YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Ariely

lines on the record: 102
first: 2019-04-01
most recent: 2019-04-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“In some aspects of life, and I wish I've taken more chances earlier, so that would have been my lesson and also what I hope to achieve more in the years to come.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take more risks. There's a general. Finding that they are lucky people and it's not that there are lucky people in the casino or stuff like that but there are people who try more things right so imagine two people are playing basketball one is waiting for something to work 100 of the time and they shoot twice and they get 100 the other people wait to 50 chance and they shoot 40 times and get 20 baskets which one is more successful in life but life is also not just like basketball because life is not a binary outcome Almost everything we do has steps in it. And lucky people are people who try lots of things and then cut out the things that don't seem to work and continue doubling down on the things that do work. And I think for me, especially because of my injury and some of my disability, I've been a little timid.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I didn't strike me for years but became apparent only in the last few years you read payoff, right? So I write about this in the introduction. It happened only a few years ago when I was helping somebody else When I realized the difficulty of being helpless all the parts with the pain and the challenges and removing bandages and surgery and failure and looking different, all of that was very clear throughout. But the part of helplessness and how deep it was ingrained in me, how deep it is, how difficult it is to feel that I have no power. Over my life it took years for this lesson for me to realize that and had a deep impact, very deep impact on me. And now I look at lots of cases, poverty, illness where people have no control. And I think about it very, very differently.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother was very trusting. She told me that she doesn't like me to take like an hour off from school here and there when I need a break. But she said when I need a whole day off, she'll write a note to the teacher and I could take the time to do something useful. So it was an interesting thing where she said we knew the time off, let me know. And as long as you use the time well, I'll let you have that. So that was. I think distrust was something very important to me. And my father was always not just a father, was also a very good friend. I felt I could talk to him about everything. And that the type of conversation has stayed with me with other people as well.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“March is interesting. I'm saying this because this morning I got an email from somebody from Prague and say, Hey, I see you're coming on the 21st. You want to have beer. So it's a combination of letting the world know where I am and counting some interesting serendipity would work out. And it's often really fun.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The suitcase, and that's that. The other thing I try to do from time to time is I, and this is, I don't know for how many people it would work, but it works for me. I have on my website my travel schedule. So it has which city I'm going to be in every day of the year. So, right now, for example, I know almost all of 2019 where I'll be on every day and it's there. And on one hand, it reduces serendipity and randomness and so on. But on the other hand, what I find is that people see that I'm coming somewhere and invite me to do all kinds of interesting things. So for me, that strategy of saying, you know, I'm going to be in Prague on the 21st of”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tried first thing to go to the gym. I land, I get to a hotel, I go to the gym, then I shower. I maybe have the record for travelling with carry on. I never take anything more than carrion, even if I'm on the road for six weeks. I always have mismatch socks. I have found that if you have pairs of socks, it's always a mess. I just bought lots of socks that look very, very different from each other. And, you know, if you have one brown, one blue, it might look like you're making a mistake. But if they're drastically different from each other, it's a fashion statement. It's not a mistake. So I have... I have lots of socks that look very, very different from each other, and I just throw them in the”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me I have very good eye covers. I get on a plane, I put them on, I ask the air crew to not wake me up for anything. I never drink alcohol and flight I try not to eat this terrible, you know, I mean sometimes it's okay, but it's never really Exciting, and I try to sleep as much as possible. The rest of the time, I used to work and I stopped at. I stopped working on flights. I decided flight is sufficiently unappealing that now I either read fiction or listen to podcast or watch a TV series. I never watch TV outside or movie outside of that, but that's, so I try to take the time on flights and make it either sleep or fun. And the other thing I do is that every time I land somewhere, after a long flight, not talking about a couple.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's nothing that I read regularly, really nothing because so often my life is so hectic that I'm Try to get through my email. You know what? That's the thing. I get a ton of email. Including lots of requests from kids for help with science projects. I can't tell you how many science projects I helped win over And I get lots of requests from people with disability to help them understand how life will be next. Not exactly the answer to your question, but I would say I always answer kids and I always answer people with disabilities. I try to answer everybody who writes me, but those two categories, I'm extra sensitive to.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like arrogance. I think for me social science is a constant exercise in experiencing how wrong I am. I do lots of experiments. Sometimes I predict them, sometimes I don't, and I get a continuous reminder of, you know, oh, I was wrong here again. And people who are overly sure in their opinions is an approach for life, that looks to me like it's not just lack of awareness, but it's a barrier for progress.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, don't do much outside of work and family as I just said, but I will tell you that I am I am trying to experience more new things. I think inherently I gamble with my time. With money, but with my time, and I get to try lots of new things. So people give me a challenge or ask me to do something that I've never done before and actually caused me some hesitation. I often try to go for it and expand my horizon. So it's not exactly a hobby, but that's the closest I have right now.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got the first nice email. Since then, we got many. And the email said, you insured my apartment. Somebody stole my laptop. You paid my claim, but turns out nobody stole it. I found it. I just misplaced it. They said, how do I return the money? Since then, we had quite a few of those. And for me, this is a great story because it says that if you create a company that... Built on trust and you build trust in the mechanism of the company, the DNA of how it's structured. You don't just tell people, trust me. You build it with trust, good things can happen. So that's basically my three lives doesn't sound too positive. I also travel about 300 days a year in the last few years and there's some cost to that as well.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When people sign up, they sign up around the charity. So let's say there's a thousand people that sign up around the World Wildlife Fund. Sign up around the world Wildlife Fund, they pay the insurance company, the insurance company takes a fixed amount, pays claims, and if there's money left over the pool in the pool at the end of the year, it goes to the charity. So now think about you as a consumer. First of all, you say the insurance company doesn't care if they pay me or not. They're not going to make a different amount. There's no conflicts of interest. And also, if you cheat, you cheat your favorite charity. So, this little insurance company is called lemonade. We started here in New York, and from the expression if life gives you lemons and make lemonade. And a couple of weeks after we started it,”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea was that in a regular insurance company, you have a built-in conflict of interest, right? So you have consumers, an insurance company, consumer pay, pay pay, pay pay. At some point, the insurance company needs to pay back for some claim, and the insurance company wants not to pay back. You split a pie, the insurance company prefers to keep more of the pie. Not because they're bad people, just because of conflicts of interest. And consumers know that the insurance company wants to keep more. So they exaggerate in the insurance company know that they exaggerate, so they make it difficult. So the whole system is based on mistrust. So we decided to create an insurance company that takes a fixed amount of profit.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's in one stand deviation, it's just noise, don't treat it. So we have a scale with no display and we give people the feedback on a five point scale. You're just the same, nothing bad happened. Congratulations. The trend is slightly better, much better. It's a running trend of the last three weeks. And we show that that scale actually does much better than a regular scale. First of all, because people step on the scale on the regular scale people just stop. It's bad news. And the second thing is that it gets people to understand the relationship between cause and effect. I started running, here's what happens. I stopped eating cheesecake. Here is what happens, and then I made part of another startup which is very important to me. We created an insurance company with no conflicts of interest.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do it myself. So I have now a startup that does food. We have capsules about the size of a mug. And we have a machine called Genie. And within 60 to 90, sometimes two minutes, we make a healthy dish with no preservatives, no additives. It's quite amazing. And the idea is that it's food that can be prepared very quickly and eaten at the right time. That's crucial and the right portion size. I have a company that is a health company. We created a scale with no display. The bathroom scale, we founded the display on the bathroom scale is very confusing. It goes up and down variants. It basically gives you noise. So we use the same approach from Ballinger bands in finance where you say,”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one life. The second life I have is I have a group in Israel who is working with the Israeli government. So once a year we meet with all the officers, almost all the officers of the government, they tell us what their big problems are and we kind of bring the behavioral economics perspective. We go ahead, we do research and this ranges from education to land disputes to traffic Tax evasion. I mean, we cover the whole realm, and that's amazingly exciting. And then the third life is that I have a few startups. And from time to time, when I think I have a good idea and nobody else is picking it up, I...”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow. So my professional life has three parts. I have a research lab at Duke called the Center for Advanced Hindsight. And we mostly do research on financial decision making for lower income, middle to lower income, trying to help people save, spend a little bit less, spend better, pay debt on time and so on. We have research on health, getting people to exercise, take their medication, sleep better, and so on. Mostly in the US, some in Africa, some in Europe. And tomorrow I'm off to China. We might start something there. So that's mostly changing health habits.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we've played with things like this and we can. We just don't see a reason for this yet. So far, there's a lot to gain in terms of returns by not doing that.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in the implementation, as you described it, is almost the most unconstrained version. Of taking this hypothesis and implementing it. Have you thought about isolating the alpha signal more? So you could do a fund or a strategy that's more neutral across sectors or that weights sectors according to the market, but that within that tries to create the differentiation of human capital.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not to panic when bad things happen and to be true to the data. So we have an investment comedian, sometimes questions come up, there's a merger or things happen and we have to ask ourselves what it is. We always return to the question of not what we feel like is the right thing to do, but what is the closest to the original intention of the algorithm. So you have two companies merging, one buying the other one, and then you ask yourself, What's the culture like? Do we take A or B? Which one or is it the average? So we have some questions like this, but we always say, not do we like that company or what is the market expectation of this? But we say, what is the algorithm going to say about this? That I think is our approach to protect ourselves against acting not in a systematic way.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So imagine that we said, Oh, the algorithm will tell us what companies will get, but then we will come and revisit it and buy the ones we feel we like and don't buy the ones we don't think and we'll have discussion about this. But, you know, the algorithm was not built on that. The algorithm was based on just that. And you have to leave it to the algorithm. So we know lots of things about failing. In investing, and a lot of it is the buying high and selling low and the herd mentality and bubbles and so on. And by creating an algorithm and sticking to it, we're tying our hands.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things we know, and this is actually true for lots of things, for example, interviews, job interviews are notoriously terrible. You take somebody and you get their GPA, GRE, whatever, and then you add an interview, your prediction is worse. If it's a non-structured interview. And the reason is that every time you do an interview, you say, oh, this person is great because A, B, and C, and then you say this person is great because of FG and R, every time you change your criteria. You make exceptions every time. So, one of our approaches was we don't make exceptions. We know that sometimes we'll be tempted to make exception, but the algorithm did not make exceptions.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, there's another part of behavior that goes into the implementation of investing. So whether it's trading and the psychology of traders, the decisions of chasing performance and things like that. Know that what you've laid out is different, but now you're in an investment strategy. How have you thought about what you know from your research that isn't exactly, oh, human capital, positive human capital for companies long, negative human capital for companies short?”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we left a lot of things out, right? And we basically said, look, we have this data going back quite a few years. We're going to ignore that and we'll see if there's still a signal there. And the reality is yes. There's a lot of signal. Could we do better if we took other things into account? Probably. Would it hurt our mission? Yes. So we basically ignore everything else. And it's not that I don't think everything else is not important. I just think this is sufficiently important as a factor. And I hope to prove it over the years. And I also think there's lots more to learn about human capital.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one thing you didn't talk about on the sort of financial side is just valuation. Lots of studies that show the valuation matters for future returns. How did you think about that when your lens has nothing to do with the price of the stock?”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fund, right? So part of the fund is I want to say I invest only based on human capital. And here is what it does, right? If we did a mix and say, I invest on human capital plus this and I have this return, nobody would know. But what we're hoping to do is to be driven out of the market by companies starting to treat their employees so well, everybody will be treated very well. So it's both a move to say You can make money by investing in companies that treat their employees well, but it's also an attempt to focus all companies traded and non-traded on the importance of starting to pay attention to something that all CEOs say is the most. I mean, how many COs don't usually say the quality of my people is the best thing I have? Everybody says that. They just don't do it.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, everything we do is automated based on what the simulation told us from the past. So we rebalance four times a year. It's I would say this approach gives me lots of joy. And part of the joy is that I think that it's good to reward companies who are doing well. It's also good to have a statement in the market. When we started this, somebody from a huge hedge fund that I really admire as an individual said, why don't we do it together? He said, give me the data on that. I'll combine that with my financial data and together it will be better than what you could do separately and he's probably right. I mean, first of all, he has a big hedge fund. He's been very successful. I'm sure he has insight into the performance data that we don't. But David and I felt that it would take away from the mission.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, we do, we do. And you could imagine that we could play some games and say, this is a bell, but we decided that's not the right approach. So we equally wait”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once we have the building blocks, then we pick the 18 that we like the most. And we like them on both theoretical grounds and empirical grounds. And then we combine them. And we have what we predict will do well. And we have the one that we predict. We'll not do well. And we basically run this approach. And we try eventually to pick about 20 companies that we go along and 20 companies.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, the description initially, and I said we buy the top 20%, it was just to look at each of the almost 80 building blocks. Once we had the 80 building blocks, and it was an important step for me to say, okay, everything we have is generally good, right? Let's just remember a lot of times when people show simulations, I worry about all the simulations they haven't shown. So somebody shows you here's five good simulations, how many bad simulations did you run? So for me, it was important to figure out how good there are building blocks, right? And if all the building blocks are good, then... Starting from a good perspective, we didn't have to have all but one being so good, but I want to show that in general we have good building blocks.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that for many of the people I know Big part of it is the game, it's the intellectual pursuit, it's the competition. Maybe not many people think they're doing good in the world. Some do, but not everybody. But I think it is about a competitive, your mind is. Being challenged. And I think you could have taken the same group and let them play poker for points. And they would have been just as motivated to do that. So yes, the competitive nature is a big part of it. And I think that saying that it's all about making money. Is probably wrong. And here's an experiment I'm willing to play with you. I'm willing to take any company you want. Go in there And create a competition for an iPad. Another competition for whiskey with a boss. To see how much more we can get people to work compared to increasing the bonus pool by some percent.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to fight bureaucracy and taking on extra work to fight the system, it's a very, very unpleasant situation. So that's on one hand. So you can have a profession that in principle has potential for tremendous intrinsic motivation, but it doesn't mean that we let them have intrinsic motivation. Teachers. We've done the same thing with the no child left behind to teachers, where we basically sucked away their joy of being teachers because all of a sudden we said if you think that there's a way to teach your kids that is not the prescribed way or if you think that one kid needs something slightly different than the other, no, no, no, you can't. So that's on one side. On the other side, in the financial world, often people say it's all about the money, but you know many of those people. I know many of them as well.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said he has to schedule his bathroom breaks. He said, You don't understand how lucky you are that you can go to the bathroom anytime you want in the day. So we think about physicians as having a lot of autonomy, but we don't treat them this way. I mean, we do maybe in some of the TV show. And I think in the Mayo Clinic and a few other places. But mostly we take these people who really want to help people. We say, oh, if we give you a scalpel, you can cut people any way you want. But if you want to prescribe a medication to them, that one would not let you do. And physicians often end up”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things we've done in healthcare is we've taken physicians, people who join medical school with the hope of curing people and so on. You wouldn't say that if you basically did the computation of how to get rich quick, you'll go to medical school. That's not the best. But people go under this intention and then eventually they are burdened by bureaucracy. Not too long ago, somebody who's a physician, a duke came to my house for dinner, and it was Saturday 9 p.m. He said, oh, I have to go. I have to be in bed before 10. I said, what's the tomorrow's Sunday? Even if it's not. And he said, no, no. He said he has to wake up at 5.30 every day. He has to be in at 6.30. He has to be in the hospital. He does rounds. Then he sees patients. He said he has patients every, I forgot if he said, I think about 15 minutes.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So A, it's a good question of whether financial services truly have just people wanting to make money and also the question of what's happening in healthcare. So I actually wrote a paper last year on healthcare. You noted about 400 physicians killed themselves every year in the US?”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, even as an example on that, financial services, which I think from the outside, most people would say, well, yeah, that's all that fuzzy stuff about compensation is nice, but financial services is about making money and compare that to maybe healthcare or something like that, where you would expect more intrinsic motivation for the employees and what they're delivering.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked very hard for a very long time to try and come up with all kinds of scenarios why our results were wrong. Another thing that we do, for example, we don't think of sectors, right? We take all the companies we know and we just buy the companies who treat their employees well. We don't think of sectors. So we said, oh, maybe it's a sector strategy so we can run a simulation for that, right? We say, what if the sector that we chose 30%, let's say it's consumer product? What if it was just a sector strategy, but we can easily run that simulation and show it's not the case.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have some things. For example, sense of purpose, right? We know that the sense of purpose works for all kinds of other things, finding the sense of purpose works is not very surprising in some way. And then we also look at different dimensions. So for example, the dimension of benefits, that one changes much more as a result of how companies do financially rather as a lead indicator. And actually in our data we don't see much of an effect for that. So we try lots of different strategies. I think actually in our case, we were maybe kind of too academic in the sense that we”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We use everything we can in terms of good statistical knowledge. And particularly for these kind of things, we use models with a delay. So what you want to do is you want to say, oh, it's not just a correlation, it's causal, right? What does it mean causal? One thing happened before the other one. If they happen in the same time, you might say, oh, I don't know which one is causing which. Most of the things we have are not quick, right? It's not, oh, there was a press announcement and now something happened. So we work with models that have a delay in them and we try to estimate the delay. And if you got in a model like this, the delay was reversed, right? You said, oh, first the company made money and then they make the environment safer. Then you would say, oh, it's not causal. So that's one part of it. We also look at what we know from research. So we didn't approach all 80 questions with equal belief about their work, right?”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leadership is really interesting, certainly very, very important. We don't have a particular angle on it yet. I will tell you that we find that in every company, when the gap between how leadership feels about the company and how the rank and file employees feel about the company, as this gap grows, it's a good sign to short the stock. So I think leadership is clearly very important. I don't know how to quantify it. I mean, we know leading by example. We know that those things work. So we know that leadership is important. There's no question about it.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would make companies successful? And we want to take irrational capital in that direction is to examine the functioning of groups and the inclusion of different perspectives and of course human capital and equal treatment of gender and so on.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for example, I find that when I work on anything with young people, like first of all, their eyesight is much better, right? So they write apps with an eight-point font, which they have their intuition. It's readable. No, no, it's not readable. But also because I'm disabled, every mouse click, every button click for me is a big deal. So my designs are much more efficient than theirs, right? I don't do everything I can to reduce every mouse click and every button click on things we do, even we do surveys and so on. For me, this is such a heightened area. So anyway, this is a long way to say that I think there's other ways to examine functionality of companies.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, what else do we want to know? What else do we want to examine? So, for example, one of the things we have no data on, but we're really curious about is what is the role of incorporating people with very different skill set. So David, my partner is very interested in learning what is sometimes called learning disabilities. Like think about dyslexia. Dyslexia, really interesting neurological state lots of very successful people historically had dyslexia. We don't know what's causing what, but you can wonder in the team what do you need, right? What are the, he calls it neurodiversity, right? What's the neurological diversity? What's happening with people with disabilities? So I have a lot of disability. I can't move my hands very well. I also have all kinds of pain.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's think about a company's potential growth. Is it affected by everybody in a company? So let's say we have a dimension like, do you feel safe at work? You could imagine that every unit increases is the same, or you can imagine I really want some people to be really feel safe. I want some people not to feel unsafe, right? You could say, is it moving from the top, the people who are extra happy or is it moving from the bottom? Let's not having people who are behind. Like you think about the Nocha left behind approach on one, let's just talk about the low end of the tail, or you could say think about excellence, which is the top end of the tail. So there's all kinds of things like that that were informed based on what we know from research, but to a large degree, it was, let's take all the data we can and trust the data. But moving forward, now there's time to...”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In evaluating the companies, I basically took a very simple econometric approach. We said this is the data. That's all we have right now. We're looking for more data all the time, but that's all the data we have. And let's see what matters and not. And so it was a very much data exercise. Now within that, we looked at all kinds of things that kind of the research lens gave us. So for example, you could say,”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are some people who are investing in agriculture based on satellite images to some degree this is the same thing.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Almost all of them are basically proprietary data set. I think the good news is that each company Wants to do it can relatively easy, start an internal process of improving human capital. And I think step one is to put HR, I think, is maybe the worst, least reputable department in almost every company. Maybe compliance is worse. But, you know, it's a hierarchy of the company. HR, rather than being considered the R&D arm of the company is considered a bureaucracy that people don't like. But I think the good news is that I think there's lots of steps that companies can take internally. Investors Have this data and we're using it, but it's tougher to get. And it also represents this approach, I think, of investing by getting outside data.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market situations and a company is well suited to do one thing or another because of some changes, but to a large degree, I don't think anybody would argue that if you could draw anything you want to know from a company, you would want to know. Human capital is probably number one. And it's kind of shocking when you think about it, that we settle for the current annual reports and we don't almost insist as investors that we want people to know. We want to know about how they're treating their employees, what are they investing in their knowledge, in their ability, how much autonomy they're giving them.”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you really want to see there? And don't you want to see investment in human capital and success in human capital, right? There's no question that human capital is the driver of growth. What else is there? I mean, you can buy whatever warehouses you want, right? Sometimes you have...”
2019-04-01 · Capital Allocators · Dan Ariely – Investing in Irrationality (Capital Allocators, EP.93) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source