Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell, a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding charities and publishing their full analysis to help donors decide where to give. They do rigorous research to quantify how much good a given charity does, how many lives does it save, or how much does it reduce poverty per dollar donated? You can read all about their research or just check out their short list

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It's free and available to everyone online. Check them out at give well.org. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and I'm here with today's guest, Annie Duke.

Annie is a former professional poker player and is now the author of the book,

Thinking in Betts, Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All The Facts.

She's also the co-founder of How I Decide, which is an organization that helps train kids,

mostly teenagers, in rationality and critical thinking in their own lives. So today we're going to be talking about how to think

in bets and why it's important, even outside of the poker domain. Annie, welcome to rationally

speaking. It's great to have you. Well, thank you. It's super great to be here.

I'm a big fan.

I'm having a fan girl moment.

Me too.

So tell us in your own words, what does it mean to think in Bess?

So thinking in Bets really, the short story is it's about embracing uncertainty.

So what we can think about is any decision that we make is really a bet that's informed

by our beliefs about what the future might look like.

And we can't really ever guarantee that one particular future might occur, but rather that all we can do is imagine a set of possible

futures. So there could be a set of possible futures can result from the decision that we make

and each of those decisions has some probability of occurring. And none of those futures is a guarantee. So when we make a

decision, we have limited resources that we can invest, like, for example, our time or our money.

And so we're betting that the decision we make, the course that we set ourselves on, is going to result

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