Annie Duke, decision strategist: Poker as a model system for life—how to improve decision making, use frameworks for learning, and apply 'backcasting' to boost your odds for future success

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top-performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast, and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
I have a complete fascination and obsession with this topic. I practice it professionally, and I've seen firsthand how access to information is basically all people need to make better decisions and improve the quality of their lives.
Curating and sharing this knowledge is not easy, and even before starting the podcast, that became clear to me. The sheer volume of material published in this space is overwhelming. I'm fortunate to have a great team that helps me continue learning and sharing this information with you. To take one example, our show notes are in a league of their own. In fact, we now have a full-time person that is dedicated to producing those, and the feedback has mirrored this.
So, all of this raises a natural question. How will we continue to fund the work necessary to support this?
As you probably know, the tried and true way to do this is to sell ads, but after a lot of contemplation, that model just doesn't feel right to me for a few reasons. Now, the first and most important of these is trust. I'm not sure how you can trust me if I'm telling you about something when you know I'm being paid by the company that makes it to tell you about it.
Another reason selling ads doesn't feel right to me is because I just know myself. I have a really hard time advocating for something that I'm not absolutely nuts for. So if I don't feel that way about something, I don't know how I can talk about it enthusiastically. So instead of selling ads, I've chosen to do what a handful of others have proved can work over time, and that is to create a subscriber support model for my audience.
This keeps my relationship with you both simple and honest. If you value what I'm doing, you can become a member and support us at whatever level works for you. In exchange, you'll get the benefits above and beyond what's available for free. It's that simple. It's my goal to ensure that no matter what level you choose to support us at, you will get back more than you give.
So for example, members will receive full access to the exclusive show notes, including other things that we plan to build upon, such as the downloadable transcripts for each episode. These are useful beyond just the podcast, especially given the technical nature of many of our shows. Members also get exclusive access to listen to and participate in the regular Ask Me Anything episodes. That means asking questions directly into the AMA portal and also getting to hear these podcasts when they come out. Lastly, and this is something I'm really excited about, I want my supporters to get the best deals possible on the products that I love. And as I said, we're not taking ad dollars from anyone, but instead what I'd like to do is work with companies who make the products that I already love and would already talk about for free and have them pass savings on to you.
Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Annie Duke. Annie is the author of the bestselling book, Thinking in Bets, Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. And some of you may recall a few months ago, I talked about this book a little bit in my Sunday morning newsletter, because it was just one of those books where even halfway through it, I realized this was a book everybody needed to read, and I couldn't get enough of it, and I immediately reached out to Annie and said, I'd love to have you on the podcast, and what follows is that discussion. But for those of you who may have not got that or missed that, Annie was one of the top poker players in the world. She played professionally for about 20 years. In 2004, she won her first world series of poker bracelet. That same year, she won $2 million in a winner-take-all invitation-only World Series Poker Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads Up Poker Championship. Prior to all of that, by the way, and we talk a little bit about this, she was actually awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. So poker actually is something that kind of came later to her in life. She now spends her time writing, coaching and speaking on a wide range of topics from decision fitness, emotional control, productive decision groups, embracing uncertainty. She's also done a lot of work in charity, and unfortunately, we don't get into any of that. I had planned to, but as is often the case, we get so far into something in this case, obviously poker and uncertainty and decision making, that after three hours or so, we hadn't even got to some of the other things that she's done.