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John List

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2022-01-26
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2022-01-26
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  1. “It takes a money ball idea and the data science idea to a new level I have data all the way back to kids who are seven and eight years old. So I know Bryce Harper's stats when he was eight and I scraped a bunch of data and built a model for the White Sox. And I bring that up because Economics is life, and life is economics. And with a little bit of data and just an economics 101 understanding. You can really go a long way to change the world and make it a better place, you know, from the White Sox to the White House to Uber and Lyft to the academy, the type of thinking, not only around scaling and how to scale ideas, but also just very simple economic principles will absolutely make your life and your family's life a lot better.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Just want to say thanks, Tim, for having me. The book does cover, you know, my work with the Chicago White Sox. I built a draft model for them. I call it Money Ball. Infinity”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “But nevertheless, I would probably say the reader would direct there. And then after you take several econ classes, then go to the wealth of nations.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Then you can kind of see wow, he had that idea back then. Took him a long time to say it. But nevertheless, right, he's verbos in the theory as well.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Of the pin factor. I'm like, Adam, just get through it. This is crazy. So I can jump and see the beauty about what was known. But to me. The beauty is a lot of that was not known, and he had these gems. So I think it would be incredibly difficult for a person who is not well versed in economics to read Adam Smith because it would be a ton of head scratch. I think he's trying to get at this issue, but I don't know. It's kind of that one. And maybe I should just read the theory of moral sentiments. So I think for the person who is not an astute, an expert reader, I would say go to the moral sentiments because there you got kind of the behavioralist at work, Adam Smith is one of the early behavioral economists, and he talks about the moral hector on one shoulder, et cetera, et cetera. And you see a lot of”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Must have been the deepest of any philosopher I've ever read. And I can appreciate the beauty because I know a lot about economics and where it's gone since then. He talks about specialization as an example. Specialization in the pin factory. And he goes through this long and tortuous and arduous explanation.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I would probably say don't read the original, right? So my advice is don't read it. The reason why is because It's painstakingly written. So Smith had this feature that a lot of writers back then had to make a point that can be made in a paragraph ends up being 25 pages of words that you have to look up what a lot of them mean. But the true beauty is exactly as you pointed out for an economist. The true beauty is I sort of know How the profession has evolved and how economic thinking has evolved and for me the wealth of nations is so beautiful because it's set off. He's a father of economics and it's set off his level of thinking”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Are you're as weak as your weakest point? And if that implodes, you're done. And it's really trying to understand questions around that. So we're dabbling a bit, Tim, in fintech, but nothing to talk about just yet”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Data science, and why wouldn't I look there? And not only because there's a wealth of data, but also because there are a lot of big juicy apples that are hanging pretty low. And it's going to be really important not only for consumers, but also for regulators. Regulators are thinking very hard now about what they should be doing. And in many cases, they're flying blind. And they're flying blind because people have not taken seriously a ton of what are the learnings from the data and what are the social costs or potential back in the day in 2008 financial crisis. We learned a lot from that and a lot about the system and some of the weak points. Remember, a lot of this comes back to the weakest link problem. A lot of these examples.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “It's a little combo platter because what we have is we have great, yeah, we have great PhD students here who want to work on cutting edge.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “No, no, you're right 100%. And just thinking about fintech in general, we've thought hard about how we can be players there. And when I say we, I mean my team. And we have a few irons in the fire.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “And it's kind of neat because I have to try to figure out how I should price. And if my tickets aren't selling, how should I depreciate my prices if I really don't want to go to this event? It's an economist playground here, StubHub is. But plus, it's great in many cases for the customer, but also for the seller. I don't like StubHub's fees that much, but nevertheless, they're taking their bite from the Apple as well. And I'm still getting some surplus. So I love Stubhub.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “One of my favorite apps is Indeed StubHub. StubHub is great because it's the ultimate market for seats to events. I can wait till the last minute. I can do a model about what prices do. I've bought Super Bowl tickets on StubHub. The other night I went to the Bowls game. I sat courtside at the Bulls game. Wait till the end. There are a few courtside seats for $350 each. My wife gets to hug Benny the Bull. I don't have to make plans till the very end. It's the ultimate market that's based on supply and demand. And then there's a little bit of behavioral economics in there because I've sold on StubHub too.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Idea is there are a lot of little nuggets in that chapter about how you can build your kabuchu. And those are the tips in the chapter on build your own culture.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Does something interesting. It gives women sort of the license to negotiate because what we find in our data is when you say in your job ad that wages are negotiable, women will negotiate as much as men and they will end up with similar wages. But if you leave that sentence out, women will not negotiate at all, really, and then they start with lower wages. So right away, just your job advertisement, it leads to a pool of applicants that can differ, but also the wages might differ. And if you want to scale a culture of equality in your paid your marginal product, then we're not going to let subtle things happen that lead to very different wage profiles, we can do that from our very beginning of our firm.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Bleeds over to society and in the one society you have a lot more of the great public goods being provided and the other society looks more selfish. So we did a bunch of experiments in these two societies. And lo and behold, we find that what happens in the workplace really spills over to the community. So bringing all that together, what I say in the culture chapter is a firm or is an organization. We should want to build our own kibuchu. That's the society that is built on community spirit. And we should do that from the very beginning. And very subtle things like letting people know that wages are negotiable in our job advertisements. You know, that seems kind of innocuous. If you say wages are negotiable, well, what does that do?”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Amongst Brazilian fishermen in two very distinct communities one community had fishermen who had to fish in teams. And in those teams they had to go out in the boat. The ocean's very rocky. They all go out together. They bring back their catch and they all share it. And those villages are also built on community when it's outside of the workplace too. So just like this brilliant utopia of everyone cooperating and getting along. Now, Inland, there's a similar village except those fishermen go to a lake and they all work in a solo way, soloist. And what happens there is when they get to the community, they also act in a soloist form. So, what's kind of cool is that you observe there that the workplace itself”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “The culture chapter was really fun to write because it allowed me to Sort of reflect on what happened at Uber and also reflect on the research that I've been engaged in for over 20 years, which is along the questions of why do women get paid less than men in doing the same job? Why do people discriminate against one another in markets? What are the underpinnings for that discrimination? And how can we think about diversity and inclusiveness in a way that a firm really wants to do it? And they're doing it for the bottom line, not just to get moral cookies. Because in the end, we want both. We want both morality to tug at it, but we also want to make sure the firm is doing right by their shareholders, because that's what a lot of times people are going to make decisions around. The chapter, in a way, begins in Brazil. We did some work.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Realize that there are billions of people who have tried and tried and tried, but they keep hitting their head against the same wall, and they never succeeded. That's lost opportunity right there.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “And there will be a story every night about the person who persevered, the person who had to go and work at the grocery store, and then they drove in the forklift in the basement of a cheese factory. And lo and behold, that person has become a great bobsledder. And then the mom is on there saying, I love Johnny. And the dad is on there saying how we knew Johnny would never quit. And these are great feel-good stories. And that causes us to want to persevere. But where is the story for the billions of people who went down the hole and they kept going down the same hole every day to a mine that had no gold in it? Where is that story written? I've never read one, so we don't.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Along the lines of your comparative advantage. So there not only needs to be something that you can go to, that's something exists, but also a comparative advantage is what are you good at? And what are you passionate about doing? The long run is filled with success only if you can wake up every morning and be passionate about something that you're good at. That's your comparative advantage. So I would say never move or rotate unless you know that what you're rotating to you're good at and you're going to love and also that it's a real option. Otherwise, there's no reason just quitting to quit. I think that there are a lot of tweener cases where it could still work out. The problem is that every time the Olympics comes, when this is aired, the Olympics will be on.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “You're right. In many cases, we sort of have these tweeners where, you know, the idea shows some Signs and just enough to keep me going. The job shows some promise, just enough to kind of keep me going. I always say that you don't want to quit unless you know you have a good option to go to. And that means that you should periodically say once a month. Look at your options and make sure that the option is real and also make sure that it”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “That they made the change. So they didn't realize that there were greener pastures out there until they were sort of forced to do it. So that's the optimal quitting chapter. And the reason why, again, people don't like to say the Q word. So what I say is call an audible. We always call an audible in football. We always pivot when people pivot or call an audible in football. They're glorified. But when you say I'm quitting, you're chastised. So I think part of this is just reframing when you quit. And we should understand that it's pivoting or calling an audible in your life. That's the optimal quitting chapter.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “We don't do that. We don't look at our opportunities until our own lot in life is soiled. And that's too late most of the time because a lot of opportunities have come and gone. So that's called opportunity cost because we don't realize that if I'm working on this idea with all of my might, that there's an idea out there that I can't work on. And we tend to neglect that opportunity cost of time. We did this large scale experiment. I helped Steve Levitt design it and run it that had people flip a coin. And if it comes up heads, you know, they had a tough decision in life, whether it was a job, a relationship, an apartment, whatever. If it came up heads, they need to change. If it comes up tails, they don't in our freak economics experiment. And what you find is when you track them over time is that most of the people are much happier.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “They also don't quit enough because they don't understand or appreciate the opportunity cost of time. You know, when you think about the person who moves to a different job or they move to a different apartment, nearly every time they're doing it because something bad happened in the workplace or something bad happened in the apartment, that's all well and fine, but you should also be moving when you get better opportunities. And you should always be looking at your opportunity set.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Dream is done. I'm going to have to quit that dream. I'm going to fulfill the golf scholarship. And I went and played and I had a very successful college golf career. But from that day on, my dream was to become an economist. I was still going to invest in golf, but it wasn't going to be all in on golf. It's going to be all in on golf and all in on econ and learning about economics and how I can use it as a trade when I quote grow up. But for me What I see in the business world and in government is that people don't quit enough. They don't quit enough because they've been taught not to quit.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Practicing confirmation bias. I said, but I'm better than them around the Greens. So, you know, when the scores come out, I'm going to show them. You know, they went out in the morning. I went out in the afternoon and saw the scores. And they were just a lot better than me. And I ended up doing a bunch of data crunching. And I realized that everything I was told as a kid, because remember, I grew up in Wisconsin and that's Vince Lombardy country. Vince Lombardy is a venerable coach of the Green Bay Packers. When people win the Super Bowl, the trophy is called the Lombardi Trophy. So I was raised in the shadows of Vince Lombardi, who famously said winners never quit and quitters never win. So in my parents taught me that time and time again. Johnny, you have grit. You stick with it. So it was really hard for me to say that.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “We had a weekend off, and I went back to Madison, Wisconsin, and I happened upon a bunch of players, one guy who was named Steve Stricker. He's been on the PGA tour for years. One is Jerry Kelly. These are guys I played against in high school. They were a few years in front of me. Steve went to University of Illinois. Jerry Kelly went to Hartford to play hockey and golf. And then they both made a ton of money later. It was really a hard lesson because I watched them on the driving range and I said, wow, these guys are really a lot better than me. I didn't realize they were that much better than me. But, you know.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “In some cases, they are very misleading when you really should be thinking about the last one and the next one, rather than a big average. So that's marginal thinking. Now, the third one is quitting. And here this gets a little bit personal because, let's face it, really, the only reason why I went to college, I'm a first-gen kid. I went to college because I wanted to be a golf bro. And I was offered a partial golf scholarship to go to UW Stevens Point, University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. And I went up there This would have been the fall of 1987, and I started playing on the golf team. About midway through that fall season.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “I don't care about the average in the last half year. What I care about is how much did we have to spend to get the last handful of drivers, the last ten or twenty or fifty on Google and Facebook? They say, well, let us check. They go and then they come back and say, well, on Facebook, it was 700 per driver. And on Google, it was 350. Then I'm like, well, wait a second. Don't you think we should be moving money then from Facebook to Google? And they're like, yeah, we didn't think about the marginal driver. What was the last driver and what would be the cost for the next driver? That's marginal thinking. And I had this in the White House with super fun cleanup. And we talked about how we should be spending money across hazardous and non-hazardous waste sites to clean them up. Averages.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Acquisition team is a team that is responsible for recruiting new drivers. We need to keep putting new drivers in the funnel because we want to grow our supply. What they present to me is a slideshow that has, here's how much money we spent on Google for ads to get new drivers. Here's how much we spent on Facebook for ads to get new drivers. And then they say on average we had to pay $500 per driver on Facebook and on average we had to pay $600 for drivers on Google. And then they say because of that average, what we're going to do is we're going to spend the next tranche on Facebook ads. And I say whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Exactly. So that's the first chapter in the second half. The second chapter is about thinking about making decisions on the margin. So a lot of your listeners who have taken economics 101 always hear this, make decisions on the margin. What we do terribly in the classroom as economics professors is actually explain what that means and give an example of what it means like what does it actually mean to think on the margin. So one example that I use in the book is to think about what we do at Lyft. So I'm sitting in a conference room at Lyft and the driver acquisition team comes in.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “We made bank for them. By the way, the DR should have a A statue soon of me and a park named after me, I hope. But if there are any people from the DR listening.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Not boring at all. These are direct letters that the Dominican Republic, the IRS sent. So they send a letter every year to people who haven't paid their taxes. All we did is told them we think we can do better than your letter. So we had them send the letter to a group of people and then we augmented their letter with a sentence or two. They always remind people to pay their taxes, but we used a little bit of non-financial incentive.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “That's a type of message that works. It gets people to pay their taxes. In the Dominican Republic, we have a paper titled The Hundred Million Dollar Nudge. The Dominican Republic has a real problem with getting both individuals and their firms to pay their taxes. So what we did is we went to them and said, here's a suite of behavioral interventions that are all non-financial, things like just a reminder that if you don't pay your taxes, you might have to serve jail time. Things like just to remind you, if you don't pay your taxes, we can make your name public and let the world know that you haven't paid your taxes. Messaging like that, we raised $100 million more in tax receipts, which is like 0.2% of GDP in the Dominican Republic.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “I think one example that you can think about with non-financial incentives is what we've been doing with governments around the world. About the UK Behavioral Insights team or in the Dominican Republic, I've helped the tax authorities raise more money through getting people to pay their taxes. In each of those cases, we've used messaging such as 70% of people have paid their taxes on time. Why haven't you?”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “That's called loss aversion, or it is built on the concept of loss aversion. And also non-financial incentives. I think a lot of times we undervalue both behavioral incentives and incentives that don't involve cash. So things like norms, things like peers. How much does my coworker earn? That's interesting information or what are their benefits or how many days off do they get? Or if I perform in a certain way, am I adhering to the norms of my company? Should I tip or not? In many cases, if we can leverage the insights from behavioral economics and leverage what we've learned about non-financial incentives, in many ways, these types of incentives Have the highest ROI because it's really cheap to give non financial incentives by definition.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “The back nine of the book is really meant for the manager or the decision maker who has scaled an idea. So Houston we have launch. And after we've launched, What we have to think about is how can we make sure or at least give our idea its best chance for high voltage? So the back half of the book really draws upon my experiences in government and firms to draw out what are the constant threads that people make mistakes around. And the first chapter is how to think about incentives that scale. And I think one of the big features that we've learned in behaviorally economics is that using framing or loss aversion, like the clawback incentive, which is essentially give somebody An incentive up front and tell them you will take it away unless they performed”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “And that might be fine. They might generalize or they might not. But what I argued was the tool will generalize. And when we get to work with firms or governments or public education, we can do large-scale field experiments there, just like hard scientists. And then we can say something causal about the relationships that we observe.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Quantity demanded goes down. Well, of course, if price goes up, you buy less. And then we don't even have a physical or quantitative estimate because that's called in elasticity. But the elasticity depends on the good and the circumstance, et cetera, et cetera. So we always have to measure it. I think when you start to add fractal and other aspects, it gives us a shot, at least, to try to be more scientific. And I think going down those dimensions can be useful. I can't imagine an application right now, but that's the fun part about the question, right? Is that there are possibilities back when I started doing field experiments, everyone said, in part, they're dumb because I'm going to a baseball card convention together date. And they said baseball card collectors are weird. And the results won't generalize.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “How do you solve these problems and get what's called a closed form or an analytical solution rather than have something be, well, anything can happen? Because when you deal with humans, you know, the sciences are great because we have laws and we can talk about these laws because their physical constants They apply everywhere that we at least understand they can exist. These laws apply. In economics, when you talk about predicting human behavior, we don't have quantitative laws. And what we have are things that on the one hand are kind of obvious. One of our big laws is the law of demand. And basically what that says is when price goes up,”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “I think there absolutely is. And I think as we move to Higher order computing. And as we move to a higher order understanding that humans have of how to apply mathematical principles to real world questions, I think some of the big breakthroughs will be in that area. And I think part of it is going to be”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “You know, University of Central Florida worked in it, it ends up working well, I think, too, because what I see is at the University of Central Florida, I could take chances and I could continue to take high variance plays. And what I mean by that is take risks in the research where if I started at the University of Chicago, it might have been harder because I might have wanted to march to the same beat of every other drummer around me. And I think University of Wyoming is a grad student, University of Central Florida, these sort of relieved the social constraints of having to be like everyone else. And I could just be me. And I think in the end, it really helped a lot. And I was kind of the silver lining of my approach to academia, I think.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “To 150 schools because I wanted to be an academic, I don't want to be a truck driver, nothing wrong with truck driver. But that was my outside option, let's be honest. If I don't get an academic job, I'm back in Madison, Wisconsin driving truck. So I applied to 150 schools, and I still wear that today. I got 149 people who told me, you're not even worthwhile talking to in an initial interview. And I saved every one of those envelopes and said thanks, but no thanks. And if I ever need motivation, I can look at that box.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “That's just sort of how the funnel works. So when you start at the University of Wyoming, Which is, I'm not sure what the ranking is, but it's certainly not in the top five schools. If you follow that rule, those top schools, they're not even going to open my envelope. I didn't know this, but when I applied to the University of Chicago, I'm quite confident that my application envelope was never opened because they saw the return address was Laramie, Wyoming. Okay. I don't think it was anything that I did wrong per se, although it is true that people were very, very skeptical of my field experiments in the early 90s. Everyone said, you're an idiot for doing it. We think you seem smart. Why are you throwing your career away? If you want to do experiments, you do them in the lab. What is this field experiment stuff? So you're right. I apply.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “And I think it's sort of two parts. One part is academia is very hierarchical. And the way the funnel works is that the top schools, Harvard University of Chicago, Princeton, MIT, et cetera, we put out about 20 to 30 students per year on this market, PhD. So we put out 25 students this year with a PhD from the University of Chicago But we only hire back one or two. So the unwritten rule in academia is where you get your PhD, the ranking of that school will be much, much higher where you get your first job. And then where you get tenure is Will be much, much lower ranked than where you get your first job”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “We end up giving incentive bonuses for drivers on a number of trips. For example, you say you get the ride bonus of $500 if you take 50 trips this week. The only way you can take 50 trips is if you do a bunch of short trips. So, there are ways to incentivize outside of the rate card. There are ways to incentivize drivers for shorter long trips, and those are all at the disposal. And Uber and Lyft are constantly doing these things.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Drivers usually do is they call you and say, by the way, where are you going? And then that's how a lot of times they find out. One way that we tackle that is if we have undersupply for short trips.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “To sit outside in the cold. I'm in Chicago here and it's freezing. I sit out in the corner waiting for a driver and I see him going the wrong way because they don't want to pick me up. I'll feel a lot better if I know they're being penalized versus if they just go to a better trip, right? And you're right. The best trips are I'm going to deadhead to the airport.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “One way to get around that problem is to pay the driver for time that they spend from when they get the dispatch to when they pick the customer up. We do that now at Lyft. And that's an important reason that you can lower rejection rates. Now there are still cases of cancellations. What we do is there's a fine for drivers. In fact, there's a fine for riders who do this too. There's a cancellation fee of $5. And I think using that mixture of actually paying drivers to go pick somebody up and having the relevant fines, right? Taking money away, clawing it back is kind of two instruments that we find can be successful in lowering exactly what you're saying because it's irritating.”

    2022-01-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #566: John List — A Master Economist on Strategic Quitting, How to Practice Theory of Mind, Learnings from Uber, Optimizations to Boost Donations, the Primitives of Decision-Making, and How Field Experiments Reveal Hidden Realities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT