This is The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie.

Thanks for listening.

This episode is sponsored by Better Help, H-E-L-P, online therapy.

More on them later in the show.

Quitting.

What do you think about quitting?

Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke.

She's an author, Doctor of Psychology,

and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker.

I interviewed her a couple years ago for her book Thinking in Beths. That's in the show notes.

Check that out. Her latest book is Quit, the power of knowing when to walk away she uses

examples ranging from mohammed ali's refusal tragic refusal to retire from boxing earlier in

his career to things like the over budget much delayed california high speed rail project

to catastrophic american wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and

Iraq to make the case that blind commitment to grit and stick-to-itiveness routinely leads

us down the wrong path in our careers, our politics, and our personal lives.

She talks about all the misleading mental ticks that get in the way,

like the sunk cost fallacy, the cult of identity and the endowment effect, and how we can

understand these and reverse them in our personal lives, our work, our politics. She earned

her PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, getting her degree in

2023 earlier this year after taking a 30-year break from academia. We talk about how her experience

of knowing when to quit in poker, and in her case in higher education for decades,

...