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

20:43In order to 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.

21:06James Altucher: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 be 10 different reasons why they laughed. You kind of have to understand what's the right reason because it might, 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 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.

21:40James Altucher:Probably not. Probably not. So if you were in front of an audience 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 doing, change my beliefs and change my decisions. And without the emotion in there as well. And when am I supposed to just sort of say, well, this doesn't really have much to do with me.

22:10It's a bad audience for me. You could ask yourself, do I want this to be my audience? 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.

22:38James Altucher:You know, community is an interesting thing because, for instance, you were able to enter this high-level poker community because your brother was already there. Yeah, 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 and sharing tips with them. So entering into a good community 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.

23:09And you can do that by sort of seeing what their stance is toward the world or what their attitude toward the world is, right? So let's say, for example, that you're coming in to play golf and you're not just gonna 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're coming to 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 you talked while I was, during my backswing. And it's all these things that, where they're just blaming things that have nothing to do with them.

23:43Maybe they get very emotional and they're like throwing their clubs, which means that they have some issues with just sort of keeping their emotions calmed 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 we pick the things that we actually have control over out of the feedback that we're getting?

24:16James Altucher: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 those types of people where they're your peers, but they're striving in the same way you are. And they understand learning in the same way you do. And you're both able to share and learn. And then there are even people below, not necessarily below, but people you could teach so that it helps you keep beginner's mind in what you're doing. And you see from their questions, it reminds you of the fundamentals that you always have to keep track of. So there's sort of this plus minus equal approach.

24:48So 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 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.

25:21And 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 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 human being. It's a really good sign that maybe what you're doing isn't the best thing.

25:45James Altucher: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 tend to moderate what you believe. But he also says something else. He says, even if you think that your belief is 100 % true, you are completely certain.

26:18If 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 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 the point of the truth of the earth is round?

26:41James Altucher: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 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 rationale and be able to support my argument. So that was true when I started teaching poker.

27:14So 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 had atrophied. Because I just sort of thought, well, these things have worked and so forth must be true.

27:34James Altucher:So even though this gets into the weeds of poker a little bit, what's an example of how your game changed at that point when you were teaching? So I'll give you 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 in trying to explain this to somebody that as I was talking about this conversation, you were having this again a little poker wonky. But as I was talking about 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.

28:23Because 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 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 were trying to learn poker from me.

28:48James Altucher: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. Well, 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 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. Because if somebody re-raised you right then, you're out.

29:18Exactly. And you're opening yourself up to exactly that play. I mean, obviously this is getting wonky, but the point is that in trying to defend things that I'd sort of accepted as kind of gospel truth for things that were correct strategy in poker, in trying to explain that to a community. In other words, I'm now having, 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 teaching, I actually like, that's like later on then I win the tournament of champions.

29:59And then, you know, I win my World Series of Puppets. I mean, there was this big change that occurred in my game right around 2004. And it happens to be right as I started teaching poker.

30:08James Altucher: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. 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 understand what they're saying and ask them questions if you didn't understand. And, you know, it's like you have, you described the conversation with Eric Seidel where you're talking about a hand and you said, oh, I had bad luck.

30:46James Altucher: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 else I'm not interested. Yeah, so they're basically giving you like a thought paradigm. So the experts in whatever you're doing understand, for example, what the important details are, right? So they understand the kinds of details that you need 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.

31:19Were you early in the night or late in the night? Who did you follow?

31:22James Altucher: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 where you are in the night, that is specifically a skill. If you're first, that's a different skill you need to learn than if you're last. And if, 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?

31:56James Altucher:But what you're saying is also you're like a meta expert. So you're trying to, you immediately are taking a skill and trying to break 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 - Like if you're teaching sales, for instance, you might be - I would do the exact same thing, right?

32:27And now we've got a template of details so that whenever you're conveying, whenever you're asking me for advice, you're 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? Similar things to the kinds of things I was just trying to construct with you.

32:57James Altucher:And I like how in the storytelling of the position, the outcome is not so important. No. It's learning how to make the best decision that's important. Exactly. Because 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 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.

33:29And I may not even realize that I'm doing it, right? So as long as we've agreed to 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?

34:01So 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.

34:11James Altucher:It's like newspaper headlines like, you know, stock market went down yesterday because of oil fears. They just make up. All we know is the only actual news is that the stock market went down. But then they try to backfill it. Oh, there's oil fears or North Korea fears or whatever. Right. And it's really bad because now when somebody reads that headline, 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.

34:47And 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 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.

35:07James Altucher:So let me ask, let's say certain types of decisions or skills he took 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 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 this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It would mean so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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37:02James Altucher: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 there's a field component 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 salespeople 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.

37:46But then you have to go apply them and come back and say, in this situation, this is what I was doing. Was that right? So that you're creating this really nice feedback loop, which really, really speeds the learning up.

37:56James Altucher:And Andrews Erickson, the real developer of this 10 ,000-hour role, calls that deliberate practice where you get expert advice, you apply it, and then 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 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.

38:32But 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 my own 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 scroll 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. Because these tend to make good hands for this reason, whatever.

39:11And 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 need to do that. But it cut off a lot of hours in the beginning of just experimentation on my part.

39:23James Altucher:Yeah, and I want to add two more things to the community thing. One is that virtual experts is also a valid community. Sure, of course. I mentioned earlier Gus Hansen 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 putting myself with, you know, borrowing his 10 ,000 hours based on his download of knowledge into a book. So 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.

40:02James Altucher: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 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, we're great, everybody else is dumb.

40:36And 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 of peers as well, where the poker example would be, it's the group that's sitting there saying like, I can't believe how bad they play. They're so bad. 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 in thought where they'll come across somebody who's doing something unusual.

41:13And 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.

41:29James Altucher:I think that's critically important. And you kind of outlined And 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 lost or whatever. There's all these kind of like. Or just being 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 skill to be meta-learning is to avoid this kind of like blame game whether it's luck or other people or someone's stupid and you know all this sort of nonsense language that you would never hear a pro speak about 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.

42:32I 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 complain about the audience. Now, the audience...

42:44James Altucher: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 says, do you think that was a bad 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 in investing.

43:23James Altucher: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 you kind of have to take personal responsibility for your position size, for 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's such a great stance toward trying to learn.

43:57So when I talk about 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 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 to get to a real place of certainty about most things.

44:41We 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 as 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 get to, certainly. But that our representation of that objective truth is in progress, let's say. And that we're searching for accuracy.

45:14James Altucher:So direction's 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 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, right?

45:45James Altucher:Okay, let me question that. But just because I lose the bet doesn't mean I'm wrong either. Over the long run. Right, over the long run. But then that's difficult to execute in a group. Unless you're 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, betting is sort of a mechanism of 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. But a bet, I think, also calculating the odds, too.

46:17Right.

46:18James Altucher:Because the odds are part of the bet as well as the money component. Right. So you want to place a good bet, 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. Was the market paying you enough for the bet that you were placing? But 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 gonna 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.

46:50When 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 wanna hear that. Do you have a question? 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.

47:21If you have a stop loss in some sort of investment situation, they can hold you accountable to your stop loss. If you say, look, 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 hold me accountable to that. Then when the stock market crashes, you know, almost 1 ,200 points on Monday, you can hold me accountable to not cashing out of my position just because that happened on a short-term basis.

47:57Because I've told you in advance the things that would cause me to actually change my position, right? So 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 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 about it. You get in my head.

48:30James Altucher:You mentioned in the book something great that I didn't think about, which is almost like negative visualization. Like if you're thinking of breaking kind of your parameters or your promise, think of the negative consequences rather than visualizing the positive things that 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 you're going to look if you keep on losing weight. think about how bad you might look or feel or illnesses you might have if you start eating like crap again.

49:06That's one really good thing to do. And another one is to be prepared. Try to get as clear a map of the future as you possibly can. So this means that you have to admit that you're not sure of how the future is gonna turn out, which is really hard for most people. Most people wanna know for sure. Like I know this is gonna work out for me, right? I know this is gonna go well. If instead you 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.

49:41James Altucher:What do you mean, oh, where the mines are? Where the mines are, you know, where the bumps in the road are, 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 positive visualization of like, oh, I'm thinking about this future and I'm thin and it's all great. And 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 imagining this positive future. What happens to you then when you lose weight and you don't get a boyfriend?

50:16That 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 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.

50:50Well, 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 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 less likely to step on the mine in the first place.

51:13James Altucher:So I just want to get back one second to the community thing, which is also that, you know, we talked about a couple of ways to get community. One is if you already know people, The other is virtually through books, whatever. But 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. He even interviewed Jerry Seinfeld as a high school kid. Jerry Seinfeld didn't realize a high school kid was coming to interview him.

51:48James Altucher:But he kind of did this backdoor way of creating something that gave him an excuse to talk to all these people to ask hundreds of questions. And he 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 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 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 2 ,000 people you know because people were sort of you know because he created this really great Ryan Holiday's been on this podcast like six times Well, I love Ryan Holiday.

52:45So he's probably told you this story about his newsletter with the book. Oh, yeah, yeah. No doubt. And I think that's a really good example. He was like, well, how do I start communicating with people? What's a thing that I like? 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 bestselling author or a huge TV star or whatever. You can literally just start off talking to three people. And as you create a great conversation and as you find what your conversation is, naturally you will start expanding your community and you're gonna be able to get more and more input and more insight.

53:21The other thing is that the 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 gonna expand your community and it's gonna 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 than yours, at least I'm going to have to be defending it.

53:54But 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 to 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.

54:20James Altucher:Yeah, and on 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 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 % before the election and Hillary at, let's say, I guess the opposite, 50 or 60 or 70%. Now, after Trump won, everybody trashed Nate Silver. So there was this, there was an ugly thing happening, which happens on the internet often, which is that there was hate because someone seemed wrong and stupid.

55:01James Altucher: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 % chance that Trump would win. And okay, 30 % is actually a fairly big number. Three out of 10 times, someone will win who has a 30 % chance. Well, I think what happened was the pundits had a really huge rounding error. So they rounded from 30 % to 100, or to zero, rather. They rounded down from 30 to zero. It's a number is that people tend to, when they're making decisions, tend to round to zero or 100.

55:38Or 100 because 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 % of the time. They're going to be like, well, I don't know what the, does that mean she's going to win? It's like, well, she's going to win 65 % of the time. Well, what does that mean? Who's right? Is she going to win?

55:56James Altucher:But they confuse it with an actual poll. Exactly. So the pundits, you know, were saying, you know, Clinton's going to win. Nate Silver was saying it was somewhere between 60 and 70 % 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 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.

56:30So that's a lot. So the fact that Trump won doesn't say anything about whether his polls were wrong. In fact, even if he said that Trump was going to win 2 % of the time, the fact that he won on the one election wouldn't say whether his prediction was correct or not. Because 2 % is not zero.

56:47James Altucher:Right. So here's the one pushback I have on that. And there's kind of the example holds in poker, but you have pot odds there to help you determine if your probabilities are useful to 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 accuracy? I mean, he kind of averages all the polls and all this other stuff. Yeah, so he has an algorithm that looks at all the polls. He has stated very clearly that national polls are always more accurate just simply because you get a better and more diverse sample.

57:22and the polling methods are better 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 sampling methods that they're using and some things that have to do with demographics in New Hampshire. And he was really clear about that. What's the use of it is that if we want to start to think about how do we make decisions about the future?

57:59What 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 presidential elections and midterm elections and special elections and things like that, we start to get a body of data that tells us what does 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.

58:35And that's going to help us decide what kinds of actions we're going to take.

58:39James Altucher:Or let's say if you were a candidate, you could say, okay, 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 poller, 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.

59:10Right. 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's telling you it's 98 % to 2%, you know, okay, you might not go out with your clipboard, but if he's saying it's 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.

59:49And 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 % of the time that I order the chicken, I'm going to 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 % in there where the chicken comes and it's dry as a bone and the sauce is horrible and it's awful.

1:00:21And I really wish that I'd ordered the steak.

1:00:23James Altucher: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 the neural time traveling you talk about also towards the end of the book about decision-making, which is you can 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? Am I 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.

1:00:59James Altucher:And in 10 years, I'm going to be a healthier person with less cancer or whatever. Or you 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. 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 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 rational decision maker is that, so we get really caught up, in the moment.

1:01:39And 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 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 know from the book. So I say, okay, so let's say that you go and you play blackjack and you go with your friends and you're going to play for like two 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,$2 ,000 and it's just because everything went your way.

1:02:13But 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?

1:02:20James Altucher:Right, so you're feeling horrible even though you're up$100. Even though you're up$100. 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 quit and you're kind of sour about it because you're down$2 ,000 because the dealer has just, you know, hits 16, hits a five, hits 16, hits a five, you know, just every single time. And you're down$2 ,000, 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 100.

1:02:52How 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. In one case, you're very sad that you won$100. And in another case, you're quite happy that you lost$100. And that, I think, 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$100 win or the$100 loss?

1:03:30If it happened a year ago.

1:03:32James Altucher:If it happened a year ago, you would just say$100 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 are looking for is to think of ourselves like a happiness stock where we want the slope to have a general upward trend.

1:04:06And we understand that there are gonna be momentary upticks and downticks, but we don't wanna 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 gonna have that upward slope because it's gonna cause us to make really silly decisions. like being super happy that we lost a hundred dollars, which is a little bit crazy.

1:04:30James Altucher:So 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 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.

1:05:02So 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.

1:05:19James Altucher:Basically what you're doing is you're transforming them into a different person, the person they'll be in a month and saying, is it important to that person? I'm getting them to have a conversation with the future version of them.

1:05:45James Altucher:So I'll give you something similar 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. 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. Let's say I 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.

1:06:19James Altucher:Or if somebody's interacting 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 traveling. So I love that. That's not in the book. I wish it were. Well, I'm going to start using the time traveling, which I haven't thought. Well, okay, so we'll exchange because I think situation traveling is also really good. We're like in the same peer group for decision making. I love that. So this goes back to community.

1:06:49So let's add a fourth community. So you talk about community of peers, community 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.

1:07:03James Altucher: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 had 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 - But then you have to get into, there's the danger of it being silly. Like, cause 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.

1:07:40Like 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 in different economic circumstances or 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 sort of taking credit for? What should you say? Well, this was lucky, but within 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?

1:08:19What 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?

1:08:29James Altucher: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 almost academically minded. You were going for a PhD before you became a poker player. But poker itself is unlike a job where every day you go on 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 going to have as much volatility. It does not have as much volatility.

1:09:03James Altucher:But like poker, where I used to be a day trader, for instance, 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 how we feel about ourselves. And there's 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 going to 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.

1:09:37James Altucher: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 both ups and downs. That's why I say a winning day is just as much a hot potato as a losing day. That's right. You know, you can't, if you're gonna glorify one, you're gonna feel horrible at the other. You have to keep it in balance. So I think it has to do with, 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 mean to be winning or losing?

1:10:15So yeah, if we define losing as at the end of the day, I had less money, then we're probably gonna get yanked around. If we define winning as 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 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 learn, right? So whatever's happening, whether I'm having a fluctuation up or a 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.

1:10:57And 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 you're giving me all this positive reinforcement for the fact that I'm not thinking about winning as 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?

1:11:26Or 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 maybe in the moment, remember we talked about temporal discounting in the moment, maybe that makes me feel better in the moment.

1:11:41James Altucher: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 could 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 am I interacting? Am I speaking my own truth on the date? Am I have a little more confidence? Am I really evaluating? Is this the right person for me as opposed to trying to please them?

1:12:17James Altucher:I'm speaking my own autobiography here. I like that though. But I think it applies to how you recast the situation itself if you change the definition of winning. Exactly. 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 'em. And I had been playing that for 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 'em, this particular form of poker.

1:12:50So 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 never played any kind of stud games. So I was playing, you know, for that time, somewhat high stakes in limit Texas hold 'em. Like I would play up to$200 and$400 limit Texas hold 'em if the game came up. The regular game was$50 and$100, about$3 ,000 at stake. But I realized that if I wanted to be putting more at stake, I had to learn stud.

1:13:24studs. So I went off with my money and I started off playing five and ten dollar studs. So to give you a difference in magnitude, in one game, I might have three thousand dollars at stake. In this 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...

1:13:52James Altucher:because 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. I'm playing a completely different game than I've been playing before. Of course I'm playing 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 going to 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 I had...

1:14:22James Altucher:Because you 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, you know, I probably did it about four times as fast. But 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 in going on a date? 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 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.

1:15:08James Altucher:That was 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 that. Right. So it's interesting. 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 is in the book is this idea of being really, really open to dissent.

1:15:48Because 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 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. Particularly in today's world. Particularly in today's world.

1:16:16James Altucher:Your feeds on wherever you're looking are kind of programmed now to agree with you. Right. So you don't see dissent. So here's the biggest 10 ,000-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 the world, probably the better our decision-making is.

1:16:56But 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 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 see, well, how would I actually figure out how to defend that, right?

1:17:26Which isn't that surprising because I imagine you don't have a lot of reason to be defending that particular truth.

1:17:33James Altucher: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, whoever Isaac Newton used to create algebra. I could just take it in one and a half a year and learn it. And that's all fine as 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 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.

1:18:07James Altucher:Like for the things that are not high stakes for you or high stakes for you 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. It's 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 don't know, I'm not sure. It just happens to be a belief of mine. And then what's really good is if somebody says to you, well, why? 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 as uncertain.

1:18:37Yeah. Right? So now you'll actually go and you'll seek out the knowledge to be able to explain it. But most of the time you don't need to and that's totally fine.

1:18:43James Altucher:So you sort of have to pick your spots where you really - You have to pick your spots. Where I'm not sure it does lead to that hunger. So I'm not sure why the quadratic equation is true. But you don't really care. I don't give a shit. Right. But if you're really trying to learn something, right? If I'm really trying to learn it, poker or at sales or in parenting or trying to become I'm a better comic than 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 be the most helpful.

1:19:20I 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 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 things I think that distinguishes experts from other people is that they're much more aware of what they don't know.

1:19:56James Altucher: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 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 somewhat irrational, but 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 that they're part of the conversation.

1:20:33James Altucher:So all of these ideas and techniques apply to parenting as well. I have actually, I think I have the example. Straight up on 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 a lot of 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.

1:21:05I 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, 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 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.

1:21:35So 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 talked to the teacher to try to figure out if there are corrections that you can do on the test? Have you gone and made a meeting with them to make sure that you're keeping up with 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?

1:22:11They now naturally have to go back and think about what could they have done better 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.

1:22:31James Altucher:And in the book, I like how you refer to this as, you know, this is a basic technique in improv. So yes, and. Yes, it's yes, and. So yes, affirm what the situation is, that there's nothing that's going to change the situation. Your beliefs about the situation are going to stay the way they are, 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.

1:23:06So because we have an agreement, if you come to me and you say, oh, that really sucked because the crowd was so bad. We have an agreement. So 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 in 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?

1:23:39What do you think you could do to actually improve that situation? And it's true for adults who aren't in agreement with me also. So I tell a story in the book actually about David David Letterman and Lauren Conrad, which I think is very demonstrative of this idea that 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?

1:24:07James Altucher:That was a great story because basically they were having two different conversations. She was having a conversation of just promoting the 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 does 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, let's say a real discussion. 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.

1:24:38James Altucher:I've never seen either. But I saw this, it happened in 2009 and I happened to see 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 going to file that away. And I started using it in my talks because I thought it would make my talks more fun.

1:25:10So here's the situation. She's on 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 they're causing all sorts of drama for Lauren. And 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 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 Spencer are being mean to me and, you know, Brody's being mean to me.

1:25:44and 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 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? Anyway, 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.

1:26:20I 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 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've been incredibly helpful for her, but they had no agreement to do so.

1:26:59James Altucher: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 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, 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 a rational way, Lauren. So that conversation went completely south.

1:27:35So I say in the book that you want to be really, really careful of letterman-ing 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 say. Wow, you really have a lot of drama in your life, Lauren. What do you think you're going to do to make 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.

1:28:04and we have an agreement to actually pull apart what actually happened and try to figure out what was the crowd and what was you. But most people you're not going to have an agreement with. So it's a lot better to yes end them.

1:28:15James Altucher:I love all these different ways of kind of hacking this 10 ,000 hour role. It's like talking 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, you how, let's say the 10 ,000 hour rule is true and that it 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?

1:28:46And, 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 or whether it works for everything. Cause you know, obviously we can have a long conversation about that. But let's just take that as a construct, you know, this 10 ,000 hours thing. I never really thought of my book as a 10 ,000 hours hack. And I really kind of like -

1:29:12James Altucher:I think it's much more than that, but yeah. No, no, I know that. I mean, I get that. I'm mixing it with your career and performance. 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 I wrote, which I really 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.

1:29:43So I just really liked the frame. So I just wanted to, I just want to tell you I'm very appreciative of it.

1:29:47James Altucher:I'm obsessed with that topic. So that's when 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. And then B, how to improve as fast as possible at anything I'm interested in. I'm not 20, I'm 50. 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...

1:30:24James Altucher:Like you mentioned violin versus poker. So you obviously believe in some degree that talent plays a role as well. For sure. And I think there's difference between 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?

1:30:56But I also think that There are certain training methods you can learn. There are certain ways that you can sort 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 knock 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 hack it like a hundred yard dash, right? 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.

1:31:27I haven't thought really deeply about what are the different types of activities and how would it apply to different types of activities, right?

1:31:33James Altucher: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, without really thinking about the meta learning of learning, I think you could probably take 60 % to 80 % off. I like that. So someone with talent at poker could probably, and who's young, could probably, you know, within two years probably be at least good enough to sit at a high stakes table.

1:32:10James Altucher:Maybe not win all the time. Yeah. But, you know, I remember, what was the guy? Dan Negrino, you know, who's a great poker player. But I remember like 20 years ago, he was a young kid and already he was like shooting out of the cannon as a great poker player. So he had enormous talent and he understood some fundamental things and he had a whole crew he was working with. So I think like 60, 80%, I think talent is often exhibited if you have a lot of passion for something. Right. I'm not going to 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.

1:32:44Yeah, actually, yeah, you're going to be more willing to put in your hours at something that you feel talented at because you're going to be getting a lot more positive reinforcement and you're going to progress faster, I think. Yeah, so I mean, I think that 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 going to be a lot better than mine.

1:33:03James Altucher:I guess, I mean, look, it doesn't matter ultimately because again, it's just 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 form a really good community, reframe the way you think so that you're embracing uncertainty, you're thinking about, I'm not sure, you're trying to invite people to be your collaborators, 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.

1:33:38And 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 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.

1:34:16And now instead of catching five learning opportunities, I 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 that that's actually a relief. I think that it allows you to have a lot more compassion for yourself that, look, I'm never going to be perfect at this stuff.

1:34:57I 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?

1:35:14James Altucher:So it's almost like not 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, 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? 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. It's kind of like this idea of, you know what, I can suck at this.

1:35:48And as long as I'm sucking less, it's all good. Because those small changes are going to have such a huge effect on what the probability, you know, sort of having good outcomes over your life, right? 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, whatever that is, is just going to be so much higher because it compounds over time. So you can think about like as if your decisions are a normal distribution, right?

1:36:22So 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 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?

1:36:54Because 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'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.

1:37:06James Altucher:I like how you take compassion for yourself and turn it into like a normal distribution in statistics. So you draw 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 said earlier, I've used this already, this book.

1:37:38I'm so happy.

1:37:39James Altucher:In three totally separate situations. And I was able to recognize, oh, I'm just used a technique from the book. So the book's Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke. I hope you come on the podcast again next time you're in town. Anytime. This is so fun. How often are you 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. What's a Ryan Holiday goal? Well, he's talked to you like six times, so now I have goals. You know, also, when I first started this podcast, like at the end of 2013 or early 2014, Ryan Holiday was the first producer of this podcast.

1:38:15Oh, really? Oh, that's so cool.

1:38:17James Altucher:Because we all, 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. I love that. So it was interesting. So let me tell you a secret about Ryan Holiday. I won't tell anybody. Nobody will listen to this. Ryan Holiday actually, he doesn't know it, I 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 and Ego is 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.

1:39:00You'd know what kind of the point of that was. Would it be better if you read all the stuff that came before 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.

1:39:22James Altucher:Well, 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 attention spans anymore. Like they're YouTube people, they're Instagram people. 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.

1:39:58And usually you're

1:39:59James Altucher: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 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 was just an interesting little 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 perspective taking.

1:40:28James Altucher:To represent the idea. Exactly. Because that's a very strong technique in a lot of nonfiction right now. 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 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 the gratitude that I have for those two books, which are, I mean, first I just love the books in and of themselves. I mean, I thought they were amazing. But also the structure that they gave me that I could really pull into this book, I think made this book so much better.

1:41:04So I'm actually really grateful to him.

1:41:06James Altucher: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. Thanks once again. Thank you.

1:41:37James Altucher:Hello, and welcome to Pluto Phone. If you know the name of the movie you'd like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto TV, where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch Anchorman, The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Fantastic. The Matrix Trilogy. Welcome to the real world. Mean Girls. Shut up. Titanic. I'm the king of the world. And so much more. For showtimes, press nothing. They're free, 24-7. That is so fetch. On Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.