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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom and temperance.

And here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time.

And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I was really excited about today's conversation and I know my guest was to meet up. I think we talked like for 15 minutes before I hit record. We just got way into it, which is always a good sign with a guest.

And I've had a couple long dinner conversations with Annie Duke before. So I knew this was going to be a good one. Annie is also an author at my publisher portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

I loved her first book, Thinking in Betts. Her most recent book, How to Decide is another awesome one. She's a best selling author. But if that weren't enough as a former professional poker player, she's won more than $4 million in tournament winnings.

And she's also an expert in cognitive psychology. So someone who has a lot to teach us about the sort of rationality elements of stoicism. But I think you'll be surprised at the ethical side of things that we get into as well. The stoics would say, you know, the ability to make good decisions in the abstract is worthless, right?

To stoicism isn't about making you a better sociopath. It's about helping you get better at making the right decisions. It's about helping you be more rational and clear headed and more consistent at doing the right thing.

So, you know, professionally that might be for someone like Annie, making the right decisions at the card table. But you'll see her talk over and over again about the importance of making the right decisions as a member of a community, as a parent, as a citizen, as a human being in the world.

We get way into that stuff. She was telling me that, you know, she hears from from from stoicism fans all the time. She thinks there's a big overlap between our works. I just love this conversation. I can't wait to share it with you.

You're going to like this. You can check out Annie's books, how to decide simple tools for making better choices and, of course, thinking in bets, making smarter decisions when you don't have all the facts.

And you can follow Annie at at Annie Duke, a N N I E D U K E Annie Duke. And, of course, you can follow her on her website Annie Duke dot com.

Thanks Annie for coming on and she told me about her next book, which I'm really excited about. So she will be on here again, airy soon.

Okay, so I wanted to run something by you, where I think sort of your work in stoicism sort of connects. There's this line from Epictetus where he says sort of like the first.

The moment you become a philosopher is when you possess the ability to think about your own thoughts, right, to be able to sort of step back and analyze yourself from a distance.

And it seems like that, that's sort of the through line between your last two books, the ability to sort of think about what you think and how to do it better.

Yeah, so I'm actually it's funny because I have a lot of people who read my work actually relate it to your work and ask me if I've read your work.

Because I do think that there's an element of that in kind of two ways, you know, one is this real need to be able to entertain the idea that your beliefs are wrong.

That you might that you might hold false beliefs and I think that's actually quite difficult. And then, then the other is what you just pointed out this ability to sort of step back from your own thinking and view it from the outside.

I think that's it's super hard to do. It's particularly hard to do when you're in the moment. So it's something that I think about a lot about how we can actually get better that exercise of being able to step outside ourselves and examine our own thoughts and our own beliefs as if they're like if they're as if they're an object that we're holding in our hands.

And it's kind of a contradiction because on the one hand, we have to sort of be very aware that we have, you know, biased or incorrect thoughts. And on the other hand, there's this sort of trust one has to develop in oneself.

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