in this situation this is what I was

[00:36:22] doing was that right so that you're creating this really nice feedback loop which really really speeds the learning up and Andrews Erickson the real developer of a ten thousand hour role calls that deliberate practice where you get expert advice you apply it and then you you immediately go into the feedback loop with the expert and then apply it again and so on right and here's the thing I mean you really do cut a lot of hours off so as an example you talked about you referenced earlier that my

[00:36:51] brother had given me a list of hands to start with now that list of hands was a beginner's list it was you know only play these particular hands and it was much too rigid for any kind of long-term poker success but for somebody who is a beginner it was an excellent list to start with and that cut off a lot of hours because I came down at the table you know as a beginner with at least a reasonable starting set of hands that I did not have to come to myself through

[00:37:20] my own experience experimentation and failure and now did I have to refine it afterwards sure but it cut off this huge part of the beginning of just losing a lot of money as you try to learn sort of through the school of hard knocks he just short-circuited that for me and said here's this list of hands you should start with here's why you know here's because these these tend to make good hands for this reason whatever and then you know off I went and played now later on I realized oh I need to expand on that and I need to refine it and I

[00:37:49] need to do that but it cut off a lot of hours in the beginning of just experimentation on my part yeah and I want to I want to add two more things to the community thing one is is that virtual experts is also valid community so like I mentioned earlier Gus Hanson because that was probably the last poker book I read he had such a great poker book where he just describes hand by hand what situation he's in and what he's thinking and that by itself is kind of a putting myself with you know

[00:38:19] borrowing his 10,000 hours based on his download of knowledge into a book so there's there's even if you don't have like you know someone you know who's already in the upper echelons of success in your field you can still get some or most or part of that benefit if not all of it I don't know I think that you can I think you can get quite a bit of the benefit and I don't want to discount the benefit that you can get from people who are at the same level as you are as long as the people who are at the same level that you're working with have the same commitment as you do to being

[00:38:48] open-minded exploratory committing to trying to make your beliefs as accurate as possible be as open as possible to dissent and really try to seek the truth together as opposed to being in a group which is the way that groups tend to go which is all about rah-rah-rah great everybody else is dumb and I think that we're all pretty sensitive to this kind of echo chamber us versus them kind of mentality and you can get it in groups

[00:39:16] of peers as well you know where the poker example would be you know it's the group that's sitting there saying like I can't believe how bad they play they're so bad I you know whenever I lose I'm just unlucky when I win I'm fantastic and then your friend is saying yeah me too basically and you're right and they're all just bad players and I can't believe they think that that strategy is good and then you'll get groups of players who are exploratory and thought where they'll come across somebody who's doing something

[00:39:44] unusual and instead of just saying well I can't believe that guy's such a donkey he's such an idiot they'll say they're doing something unusual let me ask you about it like because maybe there's something to it like maybe I shouldn't just be dismissing them out of hand but you and I have to have made an agreement to that kind of talk between the two of us I think that's critically important and you kind of outline in the book all the sort of almost bad language to look out for like oh they just got lucky or they were really bad I shouldn't have

[00:40:13] lost or whatever there's all these kind of like or just being said this how about you tell me an opinion and I say you're wrong right so it's a matter of taking more personal responsibility and again this is like a meta skill to learning there's like skills to be a better learner and then you apply them to what you're learning but like a skills to be meta learning is to avoid this kind of like blame game whether it's luck or other people or someone stupid and you know all this sort of nonsense language

[00:40:43] that you would never hear a pro speak about right and then you know again there's someone who's with you who's just as passionate who's trying to find all those micro skills and they're serious about learning they're going to figure out how to communicate with each other to improve the learning yeah so and I think that this is a natural tendency and you want to try to catch it whenever you're doing so obviously you're working on this comedy thing this year I assume when you're going up your hearing there's a certain set of the people that you interact with who come off the stage and they just

[00:41:12] complain about the audience now the audience that's like that's like almost everybody right so the audience may in fact not be fantastic I don't know but it certainly can't be the case that every single time you come off stage and you've had a bad set that it's the audience's fault and I gather that those people probably aren't going to move forward in terms of progressing in their comedy as quickly as someone who comes off the stage and doesn't say oh it was such a bad audience but instead instead says do you think that was a bad

[00:41:42] audience or I have some ideas about why my jokes were falling flat again I think personal responsibility is key like so whether you're learning poker or chess or golf or investing like you see this all the time and investing someone makes an investment then there's news the stock goes down and they're crushed for the day and they get really disappointed like oh if only that news hadn't come out I would have won big on the day okay but but you kind of have to take personal responsibility for your position size for

[00:42:11] how you hedged for how you were planning on did you have a plan in place to take into account surprising news so personal responsibility is a really big part of this I think I always assume the crowd's never a bad crowd that there's always something I could have done with any crowd that that's such a great stance toward trying to learn so when I talk about what what forms a really good learning group I say you have to agree to three things one is a commitment to accuracy so a commitment to accuracy is to say that there's a difference between

[00:42:40] being accurate and right most of us approach the world with the idea that we want to be right and what I mean by that is that I come in and I have certain beliefs and I just want my beliefs to be right I don't want to change them because that would mean I was wrong and if you approach the world with this idea that I have a commitment to accuracy it's this belief that well your beliefs are under construction that we can't be certain of anything because gosh knows we don't have all the you know we just can't collect enough information

[00:43:10] to get to a real place of certainty about most things we can get close like the earth is round but most things aren't as adjudicated as the earth is round yet so for most kinds of beliefs we have particularly when it's things like why did the stock market fall there's just a lot of hidden information in the system there's a lot of luck that makes it very hard for us to be certain of it so we view the belief is under construction that we're trying to get to the objective truth we'll agree that there's an objective truth that we're trying to

[00:43:37] get to certainly but that our representation of that objective truth is in progress let's say and that we're searching for accuracy the direction is more important than being perfect correct exactly that we're always trying to move toward a better representation of the objective truth and we're doing that together so that's part of the commitment of the group the next piece which is what you said about personal responsibility is that we're accountable that we have to be held in some way accountable to the beliefs that we have now one of the ways to be held accountable to a belief

[00:44:07] is actually through a bet if you and i disagree if we have opposing beliefs we can place a bet and the bet will act as a referee for who's got the more accurate belief okay let me question that so so but just because i lose the bet doesn't mean i'm wrong over the long run right over the long run but then that's that's difficult to execute in a group so unless you're like committed for a long time i don't actually think that in the group we should be placing money against each other i'm saying that in general like betting is it's sort of a mechanism of

[00:44:36] accountability that if we have opposing beliefs a bet can essentially act as a referee but with your friends you don't want to go around saying like i'm challenging you to a bet all the time that's not a good thing i think also calculating the odds too right because the odds are part of the bet as well as the money component right so you want it you want to place a good bet not not because necessarily the outcome went one way or the other but you want to look at whether you were actually getting a good price right with the market paying you enough for the bet that you were

[00:45:04] placing but when you're in when you're in this group setting when you're trying to form a really good decision group you've got this commitment to accuracy and then an accountability to your beliefs so for example i'm going to hold you accountable to the way that you're asking me questions to the way that you're describing the world in the way that eric seidel held me accountable when i came up to him and i said i can't believe how unlucky i got he held me accountable to that kind of worldview and said why are you talking to me like this i don't want to hear that do you have a question

[00:45:32] so i'm accountable to the way that i'm processing the world there another form of accountability is let's say that you've made some sort of commitment and the group knows that you've made that commitment so as an example you decide i'm not going to eat bread well the group can hold you accountable to that and they say hey how'd you do on that no bread eating yesterday and you're now accountable to the group for whether you ate bread or not if you have a stop loss in some sort of investment situation it can they can hold you accountable to your stop loss if you say look i'm i'm

[00:46:02] i'm going to put this position on and unless these factors change i am not going to cash out of this position like this is what i've decided i've worked through the decision i've decided that the probabilities are right and these particular things would have to change in the market in order for me to cash out and i want you to help hold me accountable to that then when the stock market crashes you know almost 1200 points on monday you you can hold me accountable to not cashing out of my position just because that happened on a short-term basis because i've told you in advance the things that would cause

[00:46:31] me to actually change my position right so we there's all different ways that you can have this accountability mechanism within the group and then what's really wonderful is not only is the group holding you accountable accountable in the moment but when you're off on your own and you're thinking about breaking that thing that you've said that you're accountable to you'll stop for a second it will stop you mid-action and you'll think oh no i'm gonna have to go talk to james about this and he's gonna question me

[00:47:01] about it you get in my head you mentioned in the book something great that i didn't think about which is almost like negative visualization like if you if you if you're thinking of breaking kind of your parameters or your promise think of the negative consequences rather than visualizing the positive things if you kept with so think of the negative consequences of breaking as opposed to the positive consequences of sticking with your rules so if you're trying to lose weight don't think about how great great you're gonna look if you keep on

[00:47:31] losing weight think about how bad you might look or feel or illnesses you might have if you start eating like crap again that's one really good thing to do and another one is is is to be prepared try to get as clear a map of the future as you possibly can so this this means that you have to admit that you're not sure of how the future is going to turn out which is really hard for most people most people want to know for sure like i know it's gonna this is going to work out for me right i know this is going to go well if instead you

[00:48:00] approach the world as i want to get the best view of the landscape as i possibly can in order to get a really good view of the landscape and we can think about it as like a military analogy it's really good for you to know where the mines are so what do you mean oh where the mines where the mines are you know where the bumps in the road are where that where the hazards lie ahead where there might be barbed wire in the way so if we take the example of let's say that i want to lose weight and one of the things that's motivating me is i'm sort of having this

[00:48:29] positive visualization of like oh i'm thinking about this future and i'm thin and it's all great now i have a boyfriend and everybody thinks it's wonderful and all my clothes fit and i look great and i get a promotion and you're you're imagining this positive future what happens to you then when you lose weight and you don't get a boyfriend that can cause you to actually fall off of the wagon and actually lose the commitment because you haven't thought about well what happens if it's bad so it's not just

[00:48:58] like what i have to think about what happens if i fall off the wagon you do want to think about that but you also want to think about the hazards that lay ahead like what am i going to do when there are donuts in the break room i got to think about that so that i have some sort of plan in place but then also what's going to happen if the thing that i want happens and i still don't get the future that i'm envisioning so that you can be prepared and then you can start to think about that well why am i really losing weight is it really just to get a boyfriend or is it because i want to be healthy am i assuming that if i'm

[00:49:27] healthy and happier then in general things are going to work out better and maybe that will be farther down the road you can start to get plans in place so you're not as shocked when all of a sudden you step on a mine number one and number two because you've planned ahead for those donuts in the break room you're just like less likely to step on the mine in the first place so i just want to i want to get back one second to the community thing please which is also that you know we talked about a couple ways to get community one is if you already know people the other is virtually through books whatever but

[00:49:57] there's also kind of like a backdoor way so i think about judd apatow who's amazing director of all these comedy movies he's done like every comedy movie in the past 20 years but as a kid when he was in high school he created a radio show and literally flew around the country interviewing even he even even interviewed jerry seinfeld as a high school kid jerry seinfeld didn't realize the high school kid was coming to interview him but he kind of did this backdoor way of creating something that gave him an excuse to talk to all

[00:50:26] these people to ask hundreds of questions and they filled a whole book out of that he wrote a book recently detailing his experiences doing that so i think and for me a podcast is a great excuse to call you and say hey let's talk about all your ideas about learning and decision making and so on so i think there's always some backdoor way where you can get to talk to these people as well i agree and and i think that you know the other thing you can do is like i think ryan holiday has a really good story in terms of how he created community for himself of people who were like interested in what he had

[00:50:56] to say that he could interact with he was like okay well i want to build community but nobody really knows who i am so what am i going to do well i'm interested in books he said so i'm just going to create a newsletter where i recommend books you know and it started with like you know he slowly but surely got it to like a couple hundred people and then eventually it was two thousand people you know because people were sort of yeah you know because he created this really great on this podcast like six times well i love ryan holiday so he's probably told you this story about his newsletter with the book oh yeah yeah no doubt um and that i think that's a really good example he was like well how do i start communicating with

[00:51:26] people what's a thing that i like um and then you know he started small the thing is i think it's really important to realize that you don't have to start like as a best-selling author or a huge tv star or whatever you can literally just start off talking to three people and you know as you create a great conversation and as you find what your conversation is naturally you will start expanding your community and you're going to be able to get more and more input and more insight the other thing is that the

[00:51:55] more open-minded you are to people who disagree with you the bigger your community will be and the more useful it will be because you won't be swatting people away just because they have a different viewpoint than you do and that's always going to expand your community and it's going to make your beliefs more accurate because the more that i can hear somebody who disagrees with me either it's going to stop my truth from atrophying so if you disagree with me and it turns out that my truth is more sort of an accurate representation of the objective truth in yours at least

[00:52:24] i'm going to have to be defending it but that's going to be rare most of the time it's going to be somewhere in the middle and because i'm willing to have that conversation with you we're both going hopefully get to a more accurate place where we end up moderating our opinions to better represent the truth because we've agreed to talk to each other in the first place and i think that's hard for most people when most people feel like someone disagrees with them or have a differing opinion they feel like it's a threat to their identity and they'll swat it away and that naturally shrinks your community down yeah and on

[00:52:53] both sides like you see and so now we're going on the decision-making side you mentioned nate silver he runs that great site 538.com which has always been good at predicting polls and predicting the accuracy of or or guessing the accuracy of who's going to be president or who's going to win what election and you mentioned how he had predicted trump at 30 or 40 percent before the election and hillary at let's say i guess the opposite 50 or 60 or 60 or 70 percent now after trump won everybody trashed

[00:53:24] nate silver so there's this there's an ugly thing happening which happens on the internet often which is that there was hate because someone seemed wrong and stupid it gave people an excuse to hate him and he had to deal with that psychologically i guess i haven't spoken to him about it but the point you make which is very interesting is that he might have been dead right the whole time in the sense that maybe there was a 30 percent chance that trump would win and okay 30 percent is actually a fairly

[00:53:52] big number three out of 10 times someone will win who has a 30 percent chance well i think what happened was the pundits had a really huge rounding error so they rounded from 30 percent to a hundred i mean you know so to or to zero rather they rounded down and you say that's a number is that people tend to when they're making decisions tend to round to zero or 100 or 100 because they want it they want to know what's the right answer and so they don't want to hear you know clinton's going to win 65 percent of the time that they're going to be like well i don't know what

[00:54:21] does that mean she's going to win it's like well she's going to win 65 percent of the time well what does that mean who's right what is she going to win but they confuse it with an actual poll exactly so so the pundits you know we're saying you know clinton's going to win nate silver was saying it was somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the time that she was going to win and just to give you an idea of how often that would happen and this is really taking an analogy from nate silver that's as often as like monday and tuesday happen in a week actually monday and tuesday and wednesday

[00:54:51] and a half right so it's like monday tuesday half of wednesday in a week how often does that occur for you like how often is that coming up for you that's how often he was predicting that trump would win so that's a lot so the fact that trump won doesn't say anything about whether his polls were wrong it in fact even if he said that trump was going to win two percent of the time the fact that he won on the one election wouldn't say whether his prediction was correct or not because two percent is not zero right so

[00:55:20] here's the one pushback i have on that and there's kind of a the example holds in poker but you have pot odds there to help you determine if your probabilities are useful for you or not so leaving that aside for a second what use is it for nate silver to say somebody's got a 30 chance of winning like how does that help him make any decision and how does he know that that that accuracy i mean he kind of averages all the polls and all this other stuff yeah so so he has an algorithm that looks at all the polls he has stated very clearly that

[00:55:50] national polls are always more accurate just simply because you get a better and more diverse sample and the the the polling methods are are better in in terms of methodology so the national polls had clinton you know between two and three percent surprise that's what she won and then he said the problem with a lot of the state polls is that the confidence intervals are very wide particularly when you look at some of the actual key states like new hampshire it's very hard to read what those polls are just because of the the sampling methods that they're

[00:56:19] using and some things that have to do with demographics in new hampshire and he was really clear about that what what's the use of it is that if we want to start to think about how do we make decisions about the future what what are our choices in terms of our actions we want to think about what are the probabilities of different futures occurring now the way that we can judge whether nate silver has a good algorithm is to look across all of his election prediction so as we're seeing him predict senate races and

[00:56:47] presidential elections and midterm elections and you know special elections and things like that we start to get a body of data that tells us what is his algorithm look like so that's over the long term and then we use that in order to say okay he's giving us some idea of what the percentage of thing a or thing b is and that's going to help us decide what kinds of actions we're going to take or let's say if you if you were a candidate you could say okay

[00:57:15] he seems to be good at a national level not so good in a state level so we're going to pay attention to or he's good with these states but not those states so we'll focus on these states if we're going to use his data right so if you have a very good polar at least in far as presidential elections it might tell you where you want to focus it might tell you where you want to be putting ads it might tell you how much danger you're in it might tell you depending on whether you want trump or want clinton whether you're willing to go out with a clipboard and start to get out the vote

[00:57:42] right so for example let's say that you have some value to your time and you're trying to decide okay on tuesday the 8th do i want to be out there with a clipboard you know trudging around or do i want to spend time with my children or do any of the other things that i do and let's just say for example that let's just say you really wanted clinton to win if nate silver is telling you it's 98 to two percent you know okay you might not go out with your clipboard but if he's saying it's

[00:58:10] 60 40 and you really do have a dog in this race then you might say you know what on this day i'm willing to forego the other options that i have for this day in order to try to get out the vote because i understand that it's close and that's no different than like if you're just trying to order something in a restaurant and you're trying to decide between the chicken and the fish you're essentially doing the exact same thing there you're trying to decide in which future am i happier and kind of how confident am i in that right so i think that 70 percent of the time that i order

[00:58:39] the chicken i'm gonna be happier than if i ordered the fish because that's sort of how i feel about you know chicken versus fish but there's this 30 percent in there where the chicken comes and it's dry as a bone and the sauce is horrible and it's awful and i really wish that i'd ordered the steak well now i'm gonna i mean i'm a vegan so i don't want either i just want to say that but whatever but i'm gonna this is a good segue into your the the neural time traveling you talk about also towards the end of the book about decision making which is you can

[00:59:07] look at a decision and how you feel about it now and the anxiety it makes you feel now say but you could say how am i going to feel about this 10 years from now i'm really going to look back at this decision and say it was important in any way and if it is important why is it important you might like chicken better than fish but you might say well if the chicken was not raised wild or organically it might be unhealthy whereas fish has got all these like great omega-3 oils and if i eat in 10 years i'm going to be a healthier person with less cancer or whatever or you

[00:59:37] could say look it doesn't matter at all 10 years from now i'm not going to think at all what i consistently was eating right now so i think that's a useful very useful thing it's we always think that right now oh my gosh which shoes should i pack for this trip this is like really important but like five years from now it's not going to i'm never once going to think about and the importance of it will have no effect on my life whatsoever five five years from now well yeah so i think the example that i give in the book of the importance of doing that kind of mental time traveling in order to be a more

[01:00:05] rational decision maker is that so we get really caught up and we really really get caught up in the moment and how we feel in the moment and the kinds of decisions we're going to make and the way we're going to process what's happening in our lives really matters in terms of the how did we get to the moment that we're in and then we just live in that moment so let me give you a couple of examples that you'll you'll know from the book so i say okay so let's say that you go and you play blackjack and you you go with your friends and you know you're going to play for like two

[01:00:34] hours and in the first half hour all you do is get blackjack just blackjack blackjack blackjack you can't lose a hand you end up up say two thousand dollars and it's just because everything went your way but your friends are still playing so you continue to play and over the next hour and a half you lose all but a hundred dollars back you know how are you feeling about that right so you're feeling horrible even though you're up a hundred dollars even though you're up a hundred dollars now we can do the reverse you start off the night and you literally can't win a hand i mean it's just horrible and you really want to

[01:01:02] quit and you're kind of sour about it because you're down two thousand dollars because the dealer has just you know hit sixteen hits a five hit sixteen hits a five you know just every single time and you're down two thousand dollars but your friends are like oh come on come on let's keep playing so you continue to play and all of a sudden you start getting blackjack every single hand for the next hour and a half and you end up only losing a hundred how do you feel about that and you know the drinks are on you you're like super happy and notice that that's really in the moment decision making and

[01:01:32] in one case you're very sad that you won a hundred dollars and in another case you're quite happy that you lost a hundred dollars and that's i think a very puts into very sharp focus how irrational we can be in the way that we process our outcomes when we're caught in the moment like that now if i got you to do a little bit of mental time travel and i said to you hey imagine it was a year ago that you went to that casino now which result do you prefer the hundred

[01:02:01] dollar win or the hundred dollar loss if it happened a year ago if it happened a year ago you would just say a hundred dollar win of course so what happens is that when you can take that extreme zoom lens off where you're just zoomed in on the moment and kind of what's just happened to you and you can put on a wide angle lens and get that so that you can see it within the scope of time a little bit better and within the scope of what the arc of the way that your whole life goes then you start to get much more rational about it because what we really

[01:02:30] are looking for is to think of ourselves like a happiness stock where we want the slope to have a general upward upward trend and we understand that there are going to be momentary upticks and downticks but we don't want to be yanked around by those too much because the more that we're yanked around by the momentary upticks and downticks the less likely we are going to have that upward slope because it's going to cause us to make really silly decisions like being super happy that we lost a hundred

[01:02:59] dollars which is a little bit crazy so and you can how often would you apply this method of decision-making in your life like does the decision have or not decision-making but in terms of point of view let's say this type of point of view does the kind of intensity level of the moment have to be a certain level because you can't do this over oh should I boil the eggs or scramble the eggs like you can't do it over everything is it something where only intensity level is so high or well I think you have to train

[01:03:28] yourself to think this way sure I think there's two things one is when you're just struggling with a decision or you see somebody else struggling with a decision so I use this with my children all the time when they're very like they come home from school and they're really upset because they got in a fight with their friend and I'll use this method all the time I'll say do you think this is really going to matter in like a month and they'll be like no because they'll be like yeah yeah I see yeah I've gotten in a fight with them before and it's been fine basically what you're doing is you're transforming them into a different person the person they'll be in a month and

[01:03:57] saying is it important to that person I'm getting them to have a conversation with the future version of them so I'll give you something similar that that I do which is almost similar to this so let's say there are three types of decisions I normally make one I'm bad at

[01:04:26] two I'm good at so let's say I'm bad making decisions on personal relationships but I'm good making decisions on business relationships and I'm good making decisions on advice for my kids so to take the exact same problem my kid presents me with the problem suddenly the answer becomes really clear like let's have a personal relationship issue I might not have any clue what to do but then if my kid comes to me with the exact same problem I might 100% know what she should do or if somebody's interacting

[01:04:53] with me in a business situation how I'm being interacted with in a personal situation I might know 100% what to do so I kind of do a version of this but instead of time traveling for myself I do the like situation traveling yeah I do situation travel so I love that that's not in the book I wish it were well I'm gonna start using the time traveling yeah well okay so we'll exchange because I think situation traveling is also really good we're like in the same peer group for yeah I love that so this goes back to community so let's add a

[01:05:23] fourth community so you talk about community of peers community where you're where you're talking to experts and community where you're teaching beginners and then let's have a fourth community which is a community of different versions of you okay right so there's situational there's time travel there's completely different you know where you really think about counterfactuals like well what if I've been born in a different country so that would be a different version of you that you could interact with as well where you're thinking about like counterfactual you so I think that

[01:05:52] but then you have to get in there's the danger of it being silly like because in those cases where okay I was born in America obviously it's better than if I was born in some third world country which doesn't have enough food well I would say that in that particular situation it might be really useful to ask just to understand for certain questions like as you're trying to how much credit should I take for the outcomes in my life so it would be good to say well what if I've been born in another country or you know

[01:06:22] in different economic circumstances or at a in a different time period do I think that I would have had the same trajectory for example so that will help you give you some perspective on what should you be you know sort of taking credit for what should you say well this was lucky but within the the situation in which I was born with I think that I made pretty good decisions along the way but I certainly like had a leg up or I didn't have a leg up or you know I think it allows you to kind of put things into context when you think about well what if the situation had been different what

[01:06:51] if I didn't have the education that I did or what if those kinds of things I think it's just helpful to sort of work through those kinds of questions of you know what should I be taking credit for and what shouldn't I you know I think this is where looking at perspective and looking at context is really important I would say the reason you came up with the ideas in this book is not just because of who you are naturally and you're obviously an inquisitive person you were you're almost academically minded you were going for a PhD before you became a

[01:07:19] poker player but poker itself is unlike a job where every day you go in the job and every two weeks you make money so it's a slightly smoother happiness curve now you might not be happy but no matter what it's not gonna have as much volatility it does not have as much volatility like poker or I used to be a day trader for instance you might actually there might be days where you lose money there might be like 10 days in a row where you lose money are you kidding and money is so important to our how we feel about ourselves and there's

[01:07:48] very few jobs where you go to work and then you lose money by the end of the day like it's games like poker where you're gambling or investing or day trading more likely day trading than investing so you kind of have to learn that if I'm gonna get better at this I have to deal with the psychology I can't just go around blaming people because then I'm wasting so much energy and I'm just using now as one example there's a thousand examples energy conservation becomes extremely important and part of that is you're balancing the emotions of

[01:08:17] both ups and downs that's why I say a winning day is just as much a hot hot potato as a losing day that's right you know you can't if you if you're gonna glorify one you're gonna feel horrible out the other you have to keep it in balance so I think it has to do with let me let me try to put your point into different words I think that we have to redefine and poker forces you to do this day trading forces you to do this and I think that we would be well to take this out of those areas into everyday life redefine what does it

[01:08:45] mean to be winning or losing so yeah if we define losing is at the end of the day I had less money then we're probably gonna get yanked around if we find define winning is at the end of the day I had more money we're gonna fall into that trap where we're taking too much credit for the win and that's a trap in and of itself or we're we're not taking enough credit for the loss we're just trying to offload the bad feeling of it but if instead we redefine what it means to win as to

[01:09:14] learn right so whatever's happening whether I'm having a fluctuation up or fluctuation down doesn't matter as long as I am grabbing as many learning opportunities as I can so that I have really interesting stuff to go talk to James about and we can now enter into this learning experience and you know what winning is for me going to you and saying I won this hand but I think I didn't play it very well and then your face lighting up because now I've created this amazing conversation with you and we've engaged in this conversation where we can now learn together and

[01:09:43] you're giving me all this positive reinforcement for the fact that I'm not thinking about winning is just sort of the end result of the money that I'm going to and I'm saying I know that I won money but I don't think that that was actually winning because I think I could have played better can we talk about that or you know what I lost and here's why I think that here were the bad decisions that I made as opposed to just like I lost and I got so unlucky which may be in the moment remember we talked about temporal discounting in the moment maybe that makes me feel

[01:10:12] better in the moment I think philosophically it's going to change a lot of things other than just your emotional energy if the focus is you win if you learn more you might then reduce the consequences of other aspects of the moment so you might play lower stakes so you can focus more on the learning or in day trading you might have less position size or on a date you might not be thinking is this my future spouse or not you might just be saying okay how

[01:10:41] am I interact am I am I speaking my own truth on the date am I have a little more confidence is this am I really evaluating is this the right person for me as opposed to trying to please them I'm speaking my own autobiography here but but I think it applies to how you recast the situation itself if you change the definition of winning exactly you know I actually have an example from my own life when I first started playing poker I was playing a very particular form of poker called limit Texas hold them and I had been playing that for

[01:11:10] quite a few years before I moved to Las Vegas and kind of declared myself to be a professional so I'd started off playing in Montana and that was the only game that they actually played was this limit Texas hold them this particular form of poker so I go to Las Vegas and it turns out that in Las Vegas the stakes only go so high in that particular form of game and if you want to actually play for higher stakes you have to include some other forms of poker which include games that are called stud games so I had

[01:11:38] never played any kind of stud games so I was playing you know for the for that time somewhat high stakes and limit Texas hold them like I would play up to two and four hundred dollar limit Texas hold them if the game came up the regular game was 50 and 100 about three thousand dollars at stake but I realized that if I wanted to be putting more at stake I had to learn stud so I went off with my money and I started off playing five and ten dollar stud so to give you a different and difference in magnitude in one game I might have three thousand dollars at stake in this

[01:12:07] game I have three hundred dollars in stake so it's an order of magnitude difference and I remember when I started doing that because my focus was on learning the game not on kind of what the end result was money wise or anything like that that people were talking I heard rumors around my back about how I'd gone broke and I thought it was very funny because I because it's like they always it's a status thing in Las Vegas what stakes table you're at exactly and I thought how funny that they think I went broke like do they not like I'm playing a completely different game than I've been playing before of course I'm playing

[01:12:37] smaller because what I thought to myself was well the way that I learned how to play limit Texas hold'em was I started in these small stakes games and then I worked my way up so if I'm gonna go play this totally new form of poker for me I should probably do the same thing now I worked my way up a lot faster I got to the bigger stud games in about six months because obviously learned how to learn already right because I already had some poker skills exactly and I already understood how to process the game and what kind of questions I should be asking and things like that so it you know I probably did it about four times as

[01:13:05] fast but I I went back and I started at the beginning and I think about that in terms of that's the same idea of like what's my purpose and going on a date am I try am I trying to learn from this experience and figuring out if I'm being authentic and I'm happy with how the date is going and that regardless of whether she wants to go out on a second date with me I feel like I presented the version of me that I wanted to as opposed to thinking about like all these other sort of big issues or worrying how about just worrying about whether she likes

[01:13:32] you which may make it good in the short run but really bad in the long run is you've presented a version of yourself that isn't authentic to you anyway that's the first 49 years of my life so just learning now it's probably the first 49 years of everybody's life but again that's a great situation where if my daughter came to me with the advice I'd know what to say if a business situation happened where I had to give advice I'd know what to say but in my own person it took 49 years to learn something close to

[01:14:01] that right so so it's interesting there was there was so so what would you say then is another just in terms of like hacking the 10,000 hours even outside the context of this book what would you say is another tip for you I think that one of the things that we haven't explored that much that that is in the book is this idea of being really really open to dissent because I think that's one of the best ways to hack the 10,000 hours because otherwise what happens is that you'll sort of go down the path that you're already going down because we really like to affirm

[01:14:30] ourselves and this is true by the way even for groups of people who one would think are incredibly committed to searching for the truth so you know judges academics they all fall prey to this closing themselves off to dissenting opinions because it just doesn't feel particularly in today's world your feeds on whatever wherever you're looking are kind of programmed now to agree with you right you don't see dissent so here's the biggest 10,000

[01:14:57] hour hack that I can think of and it has to do with this dissent issue is that the more that you're willing to embrace uncertainty and just say I'm not sure the faster you're going to learn and the fewer hours you're going to need in order to actually get to expertise so I think there's a few reasons why that is one is if you say I'm not sure you're more accurately representing the world anyway because about most things we're not sure and so the more accurate representation of

[01:15:26] the world probably the better our decision-making is but the other thing is that I think that when you don't say I'm not sure and instead you say well I'm certain that this is the way to do it what happens is that you lose this hunger for information because if you're already certain why would you ever seek out any new information because you already know right it's probably kind of the reason why when I said to you well you know you should be able to defend the earth is round against the flat earther you said well I don't actually know why why because you're certain of it so you probably haven't searched to

[01:15:55] see well how would I actually figure out how to defend that right which isn't that surprising because I'm not I imagine you don't have a lot of reason to be defending that particular truth energy to defend so like for instance I'm not going to defend algebra because I don't care if anybody knows algebra or not I just know it's there so I can borrow the 10,000 hours right whoever Isaac Newton used to create algebra I could just take it in one and a half a year and right and that's all fine as

[01:16:24] long as when somebody says to you why is the quadratic equation true you say I don't know like as long as you represent your knowledge right like well I'm I'm I learned it and I know how to use it and I'm pretty sure it's true but I can't actually explain to you why right so you have to be uncomfortable like for the things that are not high stakes for you or right high stakes which is why we're giving poker but things that are not like really important to you it's okay to say I don't know is just what I believe it's just what I believe and that's fine as long as that's how you're because then what you're wrapping into there is I

[01:16:53] don't know I'm not sure it's it just happens to be a belief of mine and then what's really good is if somebody says to you well why and and let's say it's your child so you really want to be able to explain it you're hungry for information because you have represented your knowledge is uncertain right so so now you'll actually go and you'll seek out the knowledge to be able to explain it but but most of the time you don't need to and that's totally fine she's sort of have to pick your spots for you you have to pick your spot I'm not sure it does lead to that hunger so I'm not sure why they quadratic equations true

[01:17:22] but you don't really care right but if you're really trying to learn something right if I'm really trying to learn it yeah poker or at sales or in parenting or trying to be come a better comic then saying I think that this is the right way to go but this is how sure I am as opposed to I'm certain that this is right it causes you to be hungry for information and it causes you to go seek out other people who might have different perspectives than yours because those are the ones that are actually going to

[01:17:52] be the most helpful I already know what I know I already know why I believe the things that I believe right so if I can go and find somebody who disagrees with me and be super open-minded to it then if I'm if I'm not saying I'm certain in the first place then the fact that they disagree with me doesn't make me wrong it just informs my belief because now we can have a discussion about it and I think that's actually the biggest hack is the more you say I'm not sure the faster you get to be an expert and one of the

[01:18:21] things I think that distinguishes experts from other people is that they're much more aware of what they don't know that's interesting because actually thinking about the parenting thing this applies extremely well to learning how to be a good parent which is probably the hardest skill of all oh my gosh yes and so like it makes me think of you can't really like this is one thing I learned early on you can't really argue with your kids for what's rational because they're they're they're somewhat irrational but

[01:18:51] they're never going to agree with you arguing with them about what's rational so you kind of have to figure out other ways around that and like you say you still might be wrong so you have to be open to what they're thinking as well so that they feel respected and you know that they're part of the conversation so all of these ideas and techniques apply to parenting as well I have actually I think I think I have the example parenting well I think there's some parenting examples in that book so here's one of the parenting examples in the book you know my kids I think like like a lot of

[01:19:19] kids when they do very poorly on the test they want to be like the comic who says it was the crowd's fault so they'll do poorly on the test they'll come home and they'll be like I can't believe the teacher just really hates me and then a good one is always like they put stuff on the test they put stuff on the test that they didn't teach in class I don't know if you've heard that but I've heard that one a lot there was stuff on the test that wasn't they didn't even teach it in class and the test was so hard and the teacher just hates me and you can ask anybody so notice these are all things that are totally out of their control

[01:19:48] nothing to do with their own studying or how much they applied themselves or how well they listened in class or the kinds of notes they took but that's all stuff that happened in the past so I don't really see any use in disagreeing with them or trying to get them to more a more rational perspective in that moment because I think that's just going to get them emotional and it's going to create some combat between us so instead what I do is I agree I say oh wow that's yeah that really sucks so what are you going to do about that in the future like have you gone and talk to the teacher to try to figure out if

[01:20:18] there are corrections that you can do on the test have you gone and and made a meeting with them to make sure that you're keeping up with what what to expect for the next test how you could do better on the next test now what's interesting is by focusing them on the future version of themselves so now I'm kind of getting my future child to talk to my present child is that in order for them to start think about well how could I do better on the next test they now naturally have to go back and think about what could they have done better

[01:20:47] on this one but I haven't pushed them there I've agreed with them so I'm no longer their enemy I'm just saying hey why don't you think about what you could do better in the future like have you met with the teacher have you done these things and then that will naturally cause them to circle back and it's all through kind of you know nudging my kids to do some time traveling of their own and and in the book what I like how you refer to this as you know this is a this is a basic technique in improv so yes and yes affirm what's the situation is that there's nothing's going to change the situation your beliefs about the

[01:21:16] situation are going to stay the way they are and and we have to build on that world and then the yes and right which is a technique number one in improv exactly and I think that it goes back to this community you can have a community that you are very intentional with where we've made an agreement that we're going to focus on accuracy that we're going to hold each other accountable to our beliefs and we're going to agree to dissent with each other so because we have an agreement if you come to me and you say oh that really suck because the crowd was so bad we have an agreement so

[01:21:46] I'm not I'm allowed to challenge you on that right so I'm allowed to say oh come on like really do you think it was all the crowd do you want you know can we talk about maybe where your responsibility and that was but we have an agreement to that I don't think that I have an agreement with my children for that because they're kids so you know I think that I'm supposed to say okay that's fine yes it was the crowd so now in the future how do you think you can deal with bad crowds better what do you think you could do to actually improve that situation and it's true for adults who

[01:22:15] aren't in agreement with me also so I tell a story in the book actually about David David Letterman and Lauren Conrad oh yeah which I think is very demonstrative of this idea that if if someone isn't a member of this intentional community that you've created where you have an agreement to dissent with each other and hold each other accountable in this way that the way that you might want to handle it might be a little bit differently than this more sort of direct challenge right that was a great story because basically they were having two different conversations she was having a conversation of just promoting the

[01:22:45] hills he was being David Letterman where he was just like sick of this and he was just challenging he was calling her an idiot or so to more or less and she didn't agree that that was part of the discussion she wanted to have a promotional discussion he wanted to have well an actual deep discussion so so just briefly so that people know what the hell we're talking about Lauren Conrad was on a show called the hills weirdly enough by the way a show that I never saw I've never seen either but I I saw this it would happen in 2009 and I happened to see

[01:23:15] this particular episode of David Letterman another show that I didn't watch that much after he moved away from NBC because I was in a hotel room that only had like three channels and so I happened upon this and it was like in the background and when I heard this conversation I immediately perked up and I was like oh my gosh that's such an amazing example of you know self-serving bias and this bias thinking and how you talk to each other and I said I'm gonna file that away and I started using it in my talks because I thought it would make my talks more fun so here's the situation she's on

[01:23:44] the hills it's a show about 20 somethings in LA who have all sorts of drama so people may have heard of like Heidi and Spencer and you know they're causing all sorts of drama for Lauren and you know I don't know one of the Jenners was on the show and it was whatever drama drama drama so she goes on David Letterman to promote her show oh okay there you go see you know that's that's good so she goes on the show David Letterman she's just there to promote the hills and she's talking about you know all this drama is happening to me you know Heidi and

[01:24:12] Spencer being mean to me and you know Brody's being mean to me and Stephanie's being mean to me and Audrina's being mean to me and blah blah blah drama drama drama and David Letterman stops the conversation and says well that kind of raises the question do you think it might be you so so she obviously you know doesn't take kindly to that now of course by the way he's making a very good point which is you're saying all these things are happening to you but what do you think your part in the drama might be

[01:24:42] anyway she you know he sees oh I just made the conversation go south so he quickly tries to repair it and what he says is well you know let me give you an example from my own life I used to you know for my whole life I went this person's an idiot and this person's an idiot and this person's an idiot and this person's an idiot and one day I said wait a minute could all these people be idiots no I don't think so maybe I'm the idiot she says are you calling me an idiot so I mean obviously the whole conversation goes completely

[01:25:11] south now David Letterman was making a valid point and had she been open to hearing what he was saying open to the suggestion open to the dissent open to the way that he was trying to hold her accountable for the way that she was processing the things that were happening in her life it actually might have been incredibly helpful for her but they had no agreement to do so or she could even have participated in an interest she could have engaged in a way where she took control back of the conversation she could have said

[01:25:40] something like no not every cliche about people is true and then now she takes control back exactly but she got into his world for a second just to take it back into her world exactly so so yeah so they had no agreement to this idea that we're going to work together as this cohort in order to check each other's biases and say I don't think you're actually processing the world in an irrational way Lauren so that conversation went completely south so I say in the book that you want to be

[01:26:09] really really careful of lettermanning people and make sure that if you're talking to people who you don't have an agreement with that you're doing yes end you're saying okay so you can think about this yes end in terms of what could David Letterman said wow you really have a lot of drama in your life Lauren what do you think you're going to do to make it there be less drama in the future so that's a way to yes end somebody and that's not the way that I would do it with you if you came to me and complained about the crowd I wouldn't yes end you because we have an agreement not to do that and we have an agreement to actually

[01:26:38] pull apart what actually happened and try to figure out what was the crowd and what was you but most people you're not gonna have an agreement with so it's a lot better to yes end them I love all these different ways of kind of hacking this 10,000 hour old like talk about like 20 different ideas here and sub ideas like not only community but how to break the community down how to join different communities how to find different community partners how to look at decisions in all these different ways just out of curiosity how let's say the 10,000 hour rule is true and that it

[01:27:08] does take 10,000 hour rule hours to reach your peak potential at something or some X number of hours what percentage do you really think you can knock off of that without just without just putting in the time and you know I haven't really thought about I mean first of all first of all I want to thank you because I think that this way that you're thinking about like let's set aside whether the 10,000 hours is true or whether that's the right number whether it works for everything because you know obviously we can have a long conversation about that but let's just take that as as a

[01:27:37] construct you know this 10,000 hours thing I never really thought of my book is a 10,000 hours hack and I really kind of like it's much more than that but yeah I know that I'm I get that with your career and yeah no I'm not diminishing it I'm saying thank you because I think that's a really interesting way to think about the book I like the frame of talking about it as a way to hack that I just really appreciate that because it's giving me actually a really fresh perspective on what what I wrote which I really

[01:28:05] like so anyway I'm very appreciative of that frame that you've offered to me about it being like how do you hack your way to expertise and sort of like you know knock off some of these hours that maybe you'd have to put in so I just really like the frame so I just wanted to I just want to tell you I'm very appreciative of it I'm obsessed with that topic so that's what I'm reading this I'm thinking of two things one is how do I make my life easier because emotional conservation is really important yeah and then be how to improve as fast as possible anything I'm interested in I'm not 20

[01:28:34] I'm 50 I want to I'm not going to spend 20 years trying to get better at something I want to learn to learn as fast as possible and then in terms of what percentage can you knock off I mean my true answer is I don't know I'm not sure I think that first of all it probably depends on the thing that you're asking me to learn right so I think that different like you mentioned violin versus poker so you obviously believe in some degree of the talent plays a role as well for sure and I think there's difference between

[01:29:03] activities that are more on the physical side of things and activities that more on the mental side of things so I think it's going to be a really different answer if you're trying to be a really good sprinter you know versus somebody who's trying to do something that isn't physical so but I imagine you know probably there's like a mix so it's probably better for like the marathon because I think that certainly there's a lot of just sort of like what's your talent level at the marathon but I also think that there's certain training methods you can learn there's certain ways that you can sort

[01:29:32] of time your race things like that that would be really good hacks for that race where if I were able to talk to a community of experts I could not quite a bit of time off my own race so I'd sort of be competing against myself in terms of how quickly could I improve whereas I think in something that's going to have less ability to just tack it like a hundred yard dash right I you know there I'm not sure so the answer is I don't know because I haven't really thought deeply about this kind of frame I haven't thought really

[01:30:00] deeply about what are the different types of activities and how would it apply to different types of activities right you know what I think about in terms of different types of activities I want to know what your answer is well I don't know because I've been I mean I've talked to hundreds of peak performers on this podcast and I think whatever number of hours it would take starting from scratch to you know claw your way out and be a peak performer practicing inadequately well like without really thinking about the meta learning of learning I think you

[01:30:28] could probably take 60 to 80 percent off I like that so someone with talent that poker could probably and who's young could probably you know within two two years probably be at least good enough to sit at a high stakes table maybe not win all the time yeah but you know I remember what was the guy Dan the green or you know he's great poker player but I remember like 20 years ago as young kid and already he was like shooting out of the cannon as a right poker players he had enormous talent and

[01:30:56] he understood some fundamental things and he had a whole crew he was working with so so I think like 60 80 percent I think talent is often exhibited if you have a lot of passion for something right you're not gonna I'm not gonna have a lot of passion for running the marathon but I might have a lot of passion for game playing so chances are I have more talent at game playing than running the marathon yeah actually yeah you're gonna you're gonna be more willing to put in your hours at something that you feel talented at because you're gonna be getting a lot more positive reinforcement and you're gonna progress faster I think

[01:31:25] and yeah so I mean I think that you've just you've thought about this a lot more than I have and so I would actually defer to you in terms of what your guess was because I think your guess is gonna be a lot better than mine I guess I mean look it doesn't matter ultimately because again it's just is the direction right and then you find out well one of the things actually I try to make really clear in the book is that when you're trying to apply these strategies whether it's you know form a really good community reframe the way you think so that you're embracing uncertainty you're thinking about I'm

[01:31:54] not sure you're trying to invite people to be your collaborators you're doing to you're trying to do this time traveling on your own you're trying to be your own community different versions of yourself either situational you or future you or past you that you're actually going to still not be very good at it and it's just because our brains are our brains and they're kind of built the way they are but the good news is that you don't have to be that much better at it to get huge benefit so you know I talk in the book about let's say that you know when I first start

[01:32:24] playing kind of left to my own devices there's a hundred learning opportunities that cross my path and I catch five of them so I'm missing 95% of the learning opportunities obviously you know the vast majority I don't even see and I'm not paying attention to and I'm catching five of them okay now let's say that I try to apply the strategies in this book and you know I don't even get close to perfect but I do better and now instead of catching five learning opportunities I

[01:32:51] catch 10 well you certainly can frame that as I'm still missing 90% of the learning opportunities that are available to me I guess you could call me a failure in that sense but compared to what I would be doing if I weren't applying these strategies I've doubled my learning opportunities so the version of me that is applying the strategies in the book is going to crush the version of me that isn't even though I'm not coming anywhere close to perfect and I think

[01:33:21] that that's actually a relief I think that it allows you to have a lot more compassion for yourself that look I'm I'm never going to be perfect at this stuff I am going to walk off a stage and my first instinct is going to be to blame the crowd and that's okay because that's just kind of the way my mind works the question is how often do I catch that mistake am I catching it more often than I otherwise would and how quickly am I catching it so it's almost like not

[01:33:48] compassion for yourself if you give oh I just gave a bad talk it's compassion for yourself on the meta learning right so okay okay every now and then I'm not gonna apply these meta learning techniques I'm gonna blame the crowd that's okay too as long as the direction is as long as you're going in the right direction is the slope correct and because again not having compassion for yourself like beating yourself up over that again it exerts emotional energy which will defeat the purpose of learning the next time exactly

[01:34:17] it's kind of like this idea of you know what I can suck at this and as long as I'm sucking less it's all good because those small changes are gonna have such a huge effect on what the probability you know sort of having good outcomes over your life right if I mean going back to we're trying to think of ourselves as a happiness stock and we want the slope to generally be an upward trend so if you're sucking less the probability that you have an upward trend to the directory of whatever it is that makes you happy

[01:34:45] whatever that is is just gonna be so much higher because it compounds over time so you can think about like as if your decisions are a normal distribution right so you have your average decision obviously sitting in the center and then you have your worst decision over at the left tail and your best decisions are over at the right tail our goal is to try to get us to be sitting in the right tail more often than we otherwise would have and if we can do that it's okay that sometimes you're still making a decision that's over at the left tail it's okay

[01:35:15] that sometimes a lot of your decisions are still sitting smack dab in the middle that's all right don't worry about it just try to get over to the right tail a little bit more often because that just in general shifts the distribution right because if we're out at the right tail a little more often we get to shift and the whole thing shifts right a little bit and that that's what's going to get us to where we need to go and it doesn't need to shift that much in order to really have big effects I like how you take compassion for yourself and turn it into like a normal distribution and statistics so you draw

[01:35:45] from a lot of different fields to get to the key points of I don't really know is the biggest hack for the 10,000 hours having good friends and community who are experts and learning how to communicate with them having compassion for yourself all through the process and all the other techniques we talked about for learning and decision making I think are so critical and I think about this all the time this is a great book like I like I said earlier I've used this already this book I'm so happy in three totally separate situations like and I was

[01:36:14] able to recognize oh I'm just used a technique from you know the book so the books thinking in bets Annie Duke hope you come on the podcast again next time you're in town anytime this is so fun what how often you're in New York well I live in Philly so I'm actually up here a lot now I feel like I have like Ryan holiday goals so what's a Ryan holiday goal well he's been he's talked to you like six times so yeah I have goals you know also when I first

[01:36:42] started this podcast like at the end of 2013 or early 2014 Ryan holiday was the first producer of this podcast oh really oh that's so cool because I we all it's it's community so we all came out of this community of where we were trying to help each other build these new types of media and that so let me tell you a secret about Ryan holiday Ryan I won't tell anybody nobody yeah I know Ryan holiday actually he doesn't know it I

[01:37:08] don't think but he had a huge effect on this book and I'll tell you why so I'm sure you're familiar with obstacle is the way he goes the enemy so you know that that's written in these little tiny slices where it's like these little sort of thousand word ish sections and the way that that book is written you could kind of open to anywhere in the book and you could read a thousand word section and you'd get a lot out of it you'd know what kind of the point of that was would it be better if you read all the stuff that came before

[01:37:36] it sure because it builds on itself but each one has a very specific point that it's trying to get across and it's almost like a little mini essay within a very longer discussion on these issues and that is why this book is written in that same format well I one of my books choose yourself is also written in that format because and again Ryan helped me with that book a little bit but the idea is people don't have big

[01:38:04] attention spans anymore like they're YouTube people they're Instagram you kind of have to fit everything into a thousand words for a concept or they lose interest I'll tell you my Ryan holiday story okay so we did a podcast after every single one of his books so after ego is the enemy we go out to dinner and we were talking in general about jealousy and or envy and he asked an interesting question like picture someone you're envious of and

[01:38:31] usually you're envious of someone not because of all of them but because of one feature like so-and-so has more money or so-and-so is a better athlete or so-and-so is better looking and then but he said ask yourself would you really want to completely switch places and we kept trying to think of names both of us kept trying to think of names and there was no one we actually wanted to switch places with so that's that was just an interesting exercise so what's wonderful about that is so I sort of think about something that's in my book where I really talk about this idea of

[01:38:59] perspective taking to represent the idea exactly that's a very that's a very strong technique and a lot of nonfiction and it is not naturally the way that I write the way that I write it tends to be more like tangenty and build-up and it it completely cleaned all of that up for me so I am secretly incredibly grateful to Ryan holiday so hopefully he'll hear this and he'll hear oh he'll hear the gratitude that I have for those two books which are I mean first I

[01:39:26] just love the books in and of themselves I mean I thought they were amazing but also the structure that they gave me that that I could really pull into this book I think made this book so much better so I'm actually really grateful to him well that's I am too good so Annie thanks for spending so much time thinking in bets I highly recommend it Annie Duke and if you like listening to this episode please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts many more fun guests coming up

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