Improve your decision-making, frameworks for learning, backcasting, and more | Annie Duke

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to a special episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, we want to re-broadcast a previous episode that I did with Annie Duke that first aired in July of 2019 I reached out to Annie, a decision strategist and World Series of Poker champion, to have a conversation after reading her bestselling book, Thinking in Bets, Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. It was one of those reads that I just couldn't put down once I picked it up, and I wanted to share it with everyone. In this conversation, we go deep into certainty, decision making, and of course, poker. We talk about why poker is in many ways the model system for decision making in the real world, i.e. in a world where we have incomplete information. We also discuss back casting, a topic I have since written and spoken at length about, and the importance of doing a pre-mortem, not just a post-mortem. We discuss the decision matrix, meaning how you can look at and evaluate decisions after the fact when you have to be critical of both the decision making process and the outcome. I think this episode remains just as important today as it did to me on the day when we recorded it over five years ago, and it contains a lot of valuable and actionable information that you can carry into your day-to-day decision making and behaviors. So without further delay, please enjoy or re-enjoy my conversation with Annie Duke. Annie, thanks so much for coming all the way up to New York. I'd like to say just to see me, but now you've let the cat out of the bag that I'm the second excuse to be here today.

**Annie Duke** (2:32)
Yes. When I get requests, I try to pack them in the same day for efficiency purposes.

**Peter Attia** (2:37)
Are you from Philly originally?

**Annie Duke** (2:38)
I'm not from Philly, but my father is from Philly originally. So yeah, my dad grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from West Philly High, actually. So he's born and bred and I live in Philadelphia now. It's actually my third time through. So there's clearly some kind of magnetic center to Philadelphia for me.

**Peter Attia** (2:57)
Are you an Eagles fan?

**Annie Duke** (2:58)
I am.

**Peter Attia** (2:59)
I'm sorry. I can't. I'm so angry about them beating the Patriots two years ago. I'm just so upset about it.

**Annie Duke** (3:05)
Oh, please. Oh, I'm so sorry for you that they didn't get their sixth Super Bowl that day and they had to wait two more years.

**Peter Attia** (3:12)
I don't know. It just bothered me.

**Annie Duke** (3:14)
All right. So wait, are you a Patriots fan?

**Peter Attia** (3:16)
I am.

**Annie Duke** (3:17)
Okay. So interestingly enough, I am a Red Sox fan because I grew up in New England and it's kind of just an accident of sort of the timing of my own life that I'm an Eagles fan, which has to do with I was never much interested in football when I was growing up, which isn't that crazy for when I was growing up in terms of the Patriots because they were awful. Oh, just horrible. It was horrible. So I like the Celtics because Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, and obviously the Red Sox, it was like Fred Lynn and Carly Ostremski and Carlton Fisk and like that amazing team. So and we used to go like once a year. So I would like to remind you as you're so upset that they didn't get number six on that day of what it was like to be a Red Sox fan.

**Peter Attia** (4:02)
I know. Well, you brought up Fisk, right? So yeah.

**Annie Duke** (4:05)