Best of Decision-Making: Annie Duke (2018)

26:29Well, what do I know? What does he know that I don't know? Let me think about that. Because he may have information that I don't have. So let me think about that. What other things could have won that year? You ask yourself how sure I am of that. Am I 100 % sure? Am I 60 % sure? That's probabilistic thinking immediately. Right. So it forces you to start thinking probabilistically. It forces you to start going through that step three process of seeking out information in a much more unbiased way because you're trying to figure out what the objective truth is now. because now you're being forced to put something on the line.

27:00It's sort of a skin in the game question. So that frame through which we look at things is the first step to understanding how do we calibrate our beliefs? And really, really, really wonderful things happen from that. What starts to happen is that you start to express yourself in a more probabilistic fashion because you don't want to get challenged. If I announce things and then attach some sort of level of certainty to it. So I say, now if I speak to you and I say, well, Citizen Kane won Best Picture, I'm going to say I'm 60 % on that. I've done two really wonderful things. First of all, I've accurately represented what my state of knowledge is, which is always better, better decision makers.

27:36But I've also invited you to be my collaborator to help me vet this. And that is going to get us to much better decision making. It's going to get us to be less biased. I've invited you to check my bias for me. And there's two reasons why opening that door wide open with this expression of uncertainty is really helpful in getting you to help me. The first is that when I express things with total certainty, one thing you might do is not tell me what you know about it because you're embarrassed. Because I've said it with such assurance that maybe now you think you're wrong about this whole Citizen Kane thing.

28:13So that's reason number one. But reason number two is even if you're pretty sure that Citizen Kane didn't win, you might not tell me because you don't want to embarrass me. So we have all these social reasons why we might not do this. Once I say 60%, it's like there's none of that. I mean, I imagine it's true in the trading world and in the allocation world, people just state their case. And so that lesson is, hey, if you state your case with probabilities, you end up with a richer conversation. So not only do you end up with a richer conversation, but you're more believable as a communicator.

28:44So I think it's a little counterintuitive, but our intuition isn't always good. So, I mean, our intuition is that when I hear something, I vet it before I decide whether I believe it. we know that that's not true. Intuitively, I think we think that as leaders, we need to express things with confidence and we confuse confidence and certainty. So we think if I say, I know it's going to be this way, I'm 100 % sure this is true, that we're going to be more believable communicators. Well, first of all, that's not an accurate representation of the world because there's too much luck involved. So if I say to you like, oh, I know the future is going to be this way if we make this decision, that's patently silly because there's too many things that can intervene.

29:23So A, I'm just accurately representing the world that way when I speak that way. But I'm also more believable as a communicator because when I say to you, here are the possible ways I think it's going to turn out, and I'm going to make a stab at assigning probabilities to this variety of scenarios. Now you look at me and you say, wow, she's put a lot of thought into this. She's clearly informed. She's telling me what she knows and what she doesn't know. She's acknowledging where her knowledge gaps might be or where she needs help or any of those things. And that in itself makes me a more believable communicator.

29:57The other thing is that in particular, people who are leaders need to be very careful about the way they express things. Because anybody on a team who has a leader up at the front saying, here's the strategy, we're going to do this, and I'm sure of it, the people on the team want to be A, team players. And being a team player is not disagreeing with the boss. But the other thing is that if we go back to that work that we talked about with Dan Gilbert, how easy it is for me to infect you with my belief. You know, we hear it, we believe it. So just by expressing how you think things are going to turn out, you've now caused a virus, like you've infected everybody with your belief, and they're going to tend to reason toward your conclusion because now they're going to be sort of like invited into the confirmation process with you as opposed to the exploration process with you.

30:43What a great device to just improve the way we can think, get into probabilistic thinking by just asking someone, hey, want to bet? And I have to say, I used this on my daughter last week. Oh, tell me, please. 12-year-old. I don't remember exactly what she said, but she threw something out there. And I just finished the book. I said, hey, want to bet? And she paused. And it works. Oh my gosh, that's such a great story. And you could see it. You could see it in her head. She paused. Whatever she had said to me, she completely understood. So that was great. I love getting that feedback of the application of the book.

31:16I mean, obviously, at this point, you're one of the first readers of the book. So hearing that application and sort of seeing it in action. It works. Thank you. Thank you for telling me this story. So let's talk about more. Yeah. What are some of the other devices that we can use to improve the way we make decisions? Here's the thing. So we have this kind of general framework, which is this idea of thinking about things as bets. But we know, let's just be honest, that we're pretty biased. And let's assume we're smart, so it's even worse. So really what WannaBet does is it gets you to think about what does it mean to win?

31:48So our default is winning would be affirming that our beliefs are already true, that bad things that happen aren't our fault, that good things that happen are to our credit. And that's sort of what nature has sort of defined winning as for us as we've evolved. But that's a big one. So that concept right there of good things that happen, we take credit for. Yes. It's called self-serving bias. Seems like a good name for it. A good investment decision, whatever. Is there something that doesn't work out? It's not our fault. It's a series of circumstances. Oh, it's really high vol, you know? Oh, yeah, high vol, tough environment.

32:18Well, low vol environment now. Right, like low vol, right? It was low vol. So that's sort of like the programming. Okay, that's what it means to be right. But what a bet does is it shifts your idea of what winning means. So winning is now actually having the most accurate representation of the world. And that really comes through the accountability that this idea of betting is. Because when you challenged your daughter to a bet, you were holding her accountable to her beliefs in a way that normally we don't do. What that does is it makes it so that instead of viewing information that disagrees with us as an attack on our identity, it now changes that to helpful.

32:56Because now if you have information that might calibrate my belief well, that's going to cause me to be a better better. And I've now changed the rules of what the game is. but it's really hard to do on your own. That's the thing. So we're all just really biased. We default to these natural ways of thinking. It's kind of the way that our brain works. But here's the thing, and I'm sure that you've noticed this in your own life. Do you think you're better at sort of noticing your own baggage or other people's? When other people's are running around taking credit for all sorts of stuff or just being like, oh, I lost because, insert hard luck story or thing that was unpredictable or whatever they couldn't control.

33:32You spot it right away. You're like, come on. And what that tells us is that other people are actually pretty good at spotting our biases. So in the same way that you sort of naturally recruit people into the process with you when you express things probabilistically, why not do that intentionally and just purposely recruit people into the process with you so that you can form a really good group of people who have decided together that they have a commitment to accuracy. that they're going to hold each other accountable to that commitment and necessarily that they're going to be open-minded to diverse viewpoints and they're going to consider counterfactuals and they're going to look for information that disagrees with them.

34:15And they're going to be all sorts of things like a really good credit giver, a really good mind changer, belief calibrator, all of these things and, and get people into that process with you. Because honestly, they're going to be better at sort of seeing your stuff than you are. And now you can be really helpful to each other. And then the side benefit, which is actually in some ways the primary benefit, is that they're going to reinforce these new habits of mind. So if you're in a group which has this commitment, and we all know, like, let's be honest, like when someone else is doing really well and things aren't going so well for us, it's hard to give them credit.

34:54It doesn't feel that good. But if you've gotten some people together who have made this commitment together, Now, when you give credit, they're going to go, that's amazing that you gave credit to that person because they know things aren't going so well for you. So like, good on you. That's so incredible. And the thing is that that kind of social approval can be like the biggest pellet for the rat, you know, the biggest reinforcer. And now that's what's going to start to get you that good feeling as opposed to just sort of the immediacy of the swatting away of the bad thing. Now, the idea that I'm really good at giving credit to people and these people have now reinforce that for me, that's going to start to get you to this place of being a much better decision maker.

35:33And it's all about how is the group sort of reinforcing these kind of commitment to being unbiased and open-minded and all of these things through this accountability mechanism that the group is providing, which is something you naturally see at a poker table. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about Ridgeline. Ridgeline makes your day unrecognizable. That's how refreshingly different it is from legacy investment management technology. With Ridgeline's front-to-back AI-native platform, your typical tech pains disappear. No integration headaches, no data discrepancies, and no upgrade cycles.

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37:00Or there are other kind of rules that you would say, if you want this type of feedback loop together, here are the three or four things that you should establish as the way we're going to communicate together. Absolutely. I'm so glad that you asked that question. I think it's important to understanding what makes a good group. Why is this really important, this accountability piece? So when you form a decision group, and here's the wonderful news, you might be thinking to yourself, well, who am I going to recruit into this process with me? Like, how am I going to get a good group going? And the good news is that you don't need very many people.

37:31You actually only need three. To borrow from Phil Tetlock, author of Super Forecasters, you need three because you need two to disagree and one to referee. So in the betting world, if we disagree, we have a sort of phantom third person, which is the bet itself, which is now going to sort of referee the situation for us. But obviously in the real world, we're not just throwing money down on the table. So you need a third person and they can act as the referee in a disagreement. So go find yourself a couple of people and then now really form a contract. So you have to agree to a few things. So you have to agree to this commitment to accuracy.

38:05You have to agree that you're going to be accountable to each other for the decisions. You have to agree to be open-minded to diverse viewpoints. And then how do you instantiate that, right? So how do you actually instantiate this commitment to exploratory thinking as opposed to confirmatory thinking? And it's through these ways of communicating to each other and these commitments to the types of conversation that you're having that you can really actually borrow really nicely from science and from scientific norms of communication within that community. So there was a guy named Robert Merton, super famous guy in science, and he came up with these norms for scientific communication.

38:44They're called the Mertonian norms. You can Google them, but it's an acronym that you can remember. It's called KUDOS. So the first is communism, definitely not the political kind. Communism meaning. That data are shared. So what does that mean? It means that in the scientific process, if I'm doing a study like within my group, obviously my data belongs to me. But once I publish to the community, they have to be able to see the data in order to evaluate it properly. Right. OK. So we can think about that in terms of how are we communicating with each other? Because smart people are really good at spinning the data and sort of presenting a case and like highlighting certain things or leaving other things out in order to drive you toward their conclusion.

39:28So we don't want that to happen. So within your decision group, be as transparent with the data as possible. Now, a couple of things. One is whenever you feel like you don't want to share a detail, those are the details you should share. That's a very good rule of thumb because it probably means that it's going to cast you in a bad light in some way. You in a bad light or your belief in a bad light, or maybe it's going to argue against the conclusion that you're trying to get across. And that's where it's getting uncomfortable for you. So make sure you share those. But one of the ways to actually really make sure that that happens is to essentially create a template for the details that must be shared.

40:01Because then you're always forced to share the exact same things, regardless of whether they support your conclusion or not. These things must always be shared. Otherwise, I cannot give you any kind of advice that has fidelity if I do not know these details. So that's communism. Universalism is ideas have objective truth, regardless of who the person is who's communicating it. So the example I think I give in the book is that it doesn't matter whether it's Mussolini or George Washington or your mother telling you that the earth is round. The earth is round regardless of whether you like the communicator or not.

40:43Now, obviously, if I'm talking to a PhD in economics and they're giving me an opinion about trade, their opinion is going to have more fidelity than somebody who I just met on the street who does not have a PhD in economics. So you obviously have to take those into account. But all things being equal, the truth is the truth. So one of the things that will happen is that we will change our opinion depending on who's delivering the message. So here's a really good thing you can do in the group is when you are trying to talk about different viewpoints and get people's opinions on viewpoints, don't say who has the view.

41:17And I think that we can see this in our politics now. So an idea that had Obama said it might come out of Trump's mouth. All the people who would have been like, that's awesome, Obama. You're so great. It comes out of Trump's mouth and they're like, no, no, no, that's ridiculous. Or vice versa. Oh, that was ridiculous, Obama. Oh, Trump, you're so smart. And it's literally, it's the same words. So why is that happening? And it's because people are not applying this norm of universalism. They're evaluating the message in light of the messenger. It's like, you know, don't shoot the messenger. So this is don't shoot the message.

41:53So as much as you can, when you're communicating these things, either try to leave the messenger out and just present the case as stated and vet it in absence of that. Or you can also imagine, like, let's say that you don't like the messenger. You could go through the process of saying, well, let's say that, for example, you say, what if Obama had said it if you happen to be a never Trumper? So just sort of try to think about the hypothetical, the counterfactual. So I think that that's a really good thing to do. So that's the U in kudos. And then D is disinterestedness, which is we all have these conflicts of interest.

42:28And we tend to think about conflicts of interest in this very specific way, in this financial way. So you have, you know, disclosure forms for conflict of interest. Okay, that's interesting. It can cause a whole lot of problems. The real conflict of interest comes from this issue of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. We're always trying to make sure our beliefs are true. Yeah, of course. There's gonna be two things that are gonna muck up your decision process within the group. One is your beliefs. And two, if an outcome has already happened, because you're going to try to reason to make the outcome make sense.

42:57If I tell you, oh, I think the strategy is 100 % true, you know, it's going to work. I'm sure of it. I've now infected you with my belief. And now the group is going to try to reason toward that. When you're trying to vet a decision, don't say what your belief about what the correct answer is. Just leave it out. In the financial world, really deconstruct the trade before you get the result of it. So you've decided to put a position on. deconstruct that decision process prior to say an option expiring. And the more you can do that, the better. But if it has expired, if you are past the outcome, which of course happens in poker all the time, then when you're communicating to people who don't already know the outcome, do exactly what I just said.

43:38Yeah, just don't tell them. Okay, so that's the D part. And then the OS part is objective skepticism. So approach the world asking why things aren't true as opposed to why they are. But we're hardwired to do the opposite. Completely hardwired to do the opposite. We don't like thinking about counterfactuals. We don't like thinking about, well, what if it fails? So as I'm sitting there and I'm saying to you, well, what do you think? You know, I want to make this particular investment. I should be asking you, tell me all the reasons you think that this is a really bad idea. Because that's more valuable to me.

44:09Because I already know why I think it's a great idea. So tell me, are you against it, please? So you can do that within your group as well. Within your company, you can do that through really creating red teams. So you have red team, blue team. That's one way to do it. And notice what's really wonderful about the red team thing in particular is, remember I said we have this team player issue, is that the game for the red team is to disagree. So you've actually, now to be a good team player on the red team, it's all about disagreeing. So that's actually a really good way to sort of solve the team player problem.

44:40You can do that. You can have a dissent channel, which is anonymous. So that's another good way to do it. There's a variety of ways you can sort of instantiate that organized skepticism. Can we talk about mental time travel? Yeah. Because when you're writing about Jerry Seinfeld and Marty McFly, I can't help but bring them up. Well, you know, I do get to Lauren Conrad from The Hills on MTV earlier in the book. But yeah, sure. Absolutely. What do you want to know about mental time travel? Why don't you talk about how shifting your mindset? I just love those examples. OK, so here's the thing. I like the Back to the Future movies.

45:13I would say Beauty 2. I think it's an uncontroversial opinion to say, you know what, particularly Back to the Future 1. Like if I say number three, we'll have a discussion about it. I'm not a huge fan of that one. But what do you hear from Doc Brown in that? You know, don't under any circumstances interact with yourself, the past version of yourself. What's going to happen? You know, well, the worst case scenario is the time space continuum is going to collapse on itself and the universe will be destroyed. So, and you see that, right? You see Marty doing all of these kind of circuitous things to try to avoid himself because, God forbid, they ever collide.

45:49This is going to be horrible. But what you really learn when you start thinking about how do you become a really good decision maker is that the best thing that could happen is for past Marty to run into future Marty and have a little discussion, have a little chit-chat about how things are going. because our in the moment self is pretty bad because we're temporal discounters. Here's the issue. When we think about this problem of this difference between sort of like reasoning to be right versus reasoning to be accurate, where is that reasoning to be right coming from? Because I assume that you would agree with me, I think, that if I were to tell you, if you're more accurate in your beliefs, you will have better results in the long run in your life.

46:35That seems fair. But if I'm reasoning to be right in the sense of just affirm what I already believe to be true, let's agree that that's the enemy of accuracy. So why do we do it? Because if I say to you, what's your goal in life? It's like, oh, I want to be happier and healthier and wealthier and more interesting. And we've both agreed now that, well, okay, the better calibrated your beliefs are, the more likely you're going to get there. and yet over and over and over and over and over again, you're reasoning in a way that's the enemy of accuracy. So why are you doing that? And that gets to Jerry Seinfeld, Night Jerry.

47:13Exactly. So Jerry Seinfeld does a bit. You can actually find it on the clip on YouTube. And he's like, oh, you know, Night Jerry's like, I want to party and I'm going to have another drink and I don't want to go to bed because I'm having fun. I'm Night Jerry. And then Morning Jerry's like, curse you, Night Jerry. Because Morning Jerry gets up, he's like tired and hungover and he's got to go to work. And it's, you know, it's horrible for morning Jerry. But night Jerry isn't thinking about morning Jerry. Night Jerry's thinking night Jerry's having a fun time in the moment. And so this is the real problem of temporal discounting, like laid out in the most beautiful way by Jerry Seinfeld, is that we have to get night Jerry to think about morning Jerry.

47:53Or put another way, we have to get morning Jerry to tap night Jerry on the shoulder and say, hey, night Jerry, could you go to sleep? Because I'm going to exist. and we're actually the same person. So could you please not punish me? And that's really the problem of temporal discounting. And it's the problem of this reasoning issue is that, you know, thinking fast and slow, it's really beautifully laid out that what we're all kind of trying to do is to generate this positive narrative of our life story. And within that positive narrative, having bad things happen because you were a bad decision maker, saying, well, that person is doing better than me because they actually deserve it because I'm going to give them some credit.

48:37All these things like, oh, that belief I had, that was really dumb. All those things, like they don't in the moment contribute to your positive narrative. Now, in the long run, they will, but there is no, you know, there's no long run. There's no morning Jerry. So the question is, how do we trigger this really good mental time travel that can get morning Jerry to tap night Jerry on the shoulder and say, hey, could you go to sleep? Or hey, could you change your belief? Because it's not accurate. I'd really like you to be calibrating a little bit, even if it doesn't feel good right now. And that's really the question, you know, around mental time travel.

49:15I want to see how you might apply some of these tools to kind of the parallel with poker and investing. One of the things I'm always thinking about in that context is kind of the notion of bankroll management on a poker table. If someone manages their bankroll well, what does that mean? You recognize what your edge is, you know what the vol is, so you understand what your risk of ruin is. And you make sure that however much money you have at risk in any given session is essentially you're applying Kelly, you know. Kelly, great bankroll, that given what my edge is, I can withstand the swings. Here's the problem, is that we're really bad at that.

50:01Intuitively, we're bad at it. We're bad at it for a couple of reasons. One is that we generally overestimate our edge. Let's be honest. We think we're better than we are. We also underestimate the vol. I mean, we tend to. So we generally think we need a lot less money than we do. And then we're suddenly surprised that we're broke. But another thing that happens is that, And this is actually a bigger problem because I can kind of step back from the decision making and run a calculation when I'm in an unemotional state. I can say, well, I need this much money and this is how much I'm going to risk each time.

50:32And so I can sort of get that kind of under control through brute force. The problem really comes with the in-the-moment decision making, right? So I'm sitting in a game and I have two sort of broad decisions to make. But the big one is if I've decided I'm going to risk a certain amount of money, what do I do if I run out of it? And that's where we get into really big problems. So necessarily, if I've run out of the money, it means I've been losing. So that means I'm on tilt. So it means that I'm just sort of emotionally unhinged, right? And my limbic system is now lit up. And I'm going to be trying to swat that feeling away in the moment.

51:08And how am I going to swat the feeling away in the moment? I'm so unlucky. I can't believe how unlucky I am. These people are really bad. and I'm not losing because I'm not decision fit right now or because I'm not making good decisions. I'm losing because the cards are going against me. Now, when you get into that mindset and now you're trying to make a decision about whether you should put more money on the table, you're very likely to put more money on the table. And that's really bad because you don't know why you're winning or losing. And that's really what the problem is. So I'm in no way, shape or form trying to say that it is purely rational to have a loss limit because it's not.

51:45If you were a totally rational actor, you would invest when you have an edge, again, depending on what your risk tolerance is, and you would not when you don't. Okay, that's if you're a purely rational actor. The problem is that you're assessing whether you have an edge or not. I sort of think about it as stacking irrationalities, okay? So I know it's irrational to have a loss limit, but that irrationality is a lot less damaging to me in the long run than allowing myself to make these irrational decisions about whether it's a luck or skill issue that's causing me to lose right now so that I press my position in places where I never should so that then I lose so much money that I couldn't even reasonably win it back in the next day.

52:27So even the next day, I can't come in fresh having reset with fresh decision making because I'm still emotionally unhinged from the day before trying to get my money back. And then that just cycles on until I'm broke. So I recognize that the consequences of that in the long run are a lot worse than applying this other irrational strategy, which is this is how much I'm allowed to lose, period. And assuming I have a really good group around me, I'm accountable to that. So at that moment when I think, yeah, you know, but this is an exception, I know how unlucky I am right now, then I'm going to have to go talk to Ted later.

52:59And Ted's going to be like, hey, I thought you were only going to lose this much. Why did you lose twice that? And I'm going to have to sit there and tell you, oh, well, you should have seen I was so unlucky and I couldn't possibly predict it. but I was making really good decisions and I like I've never played better. And you're just going to go, come on. Yeah, right. So, you know, that's where the accountability comes in. You know, a lot of the work that I do is interviewing people. And so one of the things I'm always envious about is this ability to read poker faces. Oh, so are there tricks?

53:30Obviously, this is a long history of experience to get good at that. What works? Sure. Well, first of all, let me just give you a recommendation. You should go read anything by Joe Navarro. He is a former FBI guy, and he is incredible with body language stuff. He wrote a couple things that are specific to poker, but he's written a few that are more in the business space. He writes for Psychology Today on a regular basis. And he's just got a lot of really, really great things to say about body language. That's number one. So number two is this, that I think that what you need to do is realize that you're kind of merging two things.

54:08One is you've got these body language cues, but also you have sort of the story that the person is kind of telling you. So the way that would work at the poker table is as I gain more experience with you, I start to sort of narrow down the possibilities of what an individual bet from you means. Because I've seen you bet in the past, and I kind of know what your tendencies are. I have some idea of the frequency with which you're willing to enter a pot, for example. The frequency which you raise versus call versus fold. When I've seen you with particular categories of hands, I've sort of seen how you play.

54:47And so if I've never met you, I'm going to go from some sort of base rate of the category of the type of person that I think that you are. It's very Bayesian, right? And then I'm going to start updating immediately as I gather more data. That's actually the most informative stuff that you can get is just seeing how do people react to certain things? How do I think they're going to react to this thing based on what I know from the past? And be a really good listener to those stories. I'm not talking about their words. I'm talking about their actions, the way they talk. When do they pull back? When do they lean in?

55:18When do they get excited? When do they not get excited? And those are some of those body language cues? This is just sort of their betting. How are they betting? Now, the body language cues have to do with signs. You're generally looking at signs of being uncomfortable and signs of being comfortable. And those are the two things you're kind of looking for. So signs of being uncomfortable that have to do with stress are things like when blocking. They're something they don't want to talk about. Arms crossed. Or they'll sort of pile things in front of them. That kind of thing. They're not leaned in.

55:51But if someone's too leaned back, if they're taking up too much space, generally you shouldn't believe a thing they're saying. Because people generally aren't like this. It's sort of like purposely trying to look relaxed. But then there's other things that they'll do. Like you'll get hooding where before they deliver something, if they sort of close their eyes and then open them again, that's usually not a good sign for what's about to come out of their mouth. When they're uncomfortable, you'll see lip pursing. You'll see people biting the inside of their cheek or sort of taking their tongue and like rubbing the inside of their.

56:21Then there's these sort of self-soothing things that you do. Like you might rub your hand or that will be sort of the licking the inside of your lip. Things that are sort of supposed to calm you down. It's really up versus down, right? So when their body language is going up, that means they're excited. They're happy when it's going down, not so much. So what's good to do is sort of take these kind of physical cues and merge them with the story that they've kind of told you in the past as you've gotten a feel for how they behave in different situations. And that now you can merge together to make some sort of prediction.

56:53So you need to understand what your base rate is. And I only know that by, well, watching you and coming in with some sort of prior. But then as I see you always updating that so that I've always got a fresh assessment. So I want to leave a little time to ask my normal closing questions. But before that, I know you were on The Celebrity Apprentice. And I don't really want to talk about the president. However, I thought it might be interesting to ask if you were hired in your business consulting seat to consult President Trump about how he could improve his decision making process. What advice would you give him?

57:35So honestly, it would be the same advice I would give to anybody. And I think that you can see that here. One is be curious. Be curious about what other people's opinions are and be open minded to them. I think that that always makes you into a better decision maker. That's true for anybody. Don't express things with such certainty. I just don't think that that's good for anybody. I don't think it's good for your listeners, and I don't think it's good for you. Specifically, seek out dissent. And that's something really important. Be open-minded to dissent. Don't swat it away. Listen to it. And I think that this is one of the most important things that you can do in order to be a good decision maker.

58:10Sounds good. Okay, here we go. What was your favorite sports moment? either as a participant or a fan. And we're going to debate whether poker is a sport or not. That's the problem, is poker is a sport. I don't know. I don't know. We'll let you answer however you'd like. Okay, if poker is a sport, and I'm specifically talking about something that I was participating in, and poker is a sport, then it would have to be the NBC National Heads Up Championship, where I got the chance to play against Eric Seidel in the final. Now, understand, I said before, I'd known Eric Seidel since I was 16. He was an incredibly important mentor to me.

58:48And so to be able to face him in a final, that was such a sort of culmination of like, you know, this big history of my life. And that was really, really amazing. But I guess I have to say, if poker is not a sport and it's just me, I mean, to be fair, I live in Philadelphia. So we just have to go with, wow, the Eagles really crushed it against the Vikings on Sunday. How about that? I don't know what's going to happen on February 4th. Yeah, I think this might come out right after, unfortunately. Oh, that's so, well, I don't know right now what will happen, but we'll know the result by the time this comes out.

59:22But that was a pretty great moment for them to make the NFC championship. And I believe that the last time that they made the Super Bowl was also against the Patriots, if I'm not mistaken. So first of all, that's cool. Second of all, my brother's a humongous Patriots fan. And you may wonder, why am I Philly? He's Patriots because we both grew up together in the same household. because I did not watch football when I was growing up. I started watching it when I was in graduate school at Penn. Yeah. And I used to go to the Eagles game all the time and I watched it every Sunday. And so I ended up being an Eagles fan.

59:51He was a Patriots fan. Now for the second time - They're going head to head? They're going head to head. And the vets will be flying. No, I just like, I'm just going to watch it. I don't have enough of an opinion about football to be a good enough better at football. What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you? This is going to be one from my father. I was probably like a teenager, late teen, something like that. And he said to me, if you have one really, really, really good friend in your life, you're doing a lot better than most people. And I think that that's always really stuck with me as a way to sort of move through the world.

1:00:28What information do you read that you get a lot out of that other people might not know about? I am a huge evolution junkie. The Greatest Show on Earth, Why Evolution is True. I mean, those books I think are so amazing. To really understand like how you think through a problem, what evidence means, how do you interpret evidence? What does it mean to have different disciplines line up to get you the same answer, that consilience and convergence and how important those are in like trying to figure out what the objective truth is? it creates this framework for a rigor around thinking about the world that I think I'm not sure you get so well from anything else.

1:01:12And I will just consume a huge book-length thing on evolution. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in your life? So I would say that this comes from parenting, that getting mad, like any kind of yelling, like, you know, because all parents yell, it doesn't do anything for you. It's kind of useless. Kind of when you're on tilt. Yeah, exactly. My youngest got in trouble for something. And I know it's something that she's 15. And it's something that with my first, I would have been nuts over. Like, what are you doing? You know, just the whole nine yards. And instead, I just said, okay, you know, so I think you did this thing.

1:01:59Lying is going to make it worse. So just please tell me the truth. And she did. And I said, okay, here's your consequence. And then we just went on with our day. And it was so much more pleasant. and I got a better result out of it. Like she got the consequence. She knows she wasn't allowed to do it. She understands why. There was no reason for me to get in a bluster about it, which wasn't going to create any good for anybody, not for my emotional state for sure. And I say all the time, like, gosh, you know, I wish I had really figured that one out earlier. I think as a parent and as a communicator, you feel like if someone does something wrong, they need to know how important it is.

1:02:34And you need to let them know that this is wrong and that it's caused. And that's so much more about your own ego and wanting to be right and wanting them to know that you're right. It doesn't get you anywhere. All right. Last one. We're a few decades from now. You are in your rocking chair, counting your poker chips. You know, what advice would you give yourself today? Don't sweat everything so much. Like, don't be so anxious about every little thing. Relax a little. It all works out. You don't need to be moving all the time. Yeah, for sure. I don't know how well I'll be at taking that advice, but maybe if I do some good mental time travel and I start getting old, decrepit, rocking chair Annie to talk to Annie today, then I can get a little better.

1:03:26Annie, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for having me. This is such a fun discussion. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at CapitalAllocators.com, where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.

1:04:03and securities discussed on this podcast.