Annie Duke
75 statements across 10 episodes · 8 bullish · 10 bearish · 6 people on the record · first statement Feb 5, 2018 by Annie Duke · said 61 times in 27 episodes since 2018 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Annie Duke's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Ted Seides (32), Steve Kuhn (5), Dr. Joe Sweeney (5), Renata Quintini (3), Sarah Samuels (2), Michael Mauboussin (2), Jordi Visser (2), Scott Bessent (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 12 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
- Renata Quintini and Roseanne Wincek – Renegade Spin-Out in the Supercritical Stage, Venture is Eating the Investment World 11 (Capital Allocators, EP. 242)
- Year in Review 2022 (Capital Allocators, EP. 289)
- Friends Reunion 2 – Five Allocators Riff on Investing with Meredith Jenkins, Casey Whalen, Brett Barth, Jon Harris, and Ted Seides (Capital Allocators, EP.271)
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 14 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
- BONUS – Michael Mauboussin on the Decision Education Podcast
- Ted with Jenny Heller – Compounding Knowledge and Relationships (Capital Allocators, EP.185)
- Jennifer Heller – Beginner's Mind with Professional Wisdom at Brandywine (Capital Allocators, EP.211)
- Ted with Patrick O'Shaughnessy – Lessons from the World's Elite Money Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.184)
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2019 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
2018 9 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Michael Lombardi – Leadership Through Football (Capital Allocators, EP.75)
- Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43)
- Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72)
- Peter Troob – Monkey Business in High Yield (Capital Allocators, EP.59)
- Brian Portnoy – From Complex to Simple (Capital Allocators, EP.57)
- Basil Qunibi - Moneyball for Allocators (Capital Allocators, EP.42)
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
Everything said about Annie Duke, oldest first
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Investors mismanage risk by overestimating their edge and underestimating volatility
“We're bad at it for a couple of reasons. One is that we generally overestimate our edge. Let's be honest. We think we're better than we are. We also underestimate the vol. I mean, we tend to. So we generally think we need a lot less money than we do, and then …”
Feb 5, 2018
Feb 5, 2018
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Leaders expressing total certainty silence contrary information from their teams
“When I express things with total certainty, one thing you might do is not tell me what you know about it because you're embarrassed. Because I've said it with such assurance that maybe now you think you're wrong about this whole Citizen Kane thing... But reaso…”
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Decision-makers must form accountability groups because others spot their biases better
“Other people are actually pretty good at spotting our biases. So in the same way that you sort of naturally recruit people into the process with you when you express things probabilistically, why not do that intentionally and just purposely recruit people into…”
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Effective decision-making requires overcoming temporal discounting via mental time travel
“But what you really Learn when you start thinking about how do you become a really good decision maker is that the best thing that could happen is for past Marty to run into future Marty and have a little discussion, have a little, you know, chit chat about ho…”
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Red teams solve corporate consensus pressure by rewarding dissent
“Within your company, you can do that through really creating red teams. So you have red team, blue team, that's one way to do it. And notice what's really wonderful about the red team thing in particular is, remember I said we have this team player issue, is t…”
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Accurate behavioral predictions require combining physical cues with historical baselines
“So what's good to do is sort of take these kind of physical cues and merge them with the story that they've kind of told you in the past as you've gotten a feel for how they behave in different situations, and that now you can merge together to make some sort …”
Feb 5, 2018 positive
Duke: Cognitive psychology directly improves decision-making under uncertainty
“What I'd been doing in graduate school actually had been incredibly helpful for me in poker and could be helpful in general to understanding how do you make decisions, you know, particularly under conditions of uncertainty.”
Feb 5, 2018
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Humans evaluate evidence to confirm beliefs and discredit contradictions
“The problem is that there's all sorts of work that shows that you just don't do step three, and that's where we really get into trouble, is that we hear it, we believe it, and then, like, maybe if we have the timer inclination later, we might do some vetting o…”
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Strict loss limits are irrational but prevent catastrophic emotional decision-making
“I sort of think about it as stacking irrationalities. Ok, so I know it's irrational to have a loss limit. But that irrationality is a lot less damaging to me in the long run than allowing myself to make these irrational decisions about whether it's a luck or s…”
Feb 5, 2018
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Framing decisions as bets transforms dissenting information into helpful calibration
“What a bet does is it shifts your idea of what winning means. So winning is now actually having the most accurate representation in the world. And that really comes through the accountability that this idea of betting is, because when you challenged your daugh…”
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Expressing outcomes with probabilities makes leaders more believable than projecting certainty
“So not only do you end up with a richer conversation, but you're more believable as a communicator. So I think it's a little counterintuitive, but our intuition isn't always good. So, I mean, our intuition is that when I hear something, I vet it before I decid…”
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: People excessively leaning back to project relaxation should not be believed
“But if someone's too leaned back, if they're taking up too much space, generally you shouldn't believe a thing they're saying. Because people generally aren't like this. It's sort of like purposely trying to look relaxed.”
Feb 5, 2018
Feb 5, 2018
Feb 5, 2018
Duke: Framing decisions as bets forces probabilistic thinking and reduces bias
“If we start to think about things as bets, which makes the risk explicit, it forces step three. If we go back to Dan Gilbert's work, it forces that vetting step... So it forces you to start thinking probabilistically. It forces you to start going through that …”
Nov 19, 2018
Duke: Decision groups improve judgment by policing mutual biases
“So if we make a pact between the two of us, That you're going to watch my bias, and I'm going to watch your bias, and now we can form kind of a decision group together where we make rules about what the interaction is supposed to be. You can set me straight. I…”
Nov 19, 2018 positive
Duke: Mapping uncertainty yields better long-term results than focusing on outcomes
“What matters to us is that we foresee the landscape much more than that we get a good outcome, right? Because we assume that if we foresee the landscape, and we go through these exercises, and we're willing to do this together, that we're going to end up on th…”
Nov 19, 2018
Duke: Preexisting beliefs drive information processing rather than facts shaping beliefs
“It's that we form beliefs in a relatively haphazard way, and then those beliefs actually drive the way we process information. So what ends up happening is kind of twofold. One is that we notice information that confirms the beliefs that we already have. So yo…”
Nov 19, 2018
Nov 19, 2018 neutral
Nov 19, 2018 negative
Nov 19, 2018 negative
Nov 19, 2018
Duke: Every decision allocating limited resources under uncertainty is a bet
“We can think about any decision we make as a bet. My book is called Thinking in Bets, and so this is obviously the premise of it. So people don't tend to think about their decisions as bets, because they think about bets as confined, like they think about it i…”
Nov 19, 2018 negative
Duke: People wrongly treat outcome quality as a proxy for decision quality
“We don't like randomness as a species, and so once we know the outcome, it's like we can't go back and kind of reconstruct
the
The decision tree in any kind of real way, and so what ends up happening is we use the outcome quality as too perfect a signal for …”
Nov 19, 2018
Nov 19, 2018
Nov 19, 2018
Duke: Future-focused questions prompt honest post-mortems without defensiveness
“Now, notice that in order for you to actually reasonably answer that question, you must go back and look at where you went wrong in the first place, because you can't answer that question without doing that. But I'm not the one making the challenge to you. I'm…”
Nov 19, 2018 negative
Duke: Results-oriented cultures incentivize consensus and status-quo decisions
“So I think that when you say results-oriented, you think that you're motivating people to give you good results, and the fact is that you are, but not the right kind. What you're motivating them to do is to choose consensus choices, to stick with the status qu…”
Nov 19, 2018 negative
Duke: Frequent feedback does not ensure effective learning in noisy domains
“And despite the fact that when I was in graduate school, I was taught that learning occurs when there's lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions, I realized, well, poker really tells you that's not true, because people don't play poker ve…”
Nov 19, 2018 positive
Nov 19, 2018
Duke: High intelligence worsens outcome bias by disguising it as process
“Unless you're willing to examine both sides of the world, how can you actually be process-oriented, right? Then you're really just outcome-oriented with a bunch of process language wrapping around it, which is why I go back to this problem of being smart makes…”
Apr 20, 2020
Duke: Decision makers mistakenly treat complex, uncertain problems as merely complicated
“And one of the things that I think that we have problems with as decision makers is that we think things are complicated when they're actually complex. We treat things as solvable and knowable when they're actually not, and we aren't very accepting of the idea…”
Apr 20, 2020
Duke: Extra data past a tipping point inflates confidence, not decision quality
“Because it's very rare that you're going to get to that much certainty and there's diminishing returns as you collect more data. And very often what happens is once you get to kind of a tipping point, it's not so much the quality of your decision is going to g…”
Apr 20, 2020
Duke: Ramping COVID testing early was a near-free hedge relative to GDP
“At that time, in January, it's very uncertain what the course is going to be here. Is it going to get here? Is there going to be community transfer? There's just all sorts of, like, the range of outcomes is super, super, super wide at this point, so we're real…”
Apr 20, 2020
Duke: Decision-makers must prioritize speed over certainty in exponential crises
“What we know is that we should be favoring time over certainty, so we should be trying to act and putting like a lot of hedges in place and doing things that are a little bit more extreme when we don't have a lot of data, because the one thing that we do know …”
Apr 20, 2020
Duke: Complicated problems like chess are solvable, but poker is fundamentally complex
“So the way I think about the difference between complicated and complex would actually be the difference between chess and poker. So a complicated decision is one that's hard. It's got a lot of levels. It's very deep, but there is a solution. So whatever groun…”
Apr 20, 2020
Apr 20, 2020
Duke: Acting in complex systems creates data that modeling cannot predict
“So it actually behooves you to actually make lots of decisions and do lots of actions In order to get the world to give you the data back so that you actually can find out how the world would respond if you did certain things.”
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: Parsing close-call options is impossible and a waste of time
“All we've determined is that they're close, and even if we could determine it, it's a bad use of our time. Because they are so close that you're probably going to be kind of about the same happiness either way, at least in expected value, and so you should pro…”
Sep 14, 2020 positive
Duke: Rapid execution on repeating choices speeds predictive model accuracy
“So the more often that you're making a similar type decision, you want to go fast because it speeds up your ability to build models that will actually help your decision making going forward in terms of making those things more accurate.”
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: Assuming plans cannot fail impairs success; decision-makers must find vulnerabilities
“Believing that this thing that you've created is impenetrable to failure is not a really great way to make sure that you succeed, but rather that they needed to be combing over the plans as if they were the rebels to try to figure out if they were to fail, how…”
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: Positive thinking belongs in goal setting, not route execution
“We don't want to confuse the route planning with the destination planning. You figure out where you want to go, and then when you look at a paper map, it's like the power of positive thinking. Oh, look at these clear roads. I'm going to go on this road, and th…”
Sep 14, 2020 negative
Sep 14, 2020 negative
Duke: Group Decisions Are Not Better but Unjustifiably Boost Confidence
“What generally happens is that the decisions that come out of a group process are not really necessarily better. It's just that you have much more confidence in them because you have this perception that group decision making is higher quality. And that's actu…”
Sep 14, 2020 neutral
Sep 14, 2020 neutral
Duke: Investors should pair strict category rules with a secondary updating process
“Is make a category decision, hold that strongly, but then have a secondary process that's going on where you're really trying to think about the world and incorporate information in a rational way that will allow you to maybe alter those categories in the long…”
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: Individual experience can actively interfere with decision learning
“And the paradox of experience is that experience is certainly necessary in order to become a better decision maker. But it's in no way sufficient. And in fact, the paradox is that any individual experience that you might have can actually interfere with learni…”
Sep 14, 2020
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: Successful Leaders Resist Process Improvement Because It Devalues Past Wins
“Particularly when people are very successful, it's particularly uncomfortable for them to imagine that there might be a ways that they could really improve their decision process. And I think that the reason is that then there's all of a sudden you open up a c…”
Sep 14, 2020 neutral
Duke: Surveyed probability interpretations for 'real possibility' ranged from 16% to 81%
“The biggest spread I ever got was on real possibility, where the range was 16% to 81%, and it wasn't like Three people in the group were like up toward 81 person was at 16. It was actually spread out across them.”
Sep 14, 2020 positive
Duke: High-impact decisions can be made faster when easily reversible
“But even for higher impact decisions, if it's easy for you to quit and reverse course and get back to another option, then you can actually speed your decision making up simply because there isn't as big a penalty for being wrong.”
Sep 14, 2020
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: Pre-planning downside responses enables rational action during crises
“So by imagining in advance what your plan of action is, if there's a downturn, if the downside realizes, you're actually going to tend to be acting more rationally. You're going to be prepared, and that's going to allow you to be more nimble rather than to be …”
Sep 14, 2020
Duke: Additional information rarely flips leading decision choices
“Is there a piece of information that I can find out That would actually make it so that some other option became clearly better than the option that I'm considering. And you'd be surprised. Most of the time the answer is no. In those rare cases when the answer…”
Sep 14, 2020
Sep 14, 2020 negative
Duke: Qualitative probability terms create false consensus and hide substantive disagreement
“This is just one of these little ways where when we speak to each other, we may think we're agreeing with each other, because we may both agree that the term real possibility applies to the likelihood of a particular future occurring, but it turns out that we …”
Sep 14, 2020 negative
Feb 4, 2021
Aug 30, 2021 positive
Brandywine rates investments 1-to-5, excluding 3 to eliminate fence-sitting
“We also are really, really believers in using a framework at the end of our process where everyone on the team grades any investment we're doing on a series of criteria that's very, very specific to that investment. On a scale of one through five, not using th…”
Oct 3, 2022 negative
Oct 3, 2022
Oct 3, 2022
Duke: Negative news causes people to double down rather than quit
“Escalation of commitment, simply put, is like this, we have the intuition that when we get bad news, that we'll stop doing what we're doing. And actually, we don't stop. When we get bad news, we actually double down. We escalate our commitment to the cause.”
Oct 3, 2022
Duke: Outside observers evaluate failing projects better without sunk cost bias
“Basically, it's like, I don't carry with me all the stuff that you carry with you, all the cognitive debris that you carry with you, when you've already made that allocation decision to a particular division. Because I didn't make the original allocation decis…”
Oct 3, 2022
Duke: Loss aversion stops starting, while sure loss aversion stops quitting
“Loss aversion is not wanting to start things for fear of the losses you might incur later. So let's think about loss aversion as something that stops you from starting. Sure loss aversion, as Kahneman says, talks about, is not wanting to turn a loss on paper i…”
Oct 3, 2022 positive
Duke: The option to quit enables people to start new endeavors
“It's the option to say, that date wasn't very good. I don't want to go out on another date with you. That allows us to go out on dates, right? And it's not just dates. It's like we can take a job because maybe if we don't like it, or it turns out the boss is t…”
Oct 3, 2022
Duke: Tackle critical bottlenecks before easy tasks to avoid false progress
“When you're approaching a problem, you want to think about what are the bottlenecks? What's the really hard thing that needs to happen in order for me to be able to unlock this problem? And that's the thing that you're supposed to go after first. You're not su…”
Oct 3, 2022 neutral
Oct 3, 2022 positive
Duke: Kill criteria allow managers to reward walking away from bad deals
“When we develop this set of kill criteria, not only are you more likely to follow it because you're sort of looking for those signals, and we've made some public declarations about how we're supposed to behave toward those, but as a manager, it allows me to ma…”
Dec 26, 2022
Jan 8, 2024
Marshall: Hewlett Foundation uses pre-mortem 'kill lists' for manager due diligence
“Not only do we start with a list of concerns, we also, thanks to your great guest, Annie Duke, we started adding what we call a kill list. So think of it as a pre-mortem. Pre-identify places where the firm, the manager style may not work.”
Jul 20, 2026