Tag: Podcast

Slate Money on Thinking in Bets with former professional poker player Annie Duke, why Elon Musk should get some sleep, and the thinking behind billionaire disaster planners.

In this show, you’ll have your mind blown by Annie’s insights regarding following conventional wisdom (even if it doesn’t make sense), focusing too much on the results (and not enough on the right choice), and accepting a level of uncertainty to gain a HUGE advantage over your competition. Annie’s theories on “thinking in bets” are designed to help others navigate a world where we can’t be certain of an outcome, but still, come out on top over time.

Annie sits down with Michael McCarthy from The Artful Trader podcast.

Do you and your team want to get better at making decisions that are not the status quo? Would you like your team to take the right risks and encourage a culture that learns from success and failure? Did you know that being too results-oriented can get in the way of making the highest equity decisions? If so, this is the podcast for you. Annie Duke, professional speaker, and Decision Strategist will share her research and help you learn how to create a process that helps you make better decisions while encouraging learning and risk-taking. She helps people have uncertainty with confidence.

Annie has mixed her poker insights with cognitive psychology in her new book, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. The book is an amazing guide to making better decisions. It’s filled with stories from Annie’s life and offers new ways to change our thinking to get better outcomes in business and in life.

I have wanted to do this interview for a long time. On this episode, I am thrilled to have Annie Duke, former professional poker player and author of the new book, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.

In this episode, we discuss how to make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We look at “the worst call in the history of football,” discuss examples from life, business and even high stakes poker to understand how to make the best possible decisions in a world filled with unknowns. What exactly is a good decision? Is that different than a good outcome? We look at this key question – and uncover the wisdom hidden in the reality that these two things might be completely different. All this and more with our guest Annie Duke. 

We make millions of decisions over the course of our lives. Most of these seem to be small and of little consequence, and so we make our choices and act with little care or thought. Other decisions require more care and consideration, as their significance will, for better or worse, have a lasting impact on our life: What job offer to accept, what life partner to choose, how to invest in retirement.

Annie is best known for her career as a professional poker player, where she has won a World Series of Poker bracelet, the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions, and the NBC National Poker Heads-Up Championship. She has more than 16 money finishes and has won more than $4 million in tournament poker.

How is poker relevant to decision-making in business and life, and to thinking better? Why is a former poker professional in great demand as a consultant to investment banks, hedge funds, and venture capital funds? In one line: poker is about decisions that are probabilistic and made with imperfect information. This is what life and business strategy are about – making good decisions in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environment.