A quick word from our sponsor today. Hello and welcome to another episode of All the Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money and travel all while spending less and saving more. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to have you on my journey to optimize my own life by sitting down each week with the world's best experts to learn the strategies, tactics and frameworks that shape their success.

Today, I'm talking with Annie Duke, a former professional poker player turned bestselling author and what I'll call a professional decision maker. Her 2018 bestseller, Thinking in Bets, Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, explored how life is more like poker than chess and has helped countless people make better decisions.

And her latest book, Quit, The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, is all about learning to quit well, which is a skill that can not only be learned, but that should be learned and practiced by just about everyone. We're going to talk about making good decisions, getting better at quitting, but more specifically, why learning the difference between luck and the quality of your decisions is so important and how that can improve your life and your career.

Why just looking at the outcome of decisions isn't enough. What forces work against good quitting behavior and why so many people struggle with the decision to walk away? How to use kill criteria to determine when to quit a project, a job or some other endeavor and a lot more.

So let's get going. Annie, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. You say there are only two factors in how life turns out. Luck and the quality of your decisions. You don't have control over luck, but you do have control over the quality of the decisions you make.

How can people tell the difference between the two and more importantly, improve the quality of the decisions they make? Yeah, so that's like the sixty four thousand dollar question. So let's just first of all say, like when you make a decision, there's two forces that are going to influence that outcome of the decision, right?

One is luck and one is the quality of the decision itself. Now, luck is a form of uncertainty that exerts itself on the outcome, right? So I could make a choice that's going to work out ninety five percent of the time. That means by definition, five percent of the time I'm going to observe a bad outcome and I have no control over when I'm going to observe that five percent.

What's important to good decision making is to accept that luck exists and try to see it clearly. So what we want to do is know that this is a ninety five percent to five percent good to bad ratio on the outcomes that I could see and not believe something else.

So if we forecast that it will work out ninety five percent of the time, but it's actually only going to work out sixty five percent of the time, that would be a problem. So it's not about like controlling luck because you can't definitionally. It's about being able to forecast appropriately how luck might exert its influence, what the influence of luck on the outcome might be.

And we know from a lot of work in cognitive bias, for example, that there's all sorts of different ways in which we don't see luck very well. The illusion of control. We think we have more control over the way that things are going to turn out than we do actually.

Or over optimism and overconfidence, for example, are ways in which we will just sort of misassign the probabilities of different outcomes that might occur in the future. So that's the luck side. So part of a good quality decision is to be a good forecaster of these things, to start to see the outcomes in the way that they actually are true to reality, what ground truth actually is, as opposed to what our brains sort of think they are.

So that's piece number one. Piece number two, the other form of uncertainty that is going to exert itself on the quality of the outcome that we might observe, and in fact, the quality of the decision that we're making is just hidden information. So for most things that we're deciding about, we know very little in comparison to all there is to be known.

The stuff we know fits on like the head of a pin. The stuff we don't know is like the size of the whole universe. I'm sure you've had that feeling, Chris, of saying, I wish I knew then what I know now all the time. Right. So that's just hidden information.

You're just sort of seeing the influence of hidden information that you sort of realize, if I knew then what I know now, I may have made a different choice. Why? Because when we're thinking about those forecasts that we make, right? I'm considering a decision and I'm thinking about what the possible outcomes are.

Each of those outcomes has a payoff associated with it. Each of those outcomes has a probability associated with it. So when we think about our beliefs, the things that we believe to be true, they're determining for us how we think any option that we're considering might turn out right.

What we believe to be true of the world is going to influence what we think the possible outcomes are of any decision that we might be considering, what the payoffs are associated with those and what the probability of those are. And in fact, our beliefs are going to inform other things as well, like what options we might actually consider.

We're usually considering more than one options. They're going to inform what we think our goals are. What is the point that we want to be heading toward? So beliefs change over time, not as much as they should, but they do change over time. And those beliefs are always going to be imperfect.

There's always going to be inaccuracies in the things that we believe because we're partially behind the veil of ignorance. We don't know a whole lot. So that's the second way in which we can think about how do we actually improve the forecast? We can consider from the option that we're making a decision about going forward, seeing the luck very clearly.

But then we can take a step back and say, well, if beliefs are at the center of that, they're the foundation, really, of every decision we make. That's a place that we can really start to focus our energy on improving the quality of the beliefs that we have. Is there a common decision you think people make where this kind of really comes to life?

Well, it's like every decision, but one of the ones that I love to think about is hiring. In hiring, we can see all sorts of different things at play, but we can see a basic decision. You have some idea of what your goal is, what you want to hire for, what your values are, so that's going to be the rec, the job description.

But that's going to have to do with things like who's the person that you think is going to be right for the role? What's the role that you think you need to be hiring for? Which is sometimes not explored enough. Then you get lots of resumes in and you start to try to fit the resumes to what you think that you want.

And those are different options that you're considering, different people that you're thinking about hiring. There's other options you're considering, like what's the comp going to be? What's going to be the balance of, say, equity to cash? The balance of guaranteed comp versus bonus, things like that. But we'll put those aside and just think of the options, which are the people that you're considering hiring into the role.

And then for any of those people that you're considering, whether you know it or not, you're thinking about what are the chances this person is going to work out? What's the chances they're not? Now, we don't often do that explicitly, but it's an implicit in any decision that we make.

And there's a lot of luck that influences the outcome. So let's think about that and the hidden information. In terms of the hidden information, as you're considering each of those people to fill the open rack. Well, OK, you have a CV. You have a few references and a couple of interviews.

They haven't worked at your company for a long time. You don't really know if they're going to be a good fit. You don't know really what their work ethic is. You have a little bit of idea, but you don't really find out most of the things that you would want to know until after you've decided whether to hire them or not.

And separate from that, all the people that you say no to, you have no idea how they would have turned out. So we can see this hidden information problem. I sort of say like with hiring, it's kind of like marrying someone after a couple of dates and two friends telling you they're cool.

People do that, by the way. And what do we all think when they do that? Wow, you're kind of nuts. You know, when they're like, oh, I'm in love. And your first date was a week ago. You're heading to Vegas, really? But that's kind of what hiring is. It's like eloping to Vegas after a week because of the hidden information.

And then what happens is that you find things out after the fact and you say, I wish I had known that before I hired them. And then in terms of luck, when you hire anybody, the probability of the person working out, it depends on sort of how you cut the data, is around 50/50.

And that's just a lot of luck, right? You sort of think they're going to be a fit. Do they turn out to be a fit? Does something happen in their personal life like after you hire them that you couldn't have known about beforehand? So and so forth. It's just a very kind of noisy decision.

Now, you can do things to improve the quality of the decision, to increase the probability of getting a good outcome to somewhere between 60 and 65 percent. But that's about as far as you can push it. It's just too uncertain. So hiring is one of those places where it's like super clear that you can see the problems with this kind of decision making.

Investing is another. But there's obviously a huge influence of luck on the way that your investments turn out. Just look at the pandemic. Nobody had control over that. And it had all sorts of effects on the stock market supply chain issues, which I don't control. What are those things?

You said there are a few things you can do. I now feel like I totally get why the decision might be outside of my control. But it seems like there's a part of it that is in your control. Oh, there is. So the first thing you can do is make yourself familiar with a concept called base rates.

This is really important. So if we go to that first thing that I said, that we're not very good at understanding what the probability of any event occurring is, know your base rates. A base rate is how often something occurs in a situation similar to the one that you're considering.

Simple. All right. So I'll give you a really simple example of a base rate. So let's just take your morning routine, right? You're trying to decide when to wake up. Because you need to decide how long does it take me to get ready in the morning so that I know when I need to get into my car in order to get to work on time.

So this is something that people do, you know, every morning, at least before the pandemic, before we're all online. There's a whole bunch of base rates involved in there, right? So one is how long does it, on average, take me to get ready? OK, so I could figure that out.

I could track that for you over a certain period of time and figure out, on average, how long it takes you to get ready. I could even figure out a lower bound and an upper bound. That's going to tell you sort of like something about risk. What's the volatility?

And then you can sort of figure out for yourself how much risk you want to take on, like how important is it for you to get to where you're going exactly on time? You would want to be at sort of account for the upper bound of how long it takes you to get ready.

If you have some slack in there, you could account for the lower bound of how long it takes you to get ready. But we can figure out, on average, how long does it take you to get ready? And in fact, when you're deciding when to set your alarm, that's included in your decision, just not explicitly, right?

Then when we think about, OK, I've got to get in my car and figure out when do I need to be in my car in order to go to work? That's another base rate that we're considering, which is, on average, how long does it take me to get to work on the route that I'm considering taking?

So that's for you personally. We could figure out those base rates. But there's all sorts of base rates in the world as well. I gave you one just a second ago, depending on how you cut the data, your chances of successful hire are about 50/50. That's a base rate.

So when I'm sitting here thinking in what we talked about, like being overoptimistic, illusion of control, overconfidence, those kinds of things, when I'm saying I'm a great person at hiring, when I talk to someone, I can look into their eyes and I can figure out whether they're going to be a good fit or not.

And I'm great at this. So you say to me, well, what do you think the probability is when you hire for this role that it's going to work out? And I say, oh, I think it's going to work out 90% of the time. Well, that's too far away from the base rate to be sane.

So what base rates do is they give us a starting point for the forecast that we're going to make, that forecast of what's the probability that things will work out one way or another. And if I know that the base rate is about 50/50 and I'm estimating that I'm going to successfully hire 90% of the time, I need to discipline myself to that base rate.

Now, maybe I am better than the average bear. But I can't be that much better than the average bear. Right. That's the thing. So maybe I can say, oh, I'm great, I'll be 60%. But notice how far that is away from 90%. So it's just disciplining you to the base right now.

I actually do research on this with Phil Tetlock, who wrote Super Forecasting, along with his collaborator and wife, Barb Mellors. And this is the single most important thing we found in getting people to be better estimators of probabilities and outcomes in the future is to teach them about race rates and start to discipline their guests, give them that starting point of a base rate.

So that's the first thing that you can do for anything you're considering. Try to figure out what's the base rate, what's the appropriate reference class. So if I want to figure out how long it's going to take me to get to work and I live in Philadelphia, I shouldn't ask how long it takes people to get to work in Cincinnati.

It doesn't have anything to do with me. So you want to get the right group that you're comparing to. If I'm thinking about hiring, I could look at averages for all hires. But if, say, a SaaS startup, I can look at average turnover at SaaS startups. Right. And that gives me a really good base rate to start from.

So that's piece number one is know your base rate. So that has to do with seeing that look really clearly. Piece number two is improve the quality of the information that you're getting. And the way to do that, honestly, the best way that you can do that is to start gathering independent viewpoints on the problem that you're considering.

OK, so we can go back to the hiring example. When you're thinking about creating the job description, figure out a group of people that are going to be on the hiring committee and are appropriate to be giving input into what you think that role requires. So let's say we're talking about like a C-level executive.

Let's say it's like a CRO. We would want the CMO to be involved, certainly the CEO. You may want the chief product officer involved. You want customer success involved. You want people who are doing enablement, so on and so forth. So you want to get the people who are sort of like in that function and then the other leaders that person is going to be interacting with.

So you figure out who the people are that you think should give input on this. And when it's a personal decision, let's say I'm trying to decide if I should buy a house, do I build a group of people that I get feedback from? Or how do you apply that to a normal, non-professional decision where there's teams involved?

Yes, 100%, you should find people that you get opinions from. But here's the really important thing. You need to ask them independently and asynchronously. For C-level, you would do a little more work, write a job description, describe this person to a recruiter, and you're asking them to do this all independently.

What are the near term challenges, near term opportunities, far term challenges, things like that. So you're just asking for tell me independently what you think this role should be. Now, why are you asking them independently? Because otherwise they're going to influence each other. OK, so when you're asking for your own self, you want to use that same principle of how do I get independent information?

And that's to say you give them a bunch of facts. I'm thinking about buying a house. I assume you're currently renting in that case. I'm currently renting. This is the location I rent in. This is how much money I pay and rent in utilities. This is how much I'm making.

This is the estimate that I have of my job stability. Here's the area that I'm thinking about buying in. Whatever you give them the facts. Now, notice nowhere have I said, but here's my concern. Like renting gives me all sorts of flexibility. If I get a house, then I'm kind of tied down to that house.

And what if I don't like it? And I'm thinking that maybe given the percentage of my total net worth that I would have to put into the house, it's too much, which is the way that I would normally ask. Like if you're sort of left to your own devices, that's the way you ask things.

In the simplest sense of if I say to you, I thought Queen's Gambit was such a great show, what did you think? You've done that before. We all do that. Right. Instead, what you want to say is, did you watch Queen's Gambit? And you say, yes, I assume. Yes.

And then I say, what did you think of it? And I completely withhold my opinion from you. Now, this is really hard to do. It's incredibly unnatural. We think about our opinion as being important data for the other person to have. But the issue is that the opinion that I'm about to offer you is actually the information that I'm trying to get from you.

So if I give you my opinion first, I'm not going to get your opinion in a way that's actually going to be helpful for me. So instead, what I want to do is just offer you up the facts that you need in order to give me a good opinion and then just get your opinion back in a uncontaminated way.

So when I say I'm currently renting and this is how much my rent is and this is my family situation and this is how much money I have saved and this how much I make and I'm thinking about buying a house, I would just love your opinion on that.

Tell me what you know. Tell me what you think. Right. So I've given you the facts that you need, and now you can tell me all sorts of things about what you think. And what you want to do is get a good range of people who have kind of differing schools of thought, if possible, and find out what they think and then explore that.

And then you'll have collected all the data. You can go back to them and say, well, I had another opinion that was kind of saying this. I'd love to hear what you think about that. But you've allowed them to express themselves in a way where they don't have to disagree with you.

They don't know what you already think, because mostly when we're having conversations, we're just trying to affirm the other person. So even if I did disagree with you or you disagreed with me and you thought the Queen's Gambit was a terrible show, you would say it in a super nice way instead of me just saying, what do you think of the Queen's Gambit?

And you're like, oh, that's horrible. It's much more stressful on the other side. Someone asks you a question with no opinion. You're like, oh, I don't know what to say. I don't want to offend. You have to give people permission to do that. Say, look, I'm really trying to just get your opinion here.

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- So understanding the base rates so you have a sense of what you're expecting, which I guess we can get into how that might affect resulting in the future, knowing that you had an opinion and you weren't as far off and you don't judge your decision incorrectly. And then asking people with a more objective manner to get their feedback, any other big things to make a better decision?

- As much as possible, try to write things down that you're deciding about. Get other people, trusted advisors, particularly people who have different points of view with you are really important. Here's a really important one, you have to give permission. So when we're trying to seek information from other people, we think that permission is implied for them to say whatever to us, but we have to actually offer that permission and they have to be willing to give it to us.

I'm sure this has happened to you. You fire someone or you break up with somebody or whatever. And as soon as you do that, you have a whole bunch of friends who say, "Oh, I'm so glad you did that. "I thought you should have done that like six months ago." Has that one happened to you?

- Well, that one hasn't 'cause my wife and I started dating, oh gosh, 2004. So it's been a long time since I've had that conversation. I'm sure it has. - Or you fire someone or you quit your job or-- - Yeah, for sure. - Whatever. And people say, "I bet you might've said it to somebody when they break up.

"Like, oh, I'm so happy 'cause really, "wish you would've done that sooner." So this is like a really common thing that happens. "Oh, I'm so happy you quit your job. "Like you were so miserable every single day. "I knew you should have done that like a long time ago." And your thought when people say that to you is, "Okay, but like, why didn't you tell me?" And the answer is because there wasn't any explicit permission given.

So in order to really find out what somebody thinks, you have to give them permission to say what they think. - I saw this so much in venture capital that I would be in meetings with other investors and they'd give feedback to founders saying, "Oh, I think it's pretty good, but it's not a good fit." And then after they'd turn to me and be like, "God, that company's horrible, it's terrible." - Right.

- I was like, "We should have just told them that." And I think everyone feels bad telling them that. And now every time someone asks me for feedback on their startup, I'm like, "How honest do you want me to be?" Like, you want me to tell you to quit?

So I guess if you're on the other side, you can also invite someone to invite you to be more honest and give critical feedback. - I actually do that with my friends. I'm like, "Are we having a conversation where you want advice or where you're just offloading your emotions?" 'Cause I wanna know, right?

Because sometimes they don't really want your advice. I think that's just really important. I think Ron Conway, who founded SV Angel, is such a good example of doing this really well, being a very good decision coach to somebody. So he would actually tell the companies what he thought of them.

But he would sit down and he'd basically say, "I think we could admit this isn't working." As opposed to, "Eh, it seems pretty good. Just keep going." He'd be like, "Look, it's not working." Invariably, the founders would push back on him and say, "No, but I know we can turn it around." So it wasn't so much disagreement that it wasn't working, 'cause I think everybody knows when things aren't working very well, but it was always, "No, but we can turn it around." So he was trying to coach them into letting go.

And founders are gritty by nature. Of course they don't wanna let go. So when they said, "No, but I think I can turn it around," his tactic was not to disagree with them, which I think would have just caused a rift, but to say, "Okay, tell me exactly what turning it around looks like.

Let's think about the next two months. You're saying you're gonna turn this around. What exactly does that look like?" And try to figure out what those benchmarks are. Now, he would sit down and do that with the founder so that the founder now owned that, sort of along with Ron Conway.

And this is a really good trick for decision-making, is that often your decision-making is at its worst when you're trying to make the decision right then, like when you're actually facing the decision down. And this is something that really improves decision quality is to think in advance. As much as possible, do advanced planning on your decisions.

It's much more efficient. It creates much better decisions. So that's essentially what he's doing in this moment. He's saying, "Let's think about two months from now, or three months from now, the end of the next quarter. Let's think about what this is gonna look like when you've turned it around." And then basically just set a set of benchmarks.

And then in three months, you can sit down with them and say, "But you haven't hit them." And we agreed that's what it looked like. And that actually makes those decisions a lot cleaner. And you can do that with your personal decisions as well. We're all in these situations, like you have a relationship where it's just not going well, but you feel like you can turn it around.

You feel like you have so much time invested and you do love the person, but you're unhappy. You can make it change. At that moment, say, "How long am I willing to tolerate the status quo?" The way that the relationship is right now or worse. What do I need to do, do I think, in order to turn this around?

And then however long that is that you're willing to tolerate the status quo, figure out at the end of that time period, say it's six months, what does change look like? What will it look like when things have actually turned around here? You can do this for a job, a job that you're miserable in.

What do I need to do? What will it look like that it's actually turned around? What will have changed? And the reason that you need to do that is because when you're actually facing down the decision, that's when you're most likely to be rationalizing things away. That's when your forecasts are gonna be really inaccurate.

That's when the things that you want to be true of the world are going to influence your actions the most. It's when everything kind of goes to crap. And the way that I try to put it to people to get them to understand this is that you can say all you want that you don't wanna eat sugar, but when there's a cupcake right in front of you, it's really hard to say no.

And that's true not just of like cupcakes or pizza or whatever, you know, it's sitting right in front of you. It's also true when you're facing a breakup or you're facing having to fire an employee, which isn't fun, or you're facing wanting to quit your job or break up with a friend or whatever.

These things are very hard to do because it's that moment where we're worried about all the time we've put into something. It's that moment where you go from in a state of failing to having failed. Because as long as you keep going, you might turn it around and not have to actually sort of put that failure on the books.

Like if you buy a stock and you bought it at 50 and it goes to 30, as long as you hold, you could get back to 50. - But selling now is accepting that. - It's accepting that. And that's really hard for us. So that's why we want to think about both, how do we ask for permission for people to tell us the truth?

How do we explicitly ask people if they want the truth? So we need to have both of those things going on. And then how do we also figure out how the person can receive the truth? And that's true whether we're coaching somebody else or we're thinking about how we can do this for ourselves.

And one of the best ways for us to receive the truth is for us to think about the truth as something in the future. - So in the investment example, this is a very common thing. I have some stock and I know I should probably sell it now. I wanna make sure it goes up.

In advance, obviously it would have been great if I had said, you know what? If this gets to this point, I'm gonna sell it. And you could even go as far as to set up the order so that you force yourself to do it. - Yes, you can put in a stop loss order.

- But let's say I didn't do that. How do we get past that point? What can you tell someone or coach someone through it? - Just do it now. - Sometimes that's hard to just do it. - No, no, I don't mean sell it now. Put in the order now.

But let's say I'm in the moment. - What does it need to be trading at in a week? - So you're saying if you're worried now, then set it for a week from now. Don't try to make the decision today. Try to make a smaller future decision even though you're dealing with it in the present.

- So look, in an ideal world, you would do it right now. And one of the ways that you can get to doing it right now is to ask yourself what you could do with that $30. So this is a helpful tool. So you bought it at 50, it's now at 30.

You don't want to sell it because you're worried about losing the $20. But that $20 is already lost. So this is something called the sunk cost fallacy. It's not just about stocks. It's about I'm in a job and I wanna quit, but what about all the time and effort I've put into the job and the onboarding and the training, and then I'll have just wasted all of that.

It's true of relationships. It's true of employees that we've hired. So it's basically true of everything, right? It's true if you buy a concert ticket, you've now paid for the concert ticket, there's planning that's gone involved. When it's freezing cold and the driving conditions aren't even safe for you to go to the concert, you still go because you don't wanna have wasted the ticket, even though it's a ridiculous decision to go.

Okay, so we know that this is a problem. So one of the things to do is to shift the frame. And instead of saying, but I don't wanna lose my $20, say, what could I do with that $30? So that can be helpful in the moment because what that does is it focuses you on the opportunity cost of the capital or the opportunity cost of your time, so on and so forth.

Like, what could I use that $30 for? What could I use this time for? - That assumes that you've made the decision that you know you need to sell it, you're just struggling with it. Let's say you work at Google and you have a ton of Google stock. And I would often tell people as a financial advisor, I'd say, you probably don't want all of your money tied in the same company.

And people would say, okay, well, I'm trying to figure out if I should sell it. And I would ask them, well, let's pretend there was a mistake and it all got sold. Would you wanna buy it all? And you said in the book that that kind of Jedi mind trick doesn't really work.

- No. - So I'm very curious what we should do instead, or maybe why it doesn't work. - There's two things that you can do instead. One is advanced planning combined with a pre-commitment contract. So essentially you wanna set up kill criteria. What could I observe in the future that would make me want to sell this?

Sometimes you'll discover, oh, that's the state of the world today, and you may sell. But just saying like, if I were fresh to this decision, what would I do doesn't really help you. So the first thing is that you can do this advanced planning. You can set kill criteria, just what we've been talking about.

What are the signals that I'm gonna see in the future that would tell me that I should walk away? And this is actually gonna get you to walk away sooner. You won't be perfect, but it will help you do it. So if you talk about like a stop loss order, for example, people cancel them all the time.

But the thing is not everybody does. And I might cancel some stop loss orders, but not others. And that means at least I'm selling some things sooner than I otherwise would have. So that's good. So a little bit of progress goes a long way, but we wanna always be thinking about kill criteria.

So that's like, I'm so miserable in my job, but I don't wanna quit because maybe I have equity in it or whatever, but it's like the cost benefit doesn't look good to me right now. What would have to happen over the next three months in my work that would tell me that I've turned things around?

What would I see that would tell me things are still bad? Write that list of things down and commit to an action associated with any of those things. I think one of the simplest examples of a kill criteria is when people mountain climb, there's something called the turnaround time.

So when you're climbing Everest, they have turnaround times for each day's climb. So there's base camp one, two, three, and four. Four is when you would actually head toward the summit, but you have to sort of go up and down in between those camps in order to get acclimated to the altitude.

And for any climb that you do on the day, including summit day, they have a turnaround time, which is set because they don't want you to descend in darkness. So for example, on summit day, when you leave camp four, the turnaround time is 1 p.m. And what that means is that if I'm not at a certain point at 1 p.m., then I must turn around.

Now, why do you set those times? Well, because of summit fever, right? Because we know that people will continue in very bad circumstances up to the summit, even when visibility is bad or the climbing conditions aren't good or there's a snowstorm, there's famous books written about it. John Krakauer, "Into Thin Air," talking about a year when a whole bunch of people got injured and like four people died because they just continued up to the summit.

So those turnaround times are meant to make it much more likely that you're actually gonna turn around when it's no longer safe to be climbing, knowing that when you're facing that decision down, you're not gonna be particularly good at it. So that's piece number one is think in advance and set turnaround times for yourself, basically.

Thing number two is get a good coach. So when you're coaching people about Google and their stock, you're giving them an outside perspective that's more likely to get them to do it today. So notice they're not saying for themselves, "What would I do in this situation?" That's not really the important thing that's going on there.

The important thing is they're getting somebody's perspective who's been there, done that, who kind of thinks about equity, who's offering them a perspective that's really important, where they're getting advice that would be similar to the advice they would give somebody if they could get out of their own head.

So that is really helpful, is to get yourself a quitting coach, which is what you're saying to them there, right? So that's offering them that perspective that allows them also to sort of get out of the moment. What Daniel Kahneman says, the Nobel laureate is, "Don't make a decision when you're in it." Okay, so notice both of these things are trying to get you to not be in it.

One is to get you to think about the future. The other is to have somebody looking in from the outside 'cause they're not in it, to see the way it looks to somebody else. Or we could think about it a different way, the way it would look if you were standing in their shoes.

Now, the best thing to do is to combine the two, which is what Ron Conway does. So he acts as a quitting coach. He tells them, "Things aren't really working out here, or I think this would be a good decision." But when they disagree, he then turns to kill criteria and coaches them through that.

- Is there something to look for in a good quitting coach, like a particular profile of a friend or a colleague? - Yeah, I love the way that Kahneman put it to me, "Find somebody who loves you, but doesn't care much about hurt feelings in the moment." So his quitting coach is Richard Thaler.

He has a Nobel Laureate for his quitting coach. - Most people listening don't have that luxury. - No, I don't. But what's he saying there? "Find someone who loves you, but doesn't care much about hurt feelings in the moment." You need someone who really has your best interest at heart.

This is really important. - To be clear, it's not your hype person. It's not the person you call who's always pumping you up and giving you compliments. It's almost like the exact opposite of that. - Someone who really cares about how you do in life, who really is rooting for you, but isn't concerned about hurt feelings in the moment.

Because why don't we tell somebody the things that we see? Because we're afraid they'll be sad, right? Who wants to deliver the news to somebody when you're talking about the VCs who are like, "Yeah, it's pretty good. I think you're getting there with the product market fit." And then the person walks out of the room and they're like, "That's just a dead company walking." Right?

And it's like, "Oh, hold on. Why didn't you tell them? Because they don't want to hurt their feelings. They don't want to be like the Debbie Downer character from "SNL." But the problem is they're doing a tremendous amount of harm to those founders, right? That's the problem is we think that we're sparing them harm.

We think that we're being kind by not telling them the truth right now. But what we're actually doing is harming them because the founders aren't getting feedback that they need to get, right? So there's all sorts of things that could come from that feedback. One is they could stop.

They could return the capital to the investors. That's a good thing. That's capital that can be used for other opportunities that might be better, right? They can free up their time. Anybody who's a founder is, for the most part, super smart, super driven, really gritty, right? And their time is incredibly valuable.

And if they're spending time on something that isn't worth that time, then you are doing them harm by not letting them know that, so they could switch and turn their attention to something better, something more worth their time and their brainpower. And then the other thing is that it's a real disservice to their employees because the people who are working at a startup are generally working for very low cash comp, but lots of equity.

So once you determine that the equity isn't worth their time, you ought to free them up. And what's interesting is that founders will often say, "I owe it to my employees to keep going." And it's like, no, but once you've decided that the equity isn't worth their time, you owe it to them to let them go so that they can go spend their time on something that might actually be world-changing, where the equity might really matter.

'Cause there's only two reasons that people are willing to do this because they wanna change the world or they think the equity is gonna be worth a lot, or both. So once you've figured out that none of those things are true, let them go. So when the VC is trying to spare their feelings, look at all the harm that's coming from that.

You're allowing someone to be a dead company walking for however long until they can't raise another round. That's months and months, sometimes years, that you're trapping people in a losing endeavor when you see something else. And so when you're looking for a quitting coach, this has to do with, first of all, that permission giving.

You have to be clear with the person that you want to hear the truth. And then you need to go find someone who really has your long-term best interest at heart, is willing to say the hard things to you because they love you. - I have a few people like that, for some decisions.

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So, please consider supporting those who support us. I briefly wanna go back in time to talk about base rates for a second, 'cause I just thought it was- - Okay, 'cause I love base rates. It's like my favorite topic, for real. - When I think about base rates, it reminds me of the whole premise of thinking in bets, which really brought to life the idea of asking someone to want to bet.

We think of these beliefs, we have these ideas that we think are so certain and we're so confident, I'm gonna hire someone, they're gonna be the best, is really just thinking about everything in life as a bet and challenging yourself to put certainties around things, even mundane, silly decisions.

The best way to rewire how this all works in your head? - Oh, I think so, absolutely. So, here's the thing. When I say, "Do you want to bet?" All I'm doing is making you examine the assumptions that are going into your statement. Listen, I know this person's gonna work out.

I'm like 90% sure. Do you want to bet? - One for my wife and I is always just like remembering something. I'm like, I'm totally sure that our daughter's preschool is starting next week. - Do you want to bet? - My wife didn't ask that, but if she had, I would've been like, "Oh, I don't know if I wanna put all my money on the line." - Because what it makes you think about is, there's a couple things.

Well, what does the person who's betting me know that I don't know? So, in some sense, when I say, "Want to bet?" I'm acting a little bit as a coach to you. 'Cause I'm telling you that I have a perspective that is different from yours. If I'm willing to bet, that means that I'm saying that I believe something different than you.

So, it's automatically making you start to think like, "Well, what's a different way to look at this?" And then you have to start examining like, "Well, exactly how sure am I of this?" My husband and I talk like this all the time. Generally, where it's like, "Well, what's the price?" That's what we end up doing, which is just a way to say, "What's the probability?" We don't think about bets as just dollar for dollar.

Let's say that it's an election. I live in Pennsylvania. So, let's say you say like, "I'm sure John Fetterman's gonna win the election." And someone says, "Want to bet?" You could immediately say, "Yes." But then the response would be, "Well, what's the price? Are you willing to lay me a price?

Are you giving me a price?" As an example, if I say to you, "I'll bet $10 for every dollar that you bet," I'm telling you that I'm very certain that I'm right. 'Cause I'm risking a lot compared to what I can win. But if I say, "No, no, no, no, no." If I say I'm 90% sure of something, I should be willing to lay you nine to one.

$9 for every one. But as soon as I'm like, "Okay, I'll take the nine to one." And I go, "Wait, no. No, no, no, no." Like even money. Then what I'm saying is actually, I think it's 50/50. And I wasn't really thinking about it. It's like a good way to be like interacting.

I can tell you that I do this with little things and big things and whatever. It's actually kind of fun. Once you start like, "Well, what price do you wanna lay?" And we always bet a dollar. And it's really fun. But I think that the thing that's really important about the betting, and this is so crucial to good decision-making, is that it forces you to make the things that are implicit in the decision you're making explicit.

The simplest example is one of the things that is always implicit in the decision you're making is your forecast of the probability of different things occurring. In other words, whether you know it or not, base rates are part of the decision-making. So when I say to you, "I'm gonna meet you for dinner at seven o'clock.

And I promise I'll be on time." And you say, "Wanna bet?" Implied in that is that I must have a tendency to be late. And the question is, "How much of a tendency do I have to be late? And how willing am I to say to you, "Yes, I'll bet you that I'm gonna be on time." When I say things like that and then you bet back, those are all things that have to do with base rates.

You could say something like, "I know the stock market is gonna go up this year." Well, that's a prediction of the future. And if I know the base rates, I may bet you on that. Depending on what you're willing to lay me, right? 'Cause the stock market goes up actually somewhere between like, it depends on how you measure it, 65 and 75% of the years, it will go up.

So if you say, "I'm 100% sure it's gonna go up this year." I might bet you. - And I would take that bet because there are actually options out there I could use to arbitrage your confidence. - That is true. That is very true. But I'm not involved in the arbitrage.

So you can hedge away. I'm just gonna take my bet. And then maybe I'll hedge it as well. But the point being that when somebody says, "Wanna bet?" It's like, when you say, "I think this person I'm gonna hire "is gonna work out 90% of the time and I bet you." It makes you actually go through and start thinking, "Well, wait a minute, why do I believe that?" You know, remember one of the things that we wanna do in order to improve decision-making is to start thinking about what's the quality of the beliefs that we have that go into any decision that we're making.

And part of that is making the implicit explicit. And this is one of the things that's so incredibly important. I mean, even talking about a hiring example where you send out to a bunch of people, what do you think the job description should be? What do you think the person, if you were describing them to a recruiter, and you're getting that all independently, what you're finding out is in an explicit way, when they would otherwise just go and interview somebody, what are the things that they think are important for filling this role?

And now you've made that explicit in a way that you can, first of all, examine it, which is incredibly important, right? We have to be able to examine our decisions. And that means that we have to actually make all this stuff that's sort of in our gut explicit in a way where you can examine it like an object.

You can walk around it, you can have discussions about it. I can see that you have a different perspective. And when we see that we have a dispersion of opinion, we can sort of dive into that dispersion to see where the gaps are, to see why you believe something different about the world than I do.

And this is the way that we start to learn really fast. It's the way that we start to get our decisions to be much more accurate. But there's a side effect of making things explicit, which is that it allows us to close feedback loops a lot better. So now, when we do actually start to get some sort of set of outcomes, when we see an outcome, we can actually now go back and say, what did I believe at the time when I made this decision?

And we can understand, here were my beliefs at the time, here's what I found out after the fact, right? Let me go back and figure out, did I already have these outcomes in my set of possibilities? Do I feel like I had the probabilities right that those were gonna occur?

Was there stuff that I learned after the fact that I didn't know beforehand? Could I have known it beforehand? Could I know it going forward? As an example, if I'm just thinking about when should I leave for work? I wouldn't write this down 'cause it's a more mundane decision, but I'm actually explicitly thinking about when should I leave for work?

How long do I think it's gonna take for me to be here? How bad is it if I'm late? And I decide in an explicit way, it's not very bad if I'm late today. I don't really have any important meetings for the first like hour and a half of the morning.

So I've got a little bit of leeway. So I'm really gonna leave according to what the average time it is for me to get to work. So now I go and there's some huge accident on the highway and I ended up being like 45 minutes late to work, okay?

So do we look back on that and say that was a mistake? Which is what we have a tendency to do. Do we look back and say that was so stupid? Why did I leave so late? Well, in this particular case, it wouldn't make sense to do that because you took it into account.

You sort of knew there's some possibility of bad things happening on the road. You don't really have control over whether there's an accident on the road or not. And you had a lot of leeway because it wasn't a big deal if you were late that morning. So you took all of that into account and then a bad thing happened, but that doesn't mean that the decision was bad to take that risk on.

Whereas if I'm deciding to leave for the airport, I may say, well, I can't miss my flight. This is the only flight that they have today to the location I'm going. So now you may leave a lot of time for just that type of thing like bad traffic or an accident.

So what are you sacrificing for that? Well, you may end up spending an extra hour hanging out in the airport, but you make sure that you get to your plane on time. Now, just as in the reverse case, when there is no traffic and the roads are totally clear and you get to the airport an hour early and you find yourself sitting around bored in an airport lounge, you also shouldn't think it was a mistake.

Because in an explicit way, you thought about what your risk tolerance was. You thought about the base rates, how long it could take you to get to work. And you took that all into account when you made the decision. And this is what we need ultimately in order to be good decision makers.

- If you think about in advance, the likelihood of the outcome happening, that makes it much easier to reflect on it. This happened to me in a situation, I won't go into the details of it 'cause it could go down a rabbit hole, but we were trying to do something tax efficiently when we were buying a home and it involved taking some money out of the market.

And I was like, okay, we're gonna have to take a good chunk of our investments out of the market for about 60 days. And data showed about what the return on average is for 60 days. And so we knew about what we thought we would lose out in those 60 days.

And we knew the upside of going through this entire process to buy the house in this specific way. And the only X factor was that in those 60 days was our last presidential election. So we were like, oh, we were a little anxious about this, this thing that could really move the markets.

At the end of the day, I think time will tell if we stay in this house for more than like seven years, it was a good decision. But if we don't, I still think it was a good decision. And even the wording I just used is probably wrong. If we stay in this house for seven years, it will have been the optimal outcome.

But no matter what, it was the right decision. And I just have to keep harping on myself when people say, oh, is that a bummer? You know, you might've lost out. It's like, well, I made the best decision with the information I had at the time. And I can feel good about that as hard as it is.

- I don't know if you have any tips for getting over that emotional angst of like, it's really easy to know you made the right decision, but if the right decision made you lose money, it's still hard to deal with that. - The other thing is I assume that you took that into account.

There are base rates for how long people stay in their homes as well, right? So you can say like, in the worst case scenario, this is how long we would have to be in the house. What do we think the probability is that we'd be in the house this long?

In the best case scenario, this is how long we, you know, so you take all of that into account. One of the things that I do, again, is to always change the frame. Well, how would I feel if it had worked out? I guess in the last presidential election, there's other factors, but just from a financial standpoint, how would I feel if it worked out?

One of the things that I always try to think about is, oh, but those things go my way a lot too. I'll take a really simple example where I play tennis a lot and a ball hits the net court a lot. And sometimes it plops over to the other side of the court.

And sometimes it plops over to your side of the court. And this can be on very big points that this happens. And when it plops back over to your side of the court, you're super sad and you feel like you're really unlucky. But then what I say to myself is, but it's gone the other way for me at really important times as well.

So I try to always remember that. And the question then I try to focus on is, did I pick the right shot? Should I have done something which was gonna have more clearance over the net? Then I start to think about, was it the right choice? I try to get back to the decision itself as opposed to just the outcome.

And we do this all the time. You're talking about a pretty high stakes decision that has to do with financial planning in-house, but you're taking equal risk by taking it out of the market. And the thing is that you weren't taking it out of the market because you were guessing the outcome of the presidential election.

Now that I would say, that's not so smart. We just know that from the base rates, trying to time the market doesn't really work out for people very much. But you're taking it out for a different reason where you understand what the risks are, that sometimes it's gonna go up, sometimes it's gonna go down.

You understand how long you would have to stay in your house in order for it to be a reasonable decision, so on and so forth. And you decided that you were willing to take on that risk. I don't have any issues with that. Now that's not to say that you wouldn't close the feedback loop and go back and say, would it have made more sense for us to wait until the presidential election had played out?

And the answer to that might've been, but this is the house that we really want. We've been looking for a long time and it's kind of go time, we can't wait. Okay, none of that sounds bad. The only thing that would be bad is I had lots and lots and lots of time to wait and I didn't need to do this at a moment of high uncertainty.

Then I would say, well, maybe we should talk about that issue. Outside of that, you've thought it through, but this tendency, like when you said then it will have been a mistake, been a bad decision, it's so strong with us. Let me ask you this. So you've gone to a restaurant, right?

- Yes. - And you're looking at the menu and you're trying to figure out what to order. Let's say it's a restaurant you've never been to. So this is really high uncertainty, right? Like you've never been to this restaurant. Yeah, it's got good Yelp reviews and you're trying to figure out what to order when you narrow it down to a couple of dishes.

And then at some point, you know, you just got to order. And so you do and you get the food and it's disgusting. It's like yucky. What do you immediately say to yourself? Like, oh, I made such a big mistake. I should have ordered something else. - Yep. - What do you mean you should have ordered something else?

Like you kind of know what your preferences are. You know what you like. So what I try to tell people is look, you know what you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff you don't know and then there's a lot of left. So even with something like ordering off a menu, I say, just look, here's the deal.

You should just divide the menu up into stuff you like and stuff you don't like. It's easy for me, I'm a vegan. So it's like, what's vegan, what's not vegan? And so I can divide it up that way. And then I could do further things like what has eggplant in it?

And then do that. And then, you know, I get it narrowed down to whatever is available for me to eat off the menu. And then honestly, you should flip a coin. Like literally just, okay, here's the things that are in my choice set. I'm just gonna flip a coin to try to figure it out.

Now, if you're not comfortable doing that, I'll do this sometimes. I'll just say to the waiter, you decide. It's the same thing as flipping a coin. Here are these two things, surprise me. - I did an episode with Patrick McGinnis, who's notable for coining the term FOMO. And he just looks at his watch.

He comes up with two things. He says, if the second hand's on the left, it's this. If it's on the right, it's this. It's his version of flipping a coin. - Yeah, or you can just tell the wait person to just decide for you. And then you get what you get and it's fine.

But that strategy, so I call it the menu strategy, is actually a way to make your whole life much more efficient. It's like, you're trying to decide what to watch on TV. Figure out what your choice set is and flip a coin. The key to doing that is that when you don't like the thing you're watching, quit it.

This is the thing about this type of strategy. You have to be willing to abandon it. The problem is that when we're approaching a decision, should we start this series? We think we have to finish the series. We think we have to finish an episode. Right, like we think all of these weird things about it.

And so then we get really caught up in trying to do research. I just look at Rotten Tomatoes and look at the things that are high rated or things that my friends have recommended. And then I just do it. And if I don't like it, I stop. But you have to be able to do the thing on the back end in order to do it.

But you can do this with everything. There's two houses that you love and you can't decide between them. Okay, if you can't decide between them, by definition, that means that your forecast of the probability of you loving either one and being happy in them is equal. So flip a coin.

I mean, you can really do it with big decisions. The difference between a big decision and a small decision is that the bar for sorting out options you would consider versus options you wouldn't is higher. For what you'd order off a menu, it's not that big a deal. You eat three meals a day, I assume, whatever.

It's a very low bar for getting to a coin flip. For buying a house, it's a pretty high bar for getting to a coin flip. And that's all that you need to think about is what's the threshold. That's it. - I love this idea. I have an example I've mentioned in the past of we were going to Greece and we found three hotels and they were all pretty similar and we were struggling.

We were like, well, does this room look nice in this room? - Yeah, and it turns into months. - And the easy answer was like, once you've gotten to a point that you're pretty sure all of them would be fine, just pick one and move on. But it brings up the bigger question, which is you've written a couple of books on decision-making and then you decided that this one decision of quitting and walking away was different enough, I assume, that you wrote an entire another book on it that just came out.

I'm curious what made quitting such a hard decision? What characterized it so differently that it was worth the follow-up to dig into? - Here's the deal. What allows us to make decisions under uncertainty is that we have the option to quit. Okay, so just basic, right? Imagine if when you hired someone, you could never fire them.

How hard of a decision that would be. Imagine if as soon as you went on a date with somebody, you had to marry them. How hard would it be to choose somebody to go on a date with? Imagine if you rented an apartment, you couldn't get out of the lease, like ever.

Like these things would become very difficult. So decision-making under uncertainty is really hard, but what allows us to be able to do it, to be able to choose things when we know so little, is that when we find out new stuff, whether it's about the world or it's about our own preferences, oh, it turns out I don't like this neighborhood, whatever, that we can quit.

So it's a really, really, really important decision. Having this option to quit is incredibly valuable. But what's interesting is that what the science tells us is that we're really bad at it. Obviously, grit is a really, really popular concept. People think about grit as character-building, in fact, as almost synonymous with character.

And it's true that grit's really important for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile. That's incredibly important, right? We have to not quit things just 'cause they're hard. Otherwise, we won't ever be successful at anything, 'cause anything worth doing is gonna be hard at some point.

So that's for sure true. And I think everybody should read "Grit," and it's a great book, and Angela Duckworth is brilliant. But I was missing the other side of the conversation, which is that grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are not worthwhile. And that's a really huge problem.

We can't think about grit as a virtue and quitting as a vice or a character flaw. I can show you lots of circumstances where grit is character flaw, where sticking to something too long is bad, like Muhammad Ali boxing for years after he already had symptoms of Parkinson's, when he was really suffering physically, he should have walked away from the game.

So we know that it's very context-dependent, and sometimes quitting is the best thing that you can ever do. Like if you're in a job with a toxic boss, or you're in a toxic relationship, or you're at the top of Everest, and it's past the turnaround time, and there's a snowstorm coming in, clearly sticking to it is dumb in that situation.

So we need to realize that they're the same decision, and one is not good and one is not bad. It's very dependent on context. And then when you start to look and dive into the scientific literature, it turns out that there's just tremendous cognitive forces that make it very hard for us to walk away from things, not at the right time anyway.

All the way from sunk costs, which we've talked about a little, which is this tendency to stick to things because you're worried you'll have wasted the time or the money or whatever that you put into it, because you wanna get that back. Somehow, like when you hold onto a stock or you stay in a job or whatever, there's issues that have to do with endowment ownership over things.

We value the things that we own more than the things that we don't, including our beliefs, by the way. And we don't like to let go of those things that have to do with something called sure loss aversion, which Daniel Kahneman talks about, which is if you quit, it turns into a realized loss.

And we don't like that. That doesn't feel good to us. As Richard Thaler says, we don't like to close mental accounts in the losses, so we don't like to close those accounts and sort of eat that loss. Even though, obviously, just like a stock portfolio, our decisions are a portfolio, our opportunities are a portfolio, and we ought to be trying to spend our time on the ones that are going to move us toward our goals the most, that are gonna cause us to gain the most ground.

We open an account for a particular thing we're doing, whether it's a marathon, or climbing Everest, or a job, or a relationship, or whatever, and we don't think about that time, that effort, that all of that is fungible across all the possible opportunities we have. Instead, we just think if I quit now, I won't have hit my goal, and then I'm gonna be a failure, and I'm gonna have lost, and so we won't quit.

There's identity, cognitive dissonance, status quo bias. These are all in the book. Omission, commission bias. There's so much stuff that we just carry around with us, this cognitive debris that makes it really hard for us to walk away, and here's the thing why I'm so passionate about this topic, is that we think that quitting will slow our progress down.

We think it may actually cause us to lose ground, but that's not true. When you quit at the right time, it actually gets you to where you want to go faster, because it stops you from sticking to something that isn't actually causing you to gain ground toward your goal, and allows you to switch to something that will allow you to gain ground toward your goal, and that's the thing that we miss, because we don't see the other opportunities that the thing we're doing is stopping us from engaging in, because there's a cost to that time.

There's a cost to that money that we're spending on whatever it is that we're into, or that we're pursuing, the path that we're on, and we won't let go of it, because if we haven't reached our goal, we think we're a failure, but just like if you sell that stock at 30, and you lost the $20, so what?

You can put that $30 into other investments that are actually gonna get you to financial well-being more quickly, so holding on to a stock that isn't worthwhile, because you already lost $20 in it, is actually slowing your progress down, because you can't go put those resources into something that will get you to financial well-being more quickly, and that's true whether it's a stock, or a job, or a relationship, or a race you're running.

I don't really care. If the world tells you you should quit, you ought to do that, because that's the thing that allows us to decide under uncertainty in the first place, so let's start exercising that option, so that we can more efficiently and more quickly get to where we wanna go.

- I love the Astro Teller example of the monkey and the pedestal. Can you just walk people through that? - We wanna be efficient in the things that we're pursuing, so we want to get to understand should we continue, or should we quit as quickly as possible, so here's a mental model that will help people do that.

It's called Monkeys and Pedestals, from Astro Teller, as you said, over at X at Google. Imagine you're trying to train a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal in a town square. This will be a money-making opportunity. What's the thing that you should do first? Should you build the pedestal first, or should you try to train the monkey to juggle the flaming torches?

Well, the thing about the pedestal building is that we've been building pedestals forever. It doesn't really help you. It's low-hanging fruit, but it's not something that's actually gonna help you to accomplish your goal, 'cause you could just turn a milk crate upside down, even. So if you spend time building the pedestal, it's really kind of wasted time, because it's not unlocking the bottleneck in the system, which is can I actually train this monkey to juggle the flaming torches?

So his point is that when you approach this project, you should say what are the monkeys, right, and ask yourself this. What are the monkeys? What are the pedestals? What are the things I know I can accomplish? What are the things that are gonna unlock the whole system, but are really hard, and I don't know if we can do it?

And attack those things you don't know first, and that's gonna do two really important things for you. One, it's gonna get you to understand whether you can actually do this thing or not really quickly, right? Two, and this is really important, is it's gonna reduce those sunk costs, because all that time you spend building pedestals is time and effort and money that you're putting into something that's then gonna cause friction when you butt up against a monkey that's hard to train.

So train the monkey first. Now, this is the opposite of the way that most people do things. How many times have people approached a project and said, well, what's the low-hanging fruit? Let's try to solve for that. And the problem with the low-hanging fruit is that those are all pedestals.

Don't do the low-hanging fruit until you know whether you can actually grow the whole tree. Can you get to the fruit at the top of the tree? That's what you really care about. So I love that mental model. - I'm gonna link in the show notes. A friend of mine, Aaron Battalion, wrote this post about knowns and unknowns.

He pushed me so hard in my last startup. He was like, figure out what that known unknown is. What's the thing that you don't know how to do that you know you don't know how to do? In his case, ultimately, the thing that he pushed me to focus on that, sorry, Aaron, I didn't follow at the beginning, was the thing that we realized halfway through running the company was the problem.

And we ended up shutting the company down with $4 million in the bank because we realized the thing wasn't going to work and we didn't wanna keep going. - And you probably could have done that with $5 million in the bank. What AstroTeller's trying to say is like, look, you're gonna spend some time trying to solve for the monkey or figure out if you can solve the monkey or monkeys.

And you might spend $2 million doing that. But if you can get to that answer in $2 million instead of $9 million, again, that's a savings of $7 million, not a waste of $2 million. That's why this is such an important mental model for people to use. There were a bunch of other great mental models on all kinds of different aspects of quitting.

Where can people find out more about the book and everything else you're working on? - Well, people can always go to AnnieDuke.com. I have a newsletter. Lately, it's been a lot about quitting, not surprisingly. I'm super into the topic, as you can imagine, or you can tell. And then Twitter @AnnieDuke.

And then you can obviously buy the book at any online or physical retailer near you. - I got an advanced copy, I appreciate that. I really enjoyed it. Sometimes I don't get through the whole book before I talk to someone. This time I was like staying up late. My wife's like, "We gotta wake up our kids in the morning." So I really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for writing it. And thanks so much for being here. - Thank you so much for having me. - I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it.

And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just wanna say hi, I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week. (upbeat music) (bubbles popping) (bubbles popping) (bubbles popping) you