#37 Annie Duke: Getting Better by Being Wrong

**Shane Parrish** (0:00)
So I wanted to ask you about what your take on the morality of gambling is.

**Annie Duke** (0:05)
Oh, I wasn't expecting that question.

**Shane Parrish** (0:16)
Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish, and this is another episode of The Knowledge Project. This show explores ideas, methods, mental models and frameworks that will help you expand your mind, live deliberately and master the best of what other people have already figured out.
You can learn more at fs.blogslashpodcast.
My guest today is former professional poker player, Annie Duke. Annie and I first met in Philadelphia where we sat down to record this conversation. Her book, Thinking in Bets, is about how we can make smarter decisions when we don't have all the facts. In this deep dive conversation, Annie offers insight into poker, the cognitive biases that lead us astray, and she offers a master class in decision making. Enjoy!
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Annie, welcome to the show. I wanna start with someone who was originally on track to become a Ph.D. in Linguistics, of all things, writing a thesis on something called Syntactic Bootstrapping, no less, ends up as a professional poker player. That's a hell of a switch.

**Annie Duke** (2:16)
Well, first of all, I'm impressed that you dug up the syntactic bootstrapping bit.
I usually just say cognitive science or language learning. Yeah, so I kind of had a winding path. I went to graduate school. I was studying syntactic bootstrapping, which for those people who are interested is the theory that children learn their first language because they have an innate grammar built in. And if you can access the grammar, that's what allows you to bootstrap the meanings of the words that you're hearing in the language stream. So that's what I was studying.
And right at the end of it, I mean, I'm talking five years in, on my way to my first job talk actually at NYU, I got sick and I'd been struggling with some stomach issues that year and I got really sick right as I was going out into the job market and actually landed in the hospital for two weeks. So because the job market and academics is seasonal, I missed that season. So I was gonna have to wait until the next year. And so I went off to Montana where my husband at the time had a house and I was gonna recuperate for a few months and then head back to Philadelphia to finish up at Penn and go back out on the job market. And it's during that time that I started playing poker mainly out of a need for money. And I thought, well, okay, so I'll do this in the meantime for money. In the meantime, just happened to turn into like 20 years.

**Shane Parrish** (3:43)
This is a family business for you guys, isn't it?

**Annie Duke** (3:46)
It is a family business, yeah. So I think that nowadays people think, oh, I can see how someone would end up thinking they should go play poker because nowadays it's on television. And so everybody kind of knows that poker is a thing that you can do for a living because they see it on like ESPN. But for me at that time, this was in the mid 90s.
It was not on television. You were never gonna come across somebody who was like, hey, I'm a professional poker player. So it was a very strange thing for me to end up doing because it wasn't something that was out in the public sphere as a way to make a living. The only reason why I ended up getting into it was because my brother, when he was a teenager, had gotten really into chess. And I mean, into chess like big books studying openings and moves and so on. And he found a grand master that he could study under in New York, had gotten into Columbia, decided to defer a year to go and study with this grand master before starting college. And in that year, got connected into the games world in New York. So, you know, it's chess and backgammon and poker. They're all very interconnected.